Good Product Manager has a good article about delivering customer value versus delivering a lot of features.
I’m going to go one further: sometimes it’s about a lot of small features instead of doing one large feature.
Example: when I was working at Escrow.com, the application was receiving a lot of bad reviews by the users, and the customer service department was working 20 or so overtime hours a week. I did an analysis of the customer service emails, and found that a full 20 percent of the emails and calls were related to the URLs in the emails — they were too long. All we had to do was design shorter URLs.
Two days of work by the developer, and in three weeks, the overtime was gone.
Over the next few months, we did a lot of small changes, like rewriting the customer service emails, making small improvements in the application, making small user interface tweaks. None of them took more than a couple of days, but over the long haul, we saw month to month improvements in both conversion rates and revenue generated. The return customers doubled, because they found the site to be easier to use.
This was all done without spending any marketing dollars.
We did do a redesign four months later, but the design was based on the small changes and user feedback collected from emails and focus groups selected from our more frequent users. They told us to make small changes, because it was the details that made it a better user experience.
Think small, then big. If you have to think big, there should be a big reason to justify it.
What are your success stories?
A few from Alexis Antonelli:
I sit in a lot of pre-sales meetings, going over requirements. Clients always say the damndest things, and this was actually a discussion that I was having with a friend of my that just started a chiropractic business, also, on Tuesday.
The conversation went a little like this:
“Bob (I won’t hide the names of the innocent), you aren’t charging enough.”
“But I want my services to be affordable, and I want the right kind of clients.”
“What are the right kind of clients?”
“Clients that will value the services that I provide, I want them to show up to appointments, and work on their personal health.”
“But do you really care if they are about their personal health or not? Isn’t it more profitable to take clients with health insurance, instead of providing services to only those that don’t want to go through their insurance?”
“Yes, but those clients cost more because of the paperwork, and a lot of those clients don’t really appreciate the services. They just want the massage, and won’t take steps to help themselves.”
He’s taken a step to providing services for a particular market segment. He might not make as much money, but he’s carving out a niche in his market that he hopes will make him successful in the long term.
That’s a decision that we all have to make at some point — I’ve tried the “lower price, to build a relationship” route, and in my experience in the tech industry, it doesn’t work. My feeling is that those are the same people that will threaten to take their business to China or India or somewhere else, and they’ll never be happy, so I choose to stay in a high priced category. Because of that (whatever rate you are charging), the clients seem to value you more because they know they are paying a higher rate.
Whatever you do, all successful businesses pick their target audience — not trying to be everything to everyone. Apple does it. Microsoft does it. MySpace and Facebook do it. Why should you?
Thoughts, comments?
How to be A Good Product Manager (which is a phenomenal blog, by the way, and wish I had written most of the content) has this excellent post about requirements, and it applies requirements gathering. One of the traps that we fall into as consultants is that with certain clients, we go into the mode of just gathering requirements and not advising what the requirements should be (read: let’s design the Pontiac Aztek, quite possibly the ugliest car on the road).
Just gathering requirements is a bad idea. Advising on requirements is a better idea, because that’s how you add value.
Sure it’s like herding cats, but the reason many consultants are valuable is there’s some wonderful insight that they may have, however small it may seem, that adds phenominal value for the client. That’s why they are paying consultants what they do.
How so? We start the conversation about what the direction should be, even if it’s the wrong direction at the start. One of the essential points that the article makes is that in many cases, the customer has no idea what they want (a car), and what they may get may be anything from a Hummer or a Prius.
Our job is to ask questions that will lead to developing a better product, and not necessarily questions that lead to what we think the product should be. Many scenarios, it’s impossible to satisfy all parties, because they may ask for a car that is great for the environment (the Prius) and can run over people (the Hummer), because the requirements are conflicting. Our job is to find the best solution, not the solution that meets the needs of everyone.
Or what do they say — trying to make everyone happy will make no one happy?
How we deal with clients and how they view our professionalism is sometimes more important than what we know, especially in the field of User Experience where our knowledge is treated at about the same level as a fortune teller. I've told some of my reports that likable and professional is more billable than knowledgeable.
I asked this question over at LinkedIn (I've grown to like the site, and it really is a powerful networking tool). I'm going to publish some of the answers every week, and you can respond to them, or not. Sometimes the answers will repeat – my apoligies. I will give credit where credit is due, and I'm going to try to live by some of these.
This was submitted by Chelsea Wyatt:
Attached is a list of 12 cardinal sins in ERP Consulting, her prior field.
How we deal with clients and how they view our professionalism is sometimes more important than what we know, especially in the field of User Experience where our knowledge is treated at about the same level as a fortune teller. I've told some of my reports that likable and professional is more billable than knowledgeable.
I asked this question over at LinkedIn (I've grown to like the site, and it really is a powerful networking tool). I'm going to publish some of the answers every week, and you can respond to them, or not. Sometimes the answers will repeat – my apoligies. I will give credit where credit is due, and I'm going to try to live by some of these.
This was submitted by David Coerchon:
How we deal with clients and how they view our professionalism is sometimes more important than what we know, especially in the field of User Experience where our knowledge is treated at about the same level as a fortune teller. I’ve told some of my reports that likable and professional is more billable than knowledgeable.
I asked this question over at LinkedIn (I’ve grown to like the site, and it really is a powerful networking tool). I’m going to publish some of the answers every week, and you can respond to them, or not. Sometimes the answers will repeat — my apoligies. I will give credit where credit is due, and I’m going to try to live by some of these.
This was submitted by Anurag Purohit:
This is a piece by a former Accenture consultant that I often use to set the basics right. These are the things a consultant can do right. Conversely, not following these basics will land consultant in a soup:
Patrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform and runs both the UX Drinking Game and Startup Drinking Game | More | Contact
