Building tiero with the people it is for

Most of the work on tiero is ordinary product work. Shipping things, fixing things, answering emails. This post is about the other part, the time we set aside to sit with the people we are making it for.

At the moment, tiero is the subject of a hackathon at the University of Surrey Business School. Second year entrepreneurship students are working on it as part of their module, and Josh and Adam from the team have been working closely with Will Langham-New, who runs it.

We shared the news on LinkedIn.

Will focuses this module on human centred design, a problem solving technique where real people are at the centre of the development process. It applies to where tiero is right now, because it helps us build a product and service that resonate with, and are tailored to, our audience.

That suits us. tiero is for students, graduates, placement students and careers teams, and those groups do not want the same things. A student applying for a placement and a careers adviser supporting a hundred of them use the same product for different reasons. We can guess at those differences, or we can ask the people who live with them.

A hackathon is a quick way to ask. Students look at tiero without our assumptions, say what works and what does not, and build their own answers.

It also puts a room of students to work on a real product together, with the company listening, which is a different experience from a case study.

There is no better feedback than the source itself.

Thank you to Will, Christopher Mahon and the University of Surrey Business School.