 Engineers and Designers need to endeavor to understand their customer. Don't rely on the MBA's, markeeters, or VC's. While its' important to be part of a winning team, every team member including the engineers, should search for an understanding of their customer.
I recently was reminded of this when I read about the problems that were the demise of web startup Friendster in this Inc article. One of the problems they had was the engineers and management did not know who their customer were. For instance, their code did not scale to the millions of customers that they needed to attract, and no manager seemed to care enough to make the scaling problem a priority. They were more interested in new features.
New features may be important to compete with your competition. In this case MySpace (the competition) had music and animations on the user web pages and it was attracting new users like crazy. But the scaling problem Friendster had was a serious problem that only the techies recognized.
The issue of not understanding the customer did not stop there. In this article excerpt they found out who their demographic was:
"Meanwhile, scant attention was paid to Friendster's users. Lunt remembers marveling sometime in early 2004 at how Friendster's traffic would mysteriously spike at 2 a.m. Intrigued, he started looking at the site's log. Oh, my God, he thought, everyone is from the Philippines. [...] In fact, more than half the site's traffic was coming from Southeast Asia.
From a business standpoint, the revelation was devastating. Friendster, it turned out, was paying millions of dollars a year to attract eyeballs that were effectively worthless to its advertisers. Says Abrams: "We needed to make a tough decision"--either spin off the Asian business or become the No. 1 Filipino social network."
In this excerpt they found out how and why their customers were using their product:
"Unbeknownst to Abrams, Sassa, and Friendster's investors, demand for social networking was changing. The lure of Friendster--and, to a much greater extent, MySpace--was not the elegant web of connections but rather the opportunity to gawk at strangers. Rather than using Friendster to make dates, most of its users were simply cruising around and looking at the weird interests, pictures, and blog-droppings of strangers (including so-called "fakester" profiles of Jesus and Burt Reynolds). Real-life connections, the core of Abrams's vision, were not quite as relevant as he'd imagined. Thus, the free-spirited MySpace,... took off. The site surpassed Friendster by the end of 2004 after only a year in business. A mere nine months later, it would be clocking 22 million unique users per month in the U.S., compared with 1.1 million for Friendster." |