Consulting Defective

[bcholmes]

In my entire career as an IT consultant, I’ve never known anything that compares to the sick, sinking feeling that I get when I realize that my customers want to buy zombo.com.

I haven’t been called upon to do this in a while, but there was a time in my career when I was often asked to sit through product demos to provide a technical assessment of each offering. I’d sit in a room with a bunch of people whose job it was to assess proposals against a Request For Proposal (RFP). One after another, I’d watch a group of product companies come in a pitch their solutions.

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Mirrored from Under the Beret.

Comments

[cynthia1960]

You should have heard the evil cackle of glee emceeaich emitted from our den when I mentioned that your client wants to buy that site. It was certainly loud enough to be heard in Toronto.

[jiawen]

Maybe you could do a presentation for them that demonstrates how pointless zombo.com is? Like, give everyone a pen and paper, then put up a Powerpoint that says "everyone please write your name on the paper provided", then the next slide says "Congratulations! You're now registered with PointlessPoint.com". Something like that.

[contrarywise]

Argh, I feel your pain. Back at my last full-time tech writing job, our head of Marketing refused to permit any actual usability testing on our product Web site, preferring to go by his feelings about the UI and how it should work. And our VP of Engineering, of all people, backed him up. Oh, the schadenfreude when the user complaints started coming in...