Customer Passion: Inherited or Acquired?

I was asked recently about the key characteristics of a Product Manager. There is much to be said about the passion for the product you are responsible for (of course) but the passion for customers needs to be at least as strong in my opinion.

You can always learn technology -- or whatever your product is -- and I don't think it would take much to fall in love with any kind of product if you put your mind to it... But I started wondering whether or not you can artificially create the same passion for your customers.

I started reflecting on my very own experience...

What is passion for customers?

In my mind, it is really about having this out-of-body experience. Their problems become automagically your problems. Their dreams become your dreams. If you get to that point then Product Management becomes pretty darn simple. Your ability to relate helps but the true difference is in your ability to care. When you're driven, you can become pretty creative. That may be the real secret of Product Management.

How do you get there?

The memory that comes to mind first: riding on my Dad's motorcycle when he visited his customers... He was in sales and kept telling me days in and days out that "customers are kings". He listened to everything they wanted to share; he helped them solve all of their problems whether they were related to what he had to sell or not. He even gave our puppy to one of them (okay, I am over it now). He hardly cared about the commission he got, sometimes forgoing it altogether. He got satisfaction from the good he was doing: solving their miseries.

It wasn't the only thing though. He went to a Commerce School in France and I never knew if he learned that there or whether he just had it in him... The good that you do comes right back at you. He learned the core principles of CRM and more importantly he taught me how to build strong and true relationships with customers. A happy customer is the best marketing you can do. This is not about a fake smile and a "pretend" attitude. If you sincerely care, you'll have no choice but be successful at your work.

I have always been impressed how many referrals and repeat customers he got, no matter what he was selling. So, when you bring more to the table than what is written in your job description, when you thrive to fulfill your customers' needs, when you get out of your way to anticipate their desires and concerns, you do something that people notice and appreciate. And when comes the time to trust someone, they will remember you. Not the sales dinner they were invited to. Not the empty promises for whatever featured they wanted. They will remember someone that was willing to jump in and ride the roller-coaster with them. Someone not afraid to stand up for them and to do what it takes to make them successful.

After all, this may not be "just a Product management" thing. This behavior can benefit anyone in any position...

But all this thinking did not help me answer the question: Inherited or Acquired? Does my very own Passion for Customers come from my Dad's education or his genes?

I guess it is not that important after all. More important would be to find out if you can bring it into someone... Past early childhood, I am not sure at all. But I could be wrong.

Social Media, Support Media

Okay, okay... In my last blog I complained about the poor news I learned via social media. Unfortunately the table turned on me and suddenly I was hit by another sad news but this time it came to me over the phone. My brother called. My dad had passed. I was mortified. My worst fear suddenly struck me by surprise.

Social Media did not hold a grudge against me. They turned into a wonderful support system. People I did not really knew sent me messages full of compassion via Twitter. My closer friends got a hold of me via Facebook. Being spread across the world, everyone could not necessarily travel for his funerals. Many people came, more than I expected, but even more contributed electronically.

I started working on a poster of my Dad's pictures over the years. My brothers joined in and we displayed it at the funeral. I also had a slideshow of the last few years we enjoyed together. He was happy with his 10 grand-children. We included shots of him at all of our houses, with his friends as well as pictures from around the world (including of course many from his beloved Vietnam). He looked so happy. He had a fulfilled life.

I posted those pictures on Facebook and read every single comment from my relatives and friends. Some knew my Dad, some did not. It was emotional.

I shed tears reading those messages.

Whatever you want to call them, those social media are helping me remember my Dad and commemorate the time he has shared with us. It is helping me cope with this tragedy.

Grieving does not come from forgetting, it comes from remembering and celebrating.

The first messages where full of empathy. The following interactions allowed me to move on. I miss my dad and will always do. That being said, having a memorial of a new kind right there, for everyone's appreciation, is helping me a lot. My cousin is putting together a painting exhibit to celebrate her late Dad. I don't have that kind of talent but social media helps me express my feelings nevertheless.

Thank you.

Social Media? Sad Media!

Several years ago, I remember receiving my very first LinkedIn invitation. I pondered for a little while whether this was junk or some kind of scam. I had never heard of it so far. Now I am collecting the accounts at facebook and Twitter, as well as a similar French network, which is where things broke.

I liked the premise of the Social Media phenomenon: Connecting with coworkers, friends, etc. My network started originally with coworkers, expanding quickly to customers and partners. It helped me find out where people were, geographically as well as company-wise. This is all the more important now that people are RIF'd left and right. It confirms that we live in a small world after all. It is fun to see that people we know from one place know people we know from another place. The groups add also some interactivity. It is not just about linking relationships any more. Cool.

Twitter is different. I got to expand my network in the unknown. Now I am connecting and interacting with a few people I really know and a lot of people that I have never met, that only know me 140 characters at the time (okay, okay, 160 for the bio).

Facebook is a different animal, I kept it limited to people I really know. I have a few customers in there but mostly friends from school or family. I have come to appreciate it better than Twitter that feels like a race for follower for most people with little feedback other than people trying to promote themselves. Don't take me wrong, I have had very rich and pleasant interactions on Twitter. But it is like the Internet: a lot of great stuff but even more junk to sort through.

