In this blog, I am going to take
you on a semester long journey of Customer Insights group project. I will
reflect on what I assumed when I went in to the class, what I realized, what I
learnt, liked and disliked. I took Customer Insights thinking that it would be
a “data analysis” class. I assumed a Part2 to Ty Henderson’s Analysis of
Markets class. When I realized on the first day of class that I would be
writing blogs, doing Empathy maps, interviews and other primary research, I was
surprised. To be truthful, I was totally freaked out. I had not done anything
like that before. I had read blogs regularly, but never wrote one. I did not
know if there was a special software or format to write blogs even. And to
imagine that this blog is not something just the professor and TA would read.
It was public! If I made a fool of
myself, all my classmates, all my friends and in fact even my potential
employers had access to it, forever.
It seemed very much out of my comfort zone. I did not see many familiar faces
in the class. It had too many second years and too many faces that seemed new.
This added to my discomfort. But so many people who had taken this class
previously had recommended it to me that I decided to go forward with it. And now
I think that it was the best class decision of my McCombs life. We did several
interesting class exercises. I particularly remember the physical prototyping
exercise. It was so much fun, I felt free to be a child and explore again. The
most interesting exercise was our group project. We were assigned the task of
exploring the “Parents with small children” segment, gaining insights and
developing a product idea for Samsung and presenting it. This final
presentation had to be a recording- something one could play and not need
clicking through. Now that I set the stage for what our project was, let me
share with you what I liked, disliked and learnt.
The main idea that I learnt from
this class is the power of qualitative research. I had previously thought of
quantitative data as powerful and qualitative insights as “additional”. Being
an engineer, quantitative analysis, hypothesis testing, using data to prove or
disprove something was a way of life for me. For most problems, I would read
the situation, develop a hunch and then read further to validate or disprove
that hunch. My “Design Thinking as Marketing Strategy” class and my final
project in this class got me comfortable to the other aspect of problem solving
– where you go in with a clean slate, with no hypothesis to test, no
“prejudice” to taint your research with. Then, collect subjective data to lead
you to the hypothesis. For example when designing a research study to figure
out what kind of technology a family with small children would like, we
designed our research to explore their life, their general fears, frustrations,
goals, dreams etc. We did not focus on technology at all. We didn’t want to
know what they were using technology for, that would just drive us to an
incremental product idea. We wanted to find out what they wanted and didn’t
even know yet. We were looking for a problem or desire that they had in their
life and didn’t know that a futuristic technology could solve it for them. The
power of this research technique and qualitative data analysis is huge in the
field of Design thinking. I learnt this technique class and then used it in our
final group project. I liked this very much because it actually fulfilled what
I came to business school for! I came here to understand how a marketer grasps
what a customer wants before the
customer himself knows his desire well enough to articulate it. A desire to
understand new product idea generation was what drove me to business school in
the first place. Doing this project as a team helped us get comfortable with
primary research. Something I had not done before. Also, we had a chance to
design a generative research questionnaire, administer it and get insights. I
loved this phase of our project.
In this project, we also
implemented the rapid prototyping technique that we learnt in class. I liked
this phase a lot. After we got the data from our research, we identified the
problem statement and organized the insights from our research into several big
buckets. Then, using rapid prototyping, we came up with several different
solutions to the problem combining one insight with the problem statement.
Then, as a team, we discussed each idea and find the best one. When we did this
exercise in class, I could not believe how create we were as a team. This is one
place where I felt that the whole was bigger than the sum of its parts.
Together, we were more productive and more creative than just each of us
working in our silos and trying to handle different parts of this project. This
is when our team truly came together. Also, this phase demonstrated to me how
qualitative data really led me to the solution, the new product idea -
something that the end user wanted but did not know well enough to articulate
yet. And to see me and my team create that idea was very exciting. I felt
creative. Also, we experienced how time limit, a stress point actually made us
more creative than we normally are. The rearranged class, post-its, empathy map
poster, colored markers all got us out of the narrow, buttoned up thinking
process and released that creative energy to come up with truly “out of the
box” ideas.
Throughout this project and
really this entire class, I felt that I was made to step slightly out of my
comfort zone. It was pretty unsettling at first, but in the end I liked it. At
all but one instances, I felt my team actually rose to the occasion. In this
process, we expanded our comfort zone, learnt new things and discovered new
strengths we never knew we had. We also got accustomed to stepping out of comfort
zones and trying new things. But the part where I think we fell flat was the
last part of the project where we had to make a video presentation. We had no
equipment, no common time to interact, no video editing expertise and this
presentation carried a big part of our grade. We tried our best but I don’t
think we learned much here. We would have done much better and learnt this
presentation technique if we were to actually present our idea in person in our
class or if we had a prezi exercise in class.
All in all, I liked this class
and would definitely recommend it to my friends. At first, it seemed like it
was too far away from my comfort zone for me to learn anything. But then, I
gradually realized my strengths and started to enjoy the learning process. The
first blog was a disaster. I spent all night writing it and still could not
write a page. But then as I kept writing, I got better at it. It is not exactly
like writing a paper or writing an Email to your friend, but it is not that
different either. In the beginning, when
I was told that my team would come up with a new product idea from insights
gained from primary research in a semester, I did not think that was
realistically possible. I also felt that this class would take up all my time
leaving me no time to learn anything else this semester. That was just my panic
from being put in a differently structured class. We not only did or primary
research and generated a product idea, we did it with a sane amount of
work-load. It was not overwhelming. Also, our instructor taught us the concept
in class, then we had a mini-problem we would try that technique on and then,
we would have an assignment to implement that technique on our final project.
That helped us learn the concept very well. Also, our final project was broken
down in to small parts which were due throughout the semester. This made sure
that our project was always on-schedule and on-course. Previously, I had only
valued a class when it taught me frameworks, two-by-two matrices and nice
acronyms to remember concepts. This class had none of it. But I think it taught
me what I came to Business school to learn.
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