Who Should Ultimately Decide?
For better or worse, I agree with another passage in Mr. Arrington’s article:
“Product should be a dictatorship, not consensus-driven. There are
casualties, hurt feelings, angry users. But all of those things are necessary
if you’re going to create something unique. The iPhone is clearly a vision
of a single core team, or maybe even one man. It happened to be a good
dream, and that device now dominates mobile culture. But it’s extremely
unlikely Apple would have ever built it if they conducted lots of focus
groups and customer outreach first. No keyboard? Please.”He also illustrates his point brutally with this hard fact:
“Digg is sort of on the opposite end of the spectrum. The company has
been standing still now for years as Facebook, Twitter and others have
run laps around it. But the company is famous for listening to its hard
core fanatical users.”My point is best made through the brilliant, funny, intelligent Better Off Ted.
In one adventure, the corporation empowers everyone to make decisions
about products in committee. See what happens to the simple product. The
always classic “Process (aka Designing the Stop Sign)” is another frightening
example soaked in truth.
Marketing aims to create consumer interest in goods and services based on
the assumption that the target consumer is buying a lifestyle or habit, with
some income, location and loyalty considerations thrown in. It draws from
information about the target demographic; however, personal preferences
about color, type size, logos and so on do not represent those of the target
demographic. One person on a committee might be a target consumer, but
certainly not the committee as a whole. Should people from disparate