Building Enterprise Software for Employees Not Just Managers

There are many enterprise applications built for one reason: to be sold to managers. Too often they don’t factor in what the rest of the employees, who use the software everyday might want.

I came across an article Groupware Bad about how Netscape lost direction by trying to build “Groupware” (boring social tools) and not what its original target market really wanted (help getting laid). The end result was a sub-par product.

In order to sell to the enterprise market Netscape began focusing on what managers wanted to buy and less on what people wanted to use.

Isaac Schlueter made the same connection to Redux whose social recommendation site is focused on the technology behind it and not on what their users want to use.

With most enterprise applications design comes second.

If managers are selecting the software for their employees to use it’s easy to lose focus on what the end user really wants.

What end ups happening is similar to when a parent takes their kids out to a movie. The parent chooses a movie they wanted to see because it’s educational for the kids. Just like the kids, the employees don’t take full advantage of the opportunity, using it only when forced to. This is because during its inception the companies focus was on the managers checklist of requirements and not on benefiting the end-user,

This presents a challenge for anyone building enterprise software. You can either build an end user focused application that the employees enjoy using. Or build something with a feature list that lets managers sleep easy at night. With the first, it would be a much harder sell to management. With the latter, the employee sees it as just another way for the management to get every ounce of productivity out of their 40-hour weeks.

I think its possible to do both (in the same way Pixar DreamWorks figured out how to make Shrek entertaining for children AND the parents).

Design for both sides.

Why not include something the employees can benefit from?

• Spending less time doing menial tasks to satisfy management i.e. paper work and reports.
• Making their contributions to the company more visible
• Spending less time in meetings

They might not sound very sexy but its the perspective that matters.

Why bother focus on the end-user when managers are the ones deciding?

When people talk about enterprise software its common to hear that the most important thing is selling the product, not the product itself.

Paul Graham said it best:

Enterprise software companies target upper management in the product development and marketing. But after the sale the software is often used by the entire organization. That’s what I think creates the separation. It’s all about the sale.

Although I believe enterprise software is maturing. An important driving factor is a growing tech-saavy younger generation. The employees who lived through first generation of business software are rising through management and are a much more knowledgeable consumer then their predecessors.

Hopefully, the focus will come back to what’s really important: the product… not how it’s sold.

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