The Experience, not the Product

On my way back from Minneapolis yesterday, after visiting my son who is soon to attend college there, I mused on building web sites. I did this while I listened to a seminar by a Google business manager on innovation. The fella who gave the talk said that Google doesn't care what language a programmer knows. Google never hires a .NET programmer, or PHP programmer, or a Java programmer. That's irrelevant to their search. They just want to know if you can program. That hard skill aside, they then want to know how creative you are. The language can be learned. The creativity can't.

I think far too many people, skilled in a trade, focus on building the product, but not on creating the experience. Said another way, it's not about whether it works (functional) but whether it's intuitive and empowering (presentation). The best route between A and B is not the shortest, but the one most easily remembered. Efficiency can come later...

Do we lose the best fit for our purposes when we pre-bias our selection criteria with hard criteria? Do we forget the purpose of what we're doing when we focus only on arriving at the goal, and not in remembering that we are often leaders who need to communicate to others how to follow behind us?

by Brett Rogers, 7/20/2008 3:59:56 PM
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