Last but not least!

Since I’m in college whether in Spain or in USA I’ve been trained to think out of the box to develop brilliant ideas while working on marketing. However, this course has allowed me to build a different standard of how to get to brilliant ideas by following a planned, structured process. Usually people think about a product and then start asking the target market if they do like it, what they would change or what are the main preferences. This is not the way to do it. We all need to follow a top down strategy, so it means that we need to choose the segment we want to target to develop different strategies or techniques to gain their insights, evaluate them and then create the perfect product or feature. Back in Spain, I was used to work more general issues like Strategic Marketing Plans for big companies, but I really liked Customer Insights because we were working very closely to these people, so we can learn from them with accurate information. 

 

My second topic or idea is Prototyping and developing a product according to the insights we found out. Before starting this class I had never tried to develop any kind of product. We usually thought about different options or different products but we never got to develop the real product. Prototyping and developing a product is not as simple as it seemed before starting the project. We needed to reflect as much insights as possible to fulfill potential customers’ needs. We knew who they were what they needed and where they wanted but we had no idea about what product could be the best option to meet those needs. This project helped me realize that prototyping is a process of iteration in which a high level of customer knowledge is required in order to come up an excellent idea.

 

I would like to focus the main part of my blog to talk about the project and my group. As you know I’m not American and before coming I wasn’t used to work with people from other countries, languages, cultures and ways of thinking. The first day I went to class and I realized that groups were assigned randomly; I was a little bit scared because I only knew the Spanish crew (Manu, David and Laura). However, my group welcomed me very well and we started working so hard on the project since the first meeting. I have had a really good experience working with them, because all of us had very different approaches, ways of thinking and ways of working but we all knew what the objective was, so we always were time efficient. All of our group meetings were meant to be as quick as possible with highest quality. I would also like to highlight that the instructor has given us the right direction in every moment. Only the fact that we had to do some updates based on a template every 2 or 3 weeks, was very useful because we were forced to think about our segment, their needs, insights or even the product, at least once a week. Finally, I want to highlight 2 more issues. The first one, as one classmate pointed out last week, it would be ideal during the project to know that we have to choose a segment and that we are assigned a room, but we shouldn’t know that we are meant to develop a product, because that could biased group’s focus. And last but not least, I’ve met some people in that class that are going to be friends for a long long time, so everything is positive and useful.