Communicating With Your Customers is Job #1

Jon Russel over at TNW Entrepreneur highlights a few cases where startups, in this case declining startups, are failing to communicate with their users and doing potential damage to their products in the process.

All startups are inherently focused on their users to help them grow, but that same focus needs to be maintained when companies are in a less successful position, or perhaps even a downward spiral towards closure.

Yep, this is true. And I think it should be obvious that successful companies are those that communicate with—and listen to—their customers.

In my mind it’s the single most important thing you can do if your designing or building products.

Last fall I gave a talk down in New Orleans at Tribecon where I explained part of my design process. It’s called Talk/LISTEN and it pretty much sums up my approach: get out there and talk to people.