Getting insight(ful)

June 14, 2017

Hi y’all! We’re Jeniece, Elvin, Shaun, and Zong Wei—and we’re Team Major Fun! For the past four weeks, we UNI.CORN interns have devoted ourselves to a deceptively simple goal: understanding the stories that we’ve heard. So, sit back and enjoy our tale of the UNI.CORNs.

Getting insight(ful)s

As part of the UNI.CORN Management Internship, our work has involved listening to our customers’ stories and understanding what we can do to improve their journey. We’ve gone out to interview dozens of people to hear about their concerns, their hopes and their dreams. One of our more memorable days was when we headed down to Jurong Point to hunt for (willing!) interviewees. To get a pair of interviewees we wanted, we waited patiently for them to finish their meal before we approached them politely.

Stopping for 4Fingers while we hunt for interviewees at Jurong Point

Pro Tip 1: Ask nicely and take rejection with grace!

But gleaning key insights from all our interviews can be a challenging task. Fortunately, we received guidance from an Insights Masterclass two weeks back. On a merry Monday morning, our mentor Alvin taught us how to draw out important insights from the stories we hear and it goes a little something like this:

1. Start with identifying clues: this involves highlighting key verbatim pieces of customers’ experiences and thoughts
2. Piecing together clues to find consistent themes: Once we have these clues, we can spot certain themes that run through our customers’ journeys
3. Construct insights from broader themes: Each insight should consist of two statements that come into tension with each other, highlighting a problem from our themes that we can help solve

Outside of the masterclasses, our mentors afford us great flexibility to do our work and let our creative juices flow. We have a lot of autonomy to plan out our interviews and sit down for our back-and-forth discussions on the insights.

A different sort of back-and-forth to unwind

Finishing up our interviews, we decided to head down to the office ping pong table for a different sort of back-and-forth. But just enough to unclog our minds, of course! With all the flexibility here, we need intrinsically motivated people to organise our timelines and get the job done well.

Bringing our ‘A’ game to the table

That being said, the mentors check in with us regularly to guide our progress. Last Friday, we shared some of our preliminary insights with our mentors, based on the 15 interviews we had done thus far. Unexpectedly, our mentors advised us to go out and get 30 more interviews by this week. Of course, the point of this is to see how our findings hold up with a wider sample pool and to get deeper clues that we might not have gotten from our first 15.

Pro Tip 2: Laying a wide and deep foundation of interviews is important when building your insights

At that time though, we were overwhelmed by the enormity of the task: to get twice as many interviews as we had already gotten—in half the time, no less! So, we sat down that Friday evening and calmly planned out our interviews for the coming week. All it takes is some dedication from your teammates to go the extra mile… plus a whole lot of thick skin to get the interviews you want. And now, we’re back on track!

Learning from the very best

Through working at DBS, we also managed to learn a lot from the many thought-provoking conversations and stories at our workplace. At the recent Imaginarium, we heard from Evan Davey, the Chief Operating Officer at Two Bulls. Evan regaled us with the tale of how Two Bulls gave the world Breadcrumb, the first ever iPad-powered point-of-sale product. It was an incredibly interesting session as he shared his first-hand experience on the challenges that Two Bulls faced, as they grew from a tiny start-up to a successful digital product consultancy firm.

Just two days after the Imaginarium, a group of DBS Management Associates and Graduate Associates came down to network with the UNI.CORN interns. They shared their experiences throughout the MA and GA programmes and gave us useful advice to help us along the way. With such events happening at the office, we get to take little breaks in the midst of our workday to learn from the very best of success stories.

Well, it’s been a blast telling you Team Major Fun’s story. But alas, it’s time to put down our digital pen and continue building our insights!

#teammajorfun

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