I was chatting with my friend Chris Harrick a few weekends ago about B2B vs. B2C. He has been working at SugarCRM for a while (B2B) while I was at PlayFirst (B2C) before joining RightScale (B2B). He had a few good B2B tips from his experience there, but one that struck me in particular was “don’t just build the thing that the last customer you talked requested.”

In a consumer company, you’re usually talking to groups of people – either through a survey, in a focus group, or via a series of forum posts. Through this, you get a good sense of what is requested by most of your customer base vs. what just a single person is requesting. While it’s much easier to call up a customer in a B2B company (or perhaps they called you with a burning request), you should make a concious effort to avoid the recency effect.

Here are some potential ways to do so:

• Keep a common list of questions you ask every customer and take notes. Later, you can go back and scan the answer to one question across multiple customers.
• Um, surveys. Yup, these work in B2B too. In fact, define your customer lifecycle flow and stick a short survey at each step of their evolution.
• Keep a wish list that acts like a pareto chart. When you hear a request, scan this list and give the request an extra tick if it is there, and add it to the bottom if it is not. Every once in a while, sort by count. Have your sales team do the same.
• Get 12+ of your customers who are attending your next industry conference to sit down with you for an hour and tell you about their experience. Since they are probably thought leaders, ask them what they’d like to see next. Bring your wish list to add tickmarks to.

Overall, just avoid the temptation to add something to the backlog because a customer just asked you for it. Seems obvious, but it’s hard in practice.

Joel Spoelsky recently posted a great example of how this tool might have helped a company survive. First, read his post on how Clear shut down. Then, imagine what a start/stop list would have looked like from most of the employees throughout the organization:

Start:

• Figuring out what people would pay just to skip the line (not to skip screening)
• See what kind of business this price point could support

Stop:

• Doing onerous background checks on people when we can’t actually let them skip the security line

Try this list out in your organization – it’s fun! Then, question the status quo if a little crowdsourcing seems to “clearly” point in a different direction.

With the advent of technologies like RightScale and Amazon’s EC2, system administrators should really care less where their machines are located. They should put a few “servers” on the west coast, a few on the east coast, and hey, why not Europe?

So here’s my request: please place all future elastic computing cloud data centers near a hydroelectric plant. As CTOs and CIOs begin to migrate their infrastructure into the cloud, we can push the carbon footprint of the Internet towards zero.

Thank you in advance,
The Earth

Here’s the rub though – if I wasn’t mostly happy with the product (I like their online banking, iPhone app, high-interest accounts, credit card link, global access, etc. etc.), I’d be out of there faster than you can say “bank run.” So, a few things to learn:

• Once you have a good product in place, set up switching costs to make your customers stay around longer.
• Get your customers who are using only one aspect of your product to use as many as possible. If they are not getting the full benefit, it will be easier for them to leave.
• If you feel like you are at a point in some business cycle where your customers are more likely to leave, perhaps you should give them an add-on product for free or at a discount (ahem, Citibank). ;-)

I wondered if I was the only one. Did I have a dud? Should I return it? Judging by the Apple Support Forums, CNET reviews, and AT&T Support Forums, it seems I am not alone.

Then the thought came to me – maybe the Apple iPhone team noticed this problem during some beta testing. They debugged and searched and stayed up way too late trying to figure out what was causing this. And they gave up. “We’re not a mobile company!” the engineers complained. “But we do think differently and make cool software,” someone piped up. “That’s it! We’ll make a one touch voicemail, so if you do miss your call – you’ll see who you pissed off and can click on it and listen to it right away! No holding down the ’1′ button anymore. Oh oh – and we’ll put a big ‘Call Back’ button right under it.” And so it was done.

I have used that ‘Call Back’ button extensively – and honestly, the line-item voicemail feature is one of the coolest innovations on the phone. So – if this is true Apple, I’d like to know. And kudos for managing to placate what could have otherwise been a stop-ship issue: “Um, boss, the phone just doesn’t ring.”

