30 Days of Agile Testing – What are the Customers Saying?

Note that this post is part of a series where I am ‘live blogging’ my way through the ministry of testing’s 30 days of Agile Testing challenge.

I spent a bit of time today researching what customers are saying about our product.  It was a very interesting exercise and there are a couple of general insight I learned.

In the first place, it seems that for most of the comments I could find, customers are looking for more features from out product.  There were a lot of comments about ‘can it do X?’  This kind of makes sense as we are working on one of newest products our company has made and so customers that have experience with our other products know that there are a lot of other things that can be done.  Some of them may want the product for it’s ease of use and integration capabilities, but they also want to be able to do some of the stuff they could in our older products.

The other things I noticed was that there was a lot of positive press around our product (good working marketing!) and overall those that use it seem to like the way it works and to be happy with the general paradigm.

So what did I learn?  I think one of the key take-aways from this is that we need to make sure we are investing in code level quality and other initiatives that will allow us to move quickly on adding new features to the code.  But we need to be careful here.  We don’t want to be pulling customers from ourselves.  In other words our target market isn’t people that already buy other version of our companies software.  It is those that use our competitors software.  Where are these feature requests coming from and what kind of customers do they help attract?  We clearly need to keep building out the feature set of our product in a quick and responsive way, but we also need to keep focused on delivering features for the kinds clients we are trying to attract.

It was fun to dig around a bit and see what customers are saying about us.  We get some of this kind of feedback through product update meetings, but it really was fun to go out and find some of it on my own.