As
an economics major in undergrad, and with a 5 year background in finance coming
into business school, the idea of “customer insights” had never really crossed
my radar. That was part of the reason I was excited to take this course, as I
literally have had 0 exposure to any of the concepts or ideas we talked about in a classroom format.
In that sense I understand EVERY concept and topic better as a result of this
course. Choosing one, I felt the observation was extremely informative
regarding better understanding our persona. You can get tons of information
through surveys and phone calls, but in my opinion none of that is as valuable
and actually talking to real people. It is very much like the lean start-up
model for starting a company. Get out of the office and into the field! You
need to talk to consumers to get a true understanding of the problems they
face. When we observed a particular family, tons of insights into their daily
life were revealed. Most importantly, I picked up on the way they incentivized
their children to do things such as chores, homework and eat their dinner:
Privileges. The fear of losing their
privileges was a driving force in the kids doing what their parents wanted.
This insight did not show up in any of our surveys or interviews, as it was a
small subtlety that would only have been realized by observing in person. This
observation served as the basis for the Galaxy Kids Tablet – a rewards driven
device for children.
A
concept that was particularly interesting to me was an exercise we did in class.
We were given a series of different insights related to a certain demographic,
and by putting a few of these together were forced to come up with ideas that
could be created around them. After one minute, each member of our group would
talk about the idea they came up with. After everyone shared, we would mix up
the insights and then come up with more ideas. This process really got my mind
moving. With each new idea said by one of the members of my team I would think
of several iterations of them. With each new insight we could build on our
existing best ideas to make an even better one. By the end of the exercise, I
felt our team had come up with a very cool idea related to the insights we were
given. I had never done an exercise like that and thought it was really cool.
This
has a little less to do with the project and more with the final deliverable.
Given no one in our group had any experience in film or film editing; we really
struggled to put one together. I really loved our idea for the galaxy kids;
however conveying that in this format became incredibly difficult. Having
thought about ways to improve this I am not sure I have an exact answer. One
thing I was thinking about would be to take a survey at the beginning of class
asking who has had experience with film/editing/software and make sure at least
one of these people is in each group. I think it would enhance the overall
deliverable to the client. Everyone had some really cool unique ideas and it’s
just too bad that given our groups (and I think some other groups) backgrounds
we were unable to truly convey what we wanted to with regards to our idea. The
other way is to do a class or two on how to do these kinds of presentations but
that is not really relevant to the class and would take away from other
material.
I
definitely think working with our group contributed to my overall learning. The
easy example is Sirisha. Given I am a 29 year old single male, I have very
limited experience with families with small children. As she has children, she
was able to provide a different perspective than what I had thought in my
assumptions. Also being the only male in the group, getting opinions and
perspectives from three different women was valuable to me.
Overall,
I enjoyed the way our ideas transformed over the course of the semester into
what I feel was a great problem statement. Seeing all the work come together
into our persona and ultimately our recommendation was pretty cool. I
definitely enjoyed the semester!
