Listening to understand is one of the lost skills in the world of business. The world is bombarded with so much information that we are constantly thinking about what to speak next. The art of listening has completely or almost living the face of the earth. That’s what my observation is while working with the team and at times with the client. I am guilty myself of not using the skills well enough. My recent one on one with the team has forced me to listen understand and go through the problem deeply.
Yesterday we reached the milestone of 10 founding members for our community. I have given them 10 topics to choose from and reached out to more than 400 people. It was surprising to me that none of the technological advanced topics was so popular. I accidentally put a topic that I was listening to in many of the conversations. To my surprise, the topic was selected and accepted by most of the professionals. If I haven’t had listened to my clients and the community member I would have not added that topic at all.
Marketing is the generous act of helping others because who they seek to become. It involves creating honest stories – stories that resonate and spread. Marketers offer solutions, opportunities for humans to solve their problems and move forward.
from the book This is Marketing by Seth Godin
In the beginning, I was confused about how how to work on the topic for the rest of this year. The framework for the year was to stick to a topic and dive deep into the nuts and bolts of it. And I leaned into the community and one of them suggested I do a particular activity which followed up with the community cal and the ball kept rolling. The advice that was given to me was to become a good facilitator and not to be the teacher. Remove the pressure of me and made me think about how can I will be a good collaborator. It gave me no choice but to sit back and listen to what the community was whispering ask for their advice and think about it.
To my surprise, they were pain point that came up during the conversations that they thought was creating a lot of frustration and doubts while working with this topic.
Here are 5 pain points that can be converted into a product feature
- Automatic testing of scoring with dummy data
- Diagram representation of scoring to communitate better
- Ability to avoid gamification of the scoring
- Simplify complexity aroung applying multipliers
- Work around the decimals to tally the scores
Vikram Shetty 