Job search for government and military contract work

When I first started in Stellwagen Technology, the owner of the company was thinking of investing in this idea a former navy seal guy was pitching for him as a Linkedin platform for highly skilled personnel and retired military people that he was sure it was going to be a success and a niche badly covered.

Myself and this guy starting working and iterating through the powerpoint slides he had about the project that consisted on 3 different branches:

1- The Admin—which once developed would be this guy who would be managing the flow of candidates posts, contracts and task orders placed by governments etc.

2. The Enterprise—which could be the contractors placing their jobs with the specific criteria and accepting biddings, placing starting biddings, and managing the process of accepting, selecting and hiring candidates.

3. The Candidates—which would be the section where candidates would search for jobs, bid for jobs, accept jobs from potential contractors, fill out their profile, etc.

The process applied to develop these essentially when from:

1. Gathering as much information as possible from his PP slides and make sense of what he intended to accomplish as a final product. It wasn't particularly easy as the more questions and concerns raised, the more complex it seemed to be getting—by the way, we were a team of 1 data scientist, 2 engineers, 1 quantitative modeller and me as a product designer.

2. Doing iteration over iteration of wireframes and doing feedback sessions and critiques to see if what we were developing make clear sense to the rest of the team.

3. Prototyping a sequence of flows for stakeholder i.e. this guy and primarily for the CEO of my company to see how viable in the end would be possible to invest on this project.

I personally found it too complex for the team we where and too ambitions not to mention that for a project like this you'd need marketing, pr, hiring more people, testing, accountants, legal dept, etc. In other words we needed more resources for the scale of the project we where building. The data scientist, who was figuring out the AI part this guy was thinking, couldn't see many things how they'd be connected and overall there were many unanswered wholes.

So, long story short, even though we spent around 3 months going on on this, we concluded and presented to the CEO that it wasn't a good investment and particularly and easy one for the resources we had on an industry we didn't know and so it went: poof! But I least I've got a few good screens here from the many flows I have.