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<h3>Tips for First-Time Entrepreneurs</h3><ol><li>Talk to users early and often.</li><li>Smaller teams can be more efficient than a bigger one.</li><li>Note-taking and building an assignment system saves time.</li><li>Making clear decisions early leads to faster progression.</li></ol><hr><img src="https://moon-website-prod-images.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/EIR_Learnings_Ascend_5633c6524e.png" alt="Startup Learnings Ascend">Building our very own onboarding platform and first venture, Ascend, forced us to stretch our comfort zones, which led us to some profound key learnings and takeaways. As an HR Business Partner, I never thought that I would have landed in the position to be an Entrepreneur-in-Residence myself at Moon, but anything is possible here! Bold thinking leads to bold experiments, which Ascend was for our entire HR team. And as we look back together over our experience building Ascend, there are some key lessons we learned and wanted to share in hopes that it might be helpful for you, too.<h3> Talk to Users Early and Often</h3> We used the design tool Figma to build out a scrappy user journey for early prototyping, and used that to create an experience for our first user to test and give us direct feedback. This first experiment was extremely useful and provided details which are still included in today's build. We all agreed as a team that gaining feedback from others is something that we could have done even earlier and more frequently. It’s also not about the quantity of users who you interview, but the quality of information that you receive from their feedback.&nbsp;<h3>Smaller Teams Can Be More Efficient Than a Bigger One</h3> Originally we had started as a small team of five, but as the idea started to progress, so did the number of people joining our weekly calls. That number peaked at more than ten people joining our ideation sessions, team syncs, and working days. While we do believe it's important to include a diverse set of perspectives, we came to realize that “too many cooks in the kitchen” can lead to uncertainty, indecisiveness, and slow progression. Our team decided to scale down the core team back to five, which allowed us to work quicker, make decisions sooner, and meet our deadlines on time. &nbsp;<h3>Note-Taking and Building an Assignment System Saves Time</h3>Once we established our core team, our engineer Wilson started taking up-to-date notes, tracking our tasks and to-do’s between each meeting. This gave the team an easy reference when completing tasks and trying to remember what we discussed prior to each meeting. This also became a general record keeping protocol that we established moving forward to make sure all ideas and thoughts were well accounted for and never lost.<h3> Making Clear Decisions Early Leads to Faster Progression</h3>Building something from zero-to-one certainly is not easy. Taking an idea from words, brainstorming sessions, and off-shoot discussions to an actual viable working product takes time and requires detailed decision-making. We ask our Entrepreneurs-in-Residence to think big and make hard decisions, so why wouldn’t we ask the same of ourselves? The truth of the matter is, it’s much easier to talk about making hard decisions until you’re actually faced with them firsthand. However, when we ourselves were faced with those moments, we had to trust ourselves to make those tough decisions in order to keep the project moving forward towards success.While these four takeaways have been huge learning experiences, there will be new challenges to face and hurdles to overcome as we venture towards different stages in the build process. With this, we’ll continue to learn and discover new things each week working on Ascend. This entire experience has allowed us to have a better glimpse into the everyday lives of our Entrepreneurs-in-Residence here at Moon. Their undertaking isn't one for the faint of heart, but through our story, we hope you realize that anyone can create something from nothing.Be sure to follow along here to learn more about Ascend! Monique Riley&nbsp; HR Business Partner <a href="mailto:monique@mooncreativelab.com">monique@mooncreativelab.com</a>

