I’ve been working to foster a work environment wherein ideas are explored a little before being shot down for risk-mitigation, feasibility, or lack-of-research reasons. We’ve sometimes had significant debates about the merit of a feature or service that never manage to include user needs. I want to make sure there is a user case for what we choose to do, and ensure that high value to the user outweighs risk at an appropriate level, so these debates have been dissatisfying at best. And about a year ago I weighed in on the topic in a pretty significant way. (Initials have been changed to protect the people involved.)
To: GM
I was thinking about this last night (not the actual question but the religious debate behind it). You’re sick of being challenged, and I’m sick of hearing the same pointless argument played out that fails to bring the story forward and never gets resolved. I will propose (next time it comes up in my presence) that we all never have this argument again.
He is basically saying “prove to me that X is a good idea.” Which is annoying, and in a way insulting, but also (in different terms, with a different manner) a best practice of innovative companies like Apple. The key difference being that at Apple thousands of good and bad ideas are competing to be heard, so the default answer simply has to be “no,” and the ideas that are truly good can eventually leap that no and get to yes. We do not have the intellectual stimulation and invitation to innovation here in which that type of method would work for us. We should foster such an environment, but we aren’t there yet, so in the short term we need to short-circuit this debate and make it a non-starter.
How? I don’t know.
But I have some ideas. “Prove to me that X is a good idea” is both part of the problem and part of the solution. CC correctly identifies poorly-defined product requirements from Marketing as an important failing. Marketing does need better contact with customers to determine product direction. But bound up in the “prove it” complaint is a lack of trust in the decisions made by Marketing. We need to address that lack of trust. CC seems to demand customer data to support every feature decision. But Marketing and Testing are different. Marketing uses information (not data) gathered from surveys, focus groups, industry research, the grapevine, etc. to inform judgment about what a product should be. But if people merely made what customers say they want, lots of interesting things that we now depend on might never have been made (such as the consumer-oriented desktop PC). Sometimes (often?) we have to lead the market in a direction we think it should go in. And it is not especially likely that customers will already be clamoring for that (although they might be clamoring for four or five other things that such a move would help solve).
The flip of “prove to me that X is a good idea” is “prove to me that X is a bad idea.” He says “where is the data that says that customers want us to build X,” knowing that there is no such data and that it would probably be really hard to get it in a timely manner in the current climate. Of course, hitting back with “no, you prove it’s a bad idea” is not fighting fair, and we have to fight fair to work together.
We need to address the real components of this debate: trust, fairness, mutual respect, mutual assumption that we have the best interests of the business and our customers in mind.
Development should be able to trust what they hear from Marketing about product direction, and Marketing should expect Development to push back, but there are right ways to push back, adaptive ways to push back to make the products better rather than simply killing their growth.
- “Negotiating the requirements” for feasibility reasons (cost, schedule, implementability, other project drivers)
- Prototype testing results might suggest a strategic or tactical shift due to revealed usability or usefulness concerns
- End-game triage (“what low-priority features do we have to cut to make our launch date”)
I might have missed some. But one key here is that both sides must do their best to inform their judgment with the voice of the customer, not one side or the other. Neither of our guesses about customer needs are significantly more informed than the other, and to pretend otherwise is simply hubris. The other key here is compromise.
- com*pro*mise n.
- 1.a. A settlement of differences in which each side makes concessions.
- 1.b. The result of such a settlement.
- 2. Something that combines qualities or elements of different things.
In a compromise, both parties give, and mutually arrive at a single solution that each can live with.
I’ve written too much. You can see where I am going with this. We need to end this debate and solve the felt issues behind it with real work that will improve the silence and move the story forward.
