[Edit: The first version of this post was scrappy and incoherent - sorry. I’m throwing in some clarifications. The core message in this post is that customer development remains critical in product development and integral to the way Made by Many works. But that its importance can lead to lazy sound-biting, where the complexities of our work is consumed by phrases that only scratch the surface. The danger is that it can start to sound like your entire value proposition is: ask customers. This is a massive undersell of the methodology that has been honed here over the last seven years, ignores the nuances of user testing and melts into generic (often insincere chatter) elsewhere about ‘putting customers first’. This is what our client was getting at. This post is not an attack on customer development - lightyears from it! - it is a consideration of how to talk about it.]

Further edits in [square brackets]...

It’s thankfully become commonplace to champion user testing, yet so many people continue to bypass or delay it. We regularly meet people who find the process novel and exciting. So there’s definitely value and relevance in continuing to talk about the importance of customer development. That much I know.

[The point here is two-fold: 1. EVERYONE now says they do it, which makes some people (like our client) a little blasé about it. 2. Despite this, commitment to customer development is still really thin on the ground, so there remains a need to explain how important it is.]

The flip-side though is that it becomes a vice: customer development makes so much sense - and not doing it is so senseless - that you make it your knee-jerk sales pitch. I think we’ve been occasionally guilty of this in the past and our client’s feedback would appear to be (ironic) validation.

One of the reasons I think we did it is that Made by Many was born from a position of opposition. Partly as a reaction to creative indulgence and transient (or in some cases, imaginary) value, we strove to put the customer first and create real value for actual people. Nothing wrong with that at all, but its simplicity is misleading.

[In a sense, I think customer development became a symbol for something much bigger. It represented an opposing mindset: instead of thinking you know the answers, you are smart and humble enough to test your hypotheses. Because of its symbolism it became a badge. And the thing about badges is that you can start to think all you have to do is wear it to show everyone which side you’re on. This is what I mean by misleading simplicity. We should move past the badge phase, which is what I think our client meant when he talked about fetishisation. Sure, wear the badge, but the badge isn’t the whole story.]

[I removed a bit here which was rambling and distracting]

We spend a lot of time discussing the techniques and nuances of effective customer development (a topic for another post). Nuance, though, is the first casualty of brevity. Which is why talking about yourself in a snappy way is so hard to do. It also makes you lazy, and lazy language leads to apparent fetishism.
To this end, we’ve made a decision. Not a ‘flashing-siren-staff-email’ kind of decision - more that a view that has surfaced during our experiments. And it’s a simple one too: use more words if necessary.

[This was a slightly distracting point because it touches a bigger topic. As we’ve experimented with what words to use to describe ourselves, we’ve learned that it’s more helpful to talk in more detail with plainer language. This is the opposite of using soundbites, which, when repeated again and again act as a badge, ‘fetishising’ concepts rather than explaining what those concepts mean in practical detail.]

The reality is that helping organisations to charge into an uncertain, messy future and come out stronger is really hard. Testing with customers is clearly sensible and equally clearly not a silver bullet for success. No soundbite can helpfully describe all the challenges and arguably, dumbing the conversation down is damaging because it sets the wrong tone. It says: this is easy, we’ve got this! When the reality is: this is frikkin’ hard, but we’ve got a load of experience, and amazing mix of talent and an approach that *will* get us there, though we’re yet to find out where ‘there’ is.

Fetishising any one aspect of what we do is unwise, because it is the adaptive combination of disciplines, people and techniques that leads to effective work and real impact to businesses. It’s not one of those things, it’s all of those things. We should handle soundbites with care, because they don’t help you tackle complexity, they mask it.

[This was a dreadful post. Well done if you’re still reading it. Here’s my conclusion: When a client (that values you) warns not to fetishise something you know is really important, it deserves consideration. My takeout is that as tempting as it is to revert to a safe one-size-fits-all soundbite, it can have a negative effect. It can begin to sound indulgent instead of helpful. Nothing is the *entire* answer. And a CEO that wants to discuss the complexities of her business might react badly to what sounds like a one-hit answer.]

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A few hours after adding those edits above, I was reading Creativity Inc. by Pixar founder Ed Catmull. He was talking about phrases that had become fetishised at Pixar to negative effect (“Story is King” and “Trust the Process”). He says it better than I did:

"Parroting the phrase ‘Story Is King’ at Pixar didn’t help the inexperienced directors on Toy Story 2 one bit. What I’m saying is that this guiding principle, while simply stated and easily repeated, didn’t protect us from things going wrong. In fact, it gave us false assurance that things would be okay.
“Likewise, we ‘trusted the process,’ but the process didn’t save Toy Story 2 either. ‘Trust the Process’ had morphed into ‘Assume that the Process Will Fix Things for Us.’ It gave us solace, which we felt we needed. But it also coaxed us into letting down our guard and, in the end, made us passive. Even worse, it made us sloppy.”