Lies of Engineers
Guy Kawasaki posts another brilliant top-10 list. #9 really resonates:
“Our beta sites loved the software.” In twenty five years of working in technology, I’ve never heard a company report that its beta sites didn’t like its software. There are three reasons for this: first, many beta sites are so honored to get pre-release software that they don’t want say anything negative. Second, most beta sites haven’t used the software very much. Third, most beta sites don’t want to seem cruel by criticizing a company’s new product. Doing so is as socially unacceptable as telling someone that his baby is ugly.
Although, to counter Guy’s experience, I was involved with a project that got tossed out of the first beta site. We had missed a requirement so badly that it was unusable (not just hard to use — impossible to use) and we couldn’t fix it in time. That was a learning experience (include a domain expert as part of the team). Luckily, the team recovered and the product stuck with the later sites.