My second bullet point in the Eyes On The Prize post that I made recently was Breaking the Shackles of the Brand. Perhaps this point is applicable more to the other areas of the business that I have worked in but then a derivative of it also exhibits itself elsewhere I think.
In my experience whilst working in the B2C facing division I thought that people were somewhat blinded by the brand that they were delivering, believing that that alone would be enough to generate traffic and to retain audiences. I tried to impress upon them that this was in fact stifling their ability to generate more traffic, that they should pay attention to the way in which products like flickr; facebook; any of the google or yahoo! offerings and many more are delivered, that it is in fact the feature sets that deliver the traffic to the sites and indeed generate new traffic.
In my own department, I think the observation is a lot more subtle. I think that the business units that we engage with are inclined to focus on how the proposed product looks rather than the requirements. However, in this instance, rather than trying to change that I think we need to understand it and embrace it understanding how we can elicit requirements through specifying how a screen will look for example.
braek for caek 