Of my primary takeaways
from this class was to approach the business model from a more customer-centric
perspective. Instead of coming up with
product ideas and seeing how they can fit in people’s day, it seems to be a
more useful process to really understand peoples’ daily lives and find the pain
points. I really enjoyed doing the
market research on the Nordstrom Project which helped me get in the practice of
trying to really understand the psyche of a customer and figure out how we
could help her.
I think this is important aspect of doing product design but a thought I do often have is that the customer shouldn't own me. I shouldn't sell a product that isn't healthy or safe simply because "that's what the customer wants". I think that is a cop-out and have found good support for that reading Yvon Chouniard's book, "Let My People Go Surfing." I need to understand my customer but I shouldn't be afraid to educate them and lead them to a new type of product offering.
I think this is important aspect of doing product design but a thought I do often have is that the customer shouldn't own me. I shouldn't sell a product that isn't healthy or safe simply because "that's what the customer wants". I think that is a cop-out and have found good support for that reading Yvon Chouniard's book, "Let My People Go Surfing." I need to understand my customer but I shouldn't be afraid to educate them and lead them to a new type of product offering.
Another Takeaway from
the Course
Before this class, I had
never given significant thought to prototyping.
And for good reason, I was a CPA for an audit firm and have focused on
energy finance during my time at McCombs.
Customer Insights was the first and only Marketing class I took besdies the core class. However, working on the prototyping during the Nordstrom project helped
me understand some of what is necessary to successfully create prototypes. I think this will help me significantly down
the road as I hope to start my own company.
The group project also made me appreciate how important it is to surround
myself with creative, talented individuals.
The divergent brainstorming process was made far more productive with
four individuals all working together to throw out ideas and many of them were
built on top of others’ initial thoughts.
Problems with the
Project
I think it would have
made more sense for Nordstrom to give us a more specific persona. While it did not take a significant amount of
time to select ours, I do not think any of us really learned much about
customer insights by trying to nail down on a persona. Once the persona was selected, we did really
start to learn about the customer insights process by trying to get a good
understanding of the behavior/pain points/personality of the persona. Also, I think it was a waste of time to have
the groups put together videos. Far too
much effort was exerted on this part of the process. We are not film students, and these videos
never had a good chance of looking professional. I think the time spent on creating the video
would have been better spent working on the prototypes. We could have then just presented in class,
with someone taping the presentation to then send to Nordstrom.
Overall Project Experience
When the project was
first announced, I was really excited as it was a totally different project
than I had worked on at McCombs and in my prior work experience. I was also
really excited to work with my group. While Sameer and I were in the same study
group during our core classes, I had yet to work with Alice or Emily. I knew
they both had marketing experience, so I looked forward to learning a lot from
them during the Nordstrom project. As the project got started, I tossed out the
idea of using a young mother for our persona as a way to do something a little
bit different than the other groups. The
other members of the group like the idea and we ran with it. Throughout the process, I learned a lot from
my group as well as took away valuable experience from conducting
interviews. Once our problem statement
was identified, we began prototyping.
This was quite a bit difficult from the first few stages. It involved divergent thinking as well as
trying to be creative in coming up with potential solutions. While Professor Walls attempted to teach the
principles of prototyping (using practice exercises and having a professional
designer talk to the class), I came away from class without a really increased
ability to prototype. I’m not sure to
what extent this represents a shortcoming of the class itself or is rather a
reflection of the fact that for this part of the process, trial and error is
the best if not only way to learn. While
I believe I provided good ideas in the prototyping process, especially in terms
of specific things I think the Nordstrom website should offer, I leaned heavily
on other members of my group who had more skill at bringing the ideas to
life. Overall, it was great learning
experience and the best part was getting to know my team members better. I don’t think we provided Nordstrom with
anything of significant value, but such is the case when you have individuals who
aren’t experienced with this doing only a few weeks’ worth of work. I understand the idea that we weren’t biased
with having worked for years at Nordstrom.
However, from talking with Scott Jones, it did not seem to me like there
were many unique insights we have.
