Launch and Learn

Sometimes I wonder if we’ve totally lost our way with the print industry definition of “web-to-print.” It seems we’re way more focused on the printer’s experience of the tool when the tool’s entire purpose is for making print ordering easier and more convenient for the printer’s customers.

Lots of printers invest in web-to-print, and a significantly smaller percentage are actually successful at deploying web-to-print to its target market: the print buying customers. I witness this daily. There is a reluctance to introduce this new way of interacting with the print business to the customers. The best explanation I found about this phenomenon is from Reuven Gorsht in a Forbes article titled “What is Customer Phobia?” My favorite quote from the article is:

"Quite simply, whenever we get the opportunity to spend time with customers, we go at them with the lens of our own products and services—the classic aspirin looking for a headache."

I remember being on a call with a printer and their customer to get their input and feedback on order entry and the artwork proofing process. The customer started talking about their challenges, and the printer started leading them with comments like, “Wouldn’t you prefer to just send us an email? Aren’t you more comfortable using a spreadsheet?” When a customer answers a leading question like this, you didn’t get to the bottom of anything. You simply confirmed your bias towards tools you understand and have been working with for decades. 

Another great quote from the Forbes article is “...but everything we do is in the tone and spirit of confirming our own biases.”

I think we’re scared of the customer. We are scared to ask them to change. We’re scared to introduce any tension into the relationship. We are scared to stand up for ourselves and for ideas that would benefit them. Our fear comes in the form of delaying the launch of customer-facing solutions until they are deemed “perfect.”

I have seen major launches held up for months for a feature that the customer ended up not even using. We have this crazy idea that we know exactly how a customer will use the tools we provide them. We have no idea, and the sooner you admit to that fact, the better for your business.

I remember talking to a top executive at Adobe right after PDF and Acrobat were launched. He admitted that they literally had no idea all the ways the PDF file format was going to be used and couldn’t even imagine what the future might bring. They didn’t know. They let their customers find all kinds of ways to use PDF. They launched and learned. 

So here we are. We invest in tools for our customers’ benefit, then we stall, we delay, we convince ourselves that the tool has to be perfect (according to our biased definition) before we show it to our customers. The software world came up with an idea to break this habit because perfecting software is very expensive, especially if your perfection turns out to be something the customer doesn’t care about. The idea is minimum viable product or MVP: a working product that you launch before it is “perfect” because you accept that you don’t actually get to define perfection, your customer does. And your customer can only define perfection if they are actually using the product. Launch early and learn.

Guess what launching early and listening to your customers’ feedback does for your relationship with the customer? It builds trust. They feel heard. Then you can invest in what your customers tell you is the next most important thing. Remember, you don’t know. 

Launch and learn. Get a little smarter then iterate from there. There is no perfection. There is no “done.” There is only a respected relationship where you keep providing your customers value and keep listening to their feedback. Be careful when listening to feedback, filter out the suggested solutions, and get insanely curious about the underlying problems your customers are struggling with. We humans think offering solutions is what makes us look smart—we’re solving things. What really matters is understanding the actual problem because until you understand the problem all your solutions are a crapshoot. When you get to the bottom of a problem, you also get to pick from lots of different solutions. A wide variety of solutions is so important because if you’re using commercial software, you don’t have the ability (without lots of time and money) to customize it to solve a problem in a specific way. When you define the problem, you can look for ways to “configure a solution” rather than “code a solution.” 

The customer is always right about their business challenges. You are there to listen and ask clarifying questions so that you can come up with the right solution for your business (where you are the expert).

A lot of printers say to me, “My customers aren’t asking for online ordering, so I don’t see a need to invest in web-to-print.”

Online ordering is a solution. Your customers are not supposed to solve problems for you. Your customers are complaining how long it takes a job to get on press. Your customers are complaining that it still takes 24 hours to get an estimate. Your customers are complaining that they can’t easily get order status or shipping updates. Your customers are telling you about the problems that online ordering/web-to-print solves. Start listening.