OHNO

I have a background in enterprise sales, but the process of doing long winded sales cycles, is pretty out-dated. Pipeline development. White papers. Sales conferences where people put their business cards into a fish bowl. I never really saw that stuff work very well.

I think has time goes on, I gravitate towards sales channels that people don't think of. It's more fun to be creative in your approach, and you can occasionally surprise yourself.

When I talk about saturated channels, let me give you an example. I've recently hidden probably 90% of my LinkedIn feed. A scroll through linkedIn these days is violent wave of Ads, masquerading as earnest, authentic posts. Most of which on topics I know nothing about, or have anything to do with.

I might have worked with someone 3 years ago, and because they work for a BI analytics company, suddenly all I see all day are 10 ways to Tweak you BI tool (What is a BI tool even) and it just gets a bit overwhelming.

So the notion I would contribute to that mess is something I wanted to avoid.

But one channel I've found really high conversion rates though is public slack channels. There are lots of groups out there, for all kinds of things, and you can usually see a lot of people talking about a problem that your product might be able to solve.

So I try and spend some time chatting to teams, mostly to learn about user needs, which can sometimes end up turning into a conversation about trying out OHNO.

I would say the thing that has helped us learn more about our customers than anything else is using fullstory.

For those who don't know, Fullstory allows you to view video playback of users on your site. You can see where they pause, stop, even rage-click.

This helped us a lot with usability problems, which has been really useful given we don't have a fulltime UX designer at the moment.

Probably the real genesis for my idea was a book I read. I came across a chapter in a management book that was talking about a company experimenting with the idea that all their staff, if they saw something wrong, or broken, or just not working right, they could log a 'bug' with management.

The idea you could log a bug with your company really resonated with me.

I had spent so long as a product manager, dealing with bugs in software, but the things that really slow you down, is usually the other things.

Maybe teams don't work well together.
Maybe the hosting platform sucks.
Maybe you don't have enough UI designers.
Maybe you don't understand sales very well.

Whatever the issues, I wanted to try and uncover that somehow, and really bring the issues to light so teams could identify them, diagnose them a little more, and come up with a solution that really speeds teams up.

Perhaps the best illustration of this is when it comes to company values. CEO's, executives, and HR people love the idea of defining values, but when you go into the trenches, they mean very little.

We've all been to the car rental place, where the value poster on th wall says "Best Service on Earth", but then you see the line with 50 people, and the sour look on the clerks face.

So why is it so hard to match values, to real behaviour?

So in OHNO, we look at all problems we capture through the lens of 3 things.

1. What's stopping you meeting the mission?
2. What's stopping you reaching your objectives
   and 3. What's stopping you upholding the values that are important to everyone.

By using these 3 things, we stop taking suggestions about getting ping pong tables and better flavoured water, and instead, get people focused on dealing with the important stuff.