July 18, 2011
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Company Culture
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I'm not a hunter.
At least, not the kind that delights in dressing in camouflage jumpsuits and sitting in a tree all day. I am, however, a hunter in business. Specifically, I'm a hunter of product improvements. I'm the destroyer software bugs. The king of sniffing out weaknesses in our company.
When you run a software company, you live and die by customer feedback. What new features are being requested? What idiosyncrasies can we weed out? I'm also eager to hear how we can make Trackur better. However, I'm not much for hunting squirrels, I'm more of a deer hunter.
Huh? How does that relate to improving our product? I'll tell you.
Every day we get requests for new features. Minor tweaks. Not normally anything earth-shattering, just the small stuff. Stuff that is tempting to fix because, well, it would make that particular customer happy. A no brainer, right? Make the change and delight a customer—textbook stuff for any company. Except, when you do that you basically hunt for squirrels. While it's easy to squeeze these changes into our development queue, they end up distracting us from the "big game" that we could be hunting. We end up acquiescing to so many little requests, that the big stuff, the cool stuff, the changes that would benefit hundreds—thousands—of customers, gets put off. We get distracted by the squirrels and forget to hunt the deer.
That's when you have to be smart with your product development decisions. It can be very easy to let your feelings of wanting 100 percent customer satisfaction to get in the way of the big picture—the big game hunt. I decided long ago that when you hunt deer, you end up with a greater sense of satisfaction AND you get to feed many more people than you do with a squirrel. To shove the hunting analogy aside; your business needs to focus on the improvements, features and bug fixes that benefit the majority of your customers, not just a single one.
To do this, we use a free service called Uservoice.com. We place their "Feedback" tab on our dashboard and then encourage our 35,000+ users to tell us about the features or improvements they would like to see made to Trackur. Then, and here's the cool part, everyone gets to vote on the features that they want. And, they only get 10 total votes. This ensures that our customers vote for the new features that they really want because they have to be sparring with their votes.
Uservoice then keeps track of all of the suggestions, and ranks them by the most number of votes. This allows us to see the deer instead of the squirrels. We get to see the features that our users really want. We're then able to provide our own feedback as to whether a requested feature is in the works, under consideration, or just plain impossible to implement.
Uservoice may not be for you. It doesn't help so much if you're a restaurant, consumer electronics manufacturer or the supplier of venison. But what you should have in place is some method of keeping track of requests that come from many users and not just the few. While squirrel hunting can be done when there's not much else to do, you'll feed many more customers if you know where the deer are.
Happy hunting!
Andy Beal is the CEO of Trackur, the world's largest social media monitoring tool. He is also the co-author of Radically Transparent, a transplant from England, a black-belt in martial arts and an avid ukulele player.
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