"Getting Out of the Building": Not always the Way for a Startup, Part 1 of 2
There's been a lot of discussion about "getting out of the building" for startup founders and technical leads. The basic premise in lean startup is not to "close the doors and write your sentences" as is literally translated from Chinese. Totally makes sense and certainly one way to go. Go forth and speak to customers, ask what they want and then build it for them. Perfectly reasonable assumption. I can also see that its about getting founders and technical folks to interact with their customers - especially, to ask questions. |
| Waiting for the Product to Grow. . . |
That said, let's not take this too far to the extreme. Steve Jobs has stated the often quoted phrase, "It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." http://www.helpscout.net/blog/why-steve-jobs-never-listened-to-his-customers/
I'd take it a step forward and use a classic example from the food industry. There comes trend cycles in which food companies do customer feedback sessions and surveys to determine that people want healthy food and all the benefits associated with it. Then when the food companies go off and create these wonderful healthy foods, do more taste testing, and set pricing, only to be rebuffed and determine that the effort is less than successful. What happened? Do customers lie? Tell surveyors what they think they want to hear? Represent themselves in an idealized scenario?
I wonder how the "get out of the building" effort looked like for Facebook?
We've got this wonderful tool for you to keep a tab on people your "friends" with, but haven't spoken to in ages and wouldn't really know how to have a conversation in person. Its a mild stalking program so you can flip through their personal photo albums and read about their every like/dislike - all from a safe distance. And the kicker is you'd want to spend all of your waking moments on this platform. . .
.JPG)
