Month: April 2020

TRACTION JOURNAL – E3 WEEK THREE

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  1. What did you love this week? What would you have loved to have achieved this week?
    • I loved it when our E3 group met with Seraphima this last week (in class for half an hour). She has so much enthusiasm for our progress and the fact that she thinks we will make an awesome event this quarter makes me feel much more confident! She shared a lot of information with us. The one that stuck with me the most was sending people invitations to our event directly. This will make them feel included and important. I wish that our team would have been able to get more survey results. So far we have 79 but I had a personal goal to get it to 100 at least. I tried to ask our team to send it to at least three people per day but I don’t think that will happen. Hopefully, by the end of this quarter, we get more results.
  2. Applying the content from this week’s learnings, connect your understanding with something that’s relevant to your venture
    • Something I learned this week was how to write an engaging email directed towards potential speakers for our event. My team (the outreach team) decided it would be a really good idea to create a general outline for what to send to the potential speakers. It includes information about what type of event we want to host, what the basic outline of the event will be, the topics we want to talk about, a link to the website for our event, etc… I think it turned out great and will be helpful in making sure everyone gets the same information.
  3. What tools are you applying that you have learned from, or deepened understanding of this week? 
    • This week I have been applying a lot of group focused conversation tactics to our team meetings. Honestly, it’s not been going great but I think soon enough we will get into a grove. I think this deepened my understanding of group dynamics especially for planning an event. I think having smaller teams for particular topics is important.
  4. What challenges are you facing? What’s Next?
    • I’m not facing a lot of challenges. Mainly, I need to find people to speak at our event and I am nervous because the speakers are the substance of this event. That’s a lot of pressure. If we don’t find people to participate then the whole event could fail. I think I am just nervous about it right now but in the next few weeks, I think it will all come together.

TRACTION JOURNAL – E3 WEEK TWO

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  1. What did you love this week? What would you have loved to have achieved this week?
    • Something I loved this week was watching everyone pitch! It was a very relaxed day for me because all of my work was done behind the scenes. Everyone did a fantastic job and I’m really proud of all the E&I students for adjusting to the online platform. It has been challenging but, in my opinion, very fun! I wish that I could have met with the teams that Jake and I were coaching at least once more. It was a great time working with them. It’s sad that it has to come to an end.
  2. Applying the content from this week’s learnings, connect your understanding with something that’s relevant to your venture.
    • This week I learned how to interview with the “9 whys” strategy. I think this will be really beneficial for VP2 because our groups are going to need to think OUT OF THE BOX. So, with the application of this interview style, I think we can achieve a deeper understanding of what our target market will be hoping for in an online event
  3. What challenges are you facing? What’s Next?
    • My biggest challenge right now is wrapping my brain around the concept of an online event. I have fears that we won’t be able to make anything successful happen. However, we are a group of really smart and creative people. I’m sure something will spark an idea and everything will fall into place. We will need to do a lot of ideation for this project.

VENTURE PROJECT ONE – E3 SPRING QUARTER 2020

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Venture Project One – Spring Quarter 2020

Team: Jake Matson and Zosia Sherwood

For this project, Jake and I were asked to be creative coaches for the students doing the VP1 project. The prompt that the E1, E2, E4, and E6s had to follow was “recreate something to make it new and fresh. Take the same old same old physical product and reinvent it to add even more value to the customer.” This super simple prompt lead the VP1 teams to create some awesome new designs!

We had the pleasure of working with Team 1 and Team 4. Our main job was to ask open-ended questions and idea-generating questions in order to help the students create an awesome project. Something I learned as a coach was that our job was not to give them ideas, we are not consultants, but our job was meant more to help inspire them and show them that they had great ideas to expand upon. This was a bit of a challenge since we are part of the E&I community (Ideating is in our blood) but I think we progressively got better with every zoom meeting.

Jake and I got a well-rounded experience because we got to see what a very ‘on top of it’ and a more lax group looked like from the outside. Since we’ve each been part of groups like this before it really brought an emphasis to what our professors are seeing from us. Along with what should be the standard expectation of students in this class.

Overall, I think this was a great experience. Jake and I worked really hard to make sure our teams did the best they could (Team 4 won the pitch)! Our POA was really beneficial for keeping us organized, Teams was a great way to communicate with the other students in the class, Zoom was new and a great tool to have learned, and finally, we now have a base set of coaching skills that will be useful in multitudes of situations.