One of the most eye opening customer meetings I had was to watch one of our Senior Directors of Product Management (PM) talking an extremely demanding customer through a discussion of improvements the customer wanted us to make. I’d been introduced to the concept of trade-offs by another PM but I’d never seen the process used so effectively as I did that day.

The way it is used is that first you go through the requests and requirements at a high level.  Secondly, you describe that you have a finite amount or resources, be it people, time, money or another variable (or more likely a combination of them). Then you discuss that you will therefore be unable to deliver all of them (as much as you wish you could). So then you ask them to pick which ones they must have and start to offer up “If you have to have just one would you like this one OR this one”.

Done in a very consultative manner it is extremely effective in getting the customer to buy into a prioritised list that is a great deal shorter than the one you walked in on!

The reason I’ve been thinking about trade-offs again the last few days was mainly as a result of the revelations that one of the TechCrunch writers might have taken some free gear in return for posts about certain start-ups. What interested me most was the speed of response in regards to the main Editor Michael Arrington addressing it publicly with a post entitled “An Apology To Our Readers“. The post included this:

We are all shaken here at TechCrunch – this is someone who was our friend and who we trusted to be honest with our readers. Our hope is that the intern learns something from this experience and grows into the kind of person that will be more welcome in this community.

I apologize to each one of you. I promise that we will always maintain complete transparency with you on how we operate, even when it isn’t such an easy thing to do.

Transparency is one of the biggest trade-offs people can struggle with, especially within the corporate world where you are trying to control the way the brand is perceived. Michael should be highly commended for such a rapid response and the openness with which he addressed this in a public forum.  TechCrunch is a slightly odd example as its business is a public website but the process of allowing employees to air their views in public is a bold, but I think critical one.

I think one of the best ever posts from Hugh of GapingVoid fame is this the where he discussed the “Porous Membrane” that corporate blogging creates. He illustrates it with this cartoon:

Go and read the whole thing but for me a key point he makes is this one:

13. The more porous your membrane (“x”), the easier it is for the internal conversation to inform and align with the external conversation, and vice versa.

There’s plenty of great advice in that post and I hope to continue learning to put it into action.