Whenever I get comfortable, I like to mix things up a bit. Actually, my mentor pushes me to mix things up a bit. Whatever the case, they get mixed up!
Being a back-room guy, that meant getting out of the “back room” metaphorically speaking and joining the company’s executive team. Mission accomplished.
But now I have a new challenge. I now have the opportunity (and challenge) to get right out of the building altogether. I have the opportunity to go and meet the scariest people of all: the customers.
So last week I trundled down the highway to meet up with a couple of fantastic partner clients over lunch. Guess what? I actually enjoyed it. Scratch that: I absolutely loved it.
I suddenly discovered things that we could be doing to make their life easier. I heard about some new idea they had. I learned what their customers were telling them.
So my number one tip for making a great product is no amazing revelation to anyone I’m sure.
Get out of the office and go and talk to the people to actually use your product.
One day I’ll post about my other great revelation — the one I had when I was just starting out: The customer is always right — except for when they’re wrong. All I’ll say on the matter here is this: you’ll never know if the customer is right or not unless you actually get out and talk to them.
My theory had always been that I knew what the customer wanted because if they cared enough about something, they’d ring up and ask or they’d send an email .. or they’d leave. But once the tapas is served, the tongues loosen up, and the conversation flows.
What I had heard as “Customer A is threatening to leave unless you do totally inconsequential thing” turned out to be “Customer A will need to leave due to government compliance unless you do this really important thing”. Here I was thinking they were just looking for a trivial reason to explain why they were leaving us, when all along, they had to leave us unless we got it fixed.
Then there’s all those issues that people have found a work-around for that would be a quick fix if only you knew about the work-around. Or worse: the work-around that’s still in practice because when we fixed it, we didn’t communicate it well enough. Fixed that problem over lunch.
So again: Get out of the office and go and talk to the people to actually use your product.
