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.