want to pay their bill, and they were upset with us. There was a meeting about
this, and I was with the new CEO and one of the MBA guys that worked for
him, talking about this customer. It was out in the Los Angeles office. The managers
said, “This customer’s upset with us. How do we get him to pay us more
money?” I said, “How much do they pay us?” They said, “$700,000.” I said, “Is
their site launched?” They said, “No.” I said, “How much did we tell the customer
that it would cost them until their site is launched?” They said, “About
$700,000.” I said, “Well, then why are we having this meeting? Why are we talking
about getting more money out of these people? Shouldn’t we be talking
about getting their site launched?”
It was a perspective that was completely alien to them. What value are you
delivering to the customer? Are you delivering what you said and what they
paid for? I didn’t think of myself as a pious, ethical expert, but at least I had that
much: if you take money from a customer, you should deliver some value to
them. After the meeting, I called up American Airlines and got on a plane. It
was a Friday and I had some social commitments for the weekend, but I
cancelled them. I flew out to LA and told the programmers that I wanted to see
them on Saturday and talk about the customer.
The programmers were all pretty junior and said, “It’s the customer’s fault
because they keep asking for these features and saying the site can’t launch
unless we have all these complicated features. They keep coming up with new
ones because they see other people’s sites.”
I replied, “You guys are engineers, and you have to explain to the customer
that there’s a lot of learning that happens only once the site is launched. And
you have to get them to accept some kind of minimum launchable feature set.
You don’t need 100 user question-and-answer forums on sites that are brand
new. There are only 15 users. How would they find each other if they’re fragmented
into 15 forums?”
I said, “You can’t blame the customer. You have to work with them to come
up with the minimum launchable feature set, and get the site launched. You
guys need it for your r?sum?s; you want to be able to say that you worked on a
project that succeeded and here’s the site and anybody can look at it, not that
you got a paycheck and accomplished nothing and that you worked for a stupid
customer and it’s all their fault.”
I brought the customer in on the same day, and we talked to them and
found out that, well, they didn’t need the last features if it meant that their site