What Will the iPad and its Apps Mean for the Product Lifecycle and Customer Intelligence?

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Customer Engagement, Marketing Musings

Unless you’ve been under a rock all day (or all your electronic devices had dead batteries), you probably heard about Steve Jobs’s announcement of the much-anticipated Apple tablet PC, the iPad. Silly name aside, everyone is rushing to predict what features of the tablet might impact the market—will it be the newspaper apps? The iBook program? The pricing model?

Despite the hype, I see the iPad accelerating a trend toward devices that support smaller software built by smaller developers. The “app” model, which depends on micropayments and mass accessibility, allows far more people (with or without technical backgrounds) become developers and sell their work. This trend and the increase in independent small-scale developers will affect the product development lifecycle and the way we think about customer engagement. Like what?

  • Product development has already become more agile, with tighter feedback loops and more iteration, but the proliferation of app-heavy devices will mean another gold rush for developers and non-developers alike. As apps develop faster, consumers will learn to expect rapid updates and responsive improvements. To keep up, developers of every size will need to learn to harness customer feedback in all its forms—testing, online, twitter comments, blogs, and direct phone contact.
  • Customer engagement has often operated under the assumption that customers are different and separate from developers. As more customers take part in the development process and more developers become influencers, the line between them blurs. Companies will need to pay attention to developers’ concerns (like those about the App Store approval process) in order to maintain a positive customer experience.

What’s it all come down to? A shorter product lifecycle and a mixed customer/developer base will require an integrated, intelligence-driven approach to be competitive.

What do you think? What are the best tools for keeping track of customer feedback over shorter cycles? How can customer engagement lend itself to developer engagement?

Customer Engagement lessons from the gaming world

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Customer Engagement, Marketing Musings

Last week, two apparently unrelated things conspired to get me thinking about community, customer feedback, and how to turn customer engagement into smarter, better-informed products.

First, Projectline’s book club gathered to chat about Clay Shirky‘s Here Comes Everybody, which does a great job of explaining the social and organizational changes we’re seeing as the internet enables rapid sharing and easy communication. In our conversation, we spent a lot of time trying to puzzle out what new ways of organizing will mean for everyone doing business online (and offline). Shirky’s examples compellingly illustrated that traditional organizations are often terrible at predicting just how users will wind up using what they make. We didn’t quite solve the question of how to balance the need to monetize (which sometimes takes the form of restricting use) with the desire to provide the flexibility to let customers determine the use of the product (which often makes it much more widely used).

Second, Ars Technica reported on the PC release of popular video game Modern Warfare 2, which has been (and continues to be) wildly successful as a console game. In what looked like an effort at customer engagement, Best Buy hosted a question-and-answer session between Infinity Ward (the game developer) representatives and PC gamers. But instead of fostering real engagement, the conversation wound up highlighting the game’s fundamental disregard for PC gamers’ myriad ways of playing.

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