by Serguey Shinder
We lost the deal on eleven answers. The customer was larger than anyone we had sold to before, and somewhere in their process a spreadsheet arrived with three hundred and forty questions in it, split across security, data handling, availability and something called supplier governance. We answered it honestly over about a week. Eleven of our answers were no, and four of those eleven were disqualifying.
I remember being irritated. None of the eleven had anything to do with whether our product worked. Nobody asked whether it was fast, or well designed, or pleasant to use. They asked whether we could produce an audit log covering administrative actions and export it. Whether customer data could be kept in a specific region. Whether we had tested a restore from backup in the last twelve months and could show the record. Whether permissions could be described in terms of roles rather than in terms of our own peculiar model.
Over the following two years we built every one of them, and a number of others from the same spreadsheet that we had answered yes to more optimistically than was strictly warranted. Single sign-on. The audit log. Data residency, which touched almost everything. A documented and rehearsed restore. A published list of the companies we in turn depended on.
None of that had been on any roadmap. All of it was on the spreadsheet.
What I have not been able to shake since is that the shape of our system for two years was determined by a document written by somebody in another company's compliance function, whose name I do not know and who I will never meet. Not by a technology choice, not by an architectural conviction, not by anything argued in our building. And the awkward part is that she was mostly right. Those were good things to have built, and left to our own judgement we would have built almost none of them, because each one individually loses to a feature in any prioritisation meeting.
People ask what to pay attention to in order to see where things are going, and the answers they expect are about technology. Mine is duller and I think more reliable. Read one of those questionnaires end to end. It is a public statement of what the most cautious buyer already requires, and the most cautious buyer today is the ordinary buyer in three years. The direction of travel is written down, in plain language, by an industry that publishes it as a matter of routine.
We keep a completed one now as a living document. Every remaining no on it is a roadmap item with a date against it, and we review it twice a year. It has been a better predictor of what we would spend our time on than any conference I have attended.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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