Bruce's Blog

WOW! what an eventful summer – I was so focused on our product releases of Summer ‘09 (Analytics 9!) and the upcoming Fall ‘09 that I neglected this space. I can’t argue with this priority given the results. And, from the overwhelmingly positive feedback from our customers, soon to be customers and partners it appears we are onto something here. These releases are the result of much hard work from the amazing and talented team I have the honor to work with at Webtrends. They clearly demonstrate our commitment to innovation, architectural integrity and our customers.

For today’s discussion I want to focus on our customers and how their needs reshaped the Engineering organization at Webtrends. Many of the innovations we have pushed out have direct customer feedback at the core of the effort. We have strived to “bring the customer directly into Engineering” so that we are designing our solutions with direct feedback from those who will leverage them. A fallacy around technical teams is that they wish to be shielded from the market – this is of course complete nonsense with the reality that engineers crave real world examples and the more we can bring our customers into the process of developing our solutions the more value our solutions will deliver to our customers.

But this simple goal – customer centricity – it is not simple in execution. Much has been written on the challenge with a seminal work being the Innovators Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen. We must balance our customer’s immediate needs with their declared and anticipated future needs. And the speed of change is only increasing thus the speed of our change in our customer’s business is increase. We need to be able to receive feedback and adjust to it at an ever increasing frequency. Listening to our customers is critical, but even more critical is responding to our customers in a timeframe that is relevant to them.

As I looked at this challenge eighteen months ago I realized that for us to respond to our customer’s feedback in a timely manner we needed to change a number of core business processes at Webtrends. Prior to focusing on implementing customer feedback mechanisms and processes (which we have now built directly into our products), we focused our ability to respond to the feedback.

Let me explain – looking at it from the customer’s perspective: how do I influence a 12-15 month development cycle? I will have to time my input for the first few months of the vendor’s development effort and then I hope that my requirements remain consistent for the next 9-12 months. Not a very likely scenario with today’s pace of evolutionary and revolutionary change. Once viewed from the customer standpoint it is pretty clear that we needed to change the way we developed our products before we could truly increase our customer intimacy and centricity.

In waterfall, work is done in phases and comes together in the end. In agile, work is also done in phases, but work is released at each stage.

Starting in summer of 2008 we set out to transform the Webtrends Engineering organization to a truly agile organization. This was not an easy process – nor was it painless for our customers. But it was critical for Webtrends and we are now seeing the benefits of this transformation. By releasing every 3-4 months we have dramatically shortened the timeframe between feedback and delivery. We now respond to our customers needs in a timeframe that is still highly relevant to their business. Looking again from the customer’s perspective, I don’t think I would choose a vendor who isn’t as agile as my business…