Although we have ten fingers, we are not good at making “top tens”. Although the Late Show does make it look easy. Will Pate makes this mistake when he asks for your Top 10 Issues/Concerns with Flock. No harm done, they will just have to filter out the noise.
Merlin Mann knows this rule of ten, because he makes lists of 5ive.
Still I prefer three.
Give them three it is better for them and you.
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I wanted to have lots and lots of responses. By giving people license to lay out all their gripes on the table I knew Flock would get three really valuable views of the information
1) The top 10 concerns, enough space to cover the community’s biggest priorities for what we need to do or explain better.
2) Low hanging fruit that we can address in short order. People know Flock is listening, we need to demonstrate more than we’re acting in response too.
3) A nice long list of all concerns, something we can revsit later and check against for future decision making.
Hope it makes a little more sense now
Hi Will,
Thanks for the comment. I can see your motivation, but I still don’t think it was a wise move.
You may actually limit your responses by associating a high number.
The results so far do look good as the answers are quite diverse, though so far is not as broad of a group as I would hope for nor as focused on the real pain points.
Focus is important so a person appreciates your results. If you fix six of ten items for me, I will likely be less impressed than if you fix three of three.
I think your second point is important, and had considered writing a separate post about that, because I think that is directly relates to my list of three and if the timing of this is poor, it is harder to demonstrate the results.
Demostrated results is what keeps me excited.
In terms of timing, two windows are good for this questioning:
1. After a new major release has settled
2. When a new major release beta is available
My experience — not just with Flock — is at this point in a release schedule development is least able to demonstrate results based on the community’s concerns.
My experience with customers and peers is after using a release for this length of time they often either no longer feel the pain of the burn or the burn has left some bitterness.