Team 2 Week 11 Blog

 

This week we focused on testing a potential MVP feature-set for the Special Forces, a path for realizing revenue in the education market, how we would build the product and completing a site visit.

 

Key Takeaways

• Testing the proposed MVP revealed there was still ambiguity regarding the secrecy level of certain data types and that the capability conferred by functionality enabled by that data may be highly valuable to Special Forces leadership.
• In exploring the potential for revenue in the education market, while we did not rule out any of the potential revenue sources. We also still need to find and identify the specific role for each of those channels who can make the purchase decision.
• On the build front, we confirmed the approachability of our designs from a technical standpoint and initial build costs would not be onerous for the base-level product. Still outstanding is clarity around on-going maintenance as well as how far down our potential roadmap the Special Forces would want to go and the economics of doing so.

 

Sean Talent Development Team Operations Manager/Fmr Operations Manager of a Charter school network

 

• Value proposition: You’ll want to be really clear about what the advantage of BulletTrain is for teachers and admin, because there are multiple. One side is budgeting, and then if you want the content of your training to be better, you can use our product to find better PDs. You could sell it in different ways: is it a great way to find PDs with a tracking benefit, or a great tracking program with side benefit of PDs, or both? You could go as far as you want to
• Having teachers rate and comment on PD will allow you to build a network, and get other teachers interacting with the clearinghouse.
• At first, it will be on the teachers and the principals to populate, and also people who are hosting PDs can post to BulletTrain. That’s where it becomes valuable to schools because rather than having the schools have to do the work, the training comes to them.
• It’s also an internal tracking tool—principals know what their teachers are trained in– beyond just a shopping service. Principals benefit in the same way that battalion commanders do.

 

Lee: Former HS Teacher

• You’ll need partner with a district, because they have the central PD calendar. They facilitate a lot of the PD, and a lot of state or professional PD won’t come to the area if the district didn’t bring them in.
• Schools and districts have strategic priorities for the year. If they’re contracting with partners for the year, it requires some careful planning. Whether a teacher could choose their own PD depends on the school and on how each school budgets, no matter if traditional or charter. If there are general funds allocated, then that could allow people to take advantage of it.
• It would also help for companies who do professional development to understand their competition, so they may be willing to pay for advertising.
• Teachers are incentivized by the fact that they have to get CECs. You give them a way to see if other teachers have been able to use a specific PD and see if they got credits for it.

 

Sergeant Richardson

• Operations Sergeant whose job is to interface with the battalion and group levels to resource support that the ODAs need such as extra medic oversight or vehicles with drivers to support a training exercise or actual deployments.
• In addition to support for training, they also regularly deploy in their support capacities.
• ODAs submit request for supply RFS and they send that up to get materials. Those requests can come in the form of a verbal conversation, email, or the actual RFS form. Regardless, when the request goes up the chain from the Operations Sergeant it is the formal RFS form.

 

Staff Sergeant Jake

• Rely heavily on their wealth of experience as both have been doing this job for 7 or more years. They know pretty much exactly what kind of medical personnel, drivers, special equipment the team is going to need for a big training event.
• Biggest concerns are not being able to track their requests. They have a weekly meeting where they may ask for a check in on for example their request for 6 humvees but usually the battalion just tells them that ‘they’re working on it.’ Or something to that effect. Only accountability is them asking the person who they asked who has to ask the person they asked etc. (potential for feature here).
• Don’t think that our system will be particularly helpful for them.
• Currently use DTT to track training concepts and there is a page of AARs for approval.

Analysis:

• If this fairly disorganized system is true, then battalion and group may not have much accountability for requests.
• Our system would be a natural place to initially identify an RFS need and send it up. It could then provide a cross-organization view of all requests, measure the impact of granting or denying the request, even compare the relative value of two different requests as measured by anticipated impact on readiness. These implications were not clear to the Sergeants. Is that due to lack of value? Inability of us to convey that value?

 

Maj Schubert

• Regarding what would be most powerful for him to show his superiors with regard to our product:
  • Overview of the training catalog and ability for the ODA to build a training program emphasizing the benefits to the ODA regarding time savings, access to better training alternatives, etc.
  • Then highlighting some of the management-level capabilities, ability to see colors of money, forecasting ammo and equipment needs.
  • Finally, depicting some of the secondary conferred benefits such as ability to measure the marginal utility of training dollars, deeper force analysis and potential identify the team/individuals that can be most-quickly pivoted to a new mission type.
• While posing potential product features it became obvious it is still unclear on the Army-side where the line is that would move our product from the unclassified network to the classified network. Just as importantly, the relative value of the difference in capability between those two product profiles is unclear.  This was illustrated when we outlined how the system could identify the team/individual that was closest to meeting a new METL profile. Turns out this problem is valuable to leadership and another outside team has been working it for a few years and is not nailing it.

 

Jovan Diaz

• Wind tunnel is really expensive, million dollar contract. Bought by USSASOC. Plays into highlighting an active vendor contract.
• Team’s use of the wind tunnel is built into the contract in such a way that it does not factor into the expense of the team’s specific training exercise.
• In addition to using the tunnel itself, they will bring in a profession skydiver with thousands of jumps to help train them in free-fall techniques and stability management.

 

FSgt Parks

• Arizona is used for Free-fall training. Have to use Arizona because it has 270 drop days a year compared to about 180 a year for north Carolina.

• Took us through the the mechanics of the jumping- i.e. 25,000 feet for MFF – calculating drop point to hit the target, etc.
• Now going to be standard for all special forces to get free fall MFF trained

 

CRT Sergeant

• Each company has a MFF team.  That team must rotate to Arizona once every training cycle and it takes a month.

• Allocated 50,000 dollars for that month but it usually only takes them 30,000.
• Not doing other training while they’re out there as they need to complete 25-30 jumps during that period.
• They have to work a variety of subtasks – work on free-fall technique, insertion calculations, formation management in air, use of oxygen at high altitude, etc.

 

Jumpmaster

• Took us through the on-the-ground training that each soldier completes before a free-fall jump.
• Fully rigged Mihir demonstrating and explaining all the connections and complete set of checks completed by the jumpmaster prior to clearing the jumper.
• Completed static line management while on plane. Clip routed over appropriate shoulder given side of plan you will exit and tucked into collar. Completed pre-jump sequence standing, clipping in, maintaining static line control and ripcord awareness.
• Initiated jump – maintain full arm length between next jumper – strongly exiting plane.

 

Yash Patil

• Contact lead for Duke Student Developer team.

• Cost of development of v1 of our application would be $1,000 – $1,500.
• It would be complete by June 1st. Earlier is possible but it would push the cost closer to $1,500.
• It would be built using React + Django + SQL. That would make it compatible with AWS.