How to reuse Nespresso pods! An Agile Experiment
The curious case of curiosity is that it can spring up at any time without knowing, and especially when you have loads of time in your hand. And during pandemic the only thing that was in abundance was time.
And I decided to put it to the best use. I decided if I can re-use my spent Nespresso pods. What a stupid thing to do you would say, and I will not contest that at any rate. But what I say is like any other good product manager, I will do my best to try to make sense of it, make a framework out of it, and will get the utmost satisfaction doing all of it.
So here we go -
- What is the vision/mission/goal of this exercise — I have loads of time and to minimize my non-biodegradable waste ( pods are made of plastic).
- Task — Try to recycle the Nespresso pods
- Pain Points — Nespresso pods are so expensive and bad for the environment duh!!!!.
- Market Research — A quick browse on youtube, it turns out that I am not the only genius in the world to come up with this idea. And lo behold I got one YouTuber explaining how to recycle the pods. All I need is an espresso blend of coffee and aluminium foil.
- MVP — Minimum Viable Product/POC, okay let's try and see how it works.
- Cut up the foil from the head, clean the pod and make sure the pod is dry.
- Add a reasonable amount of coffee and then tap it. I filled it up till the brim.
- Seal the pod using aluminium foil and make sure the end product looks similar to how pods come out of the boxes.
6. Testing — Disaster — first the machine start whining and then water started coming out of everywhere.
7. Retrospective — On closer inspection, the coffee may be too much that there was no room for the water to build up the pressure and let the coffee expand hence water came out from everywhere.
8. MVP vr 2 — With that hypothesis, I went about filling the next cleaned up pod only till half this time around.
9. Testing — Semi disaster — Half of the water is still coming from god knows where, but some of it managed to squeeze from the front (i.e. through the foil) in the cup, of what has a faint resemblance to coffee water leftover in a coffee cup that is waiting to be washed.
10. Retrospective — Is the aluminium foil too strong that the pressure the machine is generating is not enough to break the foil. After close inspection of the actual pods, the water does come out of holes pierced in the foil in the front.
11. MVP vr 3 — Half filled coffee and a thin aluminium foil, after a quick run to store to buy the cheapest and thinnest aluminium foil.
12. Testing — Voila! I have found the cure to non-recyclable Nespresso pods.
And probably a lifelong embargo from the company. But there you go Agile being done in a real life. Enjoy your coffee and have a nice weekend.
