Personally, the Evaluate mode of the project was more challenging than previous steps. I think because I’m so close to the project we’re receiving feedback on, it’s hard not to take some of the criticism personally. However, as we learned in class, most innovators never get it right on the first try — actually, through presenting an idea, most people learn they actually have a different need, and end up pivoting their project dramatically.
I think our group had a decent amount of trouble sifting through our feedback. As our target market was not necessarily the people we were getting feedback from, a lot of students had questions about our product that we had already fleshed out in our “Create” mode. For example, many students asked questions relating to how profitable an office building location would be. However, as students have not held full time jobs yet in traditional office buildings, we felt that their opinions were not relevant regarding this particular aspect of our model. Conversely, the Executive Partners in attendance on Friday seemed excited about our location choice, confirming our hypothesis that adults in the working world be more inclined to shop at CVS Pro.
Another big question we faced in this mode is how the grill aspect of our store fit in with CVS’ current business model. It’s an aspect of our prototype we are all really excited about, so the negative feedback we received was a little disappointing (to me at least.) However, I think that might mean we need to reposition our presentation of our layout and CVS Pro and figure out a way to structure our store’s elements and convey their meaning more thoughtfully.
Another aspect of this mode I had a difficult time was talking to people giving feedback. Instead of listening to their questions, I wanted to answer them and explain how we had solved that problem. However, if somebody has a question we already fleshed out, that probably meant we did not convey that solution meaningfully enough — this feedback is just as meaningful as people poking holes in our prototype. Instead of using my “prototype as a probe,” I felt like I tended to debate with questions instead of “gaining the empathy” Professor Luchs taught us to.
Most importantly, this mode taught my group that we needed to “refine the problem/opportunity.” During prototyping, we strayed away from designing an app because we felt this was kind of a cop-out to a traditional innovation design. However, during the mode we got so many questions about our app and how we wanted it to work, we found that we had neglected to flesh out a big piece of our idea. Now, in moving forward, we have planned to come up with the logistics of our app and the service it will provide our innovation. Due to the feedback we got, I now feel that we’re solving more of a “service” problem than creating a whole new product. We’re using things people already have access to, we’re just putting it all in one place and making it more convenient than they ever have been before.