I am reading this book by Mike Moran Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing rules. He is talking about the marketing here, but I find it very much suitable for the web development too.
Today winners don’t get it right the first time: they start fast, and relentlessly optimize their way to success. They do it wrong quickly… then fix it, just as quickly
I am not suggesting that one must do wrong purposely. In many web projects due to multiple stake owners, people keep fighting about the rights and the wrongs. However there’s no thing such as perfect right and perfect wrong. There are always multiple ways and approach to the same problem/feature/solution. And many a times, these arguements are not on big things – but small things and peripheral features of the project.
Deadlines & The Refrigerators
The other thing is the Deadline and Do or Die resource and time management. The days of freezing the web development post release are over. Perpetual beta and agile development are not the new words, but some how this thinking has not gone into project management or the business management.
The things you should accomodate now in development cycle should be:
- Release
- Post release feedback gathering
- Post release SWOT analysis
- Post release change management
Feedback Gathering, post release ? :
Now you would say that what about user studies that you did at the time of development. Those were user opinions and not feedback (in most of the cases). Feedback is when thousand of people actually start using your product. When they start telling you how your product changed their life OR how it sucks.
Remember, feedback is not a thumb rule or a prophecy from the user that you must listen too. It’s not a survey of a FMCG product that tells you that n number of people use soap brand A and n+1 use soap brand B and hence brand B is successful.
Feedback gathering and user study is half art and half science and if you are neither a scientist nor a artist then don’t even think about it. I have seen even professional usability consulting agencies doing a mechanical observation.
The blockbuster product is not necessarily always the result of your imagination, planning and design. There are always few tipping points behind the success. That’s why not everyone can just replicate the success. The knowledgeable product manager would know these and exploit them full to the advantage.
To sum it up here’s the quote from the same book.
“Iterate, don’t pontificate”
- Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO, Denuo
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