Focus on the Product

One of the things I've picked up from application lifecycle management course that has had maybe the most influence in my daily work was when the following product lifecycle management principle was introduced to us.

"PLM puts the focus on the product"

Summarized this meant that in PLM both customer and product are important, but product comes before customer. In Humap Software I am constantly involved in service business and in service model this is not such a great principle as is. But I noticed this made me to think about the service paradigm.

Customer rarely has high level expertise about the field of technology in which we are creating the services them for. Because of that it is also unlikely that the customer can create exact specifications about what they want. Or actually customers can define what they want, but because we have the technological expertise, we can come up with more sophisticated solutions which customer might not even consider in the first place. What customers can very well do is to define what kind of problems they have. Our job is to analyze those problems and create as good solutions as we can.

I know that was bit provocative. Usually customers have good ideas and they have more or less good vision about what they want. This just got me thinking that we should always pursue towards the most excellent outcome and be brave enough to question the customers' views when we see a better solution.