“Can you just?” culture. Digital products aren’t tangible; you can’t drive an online course, live inside a website, or display lines of code on your mantelpiece like a custom sculpture. Yet to create a bespoke Learning Management System or an interactive learning experience takes an extraordinary amount of skill, planning and people hours. So why aren’t they attributed the same monetary or time value as physical products? If I buy a new car, I can open the bonnet and see the engine that drives it. As I do this, I might briefly appreciate the human time and effort that’s gone into designing and building the beating heart of my new motor. Most people only ever see the surface of a digital product - words and images that are quickly scrolled past. There’s no mechanism to showcase the work done to put those words on the screen. Even something as simple as a magazine has tangibility to it - the feel of the pages, the smell of the ink. Back in the day, if you wanted to learn about the latest movie news, you had to make an effort to go to WH Smith’s and spend the money to buy a copy of Empire. Now you get all your movie news online for free. Because of this devaluing of digital products, clients don’t see the issue with fixing, tweaking and changing things long after a product has launched into the wild. Emails beginning with “Can you just…?” are the stuff of nightmares, as it means having to explain to a customer why their seemingly innocuous request to change the logo on their platform, when they’ve supplied a pixelated jpg with a white background, is actually a shit-load of work that’s going to cost a fortune. You don’t take your car to a garage and ask them to spray it pink, thinking it will take 10 minutes and cost a fiver. And even if they agreed to undertake the work and asked you to bring your car in for 8 am Monday morning, you wouldn’t rock up at 4.45 pm and still expect it to be done on time. There’s a huge disparity between people’s digital and real-world workload expectations and the perception of the time and effort it takes to create and service online products. I’m not saying that the analogue world and way of doing things was better (though my 80’s/90’s childhood was pretty sweet - action figures are cooler than iPhones, Appetite for Destruction is still one of the greatest albums, and Tomb Raider on Playstation 1 hasn’t been beaten). Digital innovations and products have meant that my movie collection doesn’t take up a whole room, I never have to visit a high street shop and I didn’t have to trawl bars in my 30s looking for a wife. I am saying that just because e-learning professionals make developing your digital products look easy, doesn’t mean there isn’t a tonne of blood, sweat and tears going on behind the scenes. Oh, and time - a lot of time goes into those products too. So stick to your bloody deadlines.
The top 5 email openers from clients about to pull a “Can you just?” In at number 5, it’s the classic, “Hi Mark, hope you’re well.” It’s a statement, not a question, as they don’t actually want you to answer whether you’re well or not - they want your focus to be on the “Can you just...” that’s about to follow.
At 4, we have, “Hi Mark, how was your holiday? Are your kids back at school now?” This is the next level - they’ve made it personal. So now you feel like they’re your friend, and you’d always help out a friend, wouldn’t you?
An oldie but a goodie at number 3 “Hi Mark, we’ve looked at the designs and think they’re great.” Immediate red flag. Nobody gives positive feedback. Ever. How many times have you gone on Trip Advisor to leave a positive review? You haven’t - you only leave reviews when the food is shit but you might start by saying how attentive the waitress was. That’s exactly what this is - they’re buttering you up to drop a “CYJ” that will see you redesigning every last detail of the thing they think is great.
A new entry at number 2: “Hi Mark, I spent 3 hours doing something on our LMS and now it’s disappeared.” First things first - they haven’t spent more than 3 minutes on the LMS before realising they’ve forgotten everything you taught them in that handover training session 6 months back. So now they’re going to blame the technology that you built in order to guilt you into doing their job for them. Stay strong and just email them a link to the recording of their training session that you made.
And still holding on at number 1, it’s: “Hi Mark, our boss, Director X has taken a look at the project and had a few ideas...” This one always comes once you think a project is signed, sealed and delivered. Up until this point, you’ve never heard of the mysterious Director X an eleventh-hour spanner in the works who may not even be a real person. Is it just a clever ploy for the client to squeeze last-minute work out of you whilst absolving themselves of any blame? Probably. Whip out your contract that shows who on the client-side is responsible for final sign-off. If the named contact has signed the project off, Director X can do one.
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