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October 16, 2004

Deja Vu All Over Again

I'm taking a Market Research class this quarter. It's an experience I began looking forward to, intently, after my Microsoft stint this summer. Since I spent 12 weeks of my life dipping my toe in the commercial market research process, I have been eager to get the academic perspective. In particular, I've been hoping that the material I will learn this quarter will both audit/correct my past mistakes (pointing out what I did wrong or incompletely) and also help take my understanding of the subject farther.

So far, I haven't been disappointed.

40% of the grade in this class revolves around a real-world research project. Our team (Me, Marnie, Jo, Casey and Danika) has been charged with:

• finding an organization who needs information to make a specific business decision;
• understanding the true nature of the information problem;
• designing a study that will uncover the answers to the problem;
• conducting the study;
• analyzing the information;
• presenting the findings to the organization, as well as our peers in class.

We have a lot of latitude on the organization we choose and the problem we research. We need to check in with Dr. MacLachlan from time to time to ensure that we're making the best possible decisions.

What is giving me major, major deja vu is that this process is almost identical to the one I went through with Microsoft. In the span of a summer I was asked to a) think about a problem, b) formulate a hypothesis, c) test the hypothesis, d) analyze the results and e) make those results useful to the product teams. From a learning standpoint, this is truly ideal - I am going to be actively comparing the academic approach to the problem to the real-world, down-and-dirty approach I took in Redmond.

Of course, at Microsoft I had three months, one topic, vendors, resources, and a budget. Here I have eight weeks, no budget, no vendors, sparse resources, and other classes competing for my time.

The good news? My team is composed of some of the smartest people I know.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at October 16, 2004 8:35 PM. Posted to UW MBA.

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