Is The Customer Always Right?

We Love Our Customersphoto © 2007 Carsten Keßler | more info (via: Wylio)We’ve heard it before: The customer is always right. But we’ve all run into situations where we think the customer is wrong. I ran into a situation like this recently and it taught me a valuable lesson.

I manage Delphi Forums, a network of user-created online communities. Most of our users participate in multiple communities, so one of our features is a customized “My Forums” page where users can find links to the forums they regularly visit along with information on the activity in each community. One of the features of this page is a list of the forums that the user has recently visited – sort of like a browser history for forums. If the user decides they like any of the forums on that list, they can add a permanent link to that forum on their My Forums page.

We recently went through a product upgrade that changed the way that list worked.

Before the upgrade, users had the ability to remove recently visited forums from their My Forums page. With the upgrade, that functionality was lost. No big deal, I thought, the page is still doing what it’s supposed to:  it’s still displaying the forums a user has visited recently. Nobody would demand a tool that would allow you to remove Web pages from your browser’s history, so why would one need to remove recently visited forums from that page?

More to the point, I wasn’t  about to ask for resources to fix something that wasn’t really broken when there were other features that I felt deserved more priority.

Here’s the thing I hadn’t counted on: The ability to remove recently visited forums from that page had been there for so long, users had changed the way they used the page based on that feature. Many users had turned their recently-visited forums list into a list of forums not quite important enough to be on their My Forums page permanently, but important enough to hold on to for future reference. The ability to remove forums from that list made that use case possible.

So while it made no sense to me to spend time to allow users to remove recently visited forums from a list of, um, recently visited forums, it made perfect sense to them based on how they were using the page. More importantly, they viewed this as a case of us removing a valuable piece of functionality. Once this became clear to me, I managed to get some help from an engineer to restore the functionality.

So the moral of the story is that no matter what intuitively makes sense to you as a product manager, you need to see the product from the user’s point of view. It seems obvious, but when you’re in the trenches facing competing demands and impending deadlines, it’s easy to forget.

3 comments for “Is The Customer Always Right?

  1. January 15, 2011 at 1:34 pm

    🙂
    They may not always be “right”, but they do know what they want.

    Thanks for getting it “fixed.”

  2. Rodney
    January 28, 2011 at 9:13 pm

    Damn, you’re boring, Dave. Maybe you can jazz up the next one. Work in some sex, drugs and rock and roll. It’ll be fiction, but it’ll be worth a try.

    • Dave
      January 29, 2011 at 9:58 am

      Geez, Rodney, you’re a tough critic!

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