Sorry for the hiatus. I found it incredibly difficult to come up with interesting things to discuss while election madness was in full swing.
It is painfully clear that this country is incredibly divided and that there is a severe lack of empathy for “the other side.”
There is a real “us” vs “them” feeling, where each group believes they know what is best for our country. We believe these things based on our experiences and not the collective experiences of society as a whole.
However, the experiences of a farmer in Wisconsin are going to be different than a mother in Detroit working three jobs to keep food on the table. These are different than the experiences of a child who is being bullied in school or a teen who is arrested for cannabis possession. We all have different and unique experiences.
We use these experiences to tell others how things should work, rather than taking the time to understand what others are going through.
It’s easy to speak. It’s difficult to listen.
Can you imagine being spoken over the way Kamala was on that debate stage? As if her input, her experiences didn’t matter. Like they were irrelevant. I know I have. I’m guessing many of you have been in a meeting or have tried talking to your family about something serious and felt this same thing. I was thrilled when the Vice President-elect fought to have her voice heard, but for so many people this isn’t an option.
As founders, as politicians, as leaders, and as a community we all need to listen when others are speaking. We need to create cultures where we value the experiences of others, not dismiss them.
Communicating with your customers
This isn’t just a challenge in politics. It’s also one of the biggest hurdles in product development for startups. If you ignore your customers and assume you know the right solution, you’re going to get it wrong.
Imagine you were pitched a company focused on commercial blimp travel. The founder excitedly tells you about how they hated flying on airplanes. The crowded planes. The coach experience. It’s awful. No one likes flying. And they’ve got a solution…blimps! You can create a more luxury experience and people will pay for comfort.
Obviously, blimps are not the answer to this problem. And, the problem probably isn’t that severe in the first place. Sure, people don’t love the coach experience on planes, but there’s already an option for first class and the folks who will pay for comfort already do.
This founder could go about building their company for years, raising millions of dollars, only to get down the road and realize it wasn’t the big company they thought it was going to be.
Maybe this is an obvious example, but this happens all of the time. According to CB Insights, the number one reason startups fail is that the solution has no market need.
This also happens on a smaller scale all the time with feature development. Here’s an example we had recently at my company.
We gave growers the ability to record destroy information (if you get rid of some plants because of an issue - slow growth, disease, pest, etc.). This is especially important for yield forecasting (making sure you have up-to-date inventory counts) and also for compliance (you have to record when you destroy cannabis plants, for example).
We wanted to make sure growers had the opportunity to record these destroys at any time. What if you’re in the field and notice an issue and need to destroy something right away? Of course you’d want the ability to do an ad hoc destroy.
We were wrong.
It turns out growers really only destroy when they are moving plants or harvesting. That means you’d have to do two distinct actions in our system: first enter destroy information and then find the move or harvest action and complete that. It takes an extra few seconds per item destroyed to enter all the information.
(Imagine trying to pull one individual plant out of the middle of all of these! You can’t even get to the plants, so it makes complete sense you’d only record it when you pull the plants out into a new location or for harvest.)
For commercial growers, that could be an extra hour per day just because we had split the actions in two.
We’ve now combined destroy actions with the move and harvest actions and eliminated the need to do two things. It saves growers tons of time.
It might seem small, but that feature probably took a full sprint to do in the first place. Even if it only took two weeks to build the ad hoc capability, we could’ve spent it building something else.
You have to listen to your customers.
There’s a big caveat to all of this. If you spend all of your development effort building only what your customers ask for, you’ll also fail. Why? Everyone wants/needs something a little different. If you cater to all of your customer needs, you will end up building custom products for each individual customer.
Your job as a founder is to understand what your customers want, what they need, and where the industry is heading. Product development sits at this intersection.
The best advice I can give is to ensure you create the space to listen to your customers.
You should balance customer discovery, market insight, and your own vision. After all, you’re not building for today. You’re building a product because you can’t imagine a future without it. And it’s likely your customers don’t know what that future looks like right now.
This balance is difficult to get right, but it’s certainly impossible to get right without listening to your customers.
If you enjoyed this post, please like it and share with others who might be interested. You can also leave comments and let me know what other topics you’d be interested in hearing about. Thanks for reading!