Closing the Imagination Gap

One of the ideas we talk a fair amount about at our company, Daily, is that it’s important to close the “imagination gap” between us on the one hand, and our customers and potential customers on the other. In everything we do that’s public facing, closing the imagination gap is really important.

Our customers are, by any measure, quite sophisticated.

We sell to engineers and product teams, but even though our customers are really good at what they do, we know a lot more about video, audio, and real-time networking than they do.

In fact, that’s our value. We take on as much complexity, optimization, and DevOps work as we possibly can. Freeing product teams up to work on things that are core to their use case and unique to their product.

So there’s always a gap between what we know and what our customers know, and we often have to work hard to remember what that gap consists of so that we give people the right information for what they know and what they’re trying to do.

This applies to documentation and tutorials and marketing materials and the custom demos we build when we’re working on big enterprise sales.

For example, one of our rules of thumb for demos is that they should look like real applications, even if we’re just building what we think of as a kind of a simple tech demo to show something like a specific CPU optimization.

In our experience, if we include basic UI elements that are familiar, like for us, buttons to unmute and mute cameras and microphones in a demo, those elements help orient people and makes conversations about what the tech demo is doing a lot more useful.

Two other examples. We publish versions of tutorial content that focus on specific use cases, even if the underlying tech is the same. And we try to put good screenshots in blog posts and technical explainers, even if we’re talking mostly about the underlying tech and not UX.

In our experience, a little bit of familiar context goes a long way toward closing the imagination gap.

Today’s music is “Nails” from the 1960 Jimmy Heath Orchestra record “Really Big!”. In addition to Heath’s matchless writing and tenor playing, we get to hear Clark Terry, Nat Adderley, Cannonball Adderley, Dick Berg on French Horn and Tommy Flanagan.