Week Eight: Balancing Life

This week was very similar in content as previous weeks, but my days looked much different.  My family was away on a mission trip, which left me as the only caretaker for our dogs.  I worked all week as usual, however I worked from home in the afternoons in order to give the dogs proper care.  This taught me how to work in different environments and fulfill other responsibilities at the same time.

When I got into the office in the morning I tried to work quickly and efficiently to get as much done as possible before I had to leave, and when it came time to go home I made sure I knew what I needed to do for the rest of the afternoon.  I was expecting to be more effective when I was working in the office, but I found that I was surprisingly efficient at home, too.  There were more distractions at home, but I knew that I had work to do and that I had to complete it before the next day, so I buckled down and did it.  I have to do this with schoolwork during the school year all the time, but so far this summer has been different due to my lack of other obligations to handle up until this past week.

This was a taste of what I imagine life beyond school will be, with the combination of work and home responsibilities that I had.  When I'm at school I have my school work and a few extracurriculars to focus on, but my family obligations are fairly limited by the distance between home and school, and my household obligations such as cleaning and cooking are limited by the comparatively smaller size of my dorm room to my house and the ease of eating meals in the dining hall.  Thus far this summer my obligations were also fewer than this past week, because my family shares in household obligations, and, unlike at school, I am focusing on one job at Phoenix rather than several classes at a time.  I imagine that life after college will be similar to life this past week (except that I do not plan on having my own dogs to take care of immediately after graduating).

Week Seven: New Product Development

In my first year of college I took a class entitled Lean Launchpad, in which we worked in groups to practice the lean launch method of starting a business.  This meant that we had to develop a very rough, minimal version of our product and interview numerous amounts of people in different fields surrounding our product.  We had to talk to people who would be potential customers, suppliers, investors, etc. to figure out how to further develop the product and find what would be most successful in the market place.  This seemed like an excellent concept to me when dealing with startups, but I never thought to apply it to developed businesses until now.

I was involved in several conversations and meetings this week to discuss the development of one of our new products.  Rather than simply creating a product that we think the industry could use and then trying to sell it, we are having conversations with several people who could be potential clients to see what they would find useful, as well as other groups within Phoenix to see how we can make a useful product a reality.  This makes for a much more exciting product development, because we know exactly what potential clients are looking for and what we can include in the product to stand out and really fulfill a need.  This has also involved a lot of collaboration with other areas of Phoenix to see how we can make this vision a reality.  It has been really interesting to see what different groups do.

I've also been working on a report of our wearable tech data which will be published on our report store.  This has been an interesting experience in marketing and sales, thus far.  Developing the report is enjoyable, because it simply involves taken the data that we have collected and putting it together to be understandable and visually appearing.  This has been especially enjoyable after working on the infographics earlier this summer, because I am able to imitate some of the design that one of the women in the company created for the infographics.  I've also been a part of several conversations regarding how we will use this report to market our capabilities and information to companies who might use it.

The summer is more than halfway over and I have learned so much.  When the summer began I didn't quite know what to expect, or how much I would really learn or be involved in, since I'm only an intern, but I have had so many great opportunities to learn and practice new skills.

Week Six: Field Trip

Last week we visited one of our suppliers, a call center, as an office.  This was a great experience in many ways. 

More obviously, I learned a lot about this specific call center, the products they offer, what sets them apart, and I saw firsthand how they do what they do.  This was really interesting because it is easy to think that call centers are becoming a thing of the past with the internet revolution, but this trip taught me how call centers can harness the internet to improve their business, instead of eradicate it.  Understanding how to use innovations of others and new technologies to keep your business thriving is important in any industry, it is just incredibly pronounced in technology and communications.  Innovating and pivoting in business can never stop if you want to thrive, because the market that you are serving is constantly changing.  Large companies like Apple are constantly doing this, which is why we're at the iPhone 6S instead of still all the way back at the original iPod.

A second, perhaps less obvious, yet still very important, facet of learning on this trip was my being able to witness business to business client relationships from the side of the client.  I realized that in many B to B relationships it is more beneficial to have a partnership kind of relationship instead of a one-sided supplier/client relationship.  This allows both businesses to grow and it also allows both businesses to better serve their other clients. 

When I first started at Phoenix I wasn't sure how to apply market research to my Christian worldview, but I'm starting to better understand how to do that.  I originally thought that the only way would be to behave in a Christian manner, but I'm beginning to see market research as a way to serve others, as well.  Work is an integral part of life, as ordained by God, and working in market research puts you in a position to help others to better understand their own clients and customers in their own particular field.  This helps our client companies to better serve their own clients/consumers, which then helps those clients/consumers to help others and live a happier, better life.  Another way to apply it to a Christian worldview is when analyzing data that we collect, we are working to better understand the people who God created, which is a way of worshiping and glorifying Him.