High-Tech Anthropology® Agile Software Teams

High-Tech Anthropology®

If you produce software products be encouraged!

It is possible to create new and innovative software products that dominate a marketplace. You can create great products with features your customers will want to buy and your users will want to use.

The secret is learning to see through their eyes.

For over twenty years, I have been working in, with, and for, software product companies. I've worked as a computer programmer, analyst, architect, manager, and executive for companies whose goals were to produce and sell competitive software products.

I know how difficult this business can be, and I'm intimately familiar will the common problems almost all software product companies face.

I'm not perfect either. I've made many mistakes. I've built products that customers simply didn't want. I've wasted valuable dollars building features users couldn't use. I've even ridden the dot.com bubble up, and back down again.

Fortunately, I've learned. I've learned that it is possible to create innovative new products that dominate a marketplace. I've learned how to make users light up with delight when they finally see a system that was actually designed for them. I've also learned there is a way to build software so that customers are happy to pay for the end result - without a lot of selling.

The trick, and this is really hard to say for a recovering computer programmer, is to not focus on technology.

There, I've said it. I feel better now.

Of course, it took me a long time to learn what to focus on instead. I had to change the way I interacted with customers, users, and my teams. I also had to learn a whole new way to capture requirements.

Stupid Users

Before this change, when I was a computer programmer, it was obvious to me that many of my problems were not, in fact, technical. The problem was that my customers and users were stupid.

After all, I created 'great' products, with cool new technology. Why couldn't the customers see how great it was? And don't get me started on those users. Anybody should have been able to easily use my product. Why were the users confused? We just needed smarter users, or at least a training program so that the users could learn to think more like us computer programmers.

The Real Problem

It was a hard thing to realize that the problem was not with my customers or users. The problem, in fact, was with me.

My first step to recovery was to recognize that computer programmers should not be responsible for solving all of the problems around creating killer applications. In fact, computer programmers cannot be responsible for solving the most interesting questions and problems because these issues are not technical.

To build successful products, we had to learn how to build a team that could define a new product with an entirely different non-technical focus in mind. The focus, which included the customers' ROI and the users' experience, could not be handed off to the programming team. Don't try it, it will not work. It is not how programmers are trained to think. I have a Masters Degree in Computer Science from a major university so I know from experience that programmers are not trained to think from a business or user perspective.

High-Tech Anthropology®

One day I finally came to my senses. I realized as a manager that if I was going to help my company build killer apps that I needed another team. A team focused on designing system functionality, designing user interfaces, and understanding the business drivers for the project, but not the technology.

Originally, it was just a team of three, and together we began to study the field of designing great systems. We read dozens of books and hundreds of articles on people, process, business, and innovation.

Along the way we realized why programmers have historically been so poor at these tasks. They simply have too many biases from years of technical experience to appreciate what is, and what is not an intuitive user interface.

We also found that it's really impossible to know if you are building a system that helps or hurts your customers unless you have a profound understanding of how they really do their jobs.

We began to use our specialty team to design all of our new products. They treated each new project as a process of discovery, trying different approaches, techniques, and practices - experimenting to find what worked best, and when.

Interestingly enough, many of the best practices did not come from computer science; they came from anthropology. So we began to talk to anthropologists, study their techniques, and learn from their discipline. Eventually, we even called our practice "High-Tech Anthropology®" and our team members "High-Tech Anthropologists®."

Life has never been the same since.

Our High-Tech Anthropologists® learned to study the cultural, symbolic, and value context in which our users actually do their jobs. They learned the users' world, the users' vocabulary, and the users' values. As a result, amazing things started to happen. For example, we arrived to train industrial users on a system we had just deployed in their factory and the users said "Don't bother." They were already using the system successfully! Understand, we just installed it the night before and these users were in no way technical. Most didn't even have a home computer. But between when they arrived at 8am and the class at 9am they had already learned and were already using the new system. They didn't need any training. By taking time to see with the users' eyes we built a tool they intuitively understood. They were happy, we were happy.

We created a killer application!

Oh, we've since dropped the whole user training thing altogether. We now consider user training a sign of poor design.

Revolutionary Products

If you produce software products, I would bet that your products' user interface is probably your biggest liability. However, it can be your single greatest asset. We've seen competitors literally leave a marketplace because they didn't want to compete with a well designed user interface created by our "High-Tech Anthropologists®." You can do the same for your company!

Build products your customer will want to buy.

Make your user interface into a competitive differentiator.

Sell more systems, deliver more value, and drive the competition crazy.

Interested in Learning More?

Rich, send me your free white paper "Seven Keys to Building Great Software Products"

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