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There is nothing enterprise about this at all, its just yet another project management portal with a pretty design and a simplistic feature set (the complete op

by se85 14y ago

There is nothing enterprise about this at all, its just yet another project management portal with a pretty design and a simplistic feature set (the complete opposite of what an enterprise needs). ...And to confirm my thoughts, the linked post basically says in the first paragraph that design is the reason for many problems behind enterprise software.... I think a lot of potential enterprise customers who have to deal with the problems associated with poor enterprise solutions daily would never give you guys a second look after saying something so....unrealistic? The reality is that most enterprise software I've ever had to work with has had far bigger issues than UX and design, and due to office politics among many other roadblocks, software with these known issues can remain running for years with no fixes, or half assed fixes at best, before a decision is finally made to deal with the situation, and at this point, the cycle repeats itself again. Do you honestly think that corporations are going to break the cycle and do something different and drastic (such as changing all their workflows to suit your tool for example) just because your stuff looks prettier and easier to use? When large companies are looking to replace architecture, there is usually a pretty big reason behind it, and many people who need to be sold on the idea for final approval, this isn't going to happen because of anything design related, it will almost certainly be feature or strategy related. You will find very limited traction going down this path. Enterprise is all about features, workflows, politics and (sometimes but rarely) reducing costs (from a product and man-hours point of view), all I see is a simple project management tool that doesn't address any of this. The idea of a cloud distributed project management portal arguably makes it non-enterprise automatically (security or privacy policies anyone?) as does the fact that you guys are clearly not an enterprise yourself (although there is little you can do about this, it just puts you at an automatic disadvantage for consideration amongst many large corporations). How will you guys support a support contract for an enterprise with 1000 users? What about 5000? Hows about 20,000? My point behind all of this is that, to break the software lifecycle in large corporations in large numbers requires large amounts of money, and many multi-faceted strategies (which require considerable head counts), amongst many other complex considerations. I suggest you guys have a long and hard think about who your customer really is in enterprise (its not the end user, its middle management) and think about pivoting into something which would ultimately not be as disruptive to an enterprise as a new project management portal (for the 10th time in as many years, as is usually the case) or ditch enterprise altogether, it sounds like you guys have a lot to learn before you can build a product for the enterprise, and there is nothing fun about doing this, trust me! I do really like what you guys have done so far from a product point of view, the problem is that it totally is not appropriate for enterprise and is a very very long way from being even close, I think you guys should be doing something more like what Yammer are doing with their general business strategy (not targetting enterprises, just businesses, big and small, but mostly small) to have any chance at success, and because of the industry you have chosen (project management) with the added bonus of Yammer as a competitor its going to be tough to gain any traction regardless of business strategy, but you guys should be looking to at least maximise your chances instead of shooting yourselves in the foot. Pivot. - An ex-enterprise programmer.

eitally 14y ago
Yes, a thousand times yes. - a guy in charge of enterprise apps.
rdtsc 14y ago
> I suggest you guys have a long and hard think about who your customer really is in enterprise (its not the end user, its middle management) Which is also why their strategy might work. Management have iphones and they have seen good design and can tell that their intranet web portal from 1999 looks shitty. But the bigger trick, is not actually the design or the feature set. The trick is to know how to sell to enterprise. So hire Oracle salesmen who know how to play golf and loose just enough. Sadly, if you know how to sell golfware, it doesn't matter much what golfware does.
- se85 14y ago
  I agree with you on the selling point, but the product still matters from a functionality point of view, just not from a design or quality point of view. If the business requirements are not met, everything else is a mute point. A manager is still going to be focussed on meeting business requirements (not pretty interfaces), this is their job after all, and it is their head on the line if things go bad and there is a big hit to productivity in the workplace for whatever reason, design is the last thing for them to worry about in the big scheme of things, and to survive in middle management in a typical enterprise organisation, you HAVE to think like this. The higher up the food chain this is escalated, the less people will give a crap about design, and the less of a chance you have at inking a contract. It simply does not meet very many business requirements at all in the enterprise, and is a complete unknown entity compared to say the likes of IBM or HP (who both provide enterprise project management portals (or did). Its a brutal market, the only way I see their strategy working is by targeting smaller businesses primarily and servicing enterprises on the side (like Yammer have intelligently done, which seems to be working well for them)
dave_sullivan 14y ago
As someone who currently makes a product geared towards improving the user experience of enterprise software, I think much of what you say is true. Some things I've learned from my own experience: Rather than try to get people to change anything (like have them use a different product altogether) I built my product to integrate deeply with Salesforce.com (a product with a large install base). I tried to focus on specific shortcomings of Salesforce and fix those because a huge investment has already been sunk in their current system and the whole thing is not going to change. Rather than focus first on design (which certainly factors in--it's a new user interface for Salesforce) I focused on improving the speed of specific tasks and emphasize time savings and increased user adoption. It is a lot easier to get something sold and closed at a company with 50-100 users than it is 500-1000. I have gotten feedback that I should have made things even more like Excel or ACT (ugh), because it's what people are used to. IE, many people don't want a new interface, they want an old one. It has been near impossible to sell a "one size fits all" solution for this, so I have gone the route of customizing heavily in exchange for much higher prices--a hybrid product/consulting approach. Simple sounds like a good idea, but every company has different processes and methods, and they want those integrated. (Probably why Salesforce itself had to focus on customization and a developer eco-system so much over the last 5 years). Even with all this, what I thought would be a "slam dunk" has proven to be really really hard to sell. However, I have massively improved my sales conversions by ditching the self serve approach and embracing the hybrid product/consulting model.

