A great post from Creating Passionate Users, it is basically a guide to creating a bottom up “user-focused employee guide” for when you are working in a “huge company”, I’m sure it would work as a “customer-focused employee guide.”
Creating Passionate Users: Subvert from Within: a user-focused employee guide
This post is a great example of trying to institute cultural change or “change management” from the bottom up. Achieving change in a company is extremely hard, and although this guide was written for people who want to use guerilla tactics from the bottom up, this guide is equally useful for executives that want to try and make there large company more user focused. No top down mandates are going to change the culture, only consistent messages, stories, symbols and action is going to affect a cultural change.
Here are some examples from the passionate users guide:
In meetings, phrase everything in terms of the user’s personal experience rather than the product. Keep asking, no matter what, “So, how does this help the user kick ass?” and “How does this help the user do what he really wants to do?” Don’t focus on what the user will think about the product, focus everyone around you on what the user will think about himself as a result of interacting with it. Study George Lakoff for tips on using language to shift perceptions.
Keep a notebook or hipster PDA with you always and whenever another employee, blogger, (or user) tells you something good or bad about a real user’s experience, write it down. Build up a collection, and make sure these stories are spread. Be the user’s advocate in your group and keep putting real users in front of employees (especially managers). Imagine that you are the designated representative (like the public defender) of specific users, and represent them. Speak for them.
0 Responses to “culture change: customer-focused employee guide”
Leave a Reply