Product Behavior

What comes first - your product vision, or your product experience? And once you have one, how does the other follow?

A colleague and I got wrapped up the other day in thinking about vision vs. experience. Many of our product development projects start with a focus on technology, and part of our work is to help the client through the process of developing a story that will make sense to consumers. Many of our more strategic projects start with a vision; our job is to develop the right experience to express the vision to the consumer. Projects that start with one or the other are straightforward in that we know what’s driving the process.The more difficult projects are for clients that have some of each: part of a brand vision defined, and a piece of technology that may or may not deliver an experience in line with that vision. Often the engineering and marketing teams are operating in parallel, and neither is quite done with their work. If we can engage both of those groups, and we can help the entire organization get aligned with itself, we’re in good shape. Startups are often in that state when they get to us, but the “marketing” and “engineering” sides are small (if not the same people) so we can get everyone in the same room at the same time and hash it out. Our job becomes translating between the functions, so the client can understand the real marketing implications of a technology issue, and vice versa.

If we can’t easily align the client’s organization with itself - say, the engineering group has hired us but the marketers aren’t involved - it’s trouble. A recently client had that issue: the engineering managers hired us and basically hid us from the marketing organization (and them from us) to avoid whatever internal friction they were used to. Sigh. Eventually the marketing types got wind of the situation and the whole project unraveled. And it goes the other way too, in organizations in which the marketers operate as loose cannons, going as far as they can before the engineers lasso them with reality.

So we ask a lot of questions about the organization of the company and try to get a feel for their development process, the relationship between marketing and engineering (and sales and service and all the other arms), and the process that led to our getting involved with the project. It can make clients nervous - sometimes there’s a pile of politics behind the process, personalities can be in conflict, etc.

But without that alignment, we might as well not show up at all, because somewhere down the line, the chickens will come home to roost.

Question for you: Who drives your vision? Who drives your product experience? How well do they work together?

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