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.