Chris Badgett from LifterLMS interviewed me for LMScast in March. Like me, Chris is a regular panelist on the WP-Tonic Roundtable. Unlike me, Chris plans things a long way in advance. He records interviews months in advance. The interview is now live as LMScast 189, and it’s strange to sit here at the end of June on a scorching day and see myself wearing layers of heavy clothes.
Chris and I had an animated discussion that traversed my past life as an academic, my early days of hand-coding HTML websites in the 1990s, developing and teaching courses online and off, and the importance of asking clients “Why?” every time you get a feature request.
As a consultant, Sallie has learned a lot about what it means for a website to be successful at achieving the desired goal. Challenging your clients choices is an important thing to do, and it can be intimidating for consultants, but it is better to have that discussion now than have a client end up with a product that doesn’t deliver the desired results. Asking your clients why they are making the decisions they are is key to getting clear on what their goals are.
LMScast 189: Watch the Video
ADD Kitty (so called because she can never get enough attention) makes an appearance about 5 minutes in. The “client pushback” section is near the end.
LMScast 189: Listen to the Audio
Unless you want to see the cat or admire my haircut, you should get everything you need from the audio file. I like video for conducting interviews, but I’d almost always rather listen to the audio, myself.
Read the Transcript
If you’d rather have the text, Chris has kindly provided a complete transcript. Here’s a lightly-edited excerpt:
Sometimes what a client asks you to build is not what they really need. It’s not necessarily even what they thought they were asking you for. […] They’ll say, “Oh, I want a slider, or I want this, or I want that.” If you are a developer, and you actually want a good outcome, you have to ask them, “Why? Why do you want this? What is it going to achieve for your business?”
“I saw it on X website and it was cool,” is not a good reason. […] I like looking at things that are cool and pretty as much as anybody does, but it’s my job to make the website achieve something for my client.
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