For Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals, 3 days at Tech Ed down, 2 more to go
So far, I’ve spent three extremely busy days here at Tech Ed Boston, talking to scores of attendees at our booth, meeting with DBAs, trainers, and dev team leads for extended discussions about the benefits of our product (as well as its current gaps and our future plans to fill them). I’ve had the opportunity to do a brief podcast segment (I’ll post a link as soon as it’s up at sigs.sqlpass.org) about our product. Finally, I’ve taken advantage of every opportunity possible to meet with folks who are completing our hands-on labs to get their take on how our V1 looks, what problems it might solve for them, and, most importantly, where we’re still missing the mark for their needs.
I absolutely love this kind of constant customer engagement. It’s always amazing how many assumptions that we take for granted as being true are shattered when you get face to face with the folks who pay your check (sorry, Bill, but it’s the customers who ultimately do that). Customers always bring up scenarios that, despite our best efforts, we’ve never thought of and would never think of from our point of view. Learning about these different needs and points of view through face-to-face interaction is irreplaceable, especially for someone, like me, in QA. It is impossible to do a thorough job of integration testing without a deep understanding of the problems that customers will try to solve with your product and how they currently go about solving those problems. With the information that I and my teammates are gathering through these customer engagements, we’ll do a much better job of getting this product ready to ship before the end of the year.
So, what’s in it for the customers? Aside from the quasi-selfish view that they’ll get a higher-quality version of our product, customers come to us with many, many questions about how to use current products, best practices and how they can leverage extensibility of our products to improve their own sales. My favorite so far is the gentleman who wrote a tool that uses Team Foundation Server an Outlook to automatically schedule a meeting when certain bug criteria are met. Great. Just what the world needs, an automatic meeting-creation factory. Maybe next he can work on a tool to automatically cut employee benefits and raise executive pay when a company’s stock drops to a certain level. But, I digress.
Finally, today we had a 3 hour focus group with a dozen prospective customers. This was another invaluable experience. The attendees were generous with their time and did not hold back. They let us know exactly where they felt that we fall short in V1, though they all love the direction that we are going and a number of them are going to adopt V1 even if we add nothing else to it. Despite the constructive criticism, I see this as all good. We want this product to grow over a number of cycles and even if we don’t get everyone with V1, we’ll get their eyes on us, watching for V2.
So, what, exactly, were the main customer requests? I’ll address that with my next posting. As for now, it’s almost midnight, I have another long day ahead, so I’m going to bed.