To add lemon juice to the cut, engineers typically thrive on thinking of and handling every edge case – that’s what makes good code. The opportunity cost is usually too high though, and writing a giant try { } catch statement usually allows you to move on to the next big thing that will acquire users / make more money / look flashy.

However, what if those edge cases cause make your customers want to leave?

Here’s two stories of where I was taken to wit’s end:

Citibank
Today, I wanted to open a savings account to be held under a trust (you should make one if you have kids!), so I walked into a branch since I figured it would be *somewhat* complicated. The agent said I would have to open a checking account first, then apply for the linked savings account online since the high interest savings accounts all required online registration. I asked “Are you sure I can open it online if the account is in a trust?” “You should be able to,” was the answer. Good enough – I opened the checking account at the branch.

I got home tonight, and tried to open the savings account online. No dice, I couldn’t seem to select the trust credentials as the primary account holder. I called customer service: “Sorry, you can’t open a trust account online, you’ll have to open it in the branch.” “But the branch ones have super-high minimums I can’t meet,” I said. “Sorry, nothing we can do from here.”

So, even though I’ve been a Citibank customer for 10 years, I started browsing Vanguard’s site.

Money Management
Not too long ago, I purchased Quicken for the Mac after ditching my PC. [Hmmm - another money example. Perhaps I feel the pain most when it involves money.] I then tried to download my transactions from Citibank only to find that they don’t support Mac. Turns out, Intuit charges banks more for the Mac connector – which most banks don’t buy. I don’t know who to mad at, Intuit or Citibank.

Well, off I went to Mint, an online money management site where I had been collecting transactions for a few months already. Perhaps now was the time to switch. Unfortunately, I found that I could not enter arbitrary categories. I also couldn’t exclude items from Mint. Both of these ‘exceptions’ ended up making the categorization and charts pretty useless. Frustrated, I switched back to Quicken after taking a whole month to sign up for Direct Connect with Citibank. [Kudos to Mint: turns out Mint added these two features later - perhaps after they received lots of feedback.]

What to do?
After you launch a product:

• Watch your customer feedback carefully to find any repeated edge cases
• Have customer care keep a pareto chart of issues
• Fix them quickly. Customers you lose b/c of them will likely never come back.

As a product person, I’d be pretty upset with marketing for choosing this stance. How can I reasonably assure that we can have the fewest dropped calls? How can we measure it? The connection depends on the phone, the environment, the age of the equipment, the weather… The minute you can’t live up to it – is the minute that ad campaign starts to backfire (and people like me and this guy start posting on their blogs).

A few key points I’d like to elaborate on:

1. Other networks will open up their platforms. Both MySpace and LinkedIn have indicated they will open their platforms. MySpace has specifically said that app developers will keep 100% of the ad revenue on their “canvas” page. As long as competition is offering the same nugget to developers (and MySpace is big competition), Facebook will be forced to keep this offer open in order to keep developers interested in extending their platform.
2. The market is moving very quickly. This means that innovation on advertising within the social format will also occur very quickly. Even if Facebook or MySpace offer their own advertising tools to developers, it would be silly to cripple or shut down any ad network or format that has learned how to more efficiently monetize their traffic. In fact, it would make more sense to buy such a company or license their technology since it could then be applied to advertising beyond just the “canvas” pages. If they reduce the percentage of ad revenue that developers take home, they would stifle the ad innovation that is ultimately to their benefit.
3. Facebook, while popular, isn’t the only social network. MySpace is still the king in terms of traffic and will be opening their platform in short order. If a company can figure out how to use information from both to increase effective CPMs across either – than developers will scream for this solution over a locked-down one-network solution.

You have an idea, you gather as much information as possible from as many stakeholders as possible, then you convey the idea to others.

Often, during requirements gathering (building giant “product requirements documents” or “feature lists”), you forget what it is you set out to do. Because of this, you don’t know what you’re explaining to other people – so your team is not sure what to build. Then you launch something that doesn’t really meet any of your stakeholders objectives.

I’ve learned this both the hard way and the good way: set a vision, keep it simple, and be ruthless in cutting out everything that doesn’t meet that vision.