A childhood friend of mine grew up to be Chief Technology Officer at a large software company. He was always the smartest kid in the room. 800 on his math SATs. You know the type.

Despite the big brain, he was and is a humble person. So whenever he said something that struck me as controversial, I paid close attention because I knew he wasn’t doing it to draw attention to himself. He was fond of saying that commercial research and development organizations can control only three things:

• Features — what does it do?
• Dates — when is it available?
• Quality — how bullet-proof is it?

And of these three, Dates are the most important. Why? Because a good product or service in the market that’s generating some revenue and feedback is always better than “perfection” that never sees the light of day.

You can probably guess his favorite corollary to this Truth. When an R&D team is fighting the calendar and in grave danger of missing a delivery date, the answer is to simply deliver early. Take what you got and get it to market.

As you can see, speed-to-market was his primary focus. What’s yours?

Popularity: 20%

Is your business looking backward or forward? Are you indulging yourself by dwelling on better times gone by, or are you investing for the day when the economy starts humming again?

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All companies should covet constructive feedback from customers, especially in areas that consume a lot of time and energy. Below is a recent email from a customer regarding Four51′s technical support process. This person was critical of the process, not the people; I’d rather have good people working to refine a process than bad people doing nothing. Or worse.

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You ever been called shameless?  Some fellow said I was shameless the
other day for sending along a link to www.readitfor.me.

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You could probably name dozens of products that broke too fast or were impossible to use or tasted lousy.

Here’s one that is delightful because the people who created it were tuned to the voice of their customer and experience of a fellow human.

You may have been this human being if you just spent 12 hours wide-awake on a long-haul overseas flight from somewhere like Minneapolis to Tokyo scrunched into seat 64A in the tail of a stuffed 747-400 who sleepwalked on arrival to an airline lounge to see someone somewhere in this wonderful world had thoughtfully and deeply reflected on who you are at that exact moment in the universe within the arc of all time and responded with passion to quench, not world thirst, but something way more important, that being your thirst right there, right then.

If Four51 were a beer machine we’d work really hard to be what you see here:

Here’s to humans listening to humans.

-tim morin

tmorin@four51.com

Popularity: 72%