Thursday, September 1, 2016
If I Was Your Customer…
If I Was Your Customer…
At times people ask me why some software products or services fail, despite all the resources that software companies have to do customer research, alphas, betas and pre-releases before launch, and then collection of telemetry after launch. I always answer the same thing: someone had a great idea, and forgot to check with the customers (and keep checking!). This is the same all over the software industry. People have ideas, forget to check with customers, and go on until they get themselves into a corner. Having the resources doesn’t mean that people use them. And having data doesn’t mean that people look at it, or use it, unless it is to confirm their pre-conceived opinion.
It is worse that software developers most of the time get the exception, and try to make it the rule. For example, it is quite common for someone, usually out of desperation, come up with the “Steve Jobs didn’t ask customers about feature [X]”. They totally ignore the fact that Steve Jobs was a good representative for the customer for the products he managed. Steve Jobs was a person with good taste, little involvement on the execution of plans, and little patience to listen to explanations about limitations of what can be done. Meanwhile, whenever your listen to the “Steve Jobs paradox” you are usually talking to someone who dresses like a beggar and thinks that Burberry is a fruit, is afraid that any decision will demand more work, and has vested interested on prolonging discussions as much as possible, so that projects literally run out of time to go anywhere beyond mediocrity.
I was recently involved in a design discussion that was the quintessential example of why software projects fail. I was to provide a service to some customers. I talked to more than 2 dozen customers, looked a competition, and I’m myself likely a good representative of a potential customer. Didn’t matter. Someone involved in a “review” wanted a change, because they think that something needs to be done due to a potential benefit for the customer. Well, when in doubt… I decided to send a message to customers asking about their preference. Did that matter? Obviously no. Ignoring the feedback coming directly from the customers, there I was listening to someone saying sentences like “If I was your customer…”. Unbelievable. Customer focus: zero! The customer wants A. The person providing the service for the customer wants A. Yet, there you have this obstacle blocking your use of infrastructure, wanting B, due to a scenario that neither the customer or the service provider would ever support! And that is it. At some point, no matter how much customer focus one has, you “pay the tax”, or instead of delivering something, you deliver nothing. And it is likely easier to go from “working B to desirable A” than to go from nothing to A.
If people really listened to customers, or even considered their own examples, things would be so much easier. Fine with me that some developers don’t want to talk with customers. I’m fine with using the “Steve Jobs” decision process. It shouldn’t however be hard to imagine what would Steve Jobs think of some ideas. Can people really imagine Steve Jobs using a Google Glass? No way. Steve Jobs sitting down and “Liking” posts or pictures in some social network? I doubt. Going deeper into developerland: Steve Jobs asking for yet another development language, and naming it Swift? Likely. Steve Jobs approving a software solution that introduces a level of indirection by getting a string, transforming it into an enumeration and then back to a string: over his dead body!
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