From Discovery to Pitch
Building Your Product Craft with Colab's Product Management Fundamentals Cohort
Earlier this year a group of builders and problem-solvers spent eight weeks working through the Colab Product Management Fundamentals course.
The shape of the course is hands on and practical: sit in the mess of discovery, define the problem properly, shape a solution worth building, then make the case for it in a pitch that you can defend.
The final pitches were tangiable examples of the course work put into practice; four product concepts, each grounded in a real problem the person had gone and looked at.
GalenicAI
The problem
Demand for compounded medicine is growing fast across multiple verticals, and every order still needs humans in the loop to make it safely. Compounding pharmacies are absorbing that growth on processes that do not scale. Operators run an error-prone triple data entry workflow across spreadsheets, regulator systems and label software.
The pain
Entering a handwritten prescription takes around 90 seconds. Multiply that by hundreds of prescriptions a week.
The pitch
GalenicAI is a cloud platform that uses AI and OCR to pull structured data out of a photo, sent to the pharmacy the way prescriptions already arrive, by direct message on something like WhatsApp. One scan registers the formula. No behaviour change asked of pharmacy staff.
NameFlow
The problem
Getting married is meant to be one of the better parts of life. Then the admin starts. Leigh took on the post-marriage name change in Australia, a task that requires notifying between 25 and 45 separate organisations, each with its own form and its own order of operations.
The pain
People spend an average of 8 to 17 hours on that admin, spread across days or weeks.
The pitch
NameFlow is an AI-powered workflow platform that aims to get the whole thing under four hours: a personalised checklist, smart sequencing so tasks happen in an order that actually works, and pre-filled email and letter templates.
Earned
The problem
The endless scroll is very good at its job. It lights something up in the brain and quietly takes the time that would have gone to people and to sleep. Natalie pitched Earned, a different angle on digital wellbeing and screen time.
The pain
People feel their phone use is out of their control and cannot convert good intentions into action. Hard limits get switched off.
The pitch
Earned flips the model from restriction to reward. Complete a focus session or a productive action and you earn screen time. It centres on a Screen Time Wallet, where users earn, save and spend time to unlock the specific apps they chose to restrict.
CriminAX
The problem
We are more connected than ever, and so are criminal organisations. Organised Retail Crime is getting more sophisticated, and countering it means law enforcement and retailers working the same data at the same time. Sarah introduced CriminAX, built for crime analysts.
The pain
Analysts spend around 80% of their time on administration rather than analysis, because of a disjointed swivel-chair workflow. Linking a series manually across systems, spreadsheets and dashboards can take days.
The pitch
CriminAX gives analysts a single window and cuts series linking to under 15 minutes. It turns criminal data into actionable intelligence while keeping the AI logic repeatable and explainable, so nobody is asked to trust a black box.
What we noticed
Four very different domains: pharmacy operations, life admin, consumer behaviour, law enforcement. The same underlying move in each one.
None of them opened with a feature. They opened with a number. 90 seconds a script. 25 to 45 organisations. 80% of an analyst’s week. That is what a pitch needs to survive contact with a room of people whose job is to say no.
They also each named the constraint that kills most good ideas. Zero behaviour change for pharmacy staff. Sequencing, not just a list. Rewards instead of restrictions. Explainable logic instead of a black box. Finding the root of the pain is half the work. Designing around the thing that would stop people adopting the fix is the other half.
That progression, from a vague problem space to a validated pitch in eight weeks, is the whole point of the course.
Congratulations to the PMF cohort. Amazingly good work.