5 ms·

If you are chasing RFPs, propose and build everything that checks all the boxes. If you are a product company and building for people who will hopefully love yo

If you are chasing RFPs, propose and build everything that checks all the boxes. If you are a product company and building for people who will hopefully love your product, it’s your job to understand the customers, understand the data, and build the right solution rather than building ALL the solutions.

a4isms 5y ago
Some where in the mythical “Business 101” course is the lesson that you can either find a customer and figure out what they need (customer-focus), or find a need and figure out which customers have that need (product-focus). This dynamic is everywhere: Apple has customers, they look at what their customers need, and do various product extensions (like streaming games) to fill their needs. Whereas many vendors on the Apple platform do the reverse: They fill just one need, and arrange their marketing to find the customers with that need across all ecosystems. Things get interesting in “Business 201,” where a company with product focus builds up enough goodwill with their customers that they switch strategies and become customer-focused. Which is also Apple’s story, going from being a microcomputer specialist to a device specialist to a services behemoth. It’s now about filling more needs for existing customers.
- JohnStrangeII 5y ago
  Some companies just create new needs out of thin air and even manage to replace better technologies with inferior ones. It's mostly a matter of marketing. If you want, many companies sell prestige, lifestyle ideas, and grand illusions. It's perfect from a business perspective because the customers will always remain dissatisfied in the end, no matter how much they buy.
- cma 5y ago
  It is more honest to say Apple breaks things like streaming games to fulfill business needs of locking out or taxing third party providers of it and making their own. Not to fulfill cusomer needs: blocking it hurt customers.
  - CharlesW 5y ago
    How you feel about this completely legitimate, but it simply means that you are not the customer they're serving.
arbuge 5y ago
This goes some way to explaining why municipal and government software is such an unusable pile of crap for the most part.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Former municipal software engineer, that built a product to serve other municipalities. That, and nobody pushes back on what they order as you can just bill them more. We had governments move single buttons (literally, they wanted the stock application, but with one particular button on the right instead of the left), get to use a paint bucket to set colours throughout the application (not a theme, but customise by button), want different fonts, want the order of items in a table swapped, etc. They tend to get whatever they want, whether or not what they spec out leads to a messy pile.
  - mgkimsal 5y ago
    > as you can just bill them more I've done a bit of municipal work, and had the opposite experience - there's almost always a fixed budget, and while people may ask for loads of changes, no one ever had authority to authorize a single dollar more for the project. It probably depends on the project and more likely the people involved, but "you can bill them more" isn't a given in all situations.
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      Depends on the municipality. Small ones don't have a lot of flexibility. Big ones (Chicago, etc.) have lots of wiggle room especially if you're willing to kick back some of it to an aldermans's preferred subcontractors, etc.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  I'll be honest, because most people who work for municipalities and other governments are not the best and brightest, and they will ask for a lot of stuff "because that's how we do it on paper" or other similar reasons, without much critical thinking.

a4isms 5y ago

Some where in the mythical “Business 101” course is the lesson that you can either find a customer and figure out what they need (customer-focus), or find a need and figure out which customers have that need (product-focus). This dynamic is everywhere: Apple has customers, they look at what their customers need, and do various product extensions (like streaming games) to fill their needs. Whereas many vendors on the Apple platform do the reverse: They fill just one need, and arrange their marketing to find the customers with that need across all ecosystems. Things get interesting in “Business 201,” where a company with product focus builds up enough goodwill with their customers that they switch strategies and become customer-focused. Which is also Apple’s story, going from being a microcomputer specialist to a device specialist to a services behemoth. It’s now about filling more needs for existing customers.

JohnStrangeII 5y ago
Some companies just create new needs out of thin air and even manage to replace better technologies with inferior ones. It's mostly a matter of marketing. If you want, many companies sell prestige, lifestyle ideas, and grand illusions. It's perfect from a business perspective because the customers will always remain dissatisfied in the end, no matter how much they buy.
cma 5y ago
It is more honest to say Apple breaks things like streaming games to fulfill business needs of locking out or taxing third party providers of it and making their own. Not to fulfill cusomer needs: blocking it hurt customers.
- CharlesW 5y ago
  How you feel about this completely legitimate, but it simply means that you are not the customer they're serving.

arbuge 5y ago

This goes some way to explaining why municipal and government software is such an unusable pile of crap for the most part.

MattGaiser 5y ago
Former municipal software engineer, that built a product to serve other municipalities. That, and nobody pushes back on what they order as you can just bill them more. We had governments move single buttons (literally, they wanted the stock application, but with one particular button on the right instead of the left), get to use a paint bucket to set colours throughout the application (not a theme, but customise by button), want different fonts, want the order of items in a table swapped, etc. They tend to get whatever they want, whether or not what they spec out leads to a messy pile.
- mgkimsal 5y ago
  > as you can just bill them more I've done a bit of municipal work, and had the opposite experience - there's almost always a fixed budget, and while people may ask for loads of changes, no one ever had authority to authorize a single dollar more for the project. It probably depends on the project and more likely the people involved, but "you can bill them more" isn't a given in all situations.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    Depends on the municipality. Small ones don't have a lot of flexibility. Big ones (Chicago, etc.) have lots of wiggle room especially if you're willing to kick back some of it to an aldermans's preferred subcontractors, etc.
throwawayboise 5y ago
I'll be honest, because most people who work for municipalities and other governments are not the best and brightest, and they will ask for a lot of stuff "because that's how we do it on paper" or other similar reasons, without much critical thinking.