The nine-week queue

Review cycles are where customer stories go to die. How can we change this?
It's a familiar tale; the draft takes a couple of days yet publishing takes a couple of months. For most of that time the story was at rest, or being chased.

The interview is on a Monday and the draft is ready by Wednesday. Product marketing takes a week, the regional lead takes a week, the brand team takes two. That's before the advocate's availability for review, and perhaps their comms team.

And then there are the folks that have nothing to say or add until all deadlines have passed and we're deep into approval. Don'tcha love them?

Almost every one of those people was reasonable, but add them up, one after another, and the story takes nine weeks.

01  The queue you cannot see

Look at any manufacturing line and you can see a queue: pallets stacked up beside a machine, waiting their turn. Nobody needs a report to understand status.

Don Reinertsen spent much of his career applying that thinking to product development, and his central point is that office work has inventory too; made of information, and information is invisible. Nobody can trip over a draft sitting in an inbox.

A customer story might feel busy for nine weeks, but in my experience, if you add up the time spent on it after the draft it is rarely more than a day's work.

Reinertsen argues that queues are the root cause of most poor performance in product development. I think the same is true of customer stories.

02  Red tape is real

Red tape? Politics? Whether it benefits the story or not, most of the people in that chain are people you cannot leave out.

In my experience hardly anybody in the chain says no. Mostly they say "not yet", because the draft arrived 'unannounced' on top of forty other things. So the deadline drift begins.

Queueing theory looks at how long work waits for somebody who's busy. If a reviewer is half busy, your draft waits about as long as it takes them to read it. At 80% busy it waits four times as long. At 90% busy, nine times as long.

03  So is urgency

Momentum is everything. A story that moves quickly is a better story; every time. The advocate still remembers the conversation, the enthusiasm they had in the interview, and they remain committed to the project. Nothing worse than coming back to a customer in the autumn with words they vaguely remember saying in the spring.

A customer story also loses value while it waits; often its optimum use has been and gone.

And people move. Median tenure with an employer in the US is under four years; every week in the queue is a week in which your advocate can get a new job or a new boss, and a story that loses its advocate before sign-off is often lost altogether.

Reinertsen's advice was that if you quantify only one thing, it should be the cost of delay. Most programs count stories published, yet very few count weeks spent waiting.

04  Draft seventeen

Is the seventeenth draft better than the second? Sometimes, but not often.

Every round removes something from the flow, while often trying to shoehorn in useless blurb or messaging. What survives is a compromise.

The proverb 'a camel is a racehorse designed by committee' has always been true. Enterprise tech is famous for turning thoroughbreds into dromedaries.

And every round has a price. Reviewers' hours are not free. If an agency or freelancer is writing, each round is either billed or quietly absorbed, and neither is good for the relationship. Each time the draft goes back to the advocate, a little more of their goodwill is spent.

The longer this all takes, the lower the chances are of the story ever being approved.

05  Fixing the queue

The familiar fixes still stand: agree who signs off before the interview, keep one source of truth, set a deadline and hold to it.

Everyone wants to be a writer. Send a product manager a customer story for their review, and you'll get it: of the headline, the structure, the quotes, and a new paragraph about the roadmap. What you actually needed was for them to confirm the product name and specs.

Say what is not theirs. The prose belongs to the writer and the words belong to the advocate. Product checks the product, the region checks the culture, brand checks the brand. Nobody rewrites the advocate's quote.

Keep the writing with the story team. Comments are welcome; rewrites are not. If a reviewer thinks a sentence is wrong, they say why, and if it's valid and not merely subjective, it gets fixed in the story's voice.

Make the advocate's approval easy. A short draft, laid out as it will appear, sent by someone they know, with one-click approval and a date to come back by.

The programs I have seen do this well ship the same story in weeks rather than months.

06  The test

At the end of the interview, before you thank your advocate and stop the recording, can you tell them the date they will receive the draft to approve? The week?

State a date; then keep it.

07  What comes next

This is the tenth issue of Proof Positive.

Next issue: what's in it for them. We spend a lot of time on what a customer story does for us. Why does a busy customer say yes, and what makes the good ones say yes again?

Subscribe if you have not. Forward to one person who's still waiting on the brand team's rerview.

§

Robin Hamilton is the founder of Proofpoints, the customer storytelling platform. Previously, cofounder and CEO of inevidence. Proof Positive is published fortnightly.

2週間後、受信トレイにお届けします。隔週配信、スパムなし、配信停止もかんたんです。