Reflections About My Group Project

The first main topic I learned about as a result of working on this project was the idea of a persona. At first in the course, I didn’t view it any differently than defining a target segment like I had done many times before in my previous courses. However, developing personas and developing target segments are very different ideas and involved very different levels of detail. To develop a persona, our team had to dig much deeper into the lives of a certain kind of consumer and find out as much as we could about the people we were creating. Some of the questions our team asked about our persona during the development of our couple included: how many children they had, what they liked to do in their spare time, and their religious and political affiliations. Our team developed George and Shirley McAllister, an active elderly couple that had many things in common with other active elderly folks, but at the same time had traits and personalities that made them unique. It was really interesting to delve deeper into the lives of George and Shirley and make assumptions about what they would be like. However, after conducting surveys and interviews with several active elderly people, we realized that some of our assumptions were wrong. It was really interesting to learn what people are actually like versus what you think they are going to be like. For example, we expected George and Shirley to eat organic food and be very environmentally conscious. What we found, however, was that George and Shirley didn’t think eating organic was important because “they had seen many fads during the courses of their lives” and figured they had gotten along just fine before this recent green movement had emerged. While I’m sure they didn’t hate the environment or anything, they just were not concerned with it as much as our team assumed they would be.

The second skill I learned from this project was prototyping. Before this project, I had no idea that prototyping involved such creative elements and that cheap materials could be used to make a great prototype. Having the guest speaker on prototyping was very helpful because we got to see what a prototype actually looked like and got ideas of how to make our own. I was afraid that because our product was so technical in nature, we wouldn’t be able to find cheap products to make our prototype look as realistic as possible. However, after one trip to Wal-Mart, we pretty much had all of our materials and made it work relatively easily. Our team made sure to keep an open mind while shopping and accepted any and all ideas. For example, we used light switch plates taped together to make our garage door for our oven and it ended up working out perfectly.

I definitely feel like working with all of the dynamic personalities in my group resulted in us creating a better and more unique product. We always had a devils advocate role in our group making sure every little detail and aspect of our product was intentional and purposeful. As a result, our product was better than it would have been if we had always agreed on everything and never questioned others suggestions. I really enjoyed the time spent working on this project, especially the entire process of interviewing our couples. It was kind of nerve wrecking interviewing couples I’d never met before, but we really gained a lot of useful insights from the interviews. We had a lot of fun throughout the entire project developing ideas, analyzing insights we gained, and building our prototype. It was a lot of work, but I feel that this project was the most intricate and rewarding project I’ve worked on thus far at McCombs. Thanks so much for a great semester!