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Key Takeaways:<ol><li>Defining human-centered design.</li><li>Find inspiration from personal experiences.</li><li>How to design for products using human-centered design.&nbsp;</li></ol><hr><img src="https://moon-website-prod-images.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Ascend_Moon_Original_b4d4cc765c.png" alt="Ascend+Moon+Original.png">What does human-centered design look like when creating a new product? <a href="https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/what-is-human-centered-design">The Harvard Business School</a> defines human-centered design as “a problem-solving technique that puts real people at the center of the development process, enabling you to create products and services that resonate and are tailored to your audience’s needs.” At Moon Creative Lab, we believe that human-centered design is a key component to our success, especially within HR.The past two years have had its fair share of ups and downs for just about everyone, especially when having to navigate a pandemic for the first time and adapting to a new way of working together. We were isolated and forced to work alone. The physical distance caused strains on human connection and a sense of personal belonging, and led to questions of self-worth after being used to working in group settings. Our team noticed all of these shifts in Moon Mates which led us to critically examine our current employee experiences, the main one being employee onboarding. We really wanted to make sure that whether a Moon Mate was just hired or had worked at Moon for years, everyone felt important, valued, and heard by evoking a better sense of belonging and inclusion.Without the in-person experience, but with building a human-centered culture as our North star, the challenge for our team became, “How might we better establish human connection and build trust in a virtual workplace using human-centered design?”<img src="https://moon-website-prod-images.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Ascend_9f9f591f24.png" alt="Ascend.png"><h3>Use Your Personal Experiences To Spark Inspiration</h3>The onboarding process is one of the most crucial and important parts of an employee's journey at our company. We believe that setting up every new hire for success at the beginning directly correlates with how they will feel later on at our company – not only with their peers, but with the satisfaction of the work they will do.When we first started taking a deeper look at our onboarding process and those of other companies, we noticed a common theme. Onboarding processes were simple one-pagers full of checklists. If you complete these 20 items on the checklist, then you will have completed the onboarding. This felt very flat, boring, and not aligned with our value of being human-centered at all. From the outside looking in, it seemed as if we were putting the company’s needs first before better understanding the person’s experience and needs.Noticing this sparked inspiration for us.We felt motivated to rethink the entire onboarding process by making it more fun, interactive, and thoughtful while still making sure individuals felt up to speed with all of the information about our company and the role they would be fulfilling. Traditionally as HR professionals, our first thought isn’t to consider building a tool ourselves when there wasn’t one we could use already on the market. However, Moon Creative Lab is a unique place with a unique position. Since Moon is an incubator for new, bold ideas, we felt inclined to explore this idea further, simply because we could!<h3>How We Reimagined Our Product Using Human-Centered Design&nbsp;</h3>Now, two years after the onset of the pandemic, we have taken on one of our greatest challenges: building our first, one-of-a-kind onboarding tool specifically for Moon, which we call Ascend.Ascend is an onboarding experience that greets a new hire two weeks before they start and leads them through their first 90 days by providing them with all the information about Moon, our parent company, past and present projects, our values, and more! This allows for new Moon Mates to digest information and meet fellow Moon Mates at their own pace. We really wanted the platform to feel as customized to them as possible. We believe that if someone feels instantly welcomed to a new team and acclimates to a new role as quickly and seamlessly as possible, they will feel valued and confident from their first day. Our hope is that with a human-centered approach and experience is pursued, it will result in overall better work performance and employee satisfaction. This is why we strongly believe reimagining the onboarding process using human-centered design is so critical.&nbsp;While building anything from scratch is a huge undertaking, we urge anyone that is looking to solve a problem to first think of the human-centered approach. Use that as your North Star. When a solution resonates with a person’s needs, the problem at hand can become way less daunting and more attainable. This helped us a lot on our journey towards building Ascend.Be sure to follow us here to read more progress of Ascend!Monique Riley&nbsp; HR Business Partner <a href="mailto:monique@mooncreativelab.com">monique@mooncreativelab.com</a>

Our Programs

About Moon

Our Stories

Building Ascend From 0 to 1

How the Pandemic Inspired a New Human-Centered HR Solution

In The News

Moon Opens Doors to Palo Alto Startup Community

What Does Artificial Life Reveal About Us?

The Optimal Solution Between Remote and Office: Who Chooses Where To Work

Our Programs

About Moon

Our Stories

Ascend - Moon Stories Blog

Building Ascend From 0 to 1

How the Pandemic Inspired a New Human-Centered HR Solution

In The News

Moon Opens Doors to Palo Alto Startup Community

What Does Artificial Life Reveal About Us?

The Optimal Solution Between Remote and Office: Who Chooses Where To Work