Sunday, July 18, 2010

Product Roadmaps; Proactive or Reactive?

The last several months have given me lots of time to think about product roadmaps.  As I usually do, I’m going to try and pepper this post with actual feedback I received from actual customers within the last two weeks.  I think that this fresh commentary from the customers that use ECM products, rather than just all of us ‘in the industry’ is what can really make these discussions exponentially more valuable.  My end goal is to have actual customers interact with us, be it via blogs like this or twitter or pick your medium.  My question today, should product roadmaps be proactive or reactive?  It’s easy to say ‘both,’ but I don’t think that that is a very honest or realistic answer for many products…especially mature products.

A Balanced Approach

So, roadmaps…in the eDOCS world (for those that don’t know, eDOCS is a document management application from Open Text…but I suspect if you’re reading this blog you already know that Smile) we kicked off our formal planning for DM 5.4 last month.  We went through the normal process of consolidating and grouping customer enhancement requests and balancing that with some of the concepts required to take the product in the direction we feel is best for the long term.  Now, DM is a mature product, but it is one that is used actively by thousands and thousands of users.  In many cases it is considered the mission critical application for customers.  For those reasons it continues to have a very active and vocal user community that contributes enhancement requests on a regular basis.  At the same time, as the ‘Content Experts’ we on the eDOCS product team are always keeping an eye on the ECM industry at large, and the legal industry specifically, as that is where the majority of eDOCS customers are found.  Our goal…our job…is to recognize the trends that are developing in this space and insure that our customer’s investment is protected by adapting the technology to continue to fit their business needs.  Overall, the team and I were very pleased with the first workshop for 5.4.  In this case, we truly are striking a balance of proactive and reactive roadmap development.

reactive

This past week I had the pleasure of sitting down with a legal customer here in the U.S.  They primarily wanted to talk about one of the other legal applications in the eDOCS & Legal Solutions portfolio.  Now the discussion regarding this product’s roadmap stemmed primarily from a mistake that Open Text has made in taking too long to publish a public, formal product roadmap.  A mistake I committed to remedying shortly.  Nevertheless, this customer’s natural assumption was that since we had not published a roadmap then we must be planning on ending support and development of the product.  My response was that given the lack of information from Open Text I couldn’t blame them for feeling that way, but that it was categorically untrue that we had plans to end support for the application.  Once we were over that point we turned to what was actually going to happen with the product, where was it going, etc.  After describing things such as platform updates we would be providing, etc., it was the customer who perfectly categorized our roadmap approach for this product as ‘reactive.’  And, it is.  But, is that a bad or negative approach?  I was left with the feeling that the customer believed it was and hence it’s given me pause to want to write this blog post.  The fact is, that in this case we are again dealing with a mature product that while critical to many of its customer’s businesses, sees very little in terms of customer enhancement requests.  In fact, a cursory review showed us that there have been only two or three in the last two years.  As a software vendor, that should (and does) send up alarms that perhaps people are not using the product or are looking to move away.  But, that does not appear to be true as there is little, if any, activity around maintenance cancellation.  So, what was the outcome here?  This customer left the meeting charged up to try and spark a discussion in the larger product user community at large.  They too wanted to see if people were happy with the product as is or had changes they wanted to see.  If they could develop enough discussion and collection of common interests then perhaps they could help drive the roadmap.  Personally, I thought that was great.  Obviously, we can’t commit that we will be able to implement every idea or request that may come from this group, but at least we would be having the dialogue if the user community feels significant enhancements are needed.

proactive

Two weeks ago I was in in London for our annual Legal CIO Advisory Board meeting.  One of the customers I had the opportunity to speak with there is in our pilot program for the Open Text Social Workplace (OTSW) product.  It’s a secure, turn-key social media/collaboration product that has gained tremendous interest in the legal community.  In fact, Open Text was recently selected as one of only five vendors to present in the Innovative Technology session at next month’s ILTA Conference.  Now, when I think about the roadmap for OTSW, I see it being much more proactive.  For the most part, our existing customers don’t use this type of technology today.  They’re thinking about it and they’re thinking about how it can be useful for their business, but they don’t use it yet.  Therefore, almost everything that is in the OTSW roadmap from a feature/function point of view has come directly from our own volition and market research rather than from individual customer enhancement requests.  This left the customer I mention above wondering why the feedback and functionality requests they were asking for were not yet available.  They were able to see some, but not all, in the roadmap and wanted to know why we were not reacting quickly to their requests.  OTSW is a perfect example of a vendor realizing the change in a market and proactively choosing to invest in a specific area in the belief that it will benefit their customers in the long run.

“survey says…?”

Is one approach better than another or are they both just facts of any given product’s lifecycle?  Obviously, newer products are always going to be a bit more proactive and more mature products are always going to be a bit more reactive.  While it’s easy to say “we blend both approaches,” unless you’re only dealing with one product (or very small set of products) then that is probably not very candid.  The truth is that from an R&D perspective there is always a finite amount of resources that must be prioritized over a seemingly infinite number of potential projects.  The secret sauce is in knowing which projects to invest in and when.  Naturally, this may put off new customers who purchase a product that is currently in a reactive state or frustrate customers on the bleeding edge buying a product that is in the proactive state. But, in the immortal words of Michael Corelone, “It's not personal, Sonny. It's strictly business.”  That’s why, in my opinion, the most important ingredient in that ‘secret sauce’ I mention above is communication with your customers.

Let me know what you think in the comments below…Till next time…