With the changing of the guard at eBay over the last month, Meg Whitman out as CEO, John Donahoe in as new CEO, it was inevitable that things were going to change. That is always what happens when a new sheriff rolls into town, they have to make their own mark on the company. Sometimes it is a positive mark, other times it is a negative mark.

John Donahoe wasted no time in making his mark on the company by making changes to user feedback, listing fees and service charges. Boy, I bet if he had a crystal ball when he made those decisions he surely would have stayed clear of them. The general response from their user base and the press has been extremely negative. Users are furious that they can no longer leave negative feedback (the sellers cannot leave negative feedback for the buyers), they are furious that now their service charges have increased as a result of the decrease in the listing fee pricing structure changes. So basically eBay took some of th cost off the front end and tacked it onto the back end, not a smart move, users are not dummies, they know what you have done. So to make good on this, eBay has slashed the listing prices in their media category (after all, you are talking about items that generally run around $10.00, so the listing fees should have been nominal to begin with), but this clearly did not cut the mustard for a make good.

So, as if all of this was not bad enough, some of the power users got together and organized a boycott. This has happened before and did not seem to have any negative effect, but this time it may be a little different. A Fortune Small Business article is reporting that eBay is seeing a 3% downturn in listings this week as a result of the boycott (caveat this with that they cannot determine with 100% certainty that it is a direct result, but reset assured it is having some effect). Something like this happening to a company the size of eBay could have the potential to cause a minor disruption in their day to day business, but if you are a small startup fighting to gain and retain your users, something like this could prove disastrous.

When things are not broke, you should not try to fix them. Even though every new CEO wants to make his mark on the company, perhaps they should learn a lesson from Mr. Donahoe and not mess with the users. If they are not clamoring for things to be fixed/changed, then let things ride. Like I said previously, you should take user feedback with a grain of salt, but in this case, the users were not asking for a change, so let a sleeping dog lay. Perhaps this boycott and onslaught of negative coverage for eBay may open the door for other players to step in and pick up some of their castaways.

Let’s face it, we build companies to solve a problem, or fill a void, or insert whatever cliche you can think of, but we build companies to solve for something, make our users / customers happy and make (hopefully) a ton of money along the way. The building of the company to solve a specific problem is the founder’s thing, he/she saw that something needed to be solved and came up with an idea, a business plan, a revenue model, distribution model, built a team and launched a product. That is what founders do after all, they lay the groundwork for what they hope is for a product / service that will be well received by its users and will be wildly successful beyond anyone’s imagination.

Along the way though, things can change a bit, and the company needs to be able to adapt to those changes (especially if they are changes that a bunch of users are clamoring for) and make the product / service better as a result. Every company experiences this, users submitting suggestions that they feel will make your product / service even better, but all of this has to be taken with a grain of salt. Some of the ideas are just plain out there and have no relevance to your product / service, others are suggestions that would only benefit a small percentage of users and then once in awhile there are those suggestions that would make the product / service all around better for the vast majority of people that use it.

There is a fine line that a company must walk between listening to what their users have to say and letting their users dictate what their product / service ultimately is. There are different camps that support both sides to this problem, one side of the camp would argue that you know better than your user, therefore you ignore anything they have to say and the other side would argue that you listen to everything that your users say and you change accordingly, after all they are the ones that are using your product / service, why not make them happy?

The fine line that must be walked and stayed as closely on as possible gives you the best opportunity to not only execute on the vision and strategy that you laid out for your company (not to mention pitched to your investors and promised that this vision / strategy was going to make them a lot of money), but also gains you insight into how your users are using the product and gives you the ability to make changes where change makes sense, as long as it is for the benefit of the company and of your users.

If you do not listen to a word that your users say, you are simply operating with blinders on and it will only be a matter of time before you turn your remaining users off and they will be on to better products. If you listen to every suggestion that they throw at you, you are going to loose site of what it is you are doing, loose focus, and potentially cause harm to your company. Either situation is bad and has the potential to end the same way, just the arrival is different.

Like everything else in business, it is easier said than done, and if it was so easy, everyone would be doing it. To ensure your survival and success, you do need to listen to what your users are saying, but do not take what they are saying as gospel, after all, they are most likely not prophets :-).

Come on, say it with me, “I do not have enough time in the day to get everything done, and I definitely do not have enough time in the day to do that for you.” Let’s be honest with ourselves, this is something that we have all said at one point or another, some more than others, and we have definitely used it as an excuse when someone has asked us to do something for them, right? Of course we have.

It is not a case of we do not have enough time, it is an excuse we use because it makes us sound like we are so important, so busy that we need 48 hours in a day to get everything done. What it really comes down to is good time management and setting priorities and executing on them. Everyone has a finite amount of time in a day (24 hours) and everyone has a finite amount of time in those 24 hours that they can actually be productive (some of us have more than others, but there is a breaking point for everyone, and it is no where near 24 hours). So if there is a finite amount of time in the day and a finite amount of time that you can be productive, then it stands to reason that whatever it is that you have to accomplish in that time frame gets assigned some sort of priority. If something is important enough, it gets assigned a higher priority and gets accomplished. If it is deemed not as important as the most important, but more important that the least important, it falls somewhere in the middle and the likelihood that it gets accomplished is somewhere over 50 % (these are estimates that I have pulled out of thin air for illustrative purposes, so take them with a huge grain of salt, but you get what I am saying here). The less the priority, the less likely that it will get accomplished that day, that is not to say that it will never get accomplished, after all, there is always tomorrow. It just gets thrown back into the mix of things that need to get accomplished tomorrow and reassigned a priority. Maybe this time it will get accomplished, maybe not. The good thing is that the cycle start a new with every new day, the bad news is that sometimes certain things keep getting pushed off until they are no longer deemed even remotely important and therefore never get accomplished.

So the next time that you tell someone I just did not have enough time in the day to do that for you, tell them the truth, it was not a high enough of a priority for you to do that day, sorry.