Victor Stone
May 20, 1999
It is noon on what should be a lazy Mother's Day Sunday, but you've already got three customer-support calls:
Despite turning your Sunday into a busman's holiday, all three of these issues were valid and relatively easy to fix. Your little universe of users is happy, and you're beginning to figure out the real reason people retire early from technology jobs. It has nothing to do with stock options and everything to do with "Doctor, it hurts when I click that button." Your wife says, "When you have nothing to do, can you see why the printer isn't printing yellow anymore?" When I have nothing to do, I will do nothing, you say to yourself as red and blue ink squirts onto your favorite Hawaiian shirt and into your beer.
Sure, sometimes, computers are hard to understand—and you feel bad about that. In fact, people have no idea how sorry you are. You used to like the holidays, but in the last year—between the stock price, the DOJ trial and IntelliSense® in Internet Explorer 5—you could wear sandwich boards that say "Yes, it's true: DLLs are HELL!" and hand out press releases written by lawyers as you walk into your folks' house. Your dad will invariably get around to saying, "Why does it seem so easy to write a virus for Windows 95?" as you accidentally drop the microscopic track screw under the motherboard while trying to install his new DVD reader. Why don't we consult the Haggadah? I'm pretty sure that's what Moses asked Pharaoh between the fifth and sixth plagues, you mutter to yourself while you turn the whole CPU box upside down in the air and shake the screw out as if you were trying to a retrieve a pick that had fallen into the hole of an acoustic guitar.
All this gives you the resolve to sit down Sunday night and compose the e-mail of your career. You pour your heart and soul into the words that come racing out of your fingers as your eyes burn a hole into the screen. This will be your "Customer is Always Right" manifesto. It will inspire the team, perhaps the whole company, to renew its efforts to put the user in front of every other consideration.
You quickly realize that this won't be easy, because the implications of your memo could be very sweeping. You are reminded of Jared Diamond's four factors that influence acceptance:
You cover each and every one of these points on your way to making your case, envisioning yourself as the hero that saves the corporation from the clutches of itself. You hit Save, and shut down as daylight starts to streak through the shades of your bedroom.
Normally, you would sleep in after an all-nighter, but you are too pumped up to wait—and you half-bounce, half-stagger into your supervisor's office a few morning hours later. You put your coffee down and turn your shoulder slightly toward him, clearing the way for him to pat you heartily on the back after you tell him the general contents of the memo. Let the patting commence.
But there is no patting in Mudville today. You hear your supervisor say, "Listen, sounds good, can't wait to read it—but we've got much bigger problems I need you for. I just found out that the team in Building 7 has got the green light to do the project I've been pushing for since last summer. Can you believe it? Shocking, isn't it? I can't believe those guys get to do this."
Indeed, you have shock and disappointment written all over your face, but it has nothing to with the team in Building 7 getting any green lights. Why, you ask, do we care about that project?
"Look, I thought you understood: It's my project, I brought it to the table, it's just wrong that those guys get the glory for my initiative. Our team deserves it. You deserve it."
You are now desperately trying to map corporate in-fighting into Diamond's acceptance factors. You decide that even if you get it to fit, it is so distasteful and diametrically opposite from the user benefit mantra you hoped to revive that you have to resist. Where did this feature come from?
"Our competition is doing this!" your supervisor says in a panic.
Really? I didn't know that. Where are they doing this?
"Well, they aren't actually doing it yet, but if they are smart, they will do it, and we need to be ahead of the curve!"
Wait a minute, they aren't actually doing it? And you are fighting with another team for the rights to do this project? You do not get to justify your paranoid actions with your own paranoid thoughts! Do you?
"Of course, you do. How else do you do business? Got to stay on the edge!"
You are stunned into submission—numb to logic. Users' needs be damned—he's right, you deserve that project, you're going after the team in Building 7. Within no time at all, you find yourself eagerly helping your supervisor sort through the options. The obvious one (and your supervisor's favorite): re-org the offending team under him. It's called consolidating efforts—just the thing middle management can't resist. But through back-channels you hear of a poison-pill in that scenario: The lead developer has threatened to go work at some online punk zine rather than be relocated into your building. Which brings you to the perennial plan B: skunkworks!
Skunkworks is a very unflattering name for a clandestine, off-hours operation set out to undermine someone else's big plans. You and a small team of code-bandits hole up for a week, then come out with demos blazing, proving how your team and your team alone deserves to have the go-ahead for the project at stake. You show your supervisor the results of the week locked away, and he says there's enough there.
Now, it's time to show it off to the brass. You take a "developer's shower" (lots of unscented underarm deodorant and a baseball cap) and take all 40 pounds of the one and only machine this "demo" has even been seen to work on across the campus to the building with all the really big conference tables and security cameras. You're nervously hopeful that the big-cheese boss will see how obvious it is that your team deserves to implement this project.
Disaster strikes. You're only three slides into the PowerPoint® presentation and you haven't even shown the demo when the boss says, "This is the worst excuse for a project I've ever seen!"
Your supervisor and you are stunned. In an all out effort to salvage his professional dignity, your supervisor blurts out, "That's why we think it's best that the Building 7 team keep moving forward with it."
Apparently, this is the first time the boss has heard of this project, even as being promised to Building 7. "Do you mean to tell me there are two of these loser projects here at this company?" he inquires.
Well, no one has actually started coding either effort per se, you helpfully interject.
The air is getting harder to breath as the boss continues, "What customer ever wanted this feature? Why aren't you guys working on seamless ways to import other browsers' bookmarks? Or making system messages to users something decipherable by the guy next door? Or working with hardware OEMs to print yellow more consistently?"
You spend much of the next few minutes struggling to recount exactly how you went from lying on your lawn furniture on a blue-sky Mother's Day taking support calls to this moment in this now-busted skunkworks project. Suddenly, you know just what it's like to be Hungary in the 20th century, somehow ending up on the wrong side of both World Wars and the Cold War.
This project and its review are duds, and you don't even try to claim any "I told you so" markers, because you were the one who sold out. You knew up front what was right but forgot in the heat of the political battle.
You make one last stop in your office before you head home for that sleep-of-the-dead you need after a big push. You open up the memo you wrote a few weeks ago on a Sunday night about putting user needs over all else, and you re-read it. It has never seemed more true. As you address it to your team, CC your colleagues in Building 7, and hit Send, you keep coming back to what your high school photography teacher always told you: "Focus, people!"
Victor Stone is on the Product Design Team in RAD Tools at Microsoft. He says "Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace."