Another useful write-up from Creating Passionate Users, this time on the subject of learning from people who hate your products.

For a long, long time now I’ve known this simple truth: I have learnt far more from criticism than I’ve ever learnt from compliments.

This isn’t some masochistic outlook on life: if you want to improve something you need to know what’s wrong with it. Sometimes that something is you, sometimes it’s your team, sometimes it’s your writing, your code, your broken down car, whatever. If something is wrong, living in denial and assuming the fault lies with the World at large means you’ll never be able to fix it.

All too often I’ve sat in on meetings where people have told me what I had built was “fine”, it was “OK”. I could see the product sucked, that it would fall apart when pushed, but it was their sign-off. If they’d been honest with me, I would have had the momentum and back-up for changing it and making it better. With the key people just sat there happy to sign off something “OK”, all I could do was let them be complacent.

When somebody criticises your code/service/product, don’t justify your position and block out what they’re saying. Listen. Take notes. Go away and have a coffee and think about what they said. Then work out what to do about it. It might be too late to do anything, or it might be an oppurtunity to do something great. Nobody will know until you’ve heard about the complaints in the first place.

There is one caveat though: remember being positive is harder than being negative. Negative is easy. When you ask people to be positive they may struggle, but when you ask them to be negative expect a cascade of venting to come your way. Be prepared for it, and don’t be surprised if after the exercise the number of negative comments outweighs the positive comments 10:1 or worse. Just accept it, deal with it, get on with fixing it.