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“By Committee” Development: Work with your Customers NOT against them

I came across an article on the Creating Passionate Users Blog site today and finally its nice to see someone that thinks about users as much as I do. The posting he wrote was entitled “Oops… we forgot about the users“, Written by Kathy Sierra. My favorite excerpt from the article was this one…

Until talking about the users/customers/members/clients becomes the most important thing, we’re going nowhere good. And no matter how many companies pay it lip service, the meetings tell the real story. It’s staggering how many meetings I’ve been to where nobody is advocating for the users. Nobody. Yet everybody is advocating for ways to do what “upper management” wants or ways to save money or ways to… you know, many of you probably work in the companies I’m thinking of.

Source: Creating Passionate Users Blog

My personal belief is that if you involve your customers in your business from an improvement angle you cannot go wrong because you are giving them exactly what you need and you are not dictating what their needs are. I apply it to my idea about “Software by Committee” where instead of analyzing markets to make improvements to new product or service offerings you would open a forum where the users of the system have control over what they want to see in the following new versions of a given product or service.

If you have a pulse on your customers and their thoughts, ideas and suggestions and you reward them what you will have is not only a product that will sell because it was developed in part by the people who use it but you’ll have customers that are bound to your product over the competition which makes it very hard for them to ever leave something that they have a bond with. I posted a comment recently to another Blog writer by the name of Brad Williamson where he talks about bonding instead of branding products which in part spurred on the idea of “Software by Committee” that was kicking around in my brain.

My response:

Thanks for the interesting post Brad.

I personally like the idea. I am more involved in the software sector myself but i still think these ideals would prove valuable for what I am doing. Kind of like “Software by Committee”… growing software around the customers’ needs and feedback. Truth is that i think many businesses (esp. smaller ones) stand to benefit from bonding with their customers… a kind of “we’re in this together” dynamic that would keep people coming back for more. Very exciting and I am looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this further,

Luc

Brad’s response:

Luc…

I like your approach to bonding within the software sector. There are definitely opportunities to bond with customers in ALL industries. It might take some deep thinking to figure out where your product’s opportunities to bond are; but rest assured that those opportunities DO exist! It’s your job to find and implement them.

As a business owner, you can confidently know that you have successfully bonded with your product’s users when you see them smile, or see a joyful tear running down their face.

I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again…

If you can touch your customer’s emotions, they will gladly touch your products.

bizMAVERICK…
Brad Williamson

Really you could do this with any product out there and I suspect in the coming years you’ll see more companies (probably the smaller ones first) develop a “community” feel to research and development.  Your biggest market at any time is the people already using your products.  If they bought from you once, they will do it again unless you develop something that doesn’t have their interests in mind.  There is a saying about “Developing in a Vacuum” and that is “Don’t do it!”

The True Power of Customers

Customers have more power then they know.  If customers stopped buying a particular product so much so that the company that made it was not profiting from it, the company would notice.  Why do you think television pilots get cancelled shortly after airing?  Why does your favorite brand of cereal stop appearing on the shelves at the grocery store?  It all has to do with you… the customer!

Now if companies started to look at the people that use their products to see what they wanted there would be the following

• Fewer dollars wasted on ad and marketing campaigns for a product that is shortly pulled after launching only to be never seen again
• Less time wasted on product development
• Higher sales because you are able to meet market demand by tapping into your greatest resource… Your customers!

Hope that you enjoyed this “food for thought”.  I plan to see more companies’ both great and small implementing ideas such as these.  I know that I’ll be doing this with my BizCandy endeavor in the coming months.  Remember customers aren’t a fad they are a business!

Luc

Power to the Customer