Alexander Craig's blog

I’m concerned about the lost art of conversation. Not because I’m worried about dull dinner parties and tedious receptions I hasten to add. But, because I see it costing our clients time, money and competitive advantage. And that’s not something a good host can fix with wine and bon viveur!

In our role as digital product delivery specialists, we’re often asked to help organisations understand how they can improve working practice. Distilled, this quite simply translates to “how can we bring the right product to market faster?”. While there are many facets to the answer, a starting point must be an effective and efficient delivery team. Sadly, that’s often simpler in theory than in practice. The good news, however, is that one of the most common problems we uncover is very, very easy to fix. Communication.

Communication is central to effective teams. This is not an earth shattering revelation. But let’s consider for a moment why this matters as much as it does in the world of digital product development:

• Great products are built to address an underlying collective user need manifested within a market, but the devil is in the detail – describing the nuances of that need so the whole of a product team understands it makes the difference between good product design and great product design;
• Product teams often bring together groups of people from very different parts of an organisation who may not ordinarily work together and don’t always share a common language; Sales and engineering, for example, both have their own extremes of acronyms and dialect but when collaborating to build a digital product, they must be absolutely on the same page with no confused meaning or imperfect understanding;
• Lean and agile approaches (e.g. Scrum) enable products to be built fast, but this means ambiguity can quickly manifest itself in the finished product. This potentially places the wrong thing in front of users, corroding the experience and eroding perceived value.

Obviously, these are all risks that are mitigated if “the team” (from sponsors to subject matter experts, product owners, designers and developers) communicates effectively. Yet, there are slip-ups we see over and over again. So what is the simple solution?

Conversation. It is often as straight forward as that. It’s just that people forget to do it, or do it ineffectively; I love email and instant messenger, but if someone is in the same room as me, these modes of communication are never as quick, focused and clear as a face-to-face conversation. And yet this often doesn’t happen – rather, the quick question that comes via email is taken out of context and ends up with the wrong version of a design being implemented on a front-end.

I’m not sure why people get out of the habit of talking. But I do know that performance improves when we work with teams to get them back into the habit. This is because ideas are shared faster, vision and purpose discussed and better understood and simple things like asking for help become easier.

Reinvigorating a group of people working closely together on a common goal to embrace the art of conversation is a simple but effective way to help them work better together. Better teams lead to better efficiency and effectiveness, which in our world of digital product delivery is a key foundation to bringing the right product to market quickly. And that saves time, saves money and increases competitive advantage.

They say talk is cheap. I’d say not talking is one of the most expensive mistakes people can make.

This article was first published on 10 June 2013 on the Magic Milestones blog.