Comments on: How we develop KashFlow and what happens to your suggestions

By: Frans

Frans — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 19:32:55 +0000

good approach. You can chitchat about it a lot and lose yourself in theoretical discussions etc. but most important is it works.
But if I might suggest the following ? With the app you are talking about two things: data that is already in it (and processed) and data that is not in it and you would like to have processed. Why not for example implement a way to decide yourself what kind of data you want to see in the reports ? Ok, you have one, but that only turns on or of a ledger account. I am talking about the information IN the accounts.
Just buy a nice asp.net webpart, link it and have us have fun with it.
So is for example the projects column not shown when you run general reports. I have of course contacted (btw your fantastic) support team but most of all I was a little surprised that it was not shown.
I am sure that you can agree if I state: if you deploy something, deploy it good.
(ok, it is good, I think I must say: deploy it the best).

By: John Hyde

John Hyde — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 08:53:39 +0000

I wonder if rule #1 will mean you miss some kind of game-changer that leaves everyone else in the dust?

By: shankar

shankar — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:19:25 +0000

“Collaborating with your business users frequently” is one of the critical principle for any successful product development initiative. We follow this in our company on our product development quite a bit. You can collaborate on:

– product roadmap (listening to what your customers want and put them into a prioritized feature list)
– looking at customer support issue log to understand customer pain points
– usability aspects & importance of features from the customer perspective

To answer Pauls’ question on role of developers — we do gunslinger events where we make the developers play the role of end users…that really helps them to take up the real product ownership. Once they realize what they are building, that changes their thought process, approach to development. They start asking questions on what our end users would ask :).

I have also seen products having metrics implemented which tells the feature usage across the product. I think, this is one of the important stuff which helps the product managers to focus on their enhancements.

By: Vincent

Vincent — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:31:25 +0000

Another vote for UserVoice
“Tracking ideas for 32,496 organizations.”
There’s even some kind of open source version:
https://uservoice.com/for/opensource

Or, use the KashFlow forum poll feature for more control your end.

These things also help avoid idea duplication, as none of us have any clue if our own ideas are new or already submitted/planned.

By: Paul Jackson

Paul Jackson — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:24:52 +0000

We’ve used a very similar model when adding features and planning new releases. We’ve found with external clients in particular, that they really like the ability to plan and launch new features every month – certainly using Scrum has worked for us in this respect.

How have you found your change of role from developer to Product Owner? Probably like us it’s not a big deal for a small organisation, but it must be difficult sometimes not to roll up your sleeves and get stuck in?

As Matt says, there is mileage in exposing your roadmap to customers using something like UserVoice or Get Satisfaction. It’s a great way to let them know they’re being listened to and keeps the fresh ideas coming!

By: Matt Chatterley

Matt Chatterley — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:27:50 +0000

This is very similar to the model which we will be using for our eCommerce framework when we re-launch in the near future – so I’m glad to see you’re using this sort of approach and find that it works well.

Have you thought about exposing any of the “internal” information as to what is in the queue, etc to users (e.g via UserVoice or similar)? This is a point which is still very much open for (heated) debate in our camp!