What is the secret sauce?
What really drives new software features? Do we live in a world where the marketing department rules the day with ROI driven and profit making capabilities from within the software? To an extent, I believe the answer is yes. Businesses exist to make money. Business software is written to facilitate the flow of money either through sales or automation of processes. If a piece of software doesn’t help the organization to make money it won’t last long.
But software that is not used, doesn’t make money. No matter how good the idea, if the software is not used, the business justification fails. This is why an open feedback loop with users is critical to the success of the software and could be tagged as the secret sauce for software development. User input drives usage. Usage accomplishes the goal for sales or productivity.
Creating the WOW.
Service organizations like to create the wow factor with customers to drive brand loyalty. Good software has that effect also. I see people that are passionate about Evernote, OneNote, and Photoshop as examples. Evernote survives with paid subscriptions. With a free-version available, and many options for recording/capturing notes, they have to “wow” customers to keep the software in the market place. The Evernote blog is a good place to see user input and feedback. Users provide feedback in the comments section and are often cited in case-study like blog posts. New features sometimes don’t have a direct link to increased sales. But they do have a direct link to usage which has a direct link to sales.
I was pleased this week when I heard a product manager tell a steering committee that we have a good feedback loop in place with the user-base that is driving feature enhancements in a software tool. Some of the feature-adds were completely cosmetic. But they were added to drive additional usage on the site. For the site referenced by the comment, additional usage means increased cost reduction through productivity gains in the back-office. If we execute properly, we should position ourselves to deliver the wow factor for the users. That was exactly the point of the comment.
So I submit that the open feedback loop with customers is the secret sauce that helps software achieve it’s stated goals. Product managers and marketers have to find the balance between user input and needed features for ROI. Without usage, the software is just a heap of 1s and 0s.