How to Avoid a Slow Motion Train Wreck

Yesterday, one of the sponsors of the PDMA event (who shall go unnamed) sponsored a nice dinner for the attendees, and then provided the night's entertainment. By the time the entertainers went on, it was about 7:30 p.m. after a long day of slideshow-driven presentations. Many of the attendees (including myself) had already had at least two drinks. We were definitely in the mood to be entertained.

The sales team put together a series of amusing sketches showing various sorts of dysfunctional behavior in product development, like keeping team knowledge locked inside the senior engineers' heads, and virtual team members who try to work in the dark. These sketches produced lots of laughs and groans of recognition.

Unfortunately, the sketches were surrounded by a lot of obvious sales pitch. The ratio of time was about 3 parts sales pitch to one part fun. The audience responded by talking over the presentation or walking out. I left myself after about 2/3 of the presentation. I doubt many left with a good impression.

I felt a lot of sympathy for the guy running the show. He was probably blinded by the lights and his location would have made it difficult for him to hear the audience's reaction. He may also not have felt empowered to say, "OK. This isn't working. We need to do a redirect here."

What are the unintentional lessons this sponsor delivered on product development at the PDMA conference?

• Don't allow your enthusiasm for an idea to override your customer and market knowledge. Conference dinners are for rekindling old friendships and building new ones. We expect a sponsor to do a little pitching, but by 7 p.m., we've already seen enough slides.


• Establish early customer feedback mechanisms. One quick run-through with an attendee would have shown that this presentation would be perceived as irritating rather than valuable. During the talk itself, the presenter had moments when he could have received feedback from someone watching the audience reaction from backstage.


• Manage risk with contingency plans. Given the setting, poor audience reaction was a major risk. If the presenter had a Plan B, he would have known what to do.


• If things are obviously not working as planned, don't keep charging ahead with your plans! Even without a Plan B, the presenter could have just had a quick word with the skit people during the 2nd or 3rd video, and created a better plan in the moment. I would have given him a lot of credit for adapting on the fly

Google manages this risk with their incremental development process. How do you manage the risk of poor customer reaction in your own product development process?