Distinguishing between the details

Distinguishing between the details
By Chuck Kirkpatrick, Principal Consultant, C Kirk Media 
https://ckirkmedia.com
March 18, 2016

Deeper Reading:
Tom Peters, Author, The Little Big Things
Matt Hertenstein, Author, The Tell: The little clues reveal big things about who we are.

Quote for today:
 "All action takes place, so to speak, in a kind of twilight, which like a fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are." Carl Von Klausewitz

Distinguishing between the details
When I have led projects on new technology there has been a near constant drumbeat of questioning about which details are important. Do we really need to get all of the details right? Which components of a project have to be delivered, “no matter what?” Which pieces and parts can wait and be refined later? Whenever there is a disagreement between executives and project leaders about what is truly important, a team needs to go back to its source documents and vision statements. A team needs agreement on the bottom line for each business project and the bottom line for the business in general. In advance of your next project quarrel, try defining, aligning, and getting agreement with your stakeholders on your business project's bottom line.

One day I was working on a project to deliver an ad in the, “top of the page,” space on content pages that were our most frequented pages on the company site. These were premium ad positions -- thousands of people visited these pages daily. The business executive on the project struggled with what to do with this top ad position. His view was that this ad could be leveraged to get more partner businesses to sign up and offer deals. The evidence showed that the page was most heavily trafficked by customers, though, not partner businesses, so the ad would need to “go negative.” To use the ad space, he ad needed to say something like, “this partner business has no special deals to offer you, Mr. Customer.” As a product team we had research that showed instead that customers responded very favorably in markets where used that ad space to alert customers to shop for deals. This, "house ad," that promoted our deals and the ability to quickly search to find someone willing to help solve the customer problem, it got an 18% increase in new sales for the markets where it ran.

How do you resolve a disagreement about “what will we use our ad space for?”
In a variety of resource, you can read about “getting the little things right,” “paying attention to the small details,” and taking the time to go into every detail of a key product. What you must do before you can start a project and negotiate the detail questions is get agreement on the bottom line. Ultimately, the executive thought ad space should be best used promoting a message like, “hey potential partner business, you’d better sign up to offer deals with us, or we will tell customers you aren’t.” The product team believed the message should be, “check out the deals with companies who offer them.”

The way to resolve the discrepancy? Get executive and team agreement on what the bottom line really is. Do we sell products and services to customers as the top priority? Or do we line up new products and services from new partner businesses as the top priority. At different times a business will answer this question in different ways. But Bottom Line Thinking has to be in place to know how to resolve disagreements on any project.

Key takeaway: What business are you in? What’s your bottom line for this business project? When you and project team members have alignment on the business bottom line for a project, you’ve taken your first step toward prioritizing what matters and winning big.

In my example, the executive wasn't swayed. We went with, "no special offers," language. Coding teams spent about three months coding a special set of ads that had increasingly negative penalties for partner businesses. It started with, "no special offers," and over several weeks progressed to, "don't shop on this [bad] partner business page, shop on our [preferred] other partner business page." The complexity of the code was required because we had partners in markets all across the country. 

What happened to the "no special offers," ads? They went away. Partner sales teams reported zero new deals and promotions sold to our potential B2B audience. And customer sales did not get a lift from the proposed, "shop for deals," house ad.

How do you resolve disagreements over the big priorities on a project? What solutions have you found that work? When it's time to think about the bottom line, sometimes an outside subject matter expert or technology referee (LOL) or a consultant can help.

Keep on building,
Chuck

Chuck Kirkpatrick, Principal Consultant
C Kirk Media
#UX + #Analytics
https://ckirkmedia.com
[email protected]