A strong business is like a table, supported by four legs.

• The Business. The reason that resources and people have been gathered together. There is a vision of what the group wants to do and what success looks like.

• The Design. Don’t think style; think Design/Build. This is where the group takes the business idea and determines how they will make it happen, where the stores will be, what a datacenter looks like, who they will partner with.

• The Presentation. How the Business and the Design are shown to people. How the shelves are stocked, the landing pages look, the advertising is placed, how the business looks to potential customers.

• The Delivery. This is the critical part of how the business uses the systems they have designed and the presentation they have crafted to deliver something of value to the potential customer.

Without any one of these, an organization will fail to meet the most critical goal it has set to be successful: an experience that turns a visitor or browser into a customer.

All the Business and MBA grads in the audience are yawning, and slapping their Venti non-fat, no-whip, decaf soy lattés down on the table. This message isn’t for you. Well, it is, but you can stand up and give your chair to one of the people behind you.

Now that I have Dev, QA, and Operations sitting with me (remember, the Business guys are still in the back of the room, tapping away on their Blackberries), tell me what you think of this conceptual table. How does the Table of Customer Experience relate to you?

Ok, put down the Red Bulls and Monsters and listen: Everything that Dev, QA, or Operations does has an effect on the experience (negative or positive) of the potential customer. If one of the table legs is broken (or even shorter than the others), the rippling shockwaves will eventually affect the entire operation.

So, if I were to ask the member so of your organization how their daily activities supported the online application in each of these four areas, do you think they could answer?

Grab a white board. This is going to be a long day.

Picture courtesy of sashafatcat

In the world I work in, customers bought a product or a tool. The purchase is driven by a desire to solve a problem or prevent a problem from appearing in the first place. It was a point solution, a single point of entry into an organization and added a very limited amount of value to a siloed compartment of an organization for a limited period of time, before the next shiny toy came along that purported to do the same thing, only better.

Economies of scale be damned, full inefficiencies ahead!

Companies that sell platforms, or have begun to to consider doing more than just paying lip-service to the word, look at the world with a different filter. The customer is seen as a holistic entity, as complex as any patient who comes to a doctor for treatment. If two people come to a doctor with the flu, they don’t always get the same treatment, as the one patient may be sent home for rest and the other rushed to hospital because their compromised immune system means the flu will kill them without specialist care.

The best platforms are those that are focused on one to three key aspects of customers business or way of doing business and provide a unified way to perform these 1-3 functions. The customer should not be forced to go to completely different places to use each tool on the platform.

Platforms have unified flows, and customers can expect that using different parts of the platform will be easy to learn, as they all work the same way. An example of a bad platform is Microsoft Office. When you go to the File Menu in a Microsoft Office product, you know that regardless which product in the suite you are using, the same items will be there. Where Microsoft Office fails as a platform is in the way that the rest of the menus and actions are not unified, with Powerpoint behaving differently from Word, which are both different from Excel. Microsoft Office is a the case study of history is getting in the way of ease of use, of standalone products loosely linked, like cheap knock-offs of Lego™.

Platforms are truly extensible. If a customer needs an additional component of the platform, it can be enabled (after the appropriate business negotiations) in minutes.

Platforms need to allow simplicity when needed and complexity where required. While a 10-person company and a 10,000-person company have different needs, the same platform should be able to support these needs. Salesforce.com is a classic example of this – in their world, they don’t care what the size of your company is.

And, platforms have to guided by product management teams, to have a shared vision. Product management has to enforce a strong adherence to the core values of focus, unity, extensibility, and complex simple complexity. A product management team that lacks the leadership to drive these values will produce a broken platform

How does your platform compare against this checklist?