By Giri Kesavan (MBA2021)
Giri is the Co-President of The Tech & Media Club at London Business School. An MBA2021 student, he also chairs the degree & careers wide Technology Sector Steering Committee, working with the school, faculty, industry, alumni and Careers Centre on Technology education & careers. Giri works with The Wheeler Institute on content development, outreach and student-led collaborations. He is further involved with the school as an MBA Academic Representative and Peer Leader for Technology.
We’re already a month into our ‘Digital for Impact’ consulting course at London Business School! This week we had a chance to reflect on the journey so far and share best practices across all the ten student consulting teams in the programme, as well as hear from our wonderful guest speaker Eloho Omame, the CEO of Endeavour Nigeria.
Eloho (MBA2013) took us through her time at London Business School, her stint in Investment Banking and how her experiences led her to Endeavour Nigeria. Focusing on providing mentorship to innovative founders based in emerging markets, Endeavour searches for, selects, and scales entrepreneurs with the highest potential, then spreads their stories and resources to sustain lasting economic and social transformation.
We spoke to Eloho about our own experience so far in doing business in East Africa, the nuances between different countries, the challenges of scaling up a business and touched on how we can create impact within such a short space of time. Indeed, this was a very reflective week in our DFI programme!
On Thursday, we also had the opportunity to come together virtually across all the consulting groups, aided by Costas & Rajesh, as we talked candidly about our experiences and challenges so far in the programme. Bringing together the MBA, EMBA and Sloan cohorts at LBS, we talked about the key pieces of learning that we’ve seen first-hand in our digital consulting projects:
- Building trust and rapport with the client. This can be hard in a virtual context where we can’t physically meet the client but it’s key to be engaged, build that relationship before diving into business and create an open and approachable atmosphere.
- Understand the product first-hand. A lot of our clients already have a digital offering – and the easiest way to actually understand the product and customer journey is to become a customer yourself! We found that actually putting ourselves in the shoes of the customer made all the difference in understanding pain-points and challenges.
- Scrape data. Being frugal with data is key. With limited access to the market, we had to create customer surveys (that our clients could then pass on), ask our clients to film interviews with customers, look at iOS and Play Store reviews of the product offering and use public research to understand the macroeconomic context.
We’re entering into a break week for Digital for Impact but I’ll be back in early November with the next update!
You can catch-up on the series from the beginning here.
And read the next installment here.