Cultural Isolation

In most development shops, the most-experienced programmers take responsibility for the most-demanding parts of the program. In return for this effort, they are given some modicum of immunity from having to field annoying technical-support calls. When users of the program call from the field, they are routed to technical-support personnel or to more junior programmers. On the rare occasion that a user gets through to the senior coder, it is because that user has already demonstrated her expertise to the junior programmer or the tech-support person. The result of this filtering process is that the more senior programmers are, the less contact they have with typical, run-of-the-mill users. By extension, they mistakenly assume that "their" users are representative.

For example, at Sagent Technology a vendor of datamart-management software in the enterprise-computing market Vlad Gorelik is the database guru, and his programming expertise is legendary. The only customers he speaks with directly are those who can palaver about "query segmentation," "task partitioning," and "data cubing" at Vlad's exalted level. It is not surprising, then, that Vlad imagines the typical user of Sagent's Information Studio product to be a seasoned database expert.

Conversely, Alice Blair, the Information Studio product manager, spends the lion's share of her time speaking with prospective buyers of the product. She counsels these people on what the product does and explains its basic functions. Consequently, Alice's view of her customer base is skewed toward first-time users and those with only very basic computer skills. It is no surprise that she imagines that most customers need hand-holding.

Kendall Cosby works in tech support at Sagent. He speaks with neither experts nor first timers. Mostly, he works with intermediate end users. Because the product is used as a decision-support tool, he is in constant contact with financial and marketing analysts who know little about computers and databases, yet whose jobs depend on their ability to probe into their datamarts to understand sales trends. Because Kendall's customer isn't very computer savvy, he wants the product to hide or eliminate complex functionality. Of the three, Kendall's customer view is the most accurate, yet because of their roles, Vlad and Alice have greater influence on the product's design.

There's an old story about several blind men encountering an elephant for the first time. One grasps its leg and proclaims that the elephant is "very like a tree." Another touches its side and states that it is "very like a wall." Another grasps its trunk and declares it to be "very like a snake." Like the blind men and the elephant, Alice, Kendall, and Vlad have very different opinions of what their clients are like because they are each confronting a different subset of their users. What's more, they all have clear, empirical evidence to back their deductions. In order to get an accurate portrayal, someone divorced from the day-to-day imperatives of both development and sales is needed.