Right - yeah the "not hearing" can be bad - especially if the "conversation" isn't actually a conversation so much as marketing exercise.
I guess I haven't made a clear enough distinction in this particular post between those two types of "conversations" and how they correlate.
I notice this with clients a lot: they are technical, but use different terminology and have different backgrounds
This is key I think - when someone tells you you're being too technical and they don't understand what the product "really does" but they're not a layman in the sense that they are technical people themselves, it's easy to get confused about what "really does", really means!
My thinking after seeing this TED talk is that "what does this really do?" can be translated as "why did you build this?" and thusly "why should I care?".
This may seem obvious but to me there is a subtlety there that I feel as though I've been missing all along. When people say "what does this really do?" my instinct is to say things like the list of TiVo features he talks about - not "sell with a vision" of how much better it's going to make their life - a vision based on my belief in the product and on why I built it in the first place.
I guess I haven't made a clear enough distinction in this particular post between those two types of "conversations" and how they correlate.
I notice this with clients a lot: they are technical, but use different terminology and have different backgrounds
This is key I think - when someone tells you you're being too technical and they don't understand what the product "really does" but they're not a layman in the sense that they are technical people themselves, it's easy to get confused about what "really does", really means!
My thinking after seeing this TED talk is that "what does this really do?" can be translated as "why did you build this?" and thusly "why should I care?".
This may seem obvious but to me there is a subtlety there that I feel as though I've been missing all along. When people say "what does this really do?" my instinct is to say things like the list of TiVo features he talks about - not "sell with a vision" of how much better it's going to make their life - a vision based on my belief in the product and on why I built it in the first place.