E-Lab was the most fun course I took at MIT this semester. Working with a team from diverse cultural and educational backgrounds was the best part of the course for me. Each team member brought a unique perspective to the problem and collective debating and eventual consensus was a great learning experience. After taking feedback from past students and exchanging few emails with Ken Morse(former Director of E-Center), I decided to take this course. So without further adieu let me get to the point.
Overall, I rate this course “A-“. This is just my personal experience, so please take it with a grain of salt. The course was thought by Professor Alan MacCormack (http://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty/detail.php?in_spseqno=sp0025344&co_list=F). Before coming to MIT, he was a professor at HBS for over 10 years. He has authored many case studies related to technology companies and has extensive background in Technology and Operations Management. He is very passionate about the course and is one of the nicest professors I worked with this semester. Many of the theoretical leanings from the course were directly applicable during the project. I would have liked more classes, specifically on startup finance and sales. Maybe one class on each of the entrepreneurship topics could have been very helpful. Overall I will rate him “A” based on how he handled the course.
The project I picked was with a local Boston based startup (2006), which competed with Google Analytics and Omniture with their own web-analytics product. Competing against Google should have raised warning bells :), but this was the only software product company which was picked by E-Lab team and I had to join one of the teams. There were over 20 projects and only 7 teams and hence the problem. In the end it was not so bad, because it was interesting to work with founders who were so passionate and confident about their product and undeterred by Google’s dominance in the market. It was also interesting to watch their struggle to differentiate a product in a highly commoditized market. Some of the ideas our team gave were implemented immediately and it was an amazing experience. In my opinion, I don’t think it matters which project you pick, as long as you have a great team to work with.
The team you pick is super important. Unless you know them from other classes, it will be random based on their resumes and the project you pick, which are posted few days earlier. I highly recommend working with people you have not already worked with, else you miss the fun. My team included a PhD, a Visiting student, an MBA and myself. We had varied cultural and professional background which I believe was the best part of this course. You will find an equal distribution of MBA (Sloan), HBS and non-MBA students taking the course and that by itself provides a rich platform for learning. I was the only SDM student taking the course. 99 out of 100 times, you are likely to meet great team members and you will enjoy working with them. As the semester progresses, you will spend many long hours debating on everything, but best part of the learning at Sloan comes from discussions and I am glad I had a great team to both learn from and contribute to.
Food was provided in every class; a new cuisine every time, which was really fun. But the sad part was we had only 7 or 8 classes during the whole semester. TA was very helpful and overall you get enough guidance to make progress. You are required to do primary research in terms of interviews (Cold calling and surveys) and both qualitative and quantitative analysis. It took me a few weeks, to convince myself to go for cold calling. All in all it was fun.
To summarize (in random order)
- 1. Selecting a good project is important, but overall it does not matter because you will get the same experience, no matter which project you choose.
- 2. Select a team with diverse background to get maximum experience out of the course.
- 3. Be prepared for cold calling and lot of quantitative analysis from surveys.
- 4. Do not jump into interviews and surveys. Spend time understanding the product and do a market and competitive analysis.
- 5. You will have 2, one hour team meetings with the professor during the semester.
- 6. One lunch with the professor in a group of 4 to 6 students, which is a good experience
- 7. You will help with the CEO reception. You help with inviting guests and carrying name tags to the CEO receptionJ. Good part is you get name tags as “HOST”, so it becomes easier to network with over 200 VCs and CEOs at the reception.
- 8. You have 4 presentations overall. Last presentation is 90 minutes long with Alan and another E-center professor.
- 9. Try to work with a team with atleast one HBS student, and one non-MBA to maximize your learning.
- 10. Course is not as rigorous as it is led to believe. It is manageable if you are smart about time management and have good team dynamics.
- 11. It is not important to be a lead in the team. Our team was lead by the youngest person in the group, who is a non-MBA and has no industry experience. This was his first management course, but he did an awesome job. It does not matter who is leading the team, just enjoy the experience.
- 12. Big part of the class experience is networking with fellow students. I did a terrible job at this, and it took me some time to realize and correct it. In the end it does not matter which project you did, just the relationships you built and experience you had.
- 13. Do a lot of quantitative analysis. Our team got a terrible feedback for not doing enough of it.
