The first day walking into Pollenizer was an experience in itself. I didn’t completely know what I was coming into since most of my research on the company came from tech blogs and the company’s site.
I came up to a nondescript door at their Surry Hills address. I rung up; a mysterious voice let me in. No door greeting. Found people in a meeting room that I later found to be called the dungeon. I walked up and found a converted warehouse laid out with tables and screens and a plethora of mac books. (I’ve never been much of a mac user so this was going to be a learning curve as I brought my partner’s MacBook air on my first day.)
At the top of the steps, I finally met up with the other intern waiting on the couch corner and the whole day began with an intro to the company from Claudia, a tour of the facilities, and lean meet and greets with the staff working that day.
Afterwards, I seemed to go full throttle into a project with the GetListed pod. Michael, my internship supervisor introduced me to the current product concept and the different platforms they were using to implement the processes that a lean start-up requires. The guys on the team began using terminology that was completely over my head these first couple of days… pivot, scrum, kanban and the like.
But, once I got through most of Eric Ries’ Lean Startups, (part of the Intro Packet) everything began to make so much more sense. Its like the fog lifted.
In the context of what I’ve learned at U Syd, the Pollenizer experience is a great foil to new product development that I took last semester. I wrote a paper on companies engaging in co-creation with outside stakeholders, but the project with Pollenizer took my traditional understanding to another level. I learned the customer engagement could go beyond just focus groups and surveys and that a lean startup business could in essence push the fast forward button to what traditional companies already try to do; decreasing both the cost and time to develop products. Product development is so often integral to the growth of a company and so learning how to do it in a lean fashion by experience through this internship seems invaluable.
I look forward to more learned experience within the idea incubator that is Pollenizer in whatever form it comes… meetings, lunches, brainstorming sessions, conversations with the team, lean canvas development, researching the market. And with this experience, I’ll encounter plenty of #flearnings as well where I inadvertently fail at something but ultimately learn from it.