Software that continually improves its value is the result of a strong product management process. That may seem like an obvious thing to say, but you’d be surprised how often product management is discounted or even ignored. But what does poor product management look like? How does it manifest itself in the product? I’m glad you asked!
The Ember case study
Sharon was a talented developer whose career spanned several software companies. She liked coding, but was increasingly frustrated with her managers and longed to make a change. She grew up in a family with a nurse and a fireman, so she had a natural interest in the emergency management field. She decided to take some EM classes from a local community college and that experience gave her the idea to build an EM application.
Sharon vetted the idea with her professors, founded a company called Ember, and then spent two years working evenings and weekends to create the Ember app. It was a long and difficult road, but she was very proud of what she’d accomplished, in part because she’d received positive feedback in her class demos.
Sharon felt she had a terrific product, but didn’t know how to bring it to market. She enlisted my help as a start-up consultant and my first task was to create an advisory board consisting of EM professionals. The board would provide valuable feedback about the software and it would be natural for them to become Ember’s first clients.
Unfortunately, the feedback was mostly critical. Users found it difficult or not possible to do the things they wanted to do, the navigation was confusing, and some of the features they most needed were not in the app. And yet the app included some features that were nice to have, but not necessary in their daily routines.
As the advisory board dug deeper into the app, the feedback got even more difficult to hear. After just one session, we had compiled a list of over 100 issues. The issues crossed a spectrum from user access rights to UI inconsistencies to exporting data.
The more feedback we received, the more resistant Sharon became. After all, she had invested two years in making the app what it was. In her mind, time was better spent adding new functionality than changing the look and feel of the current functionality. She spent a lot of time explaining why the app was designed the way it was in hopes of convincing users to accept it in its current state. It didn’t work.
I ended the consulting engagement as gracefully as I could. Sharon, still holding a full-time job and tending to her family, eventually burned out trying to redesign the app. Ember faded into obscurity. True story, albeit with the names of the founder and company changed.
Lessons learned
This actually happens quite often in tech start-ups, especially those founded by developers. Founders get enamored with the idea of their software and begin to believe it’s “the shit” even before any real user feedback has been received. I’ve learned the hard way that no matter how good your idea is, it doesn’t have any real value until it is validated by legitimate users. So what exactly can we learn from Ember?
- Sharon vetted the idea with her professors, but failed to go any further. It would have been good to get the idea in front of the people who actually make the purchase decisions for EM tools.
- Sharon took feedback from classmates, but failed to recognize that her classmates weren’t part of her target user group. She needed to get feedback from the EM professionals that would be the actual users of Ember.
- Sharon was open to the idea of an advisory board, but failed to embrace the feedback from real users.
Conclusion
Ember was essentially designed and built in a vacuum by one person with very limited experience in the field. I want to be careful not to compare Simplifya to Ember because the circumstances here are very different. I want to use the Ember story illustrate how easy it is for Simplifya to hit the same potholes. It’s the reason I’ve taken the time to implement a formal product management process.
But what is that process and how does it prevent Simplifya from becoming another Ember? I’m glad you asked! That’s the topic of my next post!