The Macro Challenge

In my last post, I talked about the experience we were having with the Macro Challenge at the Apple Developer Academy. A lot of things have happened since then, and today I'll tell you all about them.

The Solution

First, let's start with we Engage Phase. Before we wanted to help recover degraded lands, and we did proceed through this path until we find ourselves at a dead end on how to make the business profitable. So we took a step back and went in a similar direction when we decided to work with Carbon Credits.

Carbon Credits are a hot topic at the moment due to their importance in the plan to stop global warming from getting worse. During our Investigate Phase, we got to the conclusion that the process was rightfully bureaucratic and this made the process take too long to get complete. So we decided that our challenge would be to boost the efficiency of the certification process on the voluntary market. A quick explanation: the voluntary market is the type of commerce where companies buy carbon credits in order to stay positive and report it to their customers, so there's no legal obligation for doing it.

Our solution for this challenge was to build an organization tool similar to Jira and Trello but with a differential: the whole process was thought considering carbon credits consultants companies, so all the steps of this bureaucratic process were automatically added to a project when it was created. The consultant would then have the option to add and remove steps in order to conform to the structure they should follow in their company. This project would allow a clear path to be followed by the consultants and make the organization process a lot faster than the one they normally do at the moment.

The Process

This project was special since we were able to go deeper into the Investigate Phase, and we were really able to understand a real-world problem, be able to create a solution for it, and have positive feedback from stakeholders in order to make sure that our solution would fit their work day. This allowed my team and I to learn so much about this hot topic and get a real idea of how hard it is to work in this field.

Fortunately, the whole team was aligned since the beginning of the project and we just had small adjustments points to be discussed on what our solution should be. Even though we were aligned, I feel that we should have kept better management during the Act Phase. Defining specific roles for each member of the team would have been beneficial to help us manage the task's development time.

Due to time constraints, we weren’t able to implement all the features that we planned in order to have the app as we wanted, but we managed to develop the core functionalities and had a good deliverable by the end.

Next Steps

As the next steps, we’re planning to migrate our App from iPhone only to work on iPads and other platforms. This will allow us to improve the UX across the App and expand our target audience.