Final Reflection: Stepping in the Customer’s shoes!
This Design Thinking course has been quite a journey in terms of my thought process before the course as compared to after. Initially, I was not enrolled in this course, so after one week, one of my friends from this course told me how amazing this course is and made me swap my already enrolled course to this one (well it’s not like he forced me into this one but I was not satisfied with the original course I took, so he suggested me this one). I am very grateful to him for helping me make the right decision at the right time. Everything about this course is just so unique, the teaching style, the activities in class, actual prototyping of our ideas (and not just writing a paper about it), going out in the field, and actually conducting our own research by real-time interaction with our targeted audience. All these activities are closest to the actual product experience that I’ve got so far.
One of my favorite activities that we did in class, which was also my first activity, was creating the journey map. I remember we created a journey map for watching a movie on Netflix and I was amazed when I realized how oblivious we are of the number of steps we go through just to watch a movie! This exercise helped us understand how important it is to map the customer journey as it gives us a better understanding of the customer experience. We used this strategic approach in our Food Waste Project to identify user pain points and build according to user convenience.
When we initially conducted our research on food waste and actually started working on our project, it was very difficult to focus on one problem as there are so many! So naturally, we started thinking along the lines of trying to solve all problems and building a prototype with multiple features. But after attending our guest Rachelle’s talk, who spoke about problems and various ways in which we can interact with customers to understand them, it became clearer to us that we need to understand the importance of the problem by and thus we were able to narrow our focus: leftovers from raw groceries like fruits and vegetables which get spoiled and are thrown out.
uring the course I chose to read the book: The Innovator’s DNA, about which I have already talked in my previous reflection. I chose this book as I felt like it would help me achieve an innovative mindset, which I feel is very important to have as an aspiring Product Manager. One skill that the author focused on a lot is Questioning, which even I feel is a very important skill that I tried to improve through this semester and it helped! While working on the project whenever I felt like I needed some clarity about anything, I started asking questions about it to myself, to the people around me especially to the customers as it is all about their experience.
I also loved the session we had with our guest Niina, where she talked about product/ solution fit. After attending her session, we were clear that in order to solve the specific problem of leftovers, we need to test our prototype with the right users, validating our most critical assumptions. If you would have asked me to design a product, addressing a specific problem, before taking this course, I would have surely prioritized my perspective first thinking, I have done a lot of research and I’ve put so much effort into understanding the problem, so I know what’s best. But now, I have realized how important it is to prioritize the user’s perspective as they know what they want and by building this product I am trying to solve a problem for them! There’s no possible way that I can assume what their needs might be, therefore I have to step in the customer’s shoe to bring out the best product. In the end that is all that matters.