Blog Post #5: Course Reflection

One concept that I was able to learn more about as a result of this course and group was project is rapid prototyping. I have had a New Product Development course here at McCombs, but never had the opportunity to take part in a rapid prototyping session. So just being able to help form insights from our interviews into a product or service concept was a worthwhile exercise. It was helpful to have Jeff from upstream come in before our rapid prototyping session to help set the guidelines for how our team should approach the exercise. Of key importance, was his insights on just putting our heads together to get a rough product or service concept developed, not to try and attempt a full scale design. It was helpful to view his own examples of how products had evolved from rapid prototyping to finished solutions.

Another concept that I was able to better grasp was that of developing a persona of the customer and directing research and product ideas to the persona's characteristics. My wife is an Account Director at an advertising agency, so I have some understanding of how creative is directed towards a target, but I never got a sense for how it could be applied to product development. I think that when teams come together to develop a new product or service, having a persona makes sense because it not only gives the group a target to think about but it makes the process more fun. We developed the persona of Sam and Buck - the single, affluent dog owner (not Matt M). Sticking to this, enabled us to direct our effort around "what would Sam and Buck" want or need from our service offering? I think it's a great discipline to use; to have a segmentation, but personalization strategy.

I say more in the final project, but I don't have much to complain about here. I think the reason is that I just had a great group to work with, especially Kelly, who LOVES dogs and so that made rallying around her passion really easy. Maybe that's it - a key takeaway: maybe it takes someone's passion to create a great project? I guess if you put your full self into something like product development, your creativity really comes out. This course is really part entrepreneur! Early on, we did have some trouble getting started, finding meeting times, and subjects to interview. Also, we struggled with developing a good list of interview questions to use. But once we had that, things really flowed nicely to the end concept. But I think these are concerns with any group project - especially in business school - and the class meeting time really helped.

Yes, I enjoyed working with my team to develop the Royal Gardens Dog Lovers Apartment Complex. Although we had a very diverse background (2 MPAs, 2 MBAs), I think the diversity in thought contributed greatly to our ideas. I never felt like we ran into a wall with idea generation - we could just get together and drum up the next course of action fairly easily. Also, beyond idea generation, we had a resident expert in dog-walking, which was an immense help, a realist-type accountant, and two creative MBAs (as creative as MBAs can be). Honestly, I really had fun with this project because it allowed us to go the full cycle with research to prototype but also to be creative and visual with it. Also, the entire project wasn't too structured, so I never felt like our group "had to fit the mold." I really enjoyed being creative and thinking outside of the box. My team was very enthusiastic about the solution we developed - which made it feel less like a project and more like an endeavor.

Thank you for the course and thank you for the project!