Always Deliver More Than Expected

Business Lesson Learned From Larry Page, Co-Founder of Google

This article is about doing work at the highest level and delivering more than is expected. It’s about doing it for yourself, for your customers, for your coworkers, and for the industry as a whole. It includes a great deal of detail on how to build a product that people love, how to sell that product effectively, and how to build a great company culture.

Delivering more than is expected is the essence of great management. It’s about going above and beyond, to try to leave the world a little better than you found it. Often, it’s about individual people and their everyday lives — doing things that make a meaningful difference to them and help them feel good about themselves.

Promise the customer more than they expect.

No one likes to be disappointed. Always over-deliver. Understand that your job is never done, and that the customer will always be disappointed if you get too entrenched in how good your last work was.

Early and often means something like this: don’t wait for the company to be perfect before you start talking to real customers. It’s no coincidence that Google’s first motto was “Don’t be evil.” Any early network effects you can engender by talking to people are helpful, especially if they’re going to identify a problem you didn’t recognize. Equally important is making grandiose promises–the specific kind depends on what product you’re making.

A startup’s key resource is responsiveness. Yet it’s often not realized how responsive startups actually have to be in order to succeed. You need to respond to customer growth, to competitive moves, and to the market’s reactions to your own moves. Some of these can happen very fast, within days or hours.

Promise them more value than they expect to get for their money. The reason: if you’re right, you’re much more likely to get the business and keep it for a long time.

Doing just enough is a bad strategy. You need to go beyond customer expectations.

A problem with unconventional and/or under-funded startups is that the directors often end up doing just enough to get by. This confronts them with a risk, though. If they’re really going to grow faster than established players, then they need to do at least a little beyond what those players do.

To find a successful product-market fit, the first thing you need is to go beyond customer expectation. This includes all different ways of going beyond customer expectation — by exceeding their functional expectations, surprising them with interesting features they didn’t expect, exceeding their emotional expectations (creating an experience that makes the user look at your product and say “wow”), exceeding their financial expectations — all of them.

It doesn’t make sense to do what people expect. That way lies mediocrity. Instead, you should listen to your customers, but then go beyond what they expect. You should give them something better than what they asked for. By doing this you create an unexpected and lasting impression in their mind.

If you do just enough, your users will expect you to deliver that plus a little bit more the next time. After a few iterations, this can easily lead to feature creep and bloated products.

Don’t do just enough to be okay. Go beyond what is sufficient, and you’ll find that people will talk about you and want more from you. If you’re satisfied with outdoing the competition, you’ll be the loser in the long run.

If you do just enough, you’re another commodity. In tech, that’s a bad place to be.

Takeaway:

Always deliver more than expected.

• Promise the customer more than they expect.
• Doing just enough is a bad strategy. You need to go beyond customer expectations.

Thanks for reading :)