Beware of the naked man

Christopher Cummings makes a good argument for skepticism about many overheated claims about social media. You'd think that any overheated claim would inspire skepticism, but that ain't necessarily so.

In fact, you might write a history of the last century's overheated claims that never came to fruition, from Soon we will all be living in the dictatorship of the proletariat to In a generation we'll have permanent colonies on the moon and Mars to Dotcoms have re-written the rules of economics. People hope that the people making these overheated claims are visionaries, not idiots, or just opportunists exploiting the latest enthusiasm. Sometimes, they're actually right.

Obviously, we're going through a hothouse phase in the development of social media, when all kinds of speculation grow like kudzu. Chris takes special issue with the idea that social media will replace most face-to-face connections, or should replace them. For product managers, the risk is relying too much on social media for insights about customers.

Yes, social media done correctly in the PM sphere can help us hear about customer pain points, monitor the competition, and engage key influencers in the marketplace. But it comes at a cost that few seem willing to talk about.

I'll disagree slightly with that statement. Chris' target may be the claim, certainly overheated, that social media will entirely replace the traditional forms of requirements. If that's the case, we're not in disagreement at all. I'm a strong advocate for adding "inbound" social media to the requirements mix--heck, I wrote a three-part series on the topic--but I don't think that new media will elbow the old media out of the picture.

A lot of the traditional requirements sources were just as impersonal as a blog, discussion forum, or social networking site. In fact, they were even more impersonal, and in many cases, even more misleading. If only the specificity about enhancement requests in "I have a customer (IHAC)" e-mails matched their urgency. (If only you could have confidence in the urgency.) If only the enhancements recorded in the bug database were less cryptic.

In fact, if you were to replace the phrase social media with e-mail, you'd get something that a product manager might have written 15 years ago.

Face-to-face contacts aren't all they're cracked up to be, either. They have a very important place in requirements. In fact, they're irreplaceable. Any executive who thinks that you can do product management without face time with real users, buyers, and stakeholders is an idiot. Worse, the executive in question is contributing to the mistakes that cost technology companies time, money, and good will.

But executives are right in pressing for cost-effectiveness in requirements-gathering. If you have the opportunity to get supplementary information at a lower cost, why wouldn't you take it?

The big issue is how requirements gathering via social media should work. It's a new discipline, which is another way of saying, "It's going to take effort, time, and skill to do it right."

Here's one part of the discipline that's critically important: social media habits change by demographic. You certainly can't project your social media habits onto those of car dealers, research scientists, and accountants. By demographic slice, people participate more or less, have different goals, and vary in how much they participate in certain activities (contributing, commenting, collecting, etc.).

Therefore, if your requirements research depends on finding a lot of automotive engineers hanging around Facebook, you're out of luck. They don't "hang around" anywhere, in the physical or the electronic world. An automotive engineer who spent the day exposed to social media would be a major oddball, on the order of the title character of Randy Newman's old song, "Naked Man."

However, automotive engineers do use social media in other ways, so learning the inbound social media discipline is hardly pointless. I can tell you from both personal experience, and observing people trying to make social media work in this capacity, that it's damn hard to do right. But so is spending a day digging through the bug database for all the enhancement requests you've ignored during the last two releases.

Comments

[Jim Holland]

This post may be a foundational topic as Product Management and Social Media run intersecting courses and evolve. There are several valid and some subjective points in both Chris and Tom’s posts, however, the fact stands that in the current economy product teams have to expand their reach, capabilities and routes to information and push “traditional requirement sources” to new avenues. While it may appear that some or most requirement sources are “impersonal,” it beats inside-out thinking, daily epiphanies and “the mistakes that cost technology companies time, money, and good will.”

I agree with Tom’s point, that “it's a new discipline, which is another way of saying, it's going to take effort, time, and skill to do it right." So, how do we define and manage this “new discipline?” It has to come from the very community we are involved. As a product management community, we must collaborate, we must communicate and we must share content with each other. This year product management has written more content, met more of our peers face-to-face, shared knowledge and best practices and used tweets, posts, discussion groups, product camps, articles and more to enhance the discipline. Let's keep the momentum and build a sustainable community together.

[David Locke]

On NPR today, the story on social media described an example where the tweeter was referred to a phone number. Social media was used to herd customers to existing channels, rather than duplicating the services provided by existing channels.

As an approach to expanding the reach of product managers, have we forgotten not to code on our own dime? If I were looking to gather requirements from a particular industry, I'd get a paying client. Then, I wouldn't worry about expanding my reach.

[Jennifer Doctor]

If product management is tasked with understanding the market, then product managers need to be where the market is, and so be it if that market uses Social Media tools.

Too often we blame the tools and techonology. All the Social Media outlets provide are additional resources to gathering the voice of the market, the requirements. It's not about how you collect said requirements, it's about what you do with them that matters.

What is so wrong with using whatever venues are available?

[Tom Grant]

"This year product management has written more content, met more of our peers face-to-face, shared knowledge and best practices and used tweets, posts, discussion groups, product camps, articles and more to enhance the discipline. Let's keep the momentum and build a sustainable community together."

Do I hear an amen?

And Jennifer, I think Chris was talking about depending solely on social media as a replacement for traditional requirements. Still, there was an argument, "impersonal = bad," that I wanted to address.