So far so good, social media has been responding to my expectations. I found more people I met at school (I mean here preschool, elementary or middle -- high and engineering school are people I also found on LinkedIn, to some extent) in a French social media site. No surprise there since I was born and grew up in France. I have been quite happy to find many many friends I had lost for so long. That being said, I question whether we should dig into our past. It brings such sadness sometimes. We are self inflicting great pain that is so unnecessary. In the last 6 months I have learned about the death of people that were important to me back then, that I genuinely loved (the friendship kind of love). One good question is why didn't I stay in touch with those people if they were important to me. Well, life happens. I moved when I was 9, we did not have emails and other goodies like that back then. I did not even have phone numbers since we could simply cross the street to see each other! Anyway, when I weight the pain of knowing that those people died with the excitement of reconnecting with those I grew up with, I question the value of that aspect of social media. To be honest, it's a lie. By hiding behind doors, I can try and avoid facing the fact we all die. I don't mind so much my own death but I suffer just thinking of that of people I love. I blame social media for putting it in our face. Now I am at the crossroad: Should I leave the doors closed or open?

How Social Media affects our Technologies

I am quite fascinated by the transformation we are going through, often without noticing. In a very short period of time, we have become either slaves of technology or masters of connectivity. It does not matter that you feel more like the former or the latter, you are part of a new world and as a result our lives and our innovation have changed.

In 30 years we went from very homes with a personal computer at home to a digital era. Over 75% of homes have a computer. Many kids I know have their own laptop before they are 10. People are sometimes questioning having a landline, but they would not stand a day with no cell phone. We are getting used to having our emails stick with us wherever we go. We are setting the expectation that an answer is due in hours when it used to be days. With twitter, we can also post updates on where we are, what we do or what is going on around us, all real-time. We are publishing our lives, and technology needs to follow, to accommodate those expectations.

That makes me think of collaboration. When workflow came out, it was some kind of revolution. Cases could be dispatched to workers. The rudimentary aspect of what we called then workflow is somewhat laughable now. Basically it was a database where we pulled records from… Not rocket science. It was a great step forward for collaboration though. A few innovative features such as electronic sticky notes made it more personable, more social. With time came other considerations, for techies, it was the emergence of “collaboration tools” for code sharing, code management, etc. The technologies may have existed before but the collaboration trend made them more relevant to the modern IT ecosystem, part of the processes.

The need for interactions, for collaboration translated into BPM technologies that govern the processes we want to enforce consistently. Combining machine to machine automation with human to human interactions, it helps create a fabric for functional entities within an organization to work together, to collaborate. We may have codified a bit too much those interactions, not taking into account the human factor, treating the person as a system with a given function.

I was listening to NPR yesterday. They had a couple of interviews on newly released books on loneliness. This made me think. Is twitter a solution to remedy for the lack of human emotions in our systems? Are we likely to post on those mini-blogs to express our feelings? I find it great to take the pulse of the industry but this is definitely more than a media channel. Although limited to 140-chars, those little posts transpire happiness, surprise, mockery or sadness. The tweeple empathize and provide some kind of support network.

Don’t you wonder what that means for our next generation systems? Will we see a wave of new applications that deal with the human aspect as being more than a data entry person? Is collaboration going to remain the main focus? How about reputation? Trend setting? The whole social media story?

The Yin / Yang of Geeks

-- Posted by Carole-Ann

A long long long time ago, I studied Math/Physics *and* Biology. The school I went to was specialized in Life Sciences. Although I think it is pretty much irrelevant now, I really believe this is influencing how I think and how I tackle problems.

I have always been quite fascinated by the brain and how we make decisions -- hence my passion for Decision Management I guess. When I started working in Paris in a small consulting firm, I realized that I had a unique way of handling complexity. Not completely unique as many people with my background tend to approach problems in a similar fashion. But unique enough in the environment I was in, surrounded by Math/Physics-only engineers.

Our French system teaches us to be extremely analytic by nature. We love to categorize, structure and rationalize. When complexity increases though different strains of engineers react differently.

My observation is that Math/Physics geeks want to control all aspects of the problem. It is important to them to have a theorem or an equation to explain every single detail. When complexity grows, they will come up with increasing complex models to describe it.

Math/Physics/Biology geeks are still looking for a good model but their approach is to rely on observations, facts, patterns. What I learned in my biology classes back then is that we do not know much. We think the origin of the world is such and such but much of it remains unknown. We think the human body works one way but in many instances we are not exactly sure. Even when we know, biology classes keep insisting that we used to know something different and realized at some point in time that we were wrong. We had some good laugh at really early "understanding" of the human body (I recommend taking a look at the nervous system for example). Who knows how much fun our kids will have when they read how we thought it worked in 2008?

My point here is that with biology in the picture, we, engineers, become more humble on our understanding of the mechanics of the world. When handling complexity, we always assume there is significant chance we don't know enough. As a result, we think more in terms of behavior / interfaces, etc. It does not really matter how it works internally as we typically don't know. In our software systems we likely end up knowing of course but we can comfortably proceed without the need to control / understand how this could possibly be designed. This has proven to be a good background for Object-Oriented technologies.

I am not advocating that this is the right way of looking at things. I am actually convinced that the two approaches are very complementary. In my professional life, I have always been "attracted" (professionally speaking of course) to the "other" kind of geeks. With one of us thinking about the interactions, feedback loop and other behavioral aspects and the other one focusing on figuring out how we could build such components, we have always made strong heterogeneous teams. The best of both worlds.

Fascinating.