Rubicon Consulting - Behind The Scenes

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Wednesday April 2, 2008

The iPhone Work

So the Rubicon team released some deep thinking yesterday on the iPhone market and the implications it has for the rest of the mobile and tech industry. I’m proud of them.

Our project starts with a topic idea. That gets socialized and vetted to see if we can all see the opportunity. We then determine which audience we want to release to / with. In this case it was CTIA. Mike Mace on the team leads the research portion of the project and everyone on the team get a chance to shape what needs to be researched to make sure we’re examining multiple hypothesis. Once the research comes back, Mike cuts and slices the data in a way I marvel at. He can find an opportunity, spot a trend and bring it to life with charts. That supports the “findings” portion of the work. Then, the principals spend some time thinking and discussing the implications and meanings. The entire team collaborates; as I look at this report, I see all our fingerprints on it. I was most interested in talking about market expansion, Harry another topic, Bruce another, etc. Highly collaborative. Like we always are. Marsha then does her magic. She makes sure all this good thinking and hard work is finally released to the market. Most of the work we do, we do for clients. As a result, only one party ever gets to see the deep thinking and opportunity we find. In this case, we do custom research so we can share something in the market more broadly.

I don’t know if it’s possible that I could be more proud of them. But I leave that open. The bar always moves up. We’ll do even better tomorrow than we did today. Because we learn. We improve. We continue forward.

But today was a good day. Fortune, WSJ, others covered us. Good day.

And this little tidbit comic perfectly captured how crazy the iPhone topic is in general: