We’ve all been there. The project is “on time and under budget.” The launch party had cupcakes. The sponsor gets a promotion. 🥳
Then, you hear it… the distant, collective scream of users trying to navigate a new system that feels like, just maybe, it was designed by a raccoon on espresso. 🦝☕
Who doesn’t love hitting all the KPIs only to find out the KPI you missed was “Do People Actually Want to Use This Abomination?” Let’s dive in.
📉 The Data: When “Success” is a Four-Letter Word
- Research from The Standish Group’s CHAOS Report found that nearly 50% of software features are rarely or never used. That’s right, half our work is digital landfill.
- Gartner reports that through 2023, 50% of IT organizations will use “product-centric” metrics (like user satisfaction) over “project-centric” ones (like on-time delivery). The tide is turning!
- Fun Completely Made-Up Fact: The most-clicked button in any new enterprise software is “Forgot Password,” followed closely by “How do I revert to the old version?”
🛠️ 5 Ways to Stop Building Stuff People Hate (A Cheat Sheet)
- Talk to a User, Not a “Stakeholder Proxy”: That VP who “represents the users” hasn’t logged in himself since 2004. Get in front of the people who will actually be using this thing.
- Case Study: Nokia. They had brilliant project managers hitting deadlines, but they were building what they thought users wanted, not what Apple was actually delivering that users loved. We know how that ended.
- Embrace the “Ugly Baby” Phase with Prototypes: Don’t spend 6 months building a masterpiece in secret. Show a rough, clickable prototype early. Let them call your ugly baby ugly before you’ve hired a portrait artist.
- Anecdote: My team once spent weeks perfecting a workflow. The user’s first feedback? “Why can’t I just press ‘F1’?” We’d rebuilt a system that ignored a 30-year-old muscle memory. Oops.
- Become a Feedback Vacuum (and Actually Use It): Implement continuous feedback loops before, during, and after launch. Use surveys, interviews, and usage analytics. If your post-launch survey is your first, you’ve already failed.
- Define “Success” as “Value Delivered,” Not “Boxes Checked”: Shift the goalposts. A project isn’t done when the last line of code is written. It’s done when user productivity has increased, or their frustration has decreased. Track that.
- Case Study: Microsoft famously shifted to a “customer-driven engineering” system in the early 2000s, prioritizing user feedback and data from its usability labs, which was a key factor in rebuilding its product quality.
- Champion the User’s Voice (Even When It’s Annoying): Be the person in the room who says, “I know the timeline is tight, but if we skip user testing, we are choosing to fail later.” It’s a thankless job until you save the company from a million-dollar “successful” disaster.
🤔 Let’s Hear From You :
- What’s the most “over-engineered” feature you’ve ever built that users immediately ignored? (Bonus points if it had a fancy dashboard.)
- What’s the funniest piece of user feedback you’ve ever received? (“The software is too blue and it makes me sad.”)
- Is a project that delivers on-time/on-budget but is hated by users a true success, or the most dangerous kind of failure?
- Beyond the usual “lack of time/budget,” what’s the real reason companies keep building systems without proper user input? Is it arrogance? Fear? Something else?
There are ways to balance stakeholder demands with user needs, and it starts with admitting that a project isn’t a real success until the people are using it. Follow me for more on that later. 😉
#ThePMLeader #UserAdoption #Agile #ProjectManagement #BusinessAnalysis #Leadership
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