No Promises

When we build a new service or a piece of software for public consumption I have this rule of not talking about it. Generally I try to not talk about anything people could perceive as a promise. Believe it or not, as a business or manager, anything you say that vaguely resembles a commitment to do something can and probably will be taken as a promise by someone.

Everything is a Promise

For example, if you’re running out of office space and things are getting crowded - the first response most Managers and Directors I’ve dealt with will have is start talking about “when we move to the new office” like it’s a done deal.

Similarly whether it’s new office space or a new software version or a completely new product they start describing it in vague, wonderful sounding terms. Like “miles of room”, “more comprehensive” or “feature rich”. It’s strange, but these spruikers of all things wonderful don’t seem to understand that their staff or clients see the comments they make as commitments to deliver.

It’s possible that these people in authority simply don’t understand that to a staff member their position in the organisation adds weight to everything they say. Let me say that another way - if you are “in charge” of a company you are in charge of the livelihood of all your staff and everything you say is filtered through that perception.

The new <insert object here> is going to be <insert adjective here>!

Going back to our “new office space” example this means that even though you’re talking about a vague and undefined point in the future about something you’re sort of thinking about doing, what your staff are hearing is quite different. They are hearing their boss talk about a future event that he’s doing the planning on and is actively working on, to solve the problem of the crowded office space.

This will at first make your staff feel better and complaints will drop off in the short term, after a while though you will notice things like key staff moving on to new companies or worse staff issues that affect the whole business operation.

In previous lives I worked with 2 different public companies, in one the major shareholder/Managing Director over the space of the 3 years I was there addressed any complaints by saying they would be “fixed in the new workshop”. Shortly prior to my leaving he asked me to look at facility space in the area, which was a great surprise to me as like most of the staff I was under the impression the business already owned the location of the new workshop.

The other company was the largest in it’s area at the time in Australia, after being with them for a few months the Chairman came into the office one day and said that he’d been looking at properties for a new facility and asked us if we’d be interested in working on the fit-out project. A week later he swung by and dropped off the keys to the massive new building he’d brought and told us to get to work.

Granted this wasn’t an ideal approach either (it would have been nice to have some heads up etc) as we hard some hard and fast deadlines to get the fit-out done by - due to expiring property leases. The net affect though was positive and many good people worked very hard over those months to make the new facility a reality. They worked longer and harder than they normally would because they could see how they would directly benefit from the project.

While it was a rush and hectic, it was also exhilarating and immensely satisfying to complete. Of these two companies I know which one I enjoyed working with the most.

It’s the same for clients

We’re a small group

I run a small company with the help of a few other people. As you can imagine we work well because we have clear understanding of our goals for the business, client projects and specific products. This is why we manage messages about what we offer and the expectations for products very closely.

I was brought up with the rule never promise anything you’re not going to deliver, don’t be vague about what you’re saying, be precise so people can’t read their own wishes into things you say.

If you speak in general and vague terms about a product or a service you will end up with clients that have expectations that match their desires and needs.

That’s why we don’t talk about a product until it’s goals and feature set are defined, we don’t even put a feature on the list until we know how we’re going to implement it. We don’t even talk about the potential features, generally we listen to what people are saying about their needs and see if we can answer that need.

In Practice

Our first publicly available Joomla component, EasyTable, is exactly what it’s designed to be, a simple to use component that imports CSV files for display in the front end of Joomla websites. EasyTable FC9 will hopefully be feature complete and will, once any bugs have been squashed, form the release version of EasyTable 1.0

We manage a range of clients, from individuals to Local Government sized operations all with Joomla websites, some have 1 website while others have more than 20 websites. From our experience with them, 90% of the website owners have enough problems using the article editor and don’t want or need an over complicated interface - the original product goals for EasyTable reflect this.

Listening to users and remembering the goals for EasyTable, that’s how the feature list for EasyTable Pro came about. From the user forums, email conversations and feedback, from not trying to cram more features into an existing product that 90% of it’s users will never use.

I think successful small companies and indie developers work this way, otherwise I doubt they would be successful.