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Going Slow at the Speed of Light
One of the great advantages of building products for the Internet is the short, almost instant feedback loop. You get data back from your members that you can iterate on quickly. I have always looked at our community members as an extension of our own Product team, a group of people with a vested interest in the product and real reason to make it better. Once you embrace your members as part of the team, then you face the challenge of balancing speed and patience to get the best results.
Speed and patience seem like pretty conflicting ideas, which is where the balancing act comes in. On the product front, we have the need for SPEED…to develop products as fast as humanly possible and get them in front of members so they can offer feedback. It is all part of a "launch fast and iterate model" we live by here at Demand Media…basically, the more turns you get, the better the end product with the least amount of guessing and waste.  But it would be easy--and dangerous--to live by Ricky Bobby's famous line "I wanna go fast". We also have to employ a fair amount of PATIENCE. The ability to know when NOT to launch something is critical and can be difficult to embrace in the speed driven Internet economy. But we can’t (and won’t) launch anything until the product flow, look and feel, and marketing are all at an acceptable level of utility. Anything less risks non-usability and, well, non-use.Similarly, we strive to balance SPEED and PATIENCE from the community perspective. On the community front, SPEED propels us to respond to user feedback and concerns in real time. It also enables us to integrate good ideas at light speed. Another great byproduct of this approach is the goodwill and relationship strength we build with every idea we incorporate. On the flip side, PATIENCE gives us the runway to effectively communicate with users. Some things cannot be done fast. Sometimes we need to track answers and address user concerns and that can take time. Introducing change, system and data migration, and product transitions require a calculated and deliberate approach, which is a challenge when we all want it bigger, faster, better…NOW! The consequences of going fast without going slow are severe, and even worse, challenging to undo. We learned this the hard way in recent years with a forum move. We were so excited about bringing two communities together that we zoomed too far ahead of the individuals – thinking we could bypass the important steps of preparing the community, communicating with them in detail and involving them in the process enough to make the change welcome. The result was that one group of users perceived the move as a stampede of strangers, almost an invasion of their favorite hangout. We learned a valuable lesson in that undertaking, and used that experience to plan out a well-paced, gradual migration of our TheDailyPlate.com community to our award-winning LIVESTRONG.COM destination. While we executed individual parts of the process at breakneck pace, we delivered an entirely new experience to the community over a 12 month stretch, and gave users the option to ease into the new environment at their own pace. The result was a happy, informed and appreciative user base—paying a dividend that has fueled LIVESTRONG.COM’s soaring growth and accolades.  It's this balance of speed and patience that often plays a critical role in the success of online products. At Demand Media our team has reached a point where it’s just as good at working the brake pedal as it is with the gas. And that’s how we make things go without crashing (and without having to run around the track in our underwear).Joe Perez is Demand Media’s EVP of Product Marketing & Community. Part of the company’s founding team, Joe drives strategy for each of Demand Media’s products as well as marketing and community interaction approaches. Follow Joe on Twitter at http://twitter.com/joeperez
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