Assumptions

1. At Yale, students were looking for casual ways to connect outside of classrooms and clubs. Many enjoyed evening walks around campus but lacked a structured way to find others with similar schedules or interests.

2. A lightweight, mobile-first solution could lower the barrier to social connection more effectively than existing campus event platforms.

The Problem

Students wanted to:
1. Find peers to join them for walks.
2. Discover safe, popular routes nearby.
3. Make spontaneous plans without committing to formal events.

Without a tool, coordination happened informally through group chats, often resulting in missed opportunities and uneven participation.

The Solution: RecruitAI

I defined the product vision for Yalk, a mobile app that lets students create, share, and join casual walks. The MVP focused on:

1. Public and private walk creation (start/end locations, time, optional comments). 2. Map-based discovery of active walks happening around campus.
3. Community engagement through friend invitations and public walk sharing.

Executions

I led a cross-functional team of 3 engineers and 1 designer to bring the app from concept to launch. My role spanned:

1. Prioritizing MVP features to keep scope tight.
2. Writing user stories and acceptance criteria for group scheduling and event sharing.
3. Driving weekly sprint planning, balancing speed with usability testing.

Impact

User predicted participation grew by 35%.

Students reported Yalk walks as a “low-commitment way” to meet new people — validating our assumption of social ease as a differentiator.

Shortcomings

MVP didn’t yet solve edge cases like weather changes or overlapping walk requests, but validated core demand for casual, social walking.

Roadmap

Phase 1 (MVP, delivered): Create, share, and join casual campus walks through simple scheduling and map-based discovery.

Phase 2:
- Adding safety features (trusted check-ins, route visibility).
- Introducing recurring walks to foster habit formation.
- Expanding beyond Yale with a version tailored for other universities.