Your Product Works. Your Customer Still Has a Problem.

There is a comforting idea in technology that if you build something sufficiently clever, people will recognize its brilliance and organize themselves accordingly. Anyone who has tried to introduce a new system into an existing business will appreciate the optimism involved.

My conversation with Cisco’s Tom Richards follows a career spent discovering what lies beyond the technical answer. It begins with pure mathematics, moves through AI research and a startup, and arrives at product management, workplace technology and the challenge of bringing products to market.

The connecting thread is people. Specifically, people who have their own priorities, habits, budgets and reasons for not doing whatever the technology enthusiast thinks they should do next.

From certainty to people

Tom describes loving mathematics partly because answers could be right or wrong. There was a clarity to it. That appeal carried him through undergraduate and master’s study in pure mathematics.

But increasingly specialized research also meant a narrowing community. Tom enjoyed meeting people and learning from them. That mattered to the direction he chose next, although his eventual journey still included a PhD and some demanding technical work.

He taught himself programming in a research environment and became involved in constraint programming: modeling complicated problems and finding useful solutions within very large spaces of possibilities. His account of AI in the 1990s is a reminder that the field has a history considerably longer than the current conversation sometimes suggests.

The point here is not a claim that one approach was destined to win. Tom is quite candid about having underestimated the future importance of some of the work happening around him. Hindsight is an exceptionally efficient research technique. Unfortunately, it arrives late.

Feedback before the label

An important part of that research environment was its connection to industry. Tom describes working on specific problems, building models quickly and returning to client organizations for regular discussions about progress and what they were learning.

He recognizes elements of later development practices in those experiences. The useful lesson is the working habit, rather than an argument about who invented which methodology.

When the people doing the work are regularly exposed to the people with the problem, assumptions have less time to become permanent fixtures. A technically elegant answer can be questioned while changing it is still relatively inexpensive.

That connection becomes more difficult as organizations grow. It also becomes more valuable.

Brilliant technology needs somewhere to land

Tom’s startup experience supplies the sharpest example. The team had technology it believed was unusually capable. Yet implementing its solutions could require changes across different functions inside a customer’s organization.

That is a substantial complication. A customer may agree that your technology solves an important problem while lacking the authority, incentives or organizational capacity to adopt it.

Nobody necessarily needs to be foolish for the deal to stall. Everyone can be acting sensibly within their own responsibilities. The difficulty is that the proposed solution requires them to act together.

Tom describes a better alignment when Cisco’s needs matched a problem the team’s mathematical approach could address. His account leaves room for luck. That is refreshing in a business culture that often rewrites a favorable sequence of events as evidence of perfect foresight.

The lesson is broader than a startup sale. Understanding the environment in which a technology must operate is part of understanding the problem itself.

The customer experiences the whole business

Later in the conversation, Tom describes the importance of joining up product strategy, sales, partners, delivery, pricing, licensing and adoption.

Businesses tend to give each of those subjects an owner. This is useful for management purposes. It can be less useful if the owners optimize their own pieces without considering the combined experience.

The customer does not purchase a product strategy on Monday and a partner strategy on Tuesday. They try to achieve an outcome through whatever combination the supplier has assembled.

A product can be well designed and still be difficult to buy. It can be easy to buy and difficult to implement. It can be successfully installed and barely used. Each failure belongs somewhere, but the customer gets the complete set.

An empty room is not necessarily a broken room

Tom says he wanted to talk to angry customers. If the product was good, why were they upset? That is a much more useful question than assuming the customer simply needed additional education.

Meeting rooms provide an excellent example. A room may have perfectly capable video technology while remaining underused because employees associate it with executives or a special purpose. A booking system may make rooms unavailable even when nobody is actually sitting in them.

Those are obstacles to the outcome the customer wanted. Improving the camera may be worthwhile for other reasons, but it will not automatically change the booking behavior or the cultural signal attached to the door.

This is where product work becomes organizational work. You need to understand what people actually do, and why, before deciding what should change.

Bring builders closer to users

Tom argues for reducing the layers between those building technology and those using it. He also recognizes that exposing engineers to every possible conversation is neither practical nor necessarily helpful.

The selection matters. A handful of unusually large or vocal customers can distort a team’s view of the market. Strategic leadership involves choosing interactions that reveal representative needs and useful future directions.

Experience is valuable here because it helps people see connections and decide where attention belongs. It does not require the most senior person to remain the deepest technical specialist in every emerging field.

That is also a useful way to think about career change. Tom describes learning to welcome moves that initially felt uncomfortable. Established credibility is reassuring; it can also make a familiar role surprisingly difficult to leave.

His story offers no tidy formula. It offers curiosity, practical judgment and a willingness to keep learning from people. Those qualities may be less photogenic than a new device. They have a considerable influence on whether anyone benefits from it.

Explore to Tom Richards on Before It Was Obvious at b4obvious.com.