Nobody Cares How Hard It Was to Make

This article was originally published on LinkedIn

Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick DeLisi spent years studying what actually makes customers loyal. In The Effortless Experience, they reached a conclusion that might surprise anyone who’s been taught to always go above and beyond: exceeding expectations doesn’t create nearly as much loyalty as we might think. Customers mostly want things to work.

I feel that every time I finish a batch of moonshine.

Making it can take days or weeks. You have to procure the ingredients. Then there’s preparing the mash, waiting for fermentation, running the still, making the cuts, and proofing the final product. Sometimes the first run doesn’t produce what you wanted, so you run it again. Add in cleaning equipment, watching temperatures, and all the other little things that happen along the way, and there can be a lot of physical work behind a single jar.

Afterward, sweaty, body aching, and tired, in the whiniest voice I can muster, I’ll say to my wife, “Moonshining is hard!”

The humor ran off years ago, so the typical response from her now is, “Mm.”

But hand someone a glass when it’s finished, and they have a much simpler job. They take a sip and decide whether it’s good.

Customers Experience the Result

In business, it’s the same. We naturally become attached to the effort that goes into our work. We know how many hours the team put in, how many problems we had to solve, how many times the plan changed, and how hard it was to get something across the finish line. Those things matter to us because we lived through them. The customer has a different perspective. They experience what we produce.

I’ve seen this many times in technology. A company can spend months implementing a new system. Behind the scenes, there may be tens of millions of dollars spent on product development, complicated data conversions, multiple integrations, thousands of test cases, and teams working nights and weekends to get everything ready.

Then a customer logs in and tries to do something.

They have no idea how difficult the conversion was or how many systems had to talk to one another. They probably don’t know that someone was on a conference call at 2:00 in the morning fixing a problem before launch. They know whether they were able to do what they came there to do.

All of that work behind the scenes does matter. In fact, it may be exactly why the customer had a good experience. The distinction is that we experience the effort while the customer experiences the result.

The same idea applies almost everywhere. A restaurant can spend hours preparing a meal, and the customer decides whether dinner is good. A contractor deals with suppliers, weather, and subcontractors while the homeowner eventually sees the finished project. A consultant can spend weeks researching an issue, but the client ultimately cares whether the recommendation helped solve the problem.

Effort and Value Aren’t the Same Thing

That distinction gets harder when we’ve invested a lot in something. The more time, money, and energy we put into a product or an idea, the easier it becomes to believe other people should value it as much as we do. We can find ourselves explaining everything that went into creating it when the more useful question is whether we created something people actually want.

Writing Against the Grain has given me a fresh reminder of that.

The book took a lot more work than I expected. I spent countless hours researching moonshiners, bootleggers, and distilling history, tracking down sources, writing, rewriting, and trying to separate good stories from stories that had simply been repeated enough times to sound true. Then came editing, design, promotion, publishing, and all the other things involved in turning a manuscript into an actual book.

I’m proud of the work that went into it, and I hope that work shows up on the page. A reader will still make the decision that matters. Was the book interesting? Were the stories worth reading? Did the business lessons make them think? Was it worth the reader’s time and money?

That’s probably one of the reasons the still is such a useful business metaphor for me. Good moonshine takes work. The mash matters. Fermentation matters. Making the right cuts matters. Proofing matters. Experience matters. Every decision along the way contributes to what eventually ends up in the glass.

The Customer Gets the Final Vote

Businesses work much the same way. We need to care about the work people never see because that’s usually what determines the quality of what they eventually do see. At the same time, we have to remember whose definition of value ultimately matters.

Customers generally ask pretty simple questions. Did it work? Did it solve my problem? Was it worth what I paid for it? Would I buy it again? They don’t need to understand everything that happened behind the scenes to answer them.

There’s plenty of satisfaction in knowing how much work went into making something good. I feel that way about a good batch of moonshine, a successful business project, and certainly about Against the Grain.

The customer still gets the final vote.

They bought the result, not the effort.

What are you working really hard to produce right now, and would your customer value the result as much as you value the effort? Please share in the comments.