A small relaunch, small team communication, power in research

As consulting goes, we sell materially three things:

• Teardowns
• Research-driven optimization consulting
• Research-driven audits & prioritized strategy

These all have names, but you don’t care, because ultimately you’re buying an outcome.

Still, the names that I gave these three things are bad. One of them is nine years old. The other is seven. They were born of an industry, and a time, that looked a lot different than things do right now, both in terms of who we serve and what we do for them.

We also didn’t have quite so much of an incentive to reconsider the names. They worked. They generated cashflow for the business. People were able to look past the weirdness and buy stuff.

I don’t think that is possible anymore. Nobody has the executive function to consider how these are even different. I keep having some form of the following conversation:

“We want to work with you quarterly to improve our store.” “That’s Draft Revise.” “But there’s also… Revise… Express? How’s that different?” “It’s the kickoff for Draft Revise. You could buy that now if you want to test the waters, and we could quote you quarterly pricing at the end.” “So Draft Revise has Revise Express in it.” “Yes.” “But we want to work with you quarterly.” “You can work with us quarterly. That’s Draft Revise.” “…” “…” “What’s the difference between Draft Revise & Revise Express again?”

On the one hand, all of you are looking at this, shaking your heads, and thinking wow, that’s a bunch of red flags. But keep in mind that this could describe at least three dozen prospective clients in 2022.

Nobody has the headspace to consider these differences anymore. Everybody wants some sort of deal. It’s a miracle that they get on a sales call with us at all. And we shouldn’t be putting up any barriers to closing a sale – not now, not ever.

So we’re going to rename some things. Starting now, Revise Express is being relaunched as Draft Roadmap.

With this change, hopefully it’ll be clearer what the relationship is between all of these, and it’ll be easier for us all to do our jobs right.

Thanks for your support, now and always, and just hit reply if you have any questions.

This week, for paid members

• Our design of the week talks about a pull-down that could be answered with geolocation. Why do stores fail to geolocate their customers, most of the time? It has high resolution for countries, and could yield significant personalization opportunities.
• Our paid lesson is all about communication in small teams, especially from the perspective of value-based design, which affects every team member and all communication.

Want in? Join us now – now named one of the best ecommerce communities going on the web.

Links & analysis

• Not enough people talk about power dynamics in research activities. What blind spots are you failing to uncover in your research processes? How does power affect the knowledge that’s distributed in an organization? If you work in-house, are leveraged power dynamics affecting the quality or content of your research findings? This post sheds more light on the challenges inherent here, trying to create a deeper grammar around how to speak towards issues of power in any organization.
• Like carousels & quick view, infinite scrolling is one of those things that can work, and can be powerful, but is usually misused and should be avoided as a default. But when can it work, and how should it be implemented? NN/g has some pointers.
• The most important element on your store is the home page’s masthead. The second most important is the navigation. And the most important page type is your product detail page. Baymard’s latest this week talks about how you’re all screwing that one up.

This week’s paid lesson: What are the communication dynamics that value-based designers should take note of in small teams?

This week’s lesson is for paid members. Sign into our community to read it, or join us today to get access.