Mutaz Blog

Recently, I worked on an observation/research project. I just moved from the project I was heading to another one in retail. We had several showrooms and I needed to understand what was going on in these showrooms in the fastest and deepest way possible.

How do you tackle such an issue?

After some consultation, it was determined that I should go spend a day in each showroom. Write some observations and notes. Evaluations, maybe. The person who gave the consultation probably had a more mature idea of having evaluation sheets be ready beforehand and looking at certain aspects. I did prepare a bit, but honestly went in blindly and decided to work things out once I am there.

Surprise, surprise, after visiting 10+ branches, I ended up with 50,000 words and 20GB of media data.

How the heck did that happen? The power of taking notes.

Back in my previous job in F&B, it was part of the job to go to different countries to determine suitability for franchising. Part of that visit is to eat out from different cuisines and different popular restaurants. It's called food tasting. Sounds fun, but it's tiring.

Every time we went into a restaurant, I had to take many many notes on the phone from start to finish. The person who was with me was 20 years in the business. So, all those notes I am logging, for him it is just a mental exercise. Counting the number of chairs, the number of customers, the customer segment, observing decor, menu price, menu content, food taste, salty or not, how good, how authentic, fitout quality, waiters attitude....etc. Even during eating I would just write.

As there was no luxury of writing things slowly, I had to write as we ate, and do that for every place we went. This is in addition to general notes about malls and other locations. This is all, of course, accompanied with pictures.

This developed the habit of writing every day's notes in one single note, and cleverly leaving timestamps and keywords that I can go back to.

This allowed the ability to go back to notes and refer to things. In my discussions, and reports, etc.

But that was it. This time, I scaled all of this. It was an intense 2-week exercise. Every showroom has one single note with thousands of words, and hundreds of images/videos.

Just like in F&B, I was standing all day, taking notes of anything and everything. Talking to staff? take notes. Customer walks in? take notes. Staff is doing a certain process? take notes.

As a result, my questions became deeper and deeper as the days passed. More direct and more touching of pain points. Accompanied with visuals of actual operations.

Furthermore, I started organizing all of this data. (took a few more weeks longer than expected). All these raw notes were moved into a more organized Excel file with many sheets and many columns of issues and descriptions. 200+ issues, 200+ ideas, 100+ notes from staff. All kinds of filtrations were applied. It was eventually distilled to 4 categories and 40+ projects. Which we are working on now.

What about the images and videos? Those were organized into showroom folders, each folder is semi-standardized. I can go to any folder at any moment and get a walk-through video of a location. There are folders for products, printables, fitout related issues. All kinds of things.

What did this do to me? Similar to what happened in F&B, my knowledge of the situation has skyrocketed. It put me in a better position to discuss, present ideas, and connect to the right person/place when needed. This time, the visual part was organized as well, so it made it easier to pull up examples of things.

To dig deeper, it was a defense mechanism, against the unknown. Literally, my thinking was “how can I clear as much of this unknown as possible within the shortest amount of time?”. Going into excruciating details is my current motto of doing things.

I think this was inspired by real-world examples of people who delve into extreme details, like Mr. Beast and how he and his friends dissected YouTube in very intricate details, or Elon Musk and how he can be extremely detail oriented about specific engineering problems.

Joe Rogan interview with Mr. Beast (go to 6:40)

Also, this was to build intensity into work. Going into a new role requires momentum. This was one way to start strong and have enough momentum to carry on over the first few months until we can get work rolling.