Products Speak to Our Identities

Products can be an extension of your identity and for me, I draw inspiration from my culture.

Tayo is a product that my Filipina friend and I devised while in college. More on this later.

Our Identities are Tied to our Careers

Careers make up a significant part of our identities. They are representative of our values and interests, they influence the way others view us, and essentially, serve as one of, if not, the primary vehicle through which we contribute to society and leave our mark on this Earth. To my last point, they can shape the way we will be remembered.

For instance, large tech company CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg would probably agree with the public that they are technology innovators. When asked about themselves, MMA fighters commonly answer first by saying they are championship-caliber fighters. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs commonly say they are just that — entrepreneurs — looking to make a dent in this world by operationalizing their innovative ideas. These examples portray how people often define themselves by the careers they uphold.

Furthermore, in the case of entrepreneurs, the ventures they pursue and the product they create are often reflective of their passions and skills. This could be a skilled, young coder looking to develop the next big app that they’ve been cheffing up since their good ol’ college days or a candy connoisseur looking to manufacture healthy candy and get ahead of today’s shifting health-is-everything culture.

Other Parts of Our Identity Can Shape the Products We Build

Although I’m not a self-proclaimed entrepreneur, every now and then I enjoy dabbling with product ideas with friends. And this, mixed with my interests in social innovation and more broadly, social justice and impact, can make for some very interesting conversations.

On one occasion, I had a refreshing discussion with my Filipina friend about the lack of Filipino leadership here in the States and how one my ambitions is to create a company and product that is led and created by Filipinos. This issue of lack of Asian representation in leadership roles is called the Bamboo Ceiling, which theorizes that

while Asian Americans have attained high status in various [areas like population size, education, and income], they still experience challenges in reaching executive and management positions in corporate America, higher education, and other organizations.

As you can see, Filipinos enjoy a high college or graduate college graduation rate of 46%

Asian Americans also have a higher annual household income compared to White Americans by 1.4%, and furthermore, Filipino Americans have an even higher income compared to Whites by 12.7%.

Meanwhile, in the Silicon Valley, just 14% of executives are Asian.

During this back-and-forth bitter rant about the Bamboo Ceiling, I floated an idea to build a product with my Filipina friend that was representative of the values of our Filipino culture and by inheritance, our own values.

And so, I want to share a case about a product I imagineered with my friend to show how I drew inspiration from my cultural identity to build a product that I was passionate about and representative of who I am.

Our Product Idea: Tayo

While trying to devise this product, my friend and I were undergraduate students at the time in the midst of the stresses of midterms and tight deadlines. However, being at such a large, yet competitive and under-resourced university, we often faced the issue of not having enough resources, or colleagues, to help us adequately prepare for exams and confidently submit assignments. Thus, came the idea of Tayo: an app-based product that matches study partners together based on a variety of factors.

A white board of the user flow that would outline the user experience of our app-based product.

Here are the slides from our pitch deck that would outline key components of the potential customer base, core issue and solution, operating environment, and the product’s features.

We identified common themes across students at the university that made it easy to bucket them into “types.”

We then drew from said “types” to help describe the problem of finding and forming an effective study group.

Furthermore, the problem description informed the product and its design features (more on this later).

In case you couldn’t guess, the university that I described as “large, yet competitive and under-resourced” is U.C. Berkeley. Go bears…

There was one other competitor in this space that approached this issue through a very different user experience: a map-based approach with no other inputs aside from course taken and school in attendance.

The product was designed in a way to allow students to 1) find or identify potential study mates 2) match them with other compatible students and 3) build a study group as opposed to just a partnership.

The first step in the user experience is to build a profile by filling out inputs that inform the “match” stage.

Then, students would be able to find each other based on 1) course and 2) short vs long term intentions. To the second point, we hypothesized that students would only want to work with each other for short or long-term periods of time (e.g., doing one assignment vs studying a whole semester together).

Then, students would go through the “match” user experience, which is similar to the swiping experience of Tinder and Bumble.

And finally, students would repeat the “match” process until a study group was formed. One key design component that became our company logo was that the user could see who was in their study groups based on the faces that filled the circle of circles design.

Final Thoughts

The name, Tayo, translates in to “us” or “we” in Tagalog, and the product itself, stands on the core Filipino principle that overcoming things together (in the Philippines, having a village mindset is very common) is more effective than working separately (a mindset that is much more prevalent in Western and often, individualistic societies).

By reading this pitch deck about a product I helped devise, you learned more about my culture and values, which ultimately comprise some of the key pillars of my identity. And so, I’m hoping this blog changed your perspective on what products mean and what they can stand for. Thanks for reading.