For our foundations of professional development group project we initially struggled to find a company. At first we chose a gut health probiotic granola brand but quickly realized that coming up with an innovation solution for this company was an arduous task. After about a week of deliberation I sent the group a list of different food tech start ups with general notes attached. Initially my role was suppose to be creative director. But nothing really goes as planned.
We had a very multi-cultural group and I believe that is a strength. Ive worked with diverse teams for years around the world and different perspectives are necessary when developing new products. But this project had a unique set of challenges. Although I was the creative director my role almost immediately shifted into a project manager role. From finding the company, organizing meeting, and assigning task. I had to adapt to a leadership role almost immediately.
For me this was a challenge. Fresh off the heels of my covid battle I was not at 100%. My energy was (and still is) at a all time low. But I know that small steps lead to big results. Planning meetings in advance and showing up to those meetings early encouraged my team to join in. Also, having an agenda kept everything on track and kept us from lingering around in a meeting for hours with no result. I learned that project management is a lot of mediation, planning, and organization. You have to be involved in every aspect and to be frank it is quite stressful.
We decided on Bellwether coffee. Bellwether at its core is a tech start up not a coffee company. This was particularly interesting. Introducing technology to a coffee company is hard. Introducing technology to an existing tech company is easy. Once we began to research we came up with a subscription service. Like I mentioned earlier having a global perspective is important. We were able to take an idea introduced by one team member half way around the world critique it and evolve the idea while keeping its core. Because we were able to draw from different perspectives we developed a optional subscription based service for owners of the coffee machines.
Now it was time to really connect and flesh out the idea. We ended up choosing this because it was optional. It would not interfere with their existing business plan instead it would be another stream of revenue. By giving customers to the option to opt in to a subscription service that gives more customer data. Business owners would be able to make more well informed decisions and better know how to reach their customer and drive sales. For me, it was easy to rationalize this decision. Netflix still rents dvds. In fact, that is still a large portion of their revenue. But if you were to sign up for a Netflix account today you don’t have to choose a dvd rental package. You can get whatever service you want at your own discretion.
So we have the idea and now it is time to develop the visual presentation. Initially it was a struggle. At time it felt as though it were only two people in the group instead of eleven. This was extremely frustrating. For me to be battling lingering effects of covid on top of waking up at 4am for this project it was almost unbearable to talk to my team and only have one person respond. So I just assigned different people different roles. I was very reluctant to do so but the lack of communication left me no choice. Thankfully, I did not have to ask anyone to do their assigned part. The visual presentation came together rather smoothly.
The live presentation was not fun. Once again it felt like there were only two people in this group. Getting opinions from the team was impossible. Getting people to speak up was impossible. At this point I just accepted the leadership and had to understand the cultural differences. It was only going to be two people doing the presentation and it was no point in complaining about it. During the presentation I realized that if we had eleven out of eleven team members participating we would have had a more concise presentation and worked out the kinks of our plan. Feedback from two of our professors shared my sentiment. They would have like to see a full group contribution. All in all we finished the project but it could have been better.
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