Playing Chinese whispers with market insights

Small, nimble startups (as opposed to big corporations) are the hotbeds of innovative products & services in the software/web workspace. Its not difficult to imagine why- smaller companies are closer to the market and are better equipped to capture market insights and translate them into innovative products.

If you question this maxim, here’s a visual narrative to prick your thinking. (A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words).

Just in case you can’t read the text in the cartoon with your browser, here are the captions for each of the frames [left-to-right]:

(1) How the customer explained it
(2) How the project leader understood it
(3) How the analyst designed it
(4) How the programmer wrote it
(5) How the business consultant described it
(6) How the project was documented
(7) What operations installed
(8) How the customer was billed
(9) How it was supported
(10) What the customer really needed

In larger multilayered corporations, (with their emphasis on protocols and processes), critical market insights/feedback often gets dissipated in a game of chinese whispers as the customer’s voice is sequentially relayed from the frontline to the product development teams. Smaller organizations simply dont have these multiple layers; very often the programmer, analyst , project leader et al is the same person, thus cutting out the ambiguity.