One main concept that I have learned from this course from working on this group project is the concept that there are so many things to learn from a customer segment and it is difficult to gain insight and understanding about everything you would like to just through surveys and collages. At the beginning of this class and the beginning of our group project, I underestimated how difficult it would be to get hard data from our surveys and collages that would tell us all the exact information we needed in order to create the most fitting and perfect product for our segment. I haven't conducted many surveys since high school and so I had forgotten how difficult they can be. Although we had a good amount of subjects for both of our research methods, some responses were not helpful towards our project, but some were. This project has really helped me gain a better understanding of surveys and the kind of information you can or cannot collect from them. For instance, when asking a subject a question- even though they answer it, there may be underlying thoughts or ideas under their responses that even they are not aware of. So I also learned that it is important to really dig into their answers and responses and see what else you can pull from them.
The next main skill that I have learned from this course from working on this group project is presentation skills. Throughout this project and class, I have presented a couple times- some informally, and a more formal one. I learned that it is important to be able to convey your thoughts and findings to the group so that they will better understand the project and the goals we were trying to achieve. Along with speaking in front of a group of people, I also learned how to more thoroughly make PowerPoint presentations. For example, during our updates- Professor Walls always challenged us to write very thorough thoughts in the notes section to explain what we were trying to convey through our slides. Though these updates, I have had a lot more practice with making PowerPoint presentations now- which is a skill that I will widely use in the workplace when I graduate this May.
Since I am a Supply Chain Management/Finance major, it was interesting working on a group with two Marketing major students. I’ve always heard in the workplace how ideas can clash between finance and marketing or how it can be difficult to see eye to eye with the other “group” of people. I can kind of see what they are talking about. I think that it is definitely a learning experience and I enjoyed working on a team with them, but there were times where I could see my mind and thought process for something venturing off a different way than they did. But in the end, I really do think that we all were able to add something different to the project that made it that much better. At first when we were picking our segment- affluent empty nesters, I felt very optimistic and thought that this would be a good segment to find out more about. But as we found out our room selection- the bathroom, I was a little nervous about how we would find a connection between these two pieces of information, and how successful our project results would be. As time went on, Professor Walls did a great job of coaching us and stretching us to dig deep and find out what things really mean. He also suggested different things for us to find out and really helped out in this aspect. Towards the end of the project, things slowly started to come together. I think that our second survey method- collages- really helped out in terms of providing usable information for our project. It seemed to provide more insight into the subjects and their thoughts, views, and needs when it comes to this room. Creating a prototype for the project was interesting- I’ve never had to do that before. From this I learned that it is important to come up with a great product idea, but it is also important to make sure it is feasible and can actually be constructed in a way. All in all, I have taken some learnings away from this class and just wanted to thank Professor Walls for helping us through the process!
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