"How might we create a product which alleviates stress from dog ownership and prevent injuries to dogs, dog owners and bystanders."
I and my team mates collaboratively collected data via Google forms and interviewed 30+ dog owners to understand their fears and frustrations on dog ownership.
We understood Dog owners whose dogs have social anxiety/aggression and are not always in the mood to interact with people and their goals are to Walk their dog without fear of interactions with strangers (especially kids), Have their friends over without fearing their dog will respond aggressively and know when to end activities / leave stressful situations.
The dog owners we interviewed quoted, -
"On a recent walk, we crossed paths with a father and a ~2 year-old toddler. My dog is usually fine around kids, but this toddler ran up to her and she immediately started barking. I knew she just wanted distance, but the toddler started crying and I felt completely awful."
“The biggest change has been to our social life. We used to love having friends over to our back deck, but after a couple bad experiences, we’ve almost completely stopped....it’s not that I know she’ll be aggressive, but I can’t take the risk.”
“After some trial and error I think I can read my dog pretty well, but I know exactly how hard it is for others. Many people assume that tail wags mean the dog is happy, but I know they can sometimes mean fear or anxiety.”
As a starting point, the overwhelming majority of our target customers do not currently own an equivalent solution to D-Collar. While owners utilize trainers and behaviorists, D-Collar should be viewed as a supplement to these approaches, rather than a competitor. Our future customers are by and large changing their petcare and social patterns to adapt to their dog, simply unaware of the possibility of a biometric collar. We are entering a wide open category, and our focus is primarily around convincing customers that D-Collar is based on sound science and is effective instead of differentiating from pre-existing solutions
Dog adoption has increased over the last year during the pandemic, there are many new dog owners
As people return to offices/workplaces, new dog owners cannot always be around to ensure their dog is emotionally okay. Now that the pandemic is ending and people are more likely to go outside, there is an increased chance of interactions between dogs, dog owners, and bystanders/non dog owners. This market has no notable competitors. Recent advancements in the field of biotechnology and biomedical research have enabled accurate mood prediction. Wearables are an increasingly familiar technology - users are more willing to both purchase these products and put faith in the results they display. D-Collar will provide maximum assistance at the right time to dog owners and people around the dog, keeping the dog’s mood in mind.
D-Collar is a manual device and a native application platform designed for mobile phones and tablets so that dog owners can relish the user experience and get to know their dog better. The native mobile apps will be available for both android and IOS as the application will need device data like location and the application constantly gets responses from the collar and is configured with an interface. It is based on MVC architecture. The application will be built on React, the database of the application would use SQLite and is based on microservice architecture as microservices are independent, there is always room for constant developments of the application, efficient sprint planning and quick deployments.
We collaboratively completed the product design planning and built product roadmap to drive creative wireframes, site mockups, formulated market research document (MRD), product requirements documents (PRD), go-to-market (GTM) strategy plan, technical challenges, risk dependencies and estimated development time, market segmentation and pricing strategies to prioritize user stories for minimum viable product (MVP) via agile tools.
Vamsi Vanga
MEM Candidate - Northwestern University '22