Meet?Meet
Watch our Finale presentation on YouTube!
What is Meet?Meet. ?
Meet?Meet. is a fast and easy way to find a common time for a meeting across multiple individuals, departments, and agencies.
What motivated you to build this product?
Every day, across all of government, public officers meet in order to make progress on key decisions, initiatives, and strategies that help determine the future of Singapore. However, these critical decision making moments are often delayed due to a very simple reason – people struggle to find a common time to meet.
Emails are created with data tables of names and proposed dates and times that get sent back and forth between individuals and departments confirming time slots with yes, no’s, and maybe so’s. And these long email chains can result in confusion and no final meeting time.
All the while, decisions are deferred, progress is slowed and the cost of delay creeps slowly upwards.
That’s the problem we’re trying to solve with Meet?Meet, a simple calendar polling application designed to combat the cost of delay by making it easy to find a time that works for everyone.
What tech stack did you use?
- Backend using nodejs with express
- Frontend using react
- Postgres Database
- Deployed on AWS, DNS on cloudflare
What were the key challenges you faced in building Meet?Meet. ?
Firstly, we had to differentiate our product from commercially available solutions. There were also time constraints – our team only formed a week and a half before the end of Hack for Public Good. This meant we had to cut down features to produce a MVP showing only the essential user flows. Lastly, we had to search for the right connections and find the right users for feedback before the end of the Hack for Public Good.
What is the product vision for Meet?Meet. ?
We want to eliminate the cost of delay associated with scheduling complications so that public officers can make progress on key decisions, initiatives, and strategies as quickly as possible.
We have always envisioned that Meet?Meet. could be an extension of the CalSG product that was built by another hackathon team. These two products could come together to create a holistic scheduling and appointment booking solution for public officers.
Fun facts!
One interesting finding:
People are often able to simply use Outlook to help book meetings across multiple parties but after 5+ participants scheduling gets complicated. It was interesting to hear about all of the hacks that people use today to help find a common meeting time like bullet point lists of time slots, tables of names and proposed times sent via email, spreadsheets of the same, and even MS Teams wiki pages.
One thing you’d have done differently:
If we had more time, we would have liked to conduct additional research with more users and test our working software instead of our clickable prototype. This would help us to de-risk the product and ensure that we’re building something that works for public officers.
Takeaway/learnings:
You can accomplish more than you think in a short period of time. Our team got a late start so we only had a week and a half before the finale but we nearly had a fully functioning product before the end.
