MetaChat - come in here and list guerrilla ways

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03 July 2010

come in here and list guerrilla ways of letting people in the middle let you talk to the end client directly
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* Refuse to answer any questions from the Main Person and when person in the middle freaks tell them to give the Main Person your email/chat id/phone

* Say "I'm not gonna take your job you [insulting adjective] [garden tool] it's just gonna be easier if we could talk directly"

* Get Main Person's contact details and just pop up on their radar.

* Explain to people in the middle that they're unqualified to do their job and can't communicate well with people anyway

* Stop caring. Who cares? Exactly. Let's just finish this thing and keep it moving.

Okay, real solutions:

1) Build trust with & indispensability for middle peoples so you're part of "them" in their minds
2) Don't sign onto things that have different layers of communication like that
3) If there has to be different layers of communication like that then if the communication is approaching real time ("what's the answer to this question, now?") attempt some ninja move that gets you into a conference call or chat with Main Person

post by: Firas at: 11:06 | 9 comments

Maybe I'm slow but I'm not getting the context here, Firas. What's are you trying to do? Is this part of your job or are you trying to get customer service?

posted by octothorpe 03 July | 11:24

Yeahh I was kinda being somewhat opaque on purpose cause this kinda post gets archived forever. But basically I'm implementing the technical aspects of the application for a client and the people doing the project management would rather do the communication with the client and handle the back and forth on that. There's also a complexity in that our agencies aren't exactly the same so they're also somewhat middlemen-ish. Does this make it any clearer?

It's like if you're making a group of intricate cakes and the person buying the cakes isn't in direct communcation with you they're going through the 'business person' in the middle as to what they need as it comes along. Then the business person in the middle is fairly clueless about the technical aspects of what you're putting together so they can't really insulate you from the back and forth anyway.

posted by Firas 03 July | 11:33

So the "i'm not going to take your job you stupid [garden tool]" part is a bit of a lie, if I could I would just cut the business people out altogether and do the project solo. heh.

posted by Firas 03 July | 11:36

Sorry, I guess that I was dim. And I'm glad that I work on a commercial product and not in contract work because it means that I don't have to interact with customers at all. We do get information back from sales or support saying "customers want RAID6" or customers want us to support this or that backup solution but they don't get to directly define the product.

That said, product management is often the worst part of any project that I've worked on. Getting them to specify things well enough for you to implement or test them can be like pulling teeth.

posted by octothorpe 03 July | 12:45

Ultimately I think you have to trust your people in the middle, if that's the way your company is structured. As a developer, I can certainly see wanting to talk to the customers directly, but problems can also arise from having multiple channels of communication if they aren't all on exactly the same page.

posted by DarkForest 03 July | 14:27

That's true, if they landed the client they're probably attuned to social aspects of interacting with them too that can get twisted by someone on another wavelength.

posted by Firas 03 July | 14:48

Handling this situation is your own boss's job. If you are your own boss, however, doing an end run around your client is a major dealbreaker and could earn you black marks throughout the local business community.

posted by Ardiril 03 July | 15:29

Maybe it would help to think of the 'middle-person' as your client, rather than as a barrier between you and the client? Forget about trying to work out what the end user wants and work on providing awesome customer service to 'your' client and the problems may, if not go away, at least diminish significantly. Considering the person in the middle as a customer may also make them feel more comfortable/more trusting with you and give you the opportunity to talk direct to the 'real' client when things get really sticky.

Maybe offering to include them in any communications so that they know what is going on would help if the above isn't workable? It can be pretty hard being piggy in the middle too (from my experience) - if you are responsible for delivering a product that you rely on someone else to create, life would be pretty difficult if you have no idea what the customer wants because you haven't been privy to conversations about what that is.

posted by dg 05 July | 01:40

Thanks for the feedback all. Yes, the person in the middle is my client quite literally. It's just that in an intense moment I managed to 'level up' their chain of command to talk to a higher person automatically so my brain was probably like this'll be faster if you go even farther! But you're right, my job isn't to do some sort of odd corporate social climbing here. My relationship with 'middle-person' is more important than my relationship with the large agency that's the end client; said agency won't be the ones coming back to me for more stuff once a project is over.

posted by Firas 05 July | 07:54

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