This Thursday, DSNY12 completed our first full mock client presentation!
The past few Fridays, we’ve been assigned a mock stakeholder and dataset, which we used to complete various consulting exercises. This included written proposals, dashboard sketches, and data cleaning. However, this Thursday we were assigned a full case, complete with a KickOff call with “Jacob Roaster,” a stakeholder in a coffee company looking to expand their business (big thanks to Jacob Aronson for filling this role).
This project felt much more involved than our previous Friday projects, as our KickOff call allowed us to ask more questions and of a higher specificity than usual. This was also a much more collaborative project, with our entire cohort working together on the proposal, headed by our project manager, Sean Fei.
We started out by divvying up the questions each person in the cohort would ask Mr. Roaster, and I chose metrics. This included questions like “what metrics should the dashboard include?” and “do you have any specific data points you want us to highlight?”
The question-asking process was also slightly more chaotic than usual, as everyone in the group was trying to get their questions in without repeating things that had already been answered and taking notes while listening for his next response. Although it was nerve-wracking in the moment, it was great practice for our first projects with actual clients.
After our initial conversation with Jacob, we split off into three groups focusing on dashboard sketches for different departments: Marketing, Logistics, and Financial. All three groups worked together in a shared Excalidraw file, with our project manager keeping us on track with time and adjusting our sketches to ensure we had a consistent color palette, brand imagery, and formatting. Our final full set of sketches turned out well (pictured below):
Our feedback was mostly positive, but Mr. Roaster did ask us to clarify certain visualizations that weren't fully explained in the dashboards and weren't common types of charts. It was a good lesson on making sure your presentations are tailored to your client.
I'm looking forward to improving in our next mock presentation!