by se85 14y ago

eitally 14y ago

Yes, a thousand times yes. - a guy in charge of enterprise apps.

rdtsc 14y ago

> I suggest you guys have a long and hard think about who your customer really is in enterprise (its not the end user, its middle management) Which is also why their strategy might work. Management have iphones and they have seen good design and can tell that their intranet web portal from 1999 looks shitty. But the bigger trick, is not actually the design or the feature set. The trick is to know how to sell to enterprise. So hire Oracle salesmen who know how to play golf and loose just enough. Sadly, if you know how to sell golfware, it doesn't matter much what golfware does.

se85 14y ago
I agree with you on the selling point, but the product still matters from a functionality point of view, just not from a design or quality point of view. If the business requirements are not met, everything else is a mute point. A manager is still going to be focussed on meeting business requirements (not pretty interfaces), this is their job after all, and it is their head on the line if things go bad and there is a big hit to productivity in the workplace for whatever reason, design is the last thing for them to worry about in the big scheme of things, and to survive in middle management in a typical enterprise organisation, you HAVE to think like this. The higher up the food chain this is escalated, the less people will give a crap about design, and the less of a chance you have at inking a contract. It simply does not meet very many business requirements at all in the enterprise, and is a complete unknown entity compared to say the likes of IBM or HP (who both provide enterprise project management portals (or did). Its a brutal market, the only way I see their strategy working is by targeting smaller businesses primarily and servicing enterprises on the side (like Yammer have intelligently done, which seems to be working well for them)

dave_sullivan 14y ago

As someone who currently makes a product geared towards improving the user experience of enterprise software, I think much of what you say is true. Some things I've learned from my own experience: Rather than try to get people to change anything (like have them use a different product altogether) I built my product to integrate deeply with Salesforce.com (a product with a large install base). I tried to focus on specific shortcomings of Salesforce and fix those because a huge investment has already been sunk in their current system and the whole thing is not going to change. Rather than focus first on design (which certainly factors in--it's a new user interface for Salesforce) I focused on improving the speed of specific tasks and emphasize time savings and increased user adoption. It is a lot easier to get something sold and closed at a company with 50-100 users than it is 500-1000. I have gotten feedback that I should have made things even more like Excel or ACT (ugh), because it's what people are used to. IE, many people don't want a new interface, they want an old one. It has been near impossible to sell a "one size fits all" solution for this, so I have gone the route of customizing heavily in exchange for much higher prices--a hybrid product/consulting approach. Simple sounds like a good idea, but every company has different processes and methods, and they want those integrated. (Probably why Salesforce itself had to focus on customization and a developer eco-system so much over the last 5 years). Even with all this, what I thought would be a "slam dunk" has proven to be really really hard to sell. However, I have massively improved my sales conversions by ditching the self serve approach and embracing the hybrid product/consulting model.