Comment by karhuton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by karhuton | Hacker News Reader

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Here’s some typical reasons why a startup can fail:

1) it failed to communicate and market it’s product

2) it’s product didn’t fit the user’s needs

3) it’s technology strategy made development too expensive

4) it’s product technical quality was too low

5) it’s product did not look appealing to potential new users

Developers are responsible for 3 and 4, sales and marketing for 1 and finally designers for 2 and 5.

With competent developers you can start a startup and make sure 3 and 4 never come to pass, but lack of good product designer will eventually kill it.

Here I use the broader sense of user-centered designer, which includes:

- research

- testing

- prototyping

- validation

- UI/UX design

- visual design

- …

The first four being the most important for a product market fit.

This is especially important for B2B products, because there understanding the needs of the business and their processes is key to making sure the product fits the user’s day-to-day work but the businesses’ future needs as well.

It may not be common, but you can and should use extended UCD research methods on the customer business processes itself instead of relying on PMs and sales just asking customer’s what they want. (This is often called Business Design or Service Design around here.)

My most successful client (a company I have ownership in, now) has another slot besides marketing, design and code. That is our point person for filtering, testing and verifying user experience issues. Putting a single point person in charge of that onslaught of emails, who fully understands the software, and having them run a full time bug reporting/feature request channel, I think, is indispensible. They advocate on behalf of users but also know when the requests are silly or something is user error. They know whether an issue is mainly design or mainly code. Having them in place and engaging daily with users means we can filter out 90% of the noise in the signal. But it needs to be coupled with open-mindedness to customer feedback from the earliest iterations. Whatever requests or issues come through that person must be addressed. That person should understand what they can and cannot promise customers, what is crucial vs what is fluff, and how to prioritize those requests.

Her official role is "General Manager" but in fact she was promoted from a customer service role and the position was created for her because she was so good at spending extra time off-hours writing detailed, reproducible bug reports on behalf of customers who had experienced some issue. Reproducing and screenshotting the flow and the issues herself.

This person is a 10x force multiplier by virtue of being a power-user of the software who also interacts with customers and management daily, although she has no code or design experience.

True. When the complexity of the software causes lot of usability issues in ”edge cases”, these technically capable customer connected people are really worth it.

I’ve also seen good things coming from hiring actual ex-users from potential customers that were using competitor’s products. They’d do user training, customer software configuration and development team support. Sometimes even full time.

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But these people are good day-to-day at ironing out the details. Maybe even discovering underlying dissatisfaction with the product.

But the startup’s constant worry should be what else software is being used, how to be relevant in the future. Maybe through cutting costs in the process by co-designing new workflows to eliminate current tasks.

Executives at the client may be more intrested in finding ways to eliminate all the staff with automation in the process rather than optimizing their tools.

You’re not getting that input from the people working on the tasks now.

Would you call that role "customer success"?

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