Kathy Sierra has done a fantastic job of pushing people to understand that it is all about the users and that you should design and build your products to produce passionate users. I could not agree more with her, it is about creating passionate users.

I think it is worth a minute of time to think about what comes before creating those passionate users, and that is as a company, you need to create passionate employees. In order for a company to create passionate users and therefore fantastic products, first they must start from within and create passionate employees. After all, what is a company without it’s employees, they are a company’s greatest asset. When the success or failure hangs in the bowels of your employees satisfaction, you are best served by doing everything you can to foster and environment that creates enthused, passionate employees.

When a company starts treating their employees like commodities, numbers, dispensable objects, then they cannot possibly care about the output of those employees anymore. Unenthusiastic and dispassionate employees have no real reason to go above and beyond what they have to to get by and therefore they wind up creating mediocre products at best. As a company, this can only go on for so long until it starts impacting your bottom line, both financially and your perception on the street. The potential end users of your products see that you are churning out mediocre products and will quickly turn away to your competitors who are offering higher quality products. You will quickly establish yourself as the laughing stock of the industry, or people will take every opportunity to bash you and claim that your products are no good. Well, if you are not creating passionate employees, chances are those naysayers are right.

The first step to recovery in this situation is to admit that you have a problem. Once you have admitted that you have a problem, you need to set a plan in place to fix the problem. Apple had this problem years ago when they were producing mediocre products and everyone wondered what was going on there. They knew they had a problem, and they set themselves up to fix it. Look at them now, they are the envy of everyone. It seems that everything they produce is a home run success. Not everyone can be Apple nor does everyone even want to be, some companies would prefer to continue to drive themselves into the ground, ignore the problems from within, just stay the current course of action. For those companies, I wish them all the best, but only time will tell their fate.