Prototype Problems - You Will Be Evaluated By Your Worst Deliverable
Prototype Problems - You Will Be Evaluated By Your Worst Deliverable
If you want to avoid being seen as inconsistent, you need to really consider the value of your deliverables and what's expected from you.
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The Free Breakfast Problem
For a brief time, I opened up a spare room to Airbnb guests.
The view was fantastic, the place was nice, and my listing had a rating of 4.79 after six months and some 35 guests.
One guest mentioned it would help if we offered a simple breakfast. So, I began offering a simple breakfast of cereal, fruit, bread, etc., which guests could prepare themselves at their convenience.
I was offering more value for the same price, and I figured that might raise my rating even higher.
Can you guess what happened?
My rating began declining immediately. The feedback was always the same “Great room, but breakfast could be better”
It turns out that if I didn’t offer any breakfast, it wasn’t included in a guest’s consideration of their rating. But if I did offer breakfast, they would include it in the ratings.
I see this exact situation play out often in consulting.
The Problem With Prototypes
Once you create something, a client will begin giving feedback and evaluating it alongside anything else you create. For example, a client was considering hiring someone to implement our strategy but wasn’t sure what a reasonable salary range should be.
Even though it wasn’t in scope, I figured I’d help out by putting together a few slides with some broad ranges and job roles to think about.
This was (unexpectedly) passed to the HR folks and came back with harsh feedback of:
This looks like it was put together in less than an hour. It’s nowhere near detailed enough! Please break it down by skillsets, years of experience, and location”
Now we can see the problem. Because I had created something, they assumed it was part of my offering rather than me doing them a favour. They were critical of it because it looked like I had put it together in less than an hour (it took about 30 minutes). They didn’t know I was doing it for free to help them.
However, that perception of putting together a poor-quality deliverable can easily stick and is hard to shake. In this case, I’ve alienated the HR team by trying to help them.
In our next call, my main contact mentioned he was under a lot of internal pressure to improve the salary range deliverable because they wanted to get the job description out in the next few weeks. My attempt to be helpful caused problems for myself and my contact.
A Small Amount Of Good Pizza…
Here’s a question.
Which of these two is the better choice:
Sending a half-complete slide deck designed to meet high standards.
Sending a full slide deck which hasn’t been adequately designed yet.
In theory, it’s the latter. You want to say to the client:
We haven’t done the design aspect, but the information is ready for review.
In practice, it’s 100% the former. Your design is a reflection of your professionalism and quality. Sending blank slides with bullet points for approvals is a sure way to undermine your credibility in clients' eyes.
They will judge the quality of your design even if you tell them it hasn’t been designed yet.
This is true for any prototype or draft you create.
It’s always better to send a limited amount of information at a high standard (proofread, professionally designed etc..), than a lot of information at a low standard.
The draft/prototype or whatever you send to the client must be as good as the real thing (even if it is missing information).
Do You Need To Do [x]?
I never hosted final readout calls to end a consultancy project for years.
I honestly didn’t know they were a common practice, and clients rarely requested them. We had so many check-ins through the process anyway that they didn’t seem necessary.
Recently, we adopted the practice and offered these to some clients as a bonus towards the end of the project. It was an excellent way to wrap up a project.
But I’ve noticed that contacts often invite senior execs on these calls, we often have to make custom versions of our deliverables for these execs, and they require us to invest a lot of time in preparation. Worse yet, once you have several senior people on a call, these calls start to be frequently rescheduled and pushed back - essentially extending the length of the project and possibly preventing us from being paid.
The worst part is that once you invite senior people on a call, they rarely sit through a presentation to listen. They inevitably request changes to the finalised deliverables.
This raises a question: does anyone benefit from this?
Going forward, we’ll probably do these if a client requests them, but offering them as a default practice seems counterproductive.
Read: Rebrand your meetings to create more value.
You Will Be Evaluated By Your Worst Deliverable
Where do you think your parents would focus their attention if you get a report card at school with 9 As and 1 D?
It’s usually on the one bad grade rather than the nine good grades.
The same is broadly true of client projects. If you create three excellent deliverables and then send through one that doesn’t look so great, it’s the latter that will attract the most attention. That’s partly because clients expect your work to be great, so they hired you.
But it’s also because it stands out. Even if you created it as an out-of-scope freebie - that’s where the focus will be. That’s the perception which will stick. Instead of building a reputation for high-quality work, you will earn a reputation for being inconsistent.
We can call it the value dilution effect (a new cousin of the argument dilution effect). Average-quality work undermines good-quality work.
Three Rules To Abide By
Delivering a few items of really high quality is better than sending through anything that isn’t.
Is this something we need to do? Does it add remarkable game-changing value to the client? Is the client expecting us to do it?
Is this something we can do extremely well? Do we have the unique expertise and ability to do this really well? Can we add game-changing value to this and ensure it reaches a professional level of presentation?
Is this something we’re being paid to do extremely well? Is it listed and described in the scope of work? Are we being directly paid to complete this?
If the answer to any of the above is no, you should reconsider delivering it.
For example, instead of creating the salary range as a bonus, I should have invited everyone on to a call where they could ask questions and I could share advice. Clearly, this isn’t a deliverable, and they’re free to take notes.
Much of this comes down to the medium. Once you create any document and send it to the client, you lose control over it. It can be passed around internally and stripped of all context, and the feedback you get will reflect that.
Thanks for reading