We've all been excitedly waiting for the long-awaited Side Hustle Bootcamp after the internship, it started on 30th May, 2022. Even though we've been informed that it will more advanced & challenging, none of us had an idea of how tough it was going to be. Getting used to Slack was just the beginning, we were instructed to introduce ourselves and get to know one another & before you know it, Linkedin, Twitter & Facebook profiles were dominating all the channels. Some people were cracking jokes & it was very lighthearted and this went on for a week before registration & payment closed. We were asked to choose team leaders after being shared into our various groups.

Monday, 6th of June Drey posted the projects for every track and work had officially started. Ours required us to choose any product as a case study, take it through the design thinking process, improve the product with a new user flow and wireframe. I (Sadiya Jalal) had already volunteered to be a team leader so I scheduled a Google meet meting so we could discuss our project.

A lot of the team-members were finding it hard to navigate through the app, and this brought up the idea that we should choose Slack as our product. We decided to send out a Google form so people could review the product which helped us to decide what needed to improve.

We then decided to improve on how unread messages are viewed because it was the one feature a lot of people complained about. I instructed everyone to create a MIRO account so a team could be created and asked everyone will create a user-flow chart so we could later decide the best approach. This became challeging because not everyone was familiar with MIRO so it took a while before work commenced. In between was a lot of messages and Google meets but we were able to scale through.

Then the team leader started regretting being one because team mates went MIA. They were not answering channel messages & dm's and the ones that did were not so forthcoming. Deadline was approaching so with a lot of YouTube videos, google searches and unanswered messages, the team leader triumphed, she wasn't shamed. Next was Twitter which was a walk in the park.

This wasn't the team leader's first rodeo, she had been experienced during the internship but hoped this time around, it will be far better and it was, in the beginning. It's really not easy bringing together different people with different ideas, personalities and thought process. The main problem was everyone claiming they were too busy which makes sense but is not an excuse.

This whole experience has been a learning for the leader to know how to deal and work with team members moving on. Fingers crossed, this never repeats itself.