In the end it was quite a relief to sell the car. Our last day in Kansas City was the Tuesday, and we sold it to a dealer on the Monday for near our private sale asking price. Will we miss our green Ford Focus? Not really, just a hunk of plastic and metal. Some memories maybe — driving my pregnant wife to hospital, taking a wrinkly tiny baby home; a casket of ice dripping off it after the big ice storm; trips down to the arboretum for walks.
Everything looks rosier in retrospect. When we got it, I was a bit disappointed. Don’t get me wrong — everything was put together just so, just the odd tiny design niggle. Like the armrest.
Being a whacky European, I had selected a manual gearbox for use in suburban flatland, Kansas. This clearly wasn’t in the minds of the designers of the US version of the Focus, since they had decided that a whopping great armrest was a compulsory feature for the American market. Even if that armrest interfered with minor use cases like changing gear.
So here’s the thought. We’re living in a world of increasing interconnectedness: long value and supply chains, web services and cheap connectivity. But the corporate body hasn’t evolved along with it. I can’t penetrate the force shields of the Ford Motor Company and dive down to the product manager who decided to mess up the clean Euro design of the Focus when translating into supersize Americana. [This is nothing about Europe vs. US, by the way. It just works out that way in this one case.]
My cell phone, my car, my home, all the stuff I buy — I want to be able to make it better. I want to have a meaningful relationship with my personal suppliers. I want to see the translucent enterprise: not so transparent that they freak out, not so opaque as we have today.
I want to be able to go to the corporate web site, select any product or service, and be able to drill down. Interact with the product manager and marketing team. Tell them what’s wrong, what my unmet needs are. Do it directly, not just post up an unseen complaint on a random website.
In return, they keep me informed when my concerns are addressed in the next product iteration, give me priority access to new product, give me the inside track on other customers.
Crazy? You bet. But is it any madder than online banking and dating were twenty years ago?
Posted by Martin Geddes at 09:24 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Telepocalypse: All product and service development should be transparent and embrace power users and early adopters and geeks from Roland Tanglao's Weblog
Amen! This is a strange world at first blush but it makes sense. Why not help design those products and services you are passionate about? Why not get a reward for helping out with their design? From Telepocalypse: Corporate...
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Check out: http://www.economist.com/printedition/index.cfm?d=20040904
Posted by: at September 9, 2004 03:51 PM(With HTML formatting at: http://www.buzzhit.com/2004/09/roland-tanglao-and-product-management.html)
Roland Tanglao lends his support to a post on Telepocalypse calling for more accessibility/interaction between customers (likely both direct and end users) and corporate product managers.
No offense intended (honestly), but is this a new idea? Sure, most companies due a poor job of exposing their internal staff to the "harsh" outside world directly, but quality product managers (and marketers) are trained (or eventually learn in some awkward and painful way) to listen to their customers; heck, at most companies, the PM is described as the "customer champion".
Why? Because product managers, corporate cultures notwithstanding, are really mini-GMs. They worry about everything involving the business and its manifestation via product, from the business plan/model (P&L), to product functionality/design, to technical implementation, to positioning & messaging... and certainly all the way through to the voice and feedback of the customer.
Quality PMs know that they must gather customer feedback (from Customer Support, Sales, and any other customer facing organization) in order to (minimally):
1. Gather bugs
2. Gather feature requests
3. Gather competitive perspectives
4. And perhaps most importantly, understanding the changing and unmet needs of customers
Aside: High quality PMs do this not only by pawing through CS logs, etc, but by actually TALKING (not just emailing) to potential, current and churned customers, ideally in person (and not just during focus group, beta test, etc project phases).
Why bother? Because PMs have limited resources to work with, and they must weigh all of the above against competitive threats, general environment (economic, social, political, etc) changes, and so on, in order to refine a business and product strategy that allows them to win the market, satisfy customers and generate earnings.
So I guess I agree... in the sense that you're just asking people to do a better (and more transparent) job... but you shouldn't need to! (I guess that's the ultimate point.)
Posted by: at September 14, 2004 06:51 PM