Over 30 days since last blog post. Where have I been?
by Will M on 25 Feb 2009 12:45 AM
Last month, Jan. 14th to be exact, we tried a completely different approach to our product release process. At that time, Active Social still was not production ready, but yet we had some very anxious customers that were eager to get started. The evening of the 14th I gave a little over 200 customers access to the Active Social Customer's Only Forum. The first topic in that forum was a rather long message explaining what was about to happen and changes that Active Modules would be making above and beyond the release of Active Social. I really had no idea what was going to happen next. We were about to release a product that wasn't complete, missing features and obviously included bugs. In my mind, worse case scenario was that the negative feedback or comments would simply overwhelm and frustrate us. Best case was that we ended up with 2-3 beta testers and some feedback. I was completely shocked with what happened next.
Jan. 15th had to be the most stressful day ever in the Active Modules office. I tried to come up with every reason possible to not post the install package that day. I was about to post a product that was somewhere in between an Alpha and Beta release to over 200 paying customers. Not really something I wanted to do. Finally, after about an hour of walking around the office I said, "Let's just see what happens and deal with it". The build was posted with as much detail of known issues as possible. I also included a list of items that would be addressed next and when the next build would be posted. Instead of waiting to see what customers said about the release we just kept programming. A few customers posted about the release. Bugs were added to the tracker and support issues quickly addressed. This continued every day, 7 days a week and in some cases all day long(as in 24 hours straight). In a little over 4 weeks we released 17 builds for Active Social and 3 for Active Forums. During those 4 weeks we had over 2000 forum posts, over 50 support tickets and hundreds of emails between us and the 200 preview customers for Active Social. The support, feedback and encouragement we received from our customers was unbelievable and extremely motivating.
One of the many things we have learned from this process is the importance of communication. I don't think a single day went by that I didn't post some kind of status update. I think there was at least one day where I posted almost every hour about what was going on with the build for that day. It's safe to say that everyone involved knew exactly what was going on and what to expect at all times. This is something we will continue to do.
I think what excites me the most about this process is how our customers are now interacting with each other. We had customers that have been with us for over 3 years and never posted until now. We have never had this level of participation before. We are going to do whatever we can to make sure it continues.
Not only were our customers fantastic throughout this process, but so was the Active Modules' staff. While development was locked away (literaly), Mollie and Ben kept everything else going. Thanks!
Will Morgenweck
Active Modules