More on how to craft a great end user experience
As I often say I am really focussed on delivering a great end user experience to my customers, Omar describes some of the challenges to achieving this (his context is Microsoft vs iPod):
- You do not own the end to end experience (you make the software but not the hardware in the case where the hardware is > 50% of the experience).
- Your customer is not the end user, but another company is your customer.
In my business (out-sourcing) we have similar challenges:
- Organisational fragmentation means that no single team owns the complete experience
- Corporate IT departments that sit between ourselves and the real end-users
Omar goes on to describe some of the key attributes necessary to craft a really great experience:
- The employees that work on those products care a great deal about what they are building. It’s not just a job.
- Other employees in the company also dogfood said product and care a great deal about the product and give plenty of feedback to the product team.
- The product team is responsive and reacts to the feedback the receive.
- The product team listens to what their customers say, and create a two way conversation with them.
I think we stand a good chance of resolving these issues if my company takes the necessary steps to change its focus, and the signs are looking good!
