Listening to customers pays off - really

People (like myself) who practice user-centered design spend an inordinate amount of time preaching to and pleading with various gatekeepers in companies to bring customers into the design process. There's always a dozen excuses why it can't be done: "too expensive," "the customers can't design," "they don't want to be bothered," etc. etc. etc. Sometimes I think the gatekeepers just don't want to know how unappealing/unusable/unwanted the company's products are.

So it's a pleasure to read stories where some young gun has put the advice into practice and is rewarded appropriately. This is so easy to do and so rewarding, yet so few companies do it well.

Build me a widget...

Developers get a lot of requests from business people that sound like this: "Build me a widget (or a framework, or a proof of concept, etc.) that I can play with. It has to be flexible so I can tweak it myself and change stuff and maybe even show it to a customer." Implied but not stated, the request is also to go away but remain available if the business person needs significant changes. Business people don't realize that, from the developer's point of view, this is a very low-value request. They're asking the developer to do a great deal of work without having thought through the business case for the request. If the developer is experienced, he or she will have seen a lot of this sort of work just sit on a shelf unused.

If you're a developer, what kind of project would you rather work on? A project to build a product that could impress customers and generate a lot of revenue and gain you some recognition, or a project to build a big toy for a business person who may or may not figure out what to do with it at some unspecified future date? Business people could help themselves a great deal if they would do their part to think through a request for technology, and then engage developers early in the concept formation stage of product development.

10 most innovative business school courses

Forbes.com published a list of the 10 most innovative business school courses. Any list like this is going to be a little arbitrary, but I was happy to see NCSU's Product Innovation Lab class listed as one of the ten. I finished that class in December, and it was the most effortful and unique class I've ever taken. (That's saying a lot, because I've been through three grad school programs.)

The article also mentioned the project my team completed, a video conferencing system for PT patients. It was based on Microsoft's Natal technology. It was a killer project, if I do say so myself.

Prepping for the NPDP test

I'm doing a self-study course for the New Product Development Professional (NPDP) certification. There is no test prep material like there is for the PMP test. Fortunately, there's a reading list that's not too extensive and the books and articles are easily available if you have access to a good library. Many of the books and articles are real classics in the field.

Some people think certifications are a waste of time, but I've gotten a lot out of studying for them, and then trying to apply the knowledge.