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Everyone Loves You!

Can you have too many customers? A business cannot succeed without customers, but what happens when they want more of your time, energy or services than you can offer? Even worse, what happens if your customers each have a very reasonable request but the number of requests is untenable? That could spell disaster. Who hasn't had a million things on their plate and had something small fall off of it? "Hey, I asked you to do the dishes and you said you could, but you didn't. What gives?" That situation sucks. It's bad whether the cost is a bit of harmony at home lost because someone was let down, or because your boss is upset because "setting up that meeting wasn't a huge ask", or a customer said "All I needed was a small change", or "My order wasn't complicated."

So what do we do about it? As an individual, a team, a product, or an entire enterprise capacity cannot expand infinitely. Some would argue that capacity is fixed and at any given point in time it is. Sure, it can be scaled over time and an individual's capacity changes based on other circumstances but at a single point in time, when a request is made capacity is fixed. So what do we do about it? Demand is outpacing supply! Oh no! Our in demand commodity is scarce, in the short term you charge a premium, which is good, but if you can't scale up you're headed for trouble because people tend to get upset when they don't get what they want, especially if they paid for it.

Managing Multiple Intake Streams

I think I've painted enough of a picture so let's dive in. Let's pretend, you're the managing vast enterprises. You're the head of product for a software company that provides a service that people just can't live without. You've got business development talking about new opportunities, engineering talking about tech debt, there's quality concerns, automation, security says you need to make changes to meet some compliance standards, customers are demanding new features, there are industry set deadlines that you can't move, HR says it's time for annual reminder training, those Agile people say your teams need to do things differently and on top of that you're a benevolent leader so you want to give your people time to be creative and develop themselves professionally and personally. How do you meet all that demand?

You don't! The question is, how do you let your customers know that they matter to you, or at least their desired outcomes matter to you. That's great but demand isn't the only problem. How do you balance the priority of all these different intake streams? Are all number ones created equally? Riker isn't here, so he can't help. Great so now you have two problems to solve, capacity and priority. Fortunately there's a lot of overlap in the solutions to these challenges.

You have problems. What are we going to do about it?

The solution to both of these problems is rooted in honesty expressed via transparency and integrity expressed by making and meeting commitments. Cool story, what does that mean? Well first things first, we have a bunch of people fighting for our time right? Well then let's manage our time more wisely. Instead of talking to one person here, one group there and another somewhere else, all of which take up time. Have a conversation with all of them at one time. This might sound like madness at first and it probably will feel like that. However, if all of your customers see each other vying for your time they can start competing with one another for your time. It may also have the benefit of exposing the level of demand for your time which in turn makes it more valuable. It's probably a good idea to set up a well defined intake process so everyone knows how to show up too.

Now let's start shaping the chaos, you have an intake process, it's well defined, it's shared with the customers and now you have an intake meeting. The list of customer demands is your backlog, make that visible to those customers. But how do we know what order to put it in? Easy, start adding the word order to your lexicon and replace the word priority. Everything is always priority number one so let's talk about what order we're going to get it done in. Generally speaking if you're lucky enough to have two feet, and still more fortunate to have two shoes you'd want them both on your feet when you start your day. They both need to go on, neither is more important than the other and one isn't more important than the other. They both need to go on and most people only have the ability to tie one shoe at a time. So you have to decide, which one goes on first?

#value #product #intake #priority