I believe some sage (Regis McKenna?) said: Draft the press release before you design the product The reason is familiar to any salesperson. They get deep into a presentation and they’re stopped cold by the dreaded objection #3a – the one that slows down most sales and kills half of them. If the engineers had only designed objection 3a out of the product, life would be good. By drafting the press release, even 12 to 24 months before product launch, you’ll be forced to think about the product’s benefits rather than its features, and you’ll design a better product. You’ll think about benefits because you’re trying to engage editors and end users who don’t care about anything but what’s in it for them. You’ll answer why your darling is worth the brain damage of owning it. End users never care about features – the engineers’ beloved blinkenlights – they care about the core utility of the thing. Most of our VCRs are blinking 12:00 because we bought it to play rentals, not to schedule recordings, and we have other clocks that keep working when the power goes out. Most people still don’t watch DVDs because every time they try to buy a player, the sales guy starts talking about 3:2 pulldown and their eyes glaze over. He thinks he’s selling DVD players, but he’s really delivering brochures. A web page is essentially what salespeople refer to as a “cold call,” an interruption in the customer’s search for an answer in a haystack of solutions. My friend Jerry Vass says that most people really don’t care to change what they are doing now, because it’s too much trouble. Companies’ inability to deliver answers delays the purchases we’d otherwise leap at. Vass estimates that featureSpeak costs companies billions of dollars in delayed purchases. Customers seem to care most about dollars but we really care about the aggradollars we squander on the aggravation of owning anything we’ve not owned before. Aggradollars are the dark underbelly of the Information Economy that sounded so appealing when Paul Hawken described it in 1983. Answers, not SolutionsThe software industry believes its mission is to deliver solutions, but customers want answers. The great thing about an answer is that it includes a promise. Customers have learned that “solution” means “black hole”. We who’ve spent too much time packaging information for a computer screen have learned that we have to throttle our ambitions way back to be useful to our customers. That’s why Open Republic must first be a trusted publication, not a software development operation. OR’s first obligation is to deliver the single answer an activist wants, not the data architecture solution she needs. The OR answer for the activist is direct:
Scores of smart, committed technologists are setting up consulting shops and development operations. They will all be competing for the attention and confidence of Misty Smith’s brother-in-law. Open Republic means to be the comprehensive and comprehensible companion and portal for the activist with questions that need answers. Learning by TeachingIt’s axiomatic that the best way to learn something is to teach it. By building the indispensable guide to what’s available in the activist software market, Open Republic will understand far better what’s missing and what most needs improving. Armed with those insights, it will better spend its grant money inspiring activist developers to do what they want to do anyway, but with a better UI. The Open Republic portal to the new tech of activism will have no shortage of donors. People and foundations experienced enough to have money to give know that the world needs more benefits and fewer features – answers, not solutions. From recent comments:
8:36:17 AM |
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Escapable Logic 