Background to the Fellowship

It’s a non-trivial problem to build greenfield MVPs for users you aren’t familiar with. Even harder to do so in three months.

Yet it goes without saying that if we could design products that made people’s lives a little bit easier and were adopted by even a fraction of the 25 million American families living on less than $25,000 a year, we’d be making a significant difference.

The challenge has been thrown down again and again and again - we can’t just design for ourselves. There are millions for whom the American Dream is getting more and more elusive, and these people are being underserved by technology.

We need to find ways to fuse great technical product development with great user empathy and feedback and do our bit to help bring more opportunity back to America.

Our immersion program will help fellows walk the metaphorical mile in someone else’s shoes. A dozen times. Two dozen times. They’ll have a chance to notice pain points and see opportunities.