Volunteering as a Pitch Coach

Through Project Invent, teams of high school students work alongside their community partners to create a working product for social impact causes. During this process, students present their social impact ideas and their final products in front of a panel of judges at Demo Day in May. To help students prepare for these pitches, working industry professionals volunteer as pitch coaches through their experiences presenting at work-related meetings, speaking in front of small to midsize groups, or pitching their own ideas. These volunteers come from a variety of backgrounds ranging from basic business, entrepreneurship, marketing, design, software, product, and more.

Meet Our Pitch Coaches

One of our pitch coach volunteers, Dominique Elkind, is a product designer at Google and helped start an incubator at the company. She has entrepreneurial experience working at startups as well as a design consulting firm before joining Google. She loves the entrepreneurial nature of Project Invent because it helps students be creative, speak to their vision, and move faster in their passions. As a pitch coach, Dominique has left feedback for students asynchronously, held 1:1 sessions with student teams, completed dry runs of student ideas and their pitch, and given live feedback on pitches including the presentation and product itself. Working in industry as a designer leading critiques and giving feedback has been a beneficial experience to help Dominique give meaningful information to take student pitches further as a pitch coach volunteer because she believes in giving students the space to grow. 

Giving Back to Students

Volunteering with Project Invent has been a rewarding and fun experience for Dominique as she has been a volunteer for the past couple years, and it is fun for her to see each group of students’ ideas due to their creativity and ability to articulate their product vision. She has fun helping them format product materials such as marketing and pitches as well as to see the product development. As a pitch coach, Dominique wanted to give specific project feedback to help students be successful in school as well as find potential career opportunities by speaking with working professionals. Seeing students excited about their pitches made Dominique see that the passion for innovation set them apart because it was clear when they performed research on their space and became subject matter experts.

What Makes a Good Pitch?

Based on her previous pitch coach volunteering experience and her own product design critiques at Google, Dominique believes a good pitch includes a clearly defined problem backed by research. It is important to ensure that a pitch includes compelling data points, a competitive analysis, and pain point identification that is articulated through a presentation to reflect that students have thoroughly researched their problem space. She discovered that students believe they have to design a completely different product, but to improve their products, they can alter their designs or do more research on optimal price points, so the solution is often simpler than they think. However, student teams are hesitant to pull ideas from different places and draw inspiration too closely from existing products or businesses, so she has guided them on when it is acceptable and encouraged to gain inspiration from other resources. 

Dominique has given feedback in various ways such as written and 1:1 feedback that is incorporated in the next round of review. She has given feedback on distinct use cases to ensure that student teams are focused on the real user they are serving and able to narrow down their MVP (minimum viable product) to a valuable idea. In the past, her student teams have also juggled working with different ideas, so she has guided them and helped them realize they do not have to solve every problem but it is more beneficial to focus on a targeted use case that they are able to solve in a clear way. 

Takeaways

Throughout her volunteer experience at Project Invent, Dominique has had a great time interacting with the Project Invent team and students. She believes the Project Invent team has been organized and helpful in providing materials and guidance to volunteers which is also reflected in the preparedness of the students and teachers when developing product ideas. Not only has she seen the students benefit from the volunteers’ guidance and support, but she has found the interactions with students extremely valuable in viewing how they implement feedback to make their products and vision better. Going in as a pitch coach volunteer for the first time, she did not believe she would be able to help the students as much from a technical or engineering viewpoint, but she has been able to see how her product design experience has offered students the opportunity to explore different disciplines and job functions. Her main takeaway is that volunteers can  help students see the different areas in technology and innovation they can specialize in such as design, engineering, or business.