AIAIO: Our Blog

Hi! My name is Jaclyn Milian, and I am a rising senior at Williams College. I am also the first ever Project Management Intern at Alexander Interactive (Ai). I just wanted to introduce myself and share what I hope to gain from my time as an Ai PM Intern.

I hope to gain experience with the lifecycle that projects take and the different ways that progress is tracked. I am eager to understand the ins and outs of budget tracking, milestone management and planning out realistic and manageable timelines. Having never used Basecamp nor Harvest, two programs that the PM team uses to manage projects, I am excited to gain some experience with these programs and expand my skill set.

Coming from a liberal arts college, I have not had the chance to have a work environment experience. Being in the offices of Ai, I can already say that I have learned some new skills. I can now properly title a document for easy identification, write a blog post explaining my hopes for this internship and navigate the internal wiki. Keep in mind that I’ve only been here for a few hours. I am just excited to get started on a project and learn all that Ai is willing to teach me.

Ultimately I hope to gain skills that will stay with me for the rest of my life and have a great experience working with Ai.

A major component of Transactional Intelligence is knowing what your user is expecting before they do.  At Alexander Interactive we know quite a bit about what users typically expect when it comes to a digital workflow, but a new area of exploration for us has been users’ expectations in an Omnichannel world.

Omnichannel introduces a lot of new complexity to the world of digital because, as the name implies, covers multiple devices, locations and needs – all of which link back to the ultimate expectation: a purchase.  But in order to better understand and serve a user in an Omnichannel world, we need to think of these experiences as extensions of the digital world.  And they are not just an extension of their buying experience, but also a part of a user’s larger shopping experience.

First, it’s important to state that Omnichannel assumes that a brand has both a physical and digital presence that allows for direct-to-consumer sale of products in a retail model: either of products manufactured by the brand or resold by the brand.  For the purposes of this discussion, I’m not diving into the use of multichannel devices to help operate back-office systems or coordinate with buyers or distributors.  I’m also not going to break down the multi-channel aspects of pure digital businesses that have no physical store to contend with.  The goal here is to understand users’ motivations and options and how it connects with a physical retailer’s digital presence.