Victor Lombardi is a product developer/manager based in New York. He's currently writing a book titled Why We Fail - Real Stories and Practical Lessons from Experience Design.
Diane:Why do you think "Why We Fail" hasn't been written yet? We've been failing in customer experiences for years.
Victor:That's true, we *have* been failing in customer experiences for years, and there have been books that touched on the surface issues, like GUI Bloopers which looks at interface design specifically, or the irreverent Fucked Company which was more entertaining than insightful. What's different now is that we've experienced a few cycles of innovation where foundational concepts have been tried with success and with failure, ecommerce and social on the static web, then the dynamic web, and now mobile. It's a great time to look back and see what mistakes we keep repeating.
Diane:Can you describe one of the new stories of failure that you learned as you've been researching for your book thus far?
Victor:I'm finding a few instances of products that failed with customers but then were able to rise phoenix-like from the ashes, sometimes by copying successful elements from other products. BMW's iDrive in-car control system is a good example. The first version of iDrive replaced many physical controls with a single knob and a screen employing an unconventional circular navigation. Both customers and the media panned it as confusing and possibly dangerous. In the second version BMW simplified the circular navigation to be more like Audi's. In the third version they added back some physical controls. In the fourth version they replaced the on-screen circular navigation with hierarchical menus, like the iPod's. Over time they managed to change the frustrating aspects of the design without killing the whole idea, and you don't hear the media slamming it anymore.
Diane:What's the top one or two pieces of advice for first-time founders?
Victor:You're making a million decisions on the way to launching your business, and it's important to recognize that many of these decisions aren't based on facts; you're making hypotheses about how the future might play out. Identify your top three hypotheses that are vital to making the business work and create a plan to validate them. This is particularly important when it comes to your customers' experience because that's more difficult to validate in a discrete way compared to a question about software feasibility that can be validated by writing some code.
Diane:What's the top one or two pieces of advice for serial entrepreneurs?
Victor:You already know how to get a good product to market, so your challenge might be about how to sustain growth past the initial success. Companies that do that exceptionally well extend founder-like accountability to others in the organization. Apple does it through directly responsible individuals (DRIs), naming one person who is responsible for each project. The hugely successful hedge fund Bridgewater does it by enforcing absolute truth and transparency in the way they communicate. I don't buy into the idea that we should dismantle hierarchy, but pushing real accountability and input to decisions.
Diane:Anything you want to tell me about that I didn't ask you about?
Victor:I love that we're becoming more accepting of failure, because acceptance will make it easier to reflect on what went wrong and that leads to avoiding failure. And that's important because failure really, really sucks. It's costs money, it costs time, it costs jobs, and it hurts us emotionally. I believe we can become better at avoiding failure, and often that's just a matter of speaking up in meetings and saying, "I think x is a big unknown risk, let's figure out how to test that."
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