Corvus Consulting

Kate Trgovac shares a nugget of product management wisdom through a quote from the Sci-Fi Channel’s Pete Snyder. The post is short, and well-worth taking a few moments to read.

Pete, and Kate’s point is that isolation is a sure way to lose touch with your customers, especially if your customers are tuned in to more open modes of communication (like blogs, local meetup groups, and so on). While I’m loathe to snatch the golden lines from her post, I just can’t say it better:

Shows, and products, get in trouble when they stay up on the mountain and avoid interaction with consumers.

Come down off the mountain, brands. Your customers want to play with you, want to interact with you, want to be heard!

I love the mountain==isolation metaphor that’s in play here, and it reminds me that, in English, there’s a small system of metaphors that captures this piece of wisdom.

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We often talk about things high up as being removed and detached:

The bird’s eye view sees far and wide, but misses the details

Academics live in ivory towers when their theories seem out of touch

Having your head in the clouds ensures you won’t understand the real situation

And on the other side, we grant trust and a sense of being more genuine to those things closer to terra firma:

Having your ear to the ground means you’ll understand a situation in real-time

Spending time in the trenches is the best way to earn experience

Being down to earth makes you more accessible and able to empathize

This trend seems to boil down to something along the line of: The closer something or someone is to you and your situation, the more trustworthy they are.

Being open and accessible brings customers closer to the thinking behind your product or brand, and closer to the actual message that you may be trying to get across. That’s only one side of the potential benefit, though. The other side is that you, as a maker of said product or brand, can come into direct contact with the people who matter most to your success.

At Ma.gnolia, where we can’t stand on common ground with members at BarCamps, conferences and other events, we do so through a few web tools that work well for us:

Plain old simple email. Every support request gets read and responded to by someone who can make change happen.

Twitter. Simple, short broadcast messages in a service that many of our members also use. We get to see what’s going on in their lives, let them know bits of news, and sometimes even create instant focus groups for designs in progress. Sending out a call for opinions on Twitter brings back over a dozen responses within 10 minutes.

Pibb. Group chat in a browser, and for a lesson in coming down off the mountain, members of the Pibb team are in our channel more than we are, seeing how we’re using the service and making sure questions are answered fast.

The things people can tell you in a conversation go far beyond what you can learn from any survey or other aggregate or filtered channel. Get out in the world and be all-ears. The answers to many of your product and design questions are in the air, waiting for you to hear them.