During the “Defining” process of the Innovation Project, our group was given the task of creating a Persona and coming up with several “How might we…?” questions. To me, creating a Persona was a relatively easy task. When thinking of a product or service I imagine what the typical customer looks like in my head. This could be attributed of the increase in social media platforms, because a profile (similar to that on Facebook) pops up in my mind when I think of Johnson & Johnson products. It was really interesting to see what types of profiles my teammates came up with and how they compared and contrasted to my own. When it comes to things like these, I always think that my answer or vision is the best, so it was very useful to learn how to hear others perspectives and adjust my own ideas where it is necessary. It is also super interesting to see where peoples ideas over-lap on things like these. For example, we all seemed to have similar ideas on where our Persona lives. How it is that four very different people imagine the same area when creating a fake profile?
I think our group had a relatively easy time because of our company, Johnson & Johnson, however, I can see where these tasks may have been more difficult for groups with other companies. One group, for example, is looking at a hotel. So many ideas flow through my head when thinking about a Persona that stays at a hotel. They could be: a business person staying out of town for a conference, a family on vacation, or a loan traveler needing some time to themselves. The process of creating a Persona is interesting because it lets people with very different ideas come together to form one image that represents their ideal consumer.
After creating a Persona, we were tasked with coming up with “How might we…?” statements in relation to our company and its products. Something that our group found really challenging was trying to come up with good questions that were not too broad or too narrow. When thinking of an issue that the company could solve, it is really easy to look at the big picture as well as the super small and very specific issues. We struggled with coming up with questions that left us enough room for creativity, while not leaving too much room where we all went on different trains of thought. Even though we originally struggled coming up with our questions, once we got the hang of it we were on a roll. It was nice to see all of my group members feeding off of each other and generating questions based on each other’s different thoughts and ideas.