I’ve never met Robert Scoble (kind of surprising given his ubiquity and my profession) and while he has both ardent supporters and detractors my gut feeling is that he’s a positive influence in the tech world and in the start up world in particular. He’s clearly deeply interested in and knowledgeable about tech and social media products. That said, I think there are lots of companies (start ups in particular) that seem to mistake him for a target user. I’d venture to say Robert Scoble is not the target user for most companies out there looking to reach a mainstream audience eventually (he’s an extreme power user in case you hadn’t noticed) and yet from what I have seen it seems some try to tailor their product and feature set to his needs either because they want to get his attention and digital tip of the hat on Twitter or because they view him as an expert in their product area and representative of what their broader user base will want. It’s not that Scoble’s advice or thoughts on a product aren’t useful or relevant, they often are in my view, only that it’s important to separate Scoble the user from Scoble the professional.
Of course I use Scoble only as an attention getting example (hopefully no personal offense is taken if you read this Scoble – none is intended) – you can easily replace his name with “Power User X” and the point is the same. Going down this particular path blindly can eventually box you in to becoming an extremely complicated product tailored to a niche audience of power users. That’s not to say that this path and result is not a viable strategy and plenty of products successfully target advanced users either because it helps them gain an initial audience for their product or because it is in fact their intended long term audience. But make sure that is your intention and not a by-product of over-eagerness to satisfy a customer that’s not representative of who you’d eventually like to serve. For everything it’s done wrong in my opinion, this is something Twitter for example has done right. It is of course also not to say you shouldn’t listen to feedback and suggestions from your early adopters, quite the contrary. You should listen carefully to all of it…but that doesn’t necessarily mean you should implement all of it. Ultimately you need to have a direction and goal in mind and decide whether or not a particular suggestion or point of feedback helps you move towards that goal. This doesn’t preclude you from altering your direction based on a large amount of early adopter feedback that may surprise you or run a bit contrary to your original concept and goals of course. This often happens in early stage ventures (as it did here at Yoono in fact). But it does allow you to filter feedback that is coming from users that have their own personal interests in mind rather than those of your company or your broader target audience.
Back in the early 2000s I was the product manager for the Netscape browser. It was effectively my first product management experience and trial by fire in its nature. At the time the product was still used by millions of people and we received a boatload of user feedback every day. In addition, the browser had been open sourced which resulted in tons of feedback from the Mozilla developer community as well. In most cases, this was a good thing. But in some instances it had unintended negative consequences. One thing that was not obvious to me when I started my job was that a large (and vocal) part of the segment providing feedback by that time had narrowed to a relatively geeky set of users as Microsoft had effectively come to dominate the browser space by virtue of their integration with Windows. As a result, battles over every tiny feature seemed to result in a standard compromise – some preference to turn said feature on our off or otherwise configure it. The result? An options panel that was a complete mess. Trying to make everyone happy effectively made most users unhappy and confused.
Here at Yoono, we want to make our product first and foremost accessible and valuable to the average social networker. Someone who uses Facebook regularly, perhaps has a MySpace account they use less often but want to keep somewhat in touch with, maybe has started to use Twitter and uses at least one IM service. We think this is already a large and growing set of users. We also don’t believe these users want or need 25 horizontally scrolled columns of streaming content and 10 different twitter image hosting services to choose from, especially when they’re just getting started with our product. That’s not to say we don’t already have or won’t be adding features for more advanced users such as groups…only that we strive to not have that sort of complexity get in the way of new users quickly setting up and finding value in our product. We’ve made great strides in this direction this year but we have a ton of things we’d still like to improve and we’re constantly working on them, often as the result of direct feedback from our user base.
We get a ton of user feedback every day – on Twitter, on Facebook, on our Get Satisfaction page, on blogs and elsewhere and we read it all. But the art in product development lies largely in your ability to find the signal in the noise, to be able to envision what users themselves often cannot express but are excited by when they see it, and to prioritize, based on your objectives, volumes of input that could pull you in many directions. For example, the list of social networks we could support within Yoono is extremely long and we get requests for new networks every day. While we are working on adding additional networks, our focus to date has intentionally been mainly on supporting the most popular networks – Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. and doing that well rather than supporting 100 networks poorly.
This post can easily be misinterpreted as suggesting “don’t listen to your users – they don’t know what they’re talking about” and I want to emphasize that that reading couldn’t be further from the truth or my intent. We incorporate user feedback directly in EVERY Yoono release. But what we don’t do is incorporate EVERY piece of user feedback – that, I believe, is a mistake for you and your users. It’s not that any piece of feedback is better or worse than another, only that some better fits the direction we want to go with the product right now. There’s certainly a recent and prevailing trend towards shipping early and often and gathering user feedback to iterate quickly on your product – in general, I agree with this approach and we use it here at Yoono. That said, it seems to me all the discussion of and promotion of this approach rarely includes much discussion of the subtleties of how to filter user feedback to be successful in that iteration as quickly as possible.
For Yoono, some of the ideas that don’t fit today may fit very nicely in our longer term roadmap. But when you’re a small company with limited resources you focus on what’s most important to you and your actual users. The vast majority of whom usually bear little or no resemblance to Robert Scoble. Don’t create an options panel that pleases no one because you’re trying to please everyone or a type of user that isn’t representative of your user base. Ultimately, your users will thank you for it.
Todd (@toddpringle)
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