Loved this class!

There have been so many new concepts that I learned or expanded my knowledge as a result of this course: persona development, insights gathering and research, and product design.  Although I enjoyed learning about all of these and love seeing how each of these can be used in different business concepts, there were two topics in particular that I really liked – brainstorming and prototyping.

As a consultant, I had conducted brainstorming exercises before business school. In each session I led, I recognized the impact of a good facilitation method and facilitation skill in generating ideas. Quality idea generation can lead to greater buy-in from team members, and can ensure that even with a large quantity of ideas, team members are providing product input and ‘thinking outside the box”.  Facilitating idea generation is a skill that effective leaders need to foster, and learning alternative techniques is critical to developing this skill. Our exercises in class where we used a “traditional” brainstorming technique and contrasted that with an alternative method were very revealing in terms of the quantity and quality of ideas generated by my team. I also appreciated hearing from classmates what other businesses do/ best practices for other techniques.

In addition, I really enjoyed the prototyping exercises and requirements as part of the group project. The first in-class exercise was helpful to introduce the prototype idea generation mindset and coupled with the brainstorming techniques learned prior, was useful to facilitate idea generation within the team. The actual prototypes resulting were not as useful due to limited time and resources, however the 2^nd session was very useful in learning the specific skills and tools to create a prototype. I really enjoyed using actual prototyping tools that can be used in future applications. The project was very interesting to see other’s thoughts and perspectives on how to visualize our idea. I will definitely use these tools in future jobs. There were a few suggestions for next year’s class that may help to improve the effectiveness of the exercises: for the 1^st class session, ask students to bring their own scissors, markers, etc. Time spent looking for supplies to make the prototype can then be used to generate better ideas for the prototype and you wouldn’t have to spend more of your personal money! For the project and 2^nd class session, I really like the prototype tools, but I feel like they are biased towards technology applications vs. creating a new technology or a new physical object. There may be a few tools that can help with a different type of prototyping that would be beneficial to share in addition to application tools.

Although my previous work deeply involved gathering and using customer insights for product, marketing, and pricing decisions, I never fully had the chance to go into such depth on empathy and testing a customer persona. The project was a very good opportunity to see how assumptions and ideals of customers may not be incorrect and need to evolve. I realized in developing out personas, that there biases and inherent assumptions that we each have when thinking about customer segments. These biases and assumptions were also different for different group members and reflected our individual experiences. The experience of conducting interviews and in-home visits was very interesting, fascinating, and revealing. I realized how valuable these face-to-face interactions are to observe behaviors and see how individuals are similar or differ in actions and motivations. One of the biggest take-a-ways from this exercise was correctly facilitating the interview and instructions for questions in order to get effective insights. Although I have conducted interviews before, I do not usually use visual aids to capture and earn responses. These were very helpful to not only capture new information, but to facilitate the interviewees thought process and provide additional insight that we would not have gotten through traditional Q&A formats. It was important to note that not each interview supported our persona, and we were able to refine our assumptions based on pervasive behaviors and motivations that we saw across multiple interviews. This persona development was more detailed and in-depth than any process I have used before, and was very critical in developing a problem statement. Without this level of thoroughness, I do not think that we would have captured the critical motivation or “why” behind some of the persona behaviors that drove the rest of the project.

I think each part of the project was useful. Although there was a time constraint as a result of the work to be completed, I think that is reflective of normal business environments – there will always be a time and resource constraint, clients and colleagues will be busy, and although it was challenging to fit all of the interviews in, we were able to make it work by being flexible as a team. I would have liked to use more of the in-class prototyping sessions to work on our prototype for the project, so if there is a way to match those classes up with project schedules, it would be useful to future participants.

In terms of the class, the only thing that I felt was extraneous and not really related to the class, project, or concepts we learned is the final paper. I tried to choose a topic that overlaps with some of the topics learned in class, and is an industry where concepts such as empathy and insights gathering can be applied. However, I feel that there is not a strong tie to any of the material and it has not been a useful outlet to integrate the concepts learned in class. The blog posts, group project, and in-class sessions were the most beneficial and supported internalization of concepts introduced in class.

Overall, my experience in this class has been very positive. I really appreciated the different approach from traditional case and lecture formats – the class structure and format was consistent with the topics we learned and also more engaging than the traditional MBA class. I wish every class had similar styles. On a personal level, I really enjoyed the classes with design as the focus, such as the class where we reviewed famous designers and the functionality of products they envisioned. The other distinguishing factor was that the readings for this class were relevant, interesting, and not outdated. I appreciated that I could learn more about topics from FastCompany and blogs instead of a 30-year-old Harvard case. Working with the group definitely was beneficial. I enjoyed getting to know each member and seeing their ideas, opinions, and suggestions as each member had a very different perspective than mine. Everyone on the team was very respectful, attentive, and invested in our project. These qualities made it very easy to collaborate and share ideas to move us forward with each step. It is always good to hear different viewpoints and hear how each team member’s experiences can shape individual preferences and styles. I believe that it was also beneficial to work with each other throughout the semester, instead of mini-projects with different teams, as we were able to continually think of ideas, reflect on our project at different times, and articulate our thoughts together as a team each week.