Interview Story - Time You Failed

I always try to anticipate future customer needs. So about 5 years ago, I developed an analytic tool for confidential data, designed to be secure on mobile devices.

I needed to identify a group that would really benefit from the initial deployment. Field sales reps were a clear choice since they often need to check reports on the road. We worked with the pilot group of sales reps from inside my company to test the tool.

Our monitoring of the pilot group showed very little adoption and use. I met with a sample of individual users to learn what was blocking adoption.

Here was the problem. We were breaking ground at our company for securing confidential data on mobile devices and eSecurity had not yet established best practices. I discovered that the only approach eSecurity would approve, required a very complex installation process. I was focused on the overall user experience, which once installed was quite smooth, but did not pay much attention to the impact of that complex installation.

I learned that although I understood the general needs of the sales organization, I had not understood the specific field sales reps well enough. Even if they agreed a solution would really help them, most of them would still only invest time in new technologies that required minimal initial effort to install and start using.

I first tried arranging for local IT to install it on their devices, but that was not enough since many of them operated out of smaller offices without much in-person IT support. My natural inclination is to keep coming up with innovative ways to move forward until I solve a problem, but in this situation, I realized that the best course would be to fail fast and start over.

So I gracefully shut down the effort, then met with the eSecurity team to make sure they really understood the implications of their current approach. I offered to help them evaluate other approaches as they moved forward. After working with them to help establish an easy, stable process to deploy secure applications on mobile devices using device certificates, I led the successful deployment of a different mobile analytics tool that was widely adopted, really making a difference for many teams including our field sales reps.

I continue to try to anticipate customers' needs and remain willing to experiment with bleeding-edge solutions, but I make more effort to fully understand the distinct situations of target customer groups and try to ensure that deployment plans for installation, training, and support are aligned with the specific needs and expectations of those customers.