Hoard the Black Coffee

by Victor Stone

notes...

As soon as Sandeep walked into his work area, he saw the yellow sticky note in the middle of his monitor summoning him to his manager's office. Despite the obvious urgency of the situation, he made it a point to stop at the coffee machine before getting to his manager's den. He may not have been self-aware enough to readily admit this indirection was any overtly dismissive or passive-aggressive statement, but he did know himself well enough to hoard as much black coffee as he could to shore up for the encounter. After all, Sandeep reminded himself, this is a new manager. New to him, new to managing, new to the company—and new to life. Just new. Hoard the black coffee.

When he arrived, Sandeep was waved in by the bushy haired man-boy who was pounding away at the keys of a wafer-thin laptop while at the same time gaily yelling into the speakerphone at a voice equally young and excited on the other end of the line. Sandeep didn't pay much attention; he figured he would sip his coffee as he slowly sat down in one of the stiff guest chairs positioned opposite the host. He took the extra moments to notice where books had overflowed the limits of the shelves and were now starting to stack up on the floor. Aside from a few classic software references, the rest of the books were unknown to Sandeep—and yet they all seemed to be on the same topic. In between the gurgling slurps of his coffee that would make his manager noticeably wince as he typed and talked, Sandeep tilted his head sideways to read some of the spines: The Ins and Outs of Covert Usability, Covert Inquiry: Uncovered, How to Win Users and Influence Analysts The Covert Way, Gordon Liddy Does Usability, Surreptitious Software NOW! and Shhhh! Covert Tips and Tricks.

After the manager hung up the phone and exchanged a battery of quick and cordial morning-flavored greetings with Sandeep, he got right down to business. "We're going to correct a long-standing problem with our products, Sandeep: We're going to do what the customer wants."

"I'm glad to hear that," Sandeep replied sincerely.

"For the foreseeable future, we're going to totally devote our energies to doing a series of covert interviews," the stripling manager continued.

"I've heard something about that; isn't that like usability tests?" Sandeep asked. Usability tests were a well-known entity. You showed your new features, or at least a reasonable prototype, to real people who then tried to use your product. These tests were usually very reliable, Sandeep recalled to himself—especially if the users completely rejected the ideas or, even better, prioritized them for you ("Sure I want it all—but whatever you do, make sure you give me this foo-bar feature!").

"You see, that's the beauty of covert interviewing," the manager said, beginning what sounded like a recitation. "Usability tests are inherently polluted, because the observed has not only been told what to expect and what is expected of them—but worse, they have been told that they are being observed, and that alone is a big enough problem. You can never really know if the user is asking for the right thing."

"Really? You think so?" Sandeep asked, gladly preparing himself for "deep discussion" mode. "Because, I have to say, it doesn't seem that way to me. It seems like we know what's wrong with the product today."

"Oh, sure, Sandeep. Why talk to users? We know what's wrong because we use it. We'll just do it your way and keep things the way they are," the manager interrupted, smiling. His expression was patronizing, sarcastic—bordering on demeaning, Sandeep thought—and this took him off guard. But the surprise of the moment didn't register long on his face—for even if this particular form was unfamiliar, this type of not-so-hidden defensive aloofness was quite the typical side effect of the newness.

"Actually," Sandeep said with his own deterministic smile, "I was referring to the fact that users are pretty clear as to what's wrong with the product."

"Ah, but that is the point of covert inquiry! You can't trust the user to know what the hell they want!"

This time, Sandeep let the confusion rest on his high, crunched-up forehead for a while and took a long, loud, bubbly lap from his steaming mug—to which his manager gave a barely perceptible twitch as he proceeded to explain the ins and outs of covert inquiry to the elder engineer. Inadvertently loud caffeinated savoring aside, obedient silence seemed the most judicious course for Sandeep.

While the manager lectured on, Sandeep strained to remember the first time he had heard the term "covert inquiry." He could mentally trace the expression to the multi-billion dollar product teams in building 23, which would also explain why his manager felt so deeply about the subject. Befitting the naturally selective hierarchy within the company, if your product did not make billions of dollars, you could do worse than to follow the lead of those that did. And so, young-Turk middle-managers from all over the company became enraptured with the new burgeoning scientific branch of software usability testing that all of building 23 seemed to be holistically adopting. Sandeep could understand, if not identify with, his manager's thought process: If it's good enough for building 23, we'd better just do it.

"What's the point of this again?" Sandeep felt he had to be reminded.

"We watch the user work in their office or cubicle; they don't know they are being observed."

"You mean literally eavesdropping?"

"Yes, of course! That's the only way to know, honestly, what the user expects from their software."

"You mean prototype software?"

"Oh no! You can't let them know anything about what you're considering for the next version of the product. You have to extrapolate that feature set without talking about it."

"Whoa, sounds heavy. How far does this go? Don't tell me you set up cameras like a convenience store?"

"That would be ideal, but cost prohibitive. What studies suggest is that it is okay to be with the user and to observe them—just not to let them know that they are being observed. So the interviewer goes into the workspace of the subject under false pretenses and observes the subject that way."

"False pretenses?"

"Right, a network repairman, contractor, plant lady, phone man—anything to get into the workspace ..."

"... and pretend to be working on the network or phone?" Sandeep could no longer contain his incredulity. He could feel his eyes widening as he put his coffee down to wipe the sweat beads that had suddenly popped out of his face. His mind raced to picture some powerhouse manager from building 23 donning workmen's uniforms over his designer T-shirt, strapping a camcorder disguised as a voltage meter onto his work belt, jamming a clipboard into his hip, and chomping on a wet, snapping wad of gum while responding to innocent and honest resistance from the subject, such as "But there's nothing wrong with my phone"—at which point, the counterfeit phone repairman would say "Yeah, but we've traced a problem in the line to somewhere in this quadrant. Looks like this cubicle; I'll be out of here in no time, you just continue with whatever you were working on while I crawl under your desk. What are you working on, anyway?"

