Prioritizing the Development Pipeline: Listening to the Will of the People
I run a technology start-up. One of the things we grapple with is choosing what to build next. Is it this feature or that? This product extension or that feature enhancement? It is a hard, hard problem. In our business, it is the distilling of human customer feedback that governs pipeline prioritization, which is the way it should be. But it is an uncomfortable melding of art and science that is not wholly satisfying to one more empirically inclined. So consider a world where you could extract sentiment from a large pool of people to help guide your decision-making, where empiricism, pragmatism and speed come together to help make good decisions quickly. Sounds pretty cool, right? This is yet another example of what can be accomplished by leveraging the Internet.
Consider this example as described in today’s New York Times:
Users of Facebook, the social networking service, make up for any shortcomings in spelling, grammar and punctuation with their sheer numbers. After nearly 14,000 people joined “bring back Wispa” groups on Facebook, the food conglomerate Cadbury Schweppes announced on Aug. 17 that it would reintroduce the candy bar in October.
Companies everywhere are monitoring blogs and other online discussions for feedback on their brands and providing them with information about coming products, as well as placing so-called viral advertisements on video-sharing sites. But the company insisted that the expressions of affection for Wispa on the Internet were genuine.
The campaign for Wispa, and the decision by Cadbury to revive it, shows what can happen when nostalgia about lost brands converges with user-generated content and social networking sites.http://www.typepad.com/t/app/weblog/post?blog_id=375671
“This is the first time that the power of the Internet played such an intrinsic role in the return of a Cadbury brand,” the company said.
Cadbury said it had identified 93 user groups on Facebook calling for a return of Wispa. Fans posted video clips from 1980s advertisements for Wispa, featuring stars of British television shows like “Hi-de-Hi!” and “Yes Minister,” on YouTube, the video-sharing Web site.
This is totally amazing on so many fronts. That the Internet could have such an impact on corporate strategy. That Cadbury, an established, old-line company, could be as forward-looking as to consider such input in a product development decision. At infinity, there is no doubt that using the Law of Large Numbers as a tool for selecting product development initiatives is the way to go. It is just hard, in real life, to find situations such as these. My guess is that we’ll see more of this - and soon. And that product managers the world over will be thanking their lucky stars that the power of the Internet is in full bloom - and only getting more robust with time.
