themadpeacock

If you look at the leading technology companies in almost any industry you will notice that they are (or were) end users of their technology. They don’t require empathy to understand the customer, they are the customer.

Its a powerful competitive advantage.

The NxN team was not a game development team. It was primarily a group of database and application programmers. We prided ourselves on being specialists and being very customer driven. We spent almost all our time adding the features customers asked for.

Task and project management was a good example; many customers asked for it so we added some rudimentary functionality and asked for feedback. The problem was that the implementation was shallow, enough functionality to say we had task management but not robust enough to be “used in anger”.

Customers couldn’t use it and we never got good feedback. The workflow never improved and never got used much.

At the time development was using VSS to manage the code for Alienbrain. The decision was made to use Alienbrain to manage the Alienbrain source code; we would use our own product as a critical part of our business. We joined the user community.

There was some justified resistance, at the time Alienbrain was not designed for code management and some VSS features the programmers felt were critical were missing but the improvement to the product was remarkable.

The next version of the software had a smaller feature set. Some cool features disappeared from the product never to return. The features that survived became elements in tight workflows rather than a disparate selection of functions.

Lynn Miller over at Autodesk has written a very insightful article on the workflow topic:

Long feature lists often result from gathering customers' proposed solutions. The customer requests, “I want a print menu” (a solution), instead of “I need to share my work” (a problem). But as Theodore Levitt of the Harvard Business School said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.” If you implement features without understanding what the customer really wants, then you can end up with multiple solutions for the same problem, with none of them quite succeeding.
via Autodesk: Design Values: Complete Workflows over Long Feature Lists

As a sales person out in the field selling that new stripped down product was challenging at first. Trying to convince people that less is more is not easy.

In the end however that version was our tipping point; it was the version that gave us the biggest growth in our user base.

A deep understanding of your customers working environment, values and challenges is critical to building good workflows and workflows beat feature lists every time.

Our solution was to become a customer; we were lucky, in some B2B situations that’s just not possible. If that’s the case I suggest collaboration partnerships, great simulation testing and team members that come from the industries you serve. Autodesk does this very well and their products benefit.

You have read this far, why not share some feedback; How does your company go beyond empathy?