"Think about it," Sandeep's manager pressed. "How else can you be assured that you are getting a real read on the way the user works?"

Sandeep picked up his mug and drew the hot brew through a tiny slit in his mouth using the air from the depths of his diaphragm. With an easy prejudice, Sandeep had rightly or wrongly come to mistrust anyone under thirty.

Meanwhile, he was being lectured with statistical proofs in favor of covert inquiry, which he put through "the filter" before absorbing. Until now, he knew he was using some kind of straining process, but he couldn't really define it. He figured it was roughly based on the knowledge that the vast majority of software projects do not die because the wrong libraries or platforms were used, or because the team wasn't smart enough or big enough or funded enough, or because the marketing catch-phrase was wrong, or because user input and reaction weren't gathered with the latest, greatest scientific methodology. While it might be true that some situations call for a seat-of-the-pants bold, new, non-reflexive reaction, the filter he used was beyond that kind of cleverness. Sandeep soon realized that "filter" was a bad analogy altogether, because it implied a taking away, a reductive reasoning. But this was definitely an additive transformation that resulted in a focusing, a clarity. It was the missing element from this manager, and was represented by the idea of putting everything in their project on hold to experiment with something called "covert inquiries," only to (hopefully) end up with the same set of well known user requirements and no closer to implementing them.

After the verbal lecture and the internal rebuttal were over, Sandeep stood up and asked if he could borrow some of the covert inquiry books. The manager was visibly pleased at Sandeep's apparent turnaround, and eagerly handed him the "best" of the bunch, citing each book's strong and weak areas, pointing to specific chapters of interest, and offering to buy Sandeep his own copies. As Sandeep politely deferred the offer, he cradled the books under one arm and scooped up his nearly empty coffee mug with the other. It was everything the manager could do to contain his pride at having sold the importance of covert inquiry to Sandeep, a man for whom the manager seemed to have a newly found respect. A respect, Sandeep thought, of convenience.

Back in his own work area, Sandeep sat down to research covert inquiry, but the constant, nagging, unanswered question was the unexplained popularity of the theory in building 23. After two days of book research, that question led him to call an old friend.

Unlike Sandeep, Rajeev had made it a career imperative to "own" a substantial project—and after several years of working his way up the company pecking order, he managed to broaden his sphere of influence all the way to senior management in building 23. As soon as he saw the caller-ID name SANDEEPV on his phone, Rajeev enthusiastically hoisted the handset to his face. "Hey Sani! Let's go to Starbucks and slurp some coffee! Wait, I've got my earplugs around here someplace!"

Without missing a beat, Sandeep ignored the playful slight and punched back "Oh, you see, I'm never sure when the big, important people have the time to mingle with the riff-raff untouchable engineers whose labors make it possible for them to live so high on the hog! If you pardon the expression!"

"Well, Sani, it's been too long!" Rajeev said with genuine joy and affection. "What can I do for you today?"

"In all seriousness, tell me about convert inquiry, why is your team so hot on it? How do you plan to use it?" Sandeep asked without giving any hint of judgment.

Rajeev starting laughing in a way very familiar to Sandeep. That laugh meant something was up, but Sandeep didn't want to attribute it to anything specific until he could hear it from Rajeev, unprompted and untainted.

"Oh my lord! Where do I start? Do you want to hear a story?"

"I'm listening," Sandeep said, trying to stay out of the way.

"It turns out that because we have majority market share and trending upwards, middle-managers around here looked up and said 'Guess what! We won!' and they took it to mean that they don't have to talk to customers anymore. As if they had never heard of 'something to lose.' As you can imagine, senior management heads were exploding when they realized what was going on. I mean, I thought I was going to go insane! So we tried everything—I mean, everything—to get our people to talk to customers. We threw parties, flew them all over the world, threatened to fire them, move them, demote them, promised money in their budgets, pet projects, head count, offices with views of the lake—I mean, everything! Then, in the middle of all that, one thing stuck to the wall: 'You should go and do this thing I just read about,' one of my colleagues said. 'It's a little weird,' he says, 'but it's a fresh, sexy, fun way to get user feedback; not the same old same old,' blah, blah, blah ... and what do you know? Of all the stuff to get these guys off the golf course and in front of users again, it turns out to be this crazy covert madness. Who knew?" It was easy for Rajeev to tell this story and conjure the same surprise he felt when he first realized it was actually working.

"So, let me see if I get this," Sandeep said, starting to let a sliver of judgment into his tone. "The only reason you paid attention to covert inquiry was to get your middle-managers to talk to their users?"

"You got it. Can you believe that? I still get a belly laugh every time I see a video of one my team under a desk in some ridiculous phone man costume."

They quickly changed subjects to matters of all kind, talking as if they were sitting on a stoop catching up on old times. Then, with a purposeful finality, Sandeep said, "Okay, my big, important friend, it's late and time I check in with my real boss." They left the conversation with a mutual promise to make a date to get together face-to-face.

Sandeep had what he needed, and his research project was over. He speed-dialed his home and in a calm tone reserved for her and her alone, he asked his wife for forgiveness for coming home later than usual that evening, explaining that he'd gotten behind about two day's worth of work and had to make up for lost time. Later that night, on his way out, he returned the manager's books—leaving them on the large rolling chair topped with a hearty "Thanks!" scrawled across one of the sticky notes he found on his manager's desk.