In early February this year we published our first product roadmap, outlining our product priorities and plans through to the end of June (Q2)�
Firstly, our users responded with more energy, enthusiasm and excitement than we could have imagined. We had users sharing their ideas and their own priorities, a big uptick in voting in our Ideas Forum and a lot of feedback and suggestions.
Internally, having public, stated priorities and implicit promises had a powerful result for our own productivity and production. Our design and development teams rose to the challenge and were able to focus on the important things, which made sure they got done!
Finally, we saw a big effect in our conversations with prospective clients. While we'd always had clear future plans about features we were going to introduce in the future, it turns out that many technology companies use vague "in the pipeline" promises to hoodwink new clients into committing to a product and then being let down. Turns out being specific, honest and accountable wasn’t something many people were used to, and sharing our roadmap in detail was just another way for new faces to see that we’re not like the legacy technology companies they might have (had the misfortune) of working with before.
In keeping with the philosophy of Big Rocks, we focused on the priorities that mattered the most in Q1. We were excited to ship breakthrough new features in our Upgrade to the Contracts & Retainers Module, let you show your creative side with Custom Email Signatures, gave admins more control with Visibility Options on Financials and even shipped a new feature early - our new API.
While we just missed the cut-off date of the end of Q1, we’ve also recently shipped the Expenses Module and the Divisions Module, which were also important to us in Q1.
In terms of the missed targets, we’re still going on the Activities overhaul because we decided to make it a bigger upgrade in Q2 than we had in mind previously; keep an eye out for a new approach to your To Do list, a new way to create activities and more in coming weeks. We also pushed back the Weekly Activity Summary and the inclusion of Tasks, Activities and Requests in Sync until Q2, mainly because the proper upgrade to Activities will allow us to make these features even better.
Now we’ve finished Q1 and we're into Q2, we’ve been able to look more clearly and closely at our plans and priorities, and unsurprisingly we have a more detailed view of what we’re focusing on this quarter. Additionally, we’re also able to share with you our priorities for Q3 - we’d love to hear what you think!
The following are the priorities we’re working on delivering before June 30, 2013:
You might note if you compare this list to the priorities published in February that we’ve moved out the Resources/Attachments Improvements and the Automatic Notifications/Reminders.
The reason for moving back the Resources/Attachments piece is that we want to give our users more choice when it comes to files and storage in Accelo, and so in Q3 we’ll be focusing on integrations with Box, Dropbox and Google Drive/Docs natively within Accelo.
The Automatic Notifications/Reminders have been pushed back to Q3 because we’ve decided to invest more heavily in the Activity Module Upgrade than we'd planned at back in February, which is going to leave us too short on time in Q2 to knock over this new feature (which of course depends on activites being rock solid).
The following are priorities that we’ll be focusing on in July, August and September 2013:
We'd love to hear your thoughts about our roadmap - feel free to contact us or join the discussion in our Accelo User Group.
