Getting Guerrilla with it.
Written by: Shipra Arora & Robert Paul — February 18, 2018
We were still at least a few weeks away from interviewing actual users of PNC products, but that delay didn’t stop us from doing some “hands dirty” guerilla research.
We contacted dozens of companies who have procure-to-pay processes and tried to set up interviews with them, to learn how their company procures their goods and supplies.
We then contacted professionals working in the P2P space through LinkedIn, hoping we’d get a few bites. Lastly, we reached out through local community based channels on Facebook and NextDoor. Unfortunately… we weren’t getting any traction. The emails we sent out resulted in radio silence, and the companies we were contacting in person weren’t interested.
All of our efforts seemed futile until…finally…
One incredibly friendly person on LinkedIn responded to our message and said she’d help.
!!! (us screaming internally)
Elated to finally get a response, we scheduled a phone interview with her the following day, and within an hour of conversation she walked us through how the procure-to-pay process functions at her company, step-by-step. She highlighted all the pain points and frustrations, as well as the human error that can cause all those frustrations late in the procurement cycle.
Eureka!
Later that day, we got together as a team and did some interview interpretation. We captured the interview as a collection of individual data points, and created a cultural model of how the different components of the process influence each other. We also drew out a sequence-flow diagram that captures from beginning-to-end how the procure-to-pay cycle works, and where the breakdowns occur in that process.
Thanks to that one person who allowed us to interview them, we were another step in the right direction for understanding how this previously mysterious process actually works. This experience was just more evidence that it only takes one helpful person to make the world of difference for another!
We’re hoping to get some more guerrilla interviews done this week, in preparation for our client interviews later this month.
As amazing as it was to finally make some progress, this week was quite gruelling for all of us. We took some time to decompress with a team Karaoke session. It was great to see everyone just out there singing their hearts out. It was also timely that the Lunar New year fell this week. The cultural celebration which represents the start of a new year based on the lunisolar calendar fell on the 16th. We celebrated with the entire cohort, and ate a lot of delicious food.
We hope this year brings everyone luck, prosperity, and longevity.
Happy Year of the Dog, everyone!
— Team PNC
