PAM helping families thrive | PaperKite

What would you do with the gift of time?

Supporting working parents by reducing the load of family admin

Services

Product strategy and coaching to reduce ambiguity and refine direction
An approach to tackling unknowns and provide product guidance
Limited release product to put into parents’ hands and showcase for investors

Businesses need software to manage their workload, but what about families? As the busiest micro-businesses out there families could use a hand. We helped build a smart digital assistant to take the load off our most invisible workers: parents.

How can we reconstruct a village around parents in the modern world?

Imagine you had a personal assistant that could take care of all the things you didn’t have time to do, freeing you up to have more fun in life. That sounds unaffordable for most of us. What if you could use the power of smart tech and AI to make that a reality?

Nicole Retter, founder of PAM, knows you can. Her vision is to reduce the physical and mental load of family admin, build a village of support around parents, and give them space to have more fun.

Emerging from a startup incubator, Nicole knew she had a solid foundation for a product that clearly met a need. But, with limited funding, she needed a partner who could help her think strategically about the leanest way to move from concept to product.

“Working with PaperKite, I didn’t feel like a solo founder anymore. I felt like I had someone else on my team to bounce things off. Instead of nodding and agreeing, they collaborated with me to solve this problem in a much smarter, big picture way.”

— Nicole Retter, PAM founder

Navigating uncertainty with good product strategy

We applied our product strategy approach to PAM, working with Nicole to deeply understand the problem and opportunity space, her priorities, her biggest unknowns, and what else is out there in the market. We focused on being a product coach, challenging Nicole to refine her thinking and providing a framework to navigate ambiguity.

This framework gave us a structure in which to consider possible solutions for the problem space, and ideas for experiments to quickly understand whether the potential solutions will work.

What’s the minimum you can spend to learn the most?

Working side-by-side with Nicole we created an outcome-based roadmap to make sure our experiments directly aligned to her business goals. We identified the unknowns with the biggest impact, and the quickest way we could get insights to tackle these unknowns. This enabled Nicole to place considered, affordable time and money bets on each one of those experiments. It’s an efficient way to work, helping us to go faster and spend less as we refine the product direction.

Thinking creatively to only build the unique piece

We want to find the fastest, most sensible way to solve a problem, leveraging technologies that already exist. This enables us to focus on building the unique piece that makes a product valuable. For PAM, that meant using existing AI and software products to automate a lot of the functionality, saving Nicole a significant amount of money. We integrated these existing products with our creative design and development to build a limited release product that Nicole can confidently put into parents’ hands and showcase for investors.

Creating a product with enormous potential

Who wouldn’t want a Personal Admin Manager to free up their time? We believe this product has enormous potential, and we’re proud to collaborate with Nicole to turn her vision into reality. Throughout this project we’ve supported Nicole with building a case for funding, and helped her take her product to the next level. We’re looking forward to seeing busy families benefit from PAM, giving them space to have more fun.

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