I found this group project experience to be quite challenging but overall very rewarding. I think that the company that we were given was definitely less straightforward and a bit harder to understand than a more traditional company, as we have to service both our artisan partners and our customers, but I think that it was much more rewarding to come up with our eventual initiative / solution when we did. I think initially this caused a lot of friction, as we became pretty stuck on a simple idea of expanding our company to an online platform, but once we moved past that and considered potentially changing our product offering / brand identity, it opened up a lot of options for creative thinking and problem solving.
The most difficult part of this project was definitely navigating a lot of the ambiguity that comes with this sort of work — I come from a computer science / STEM background where everything tends to have a correct, perfect answer, and so to deal with situations where there is no exact perfect solution or answer, but rather finding one that is backed with the most evidence and potential was definitely a mental shift that I had to make. I think the solution we ended up arriving at was one that took a lot of thought and understanding of the problem space, and is fairly outside of the box, and for that I’m quite happy with it.
Overall as a group, I think there were definitely a number of things we could have improved on, mostly with respect to individual communication and work expectation. I think some areas of our individual + group work quality could have been improved, but overall I felt satisfied with the end result that we were able to produce.
