Glass Wool Effect

Glass wool is/was used in thermos flasks because glass wool is a poor conductor of heat. You can enjoy cool lemonade from your thermos flask even on a hot sunny picnic day because of the glass wool.

Many years ago, I found myself in a software building team which reminded me of this Glass Wool Effect. It taught me how bad this effect can be for the business and it also taught me how to tackle it.

Our team size was about 18 consisting of developers, testers, PO, designers etc. We also had a separate Tech Support team who worked closely with Customers to educate them, do the hand-holding, and solve their problems. Frequently Tech Support Team and Developers had long discussions (many times heated discussions) about the problems customers face.

The Tech Support opinion used to be “Developers do not really understand how Customers use our product and how to solve their problems”. The Developer’s opinion used to be “Tech Support folks do not know how to use the product and how to provide support”.

In short, the Developers were living a life like lemonade in a thermos flask, completely isolated and safe from the heat of customers. They were completely oblivious to the heat from the real users.

To be fair to Developers, it was not their fault.

Somehow our Org had created a working practice that Customer Interaction was exclusively reserved for the PO and Tech Support. A working practice where Developers job was just to write code. In Agile lingo, their job was just to complete User Stories. To make the matter worse, they were using metrics like… Velocity, #of Stories Completed, Health of Backlog, yadda, yadda, yadda. They were doing all this very diligently. But at the same time these developers had absolutely zero outward focus.  It never struck them that all these metrics are worthless, in absence of the metric of Market Feedback.  

All these developers were extremely sharp and hard working. The root cause for customer complaints was that the developers were not PERSONALY exposed to them.  The glass wool effect. I decided to remove the glass wool so that the lemonade will realize how hot it is outside.

I removed 4 developers from the Dev team for a duration of 3 weeks and told them that they should work closely with Tech Support folks and help them to solve Customer issues. Developers were anyway convinced that Tech Support folks lack product knowledge. So, they took this challenge happily. Within just 2-3 days, these Developers realized that the way they were visualizing the product is not same as the way it was being used in market. They quickly understood what kind of problems real users face. More importantly they started appreciating the challenges and the work of Tech Support folks.

Just after 1 week, I could conclude this experiment which I had planned for 3 weeks. The outcome (& the learning) was…. There is absolutely no substitute for the first-hand interaction with real users.  After that 1 week, the interaction between the Developers and the Tech Support was completely changed. Their team work became exemplary. Developers started showing willingness to talk to Customers with (or even without) Tech Support folks. Because they had realized that 1 Hr spent with Customers can give them big insight and that can help them tweak the software and to plan further work.

Once the glass wool effect was tackled, it became a win-win game.

In fact, a win-win-win game.