Work

    We work with start-ups, Fortune 100s and educational institutions. But all of them face similar core business challenges—building the right relationships at each stage of the market cycle to help ensure widespread reach and acceptance.

    • Where will your next community of early adopters come from? Where will your next community of early adopters come from?

      You need to have real, in-depth conversations with the right customers and those using your competitors. This isn’t the kind of thing that can happen at trade shows. This is not a marketing exercise—what you talk about might end up on the chopping block. How do you id people with that future view—who you can trust—where you can reveal plans and have a meaningful conversation. How do you bring the right people in collaborate on your go or no-go decisions. The value of face-to-face engagements, Summit etc.—hear from your influencers, feedback.

      Read More…

    • What’s the pathway to your product? What’s the pathway to your product?

      If you’re an early adopter, you’ll teach yourself. The rest of us need entry paths—for brand new ideas, for new releases.

      People are happy what they have. To create a migration path, you need to train them. We enter at an early phase, bringing in authors and other influencers to help ease adoption and more importantly, make a case for why your audience developers. For instance, we helped ID the barriers for entry to MS certification and created the entry materials. Also barriers for entry to educators using MS products. We help ID audiences who aren’t using your products and build the educational path for being successful in using.

    • How do you validate your big technology bets? How do you validate your big technology bets?

      Build a community of innovators to reach the tipping point for broad adoption: Current stats suggest 10% adoption by a community signals acceptance. We help companies get to that 10%. Build a community of early adopters to pave the way for broader market acceptance.

    The Microsoft Office team asked us to develop a method to provide in-depth, ongoing feedback for their developer focused products from initial concept to beta testing. They wanted to hear both from their users, non-users, and those who use the competitors’ products. We built panels of users in different roles from Solution Architects, to ISV’s to IT Pros. We’re on the second version of SharePoint and Office Developer tools since this project launched. The project consists of providing customer input to an internal cross team effort from M1 to launch for new versions of Office developer products. Product areas have included Access, SQL Server, SharePoint, Web Development, and support tools. 

    Panelists were recruited and selected based upon their expertise and relevance to the job role specific to each panel.   Over seventy panels, with 8-10 customers each, have been conducted since June 2010 to provide on-going feedback. As a result we have built deep relationships between the developers and their customers.  Upon completion of each panel session, the respective PowerPoint presentation, annotated Lync notes, audio recording and a summary report are shared broadly among the appropriate internal teams.

    Not only are we on V2.0 for this team, we’re being talked about and asked to provide support for other product development teams at Microsoft.