Your Product Works. Your Customer Still Has a Problem.

One of the dangerous sentences in technology is: the product works.

It sounds reassuring. It can also be the point at which everyone stops asking useful questions.

In my Before It Was Obvious conversation, Tom Richards describes wanting to speak to customers who were angry and upset. Not because he enjoys an afternoon, but because their dissatisfaction might reveal something the product specification never mentioned.

Perhaps the meeting room is excellent. Perhaps nobody uses it because they think it belongs to the executives. Perhaps someone has booked it just in case, rendering it unavailable to everyone who needs it.

A software update is unlikely to cure that.

Tom came through pure mathematics, AI research, a startup and product management. His story is a useful reminder that the correct technical answer and the successful business outcome are different things.

The commercial pieces matter too: how the product is sold, how partners deliver it, how it is priced and how people adopt it. Every department can have a sensible plan. The customer still has to survive the combination.

What interested me most was Tom’s emphasis on connecting the people building technology with the people using it. Carefully, of course. Three demanding customers do not constitute a market research department.

But neither does a chain of internal presentations.

Innovation starts to become useful when we understand the environment it has to enter.

Explore to the conversation at b4obvious.com.

What looked like a product problem, but turned out to be something else?