Agility by Robin Williams (Need for feedback)

 

Are you aware that you're being bombarded with lessons? The picture shows a lesson of Robin Williams (1951-2014), but that's not the lesson I want to talk about in this blog post.

Wisdom through TV?

Couple of months ago, on a lazy evening I was watching television. The greatest comic in history, I think, died due a depression. It was Robin Willams at an age of 64 years. Though he seems to have had a happy life from the outside, he obviously didn't in his personal life. I guess he was more trying to make the crowd happy rather than himself.
The show babbles along while friends and colleagues tell about him being a great actor, father, comic, that he was flabbergasting and astonishing, and he was the greatest man on earth. You know how that sort of documentaries come along with that kind of hail and hallelujah. Of course he was a great man, but if I had to learn one thing from him, it's not one of the great phrases he said, or good things he did, but it is this comment that he made about thinking up his stand-up comedian shows.

Audience

Here's what he said: 'You have things in the back of your mind that you think yeah, these ideas, yeah this might work. Mmmmmaybe, yeah, mmm. Here's the core vision that makes it all work; it's the audience! Well, you can think of these things alone and a lot of times you are, and then you take it out in front of the people and this works or this doesn't work. It's a combination of okay, this might be the wrong audience for this routine, or this is the perfect group to do it for.' (link: 31:55)

Actually he's trying to explain that, no mater what you think of 'for' the audience, the success of it depends on the 'kind of' audience you're dealing with. This conclusion is coming from a great stand-up comedian, but is of course applicable to the not so humoristic world of software development. But then of course you can make it more fun by changing your style of developing, but that's an other story. Maybe I write a post on that subject as well.
But to get to the point of this blog post: It's absolutely mandatory to let the audience play with your software for a while and make sure you study their behavior at best! (This is the strongest sentence I could came up with. Hope I convince you.)
You have to find out if your ideas are good ones. Try to tweak your ideas, UI and back-end to the needs of the customer. Even throw away your features if the customers don't like it and come up with new ones. That last one by the way, may be the hardest thing to do.

Need for feedback

Always, and I mean every always, consult your customer on everything! You cannot successfully do it on your own, no matter how smart you think you are (think of Robin Williams, he was a genius and he couldn't do it on his own). It's the 'need for feedback'.