How product innovation is combined with feedback from customers – the evolution of CrossTag for XBRL tagging

In my last entry, I talked about how customer feedback was incorporated into the product. However, we try to balance feedback from customers in conjunction with product ideas that we think would benefit our users

In the spring release we have several new features that we would like to enhance (based you’re your feedback) over the next 6 to 9 months. We are introducing the following:

• Workflow

• Automation via import from Excel

• Hierarchies for dimensional tagging

• Tagging assistance features including comparisons of tags from other filers

• Enhanced search and help me tag

Now, we could follow the traditional way of developing software and think through all the possible scenarios for each of these features, develop these features, go through a process of cutting the items that we do not have time to complete, and finally deliver one (maybe two) of the above features sometime in 2010.

However, with Agile development, we include all of these feature in our CrossTag Spring Release. We try to deliver a feature that has enough functionality to solve some of your basic issues. For example, in this release, we provide tagging assistance to assist when you are tagging an element. This tagging assistance will include the number of filers who are also tagging using that element (patent pending). See the screenshot below:

Now we know and have discussed a number of other uses for this feature. For example, we could:

• Add peer group %’s

• Include this in the in-use elements

• Include this in the markup report (which we did)

• Include this in Dragon View

• Include this in Dragon Tag

• Drilldown to see what companies make up the 57.5% number

• Etc, etc

Instead, we keep this somewhat basic, but very useful. We then listen to our customers and, based upon this feedback, incorporate enhancements into the summer or fall release of CrossTag or our other products.

This results in a win-win situation for Rivet and for yourself.

Customers win in the short term because they have five new features that they can use immediately rather than one feature with all the bells and whistle that they can use in 2010.

Customers win in the long term because they can use the feature and thus provide better feedback. Only the development work that is going to have actual benefit is performed. You will see the features enhanced over the next few releases, thus making their experience in 2009 that much better.

Rivet software wins because we keep our development costs low as we did not develop every variation of the feature imaginable for a product. We might just discover that customers do not use the feature they way we had imagined (or worse yet, they do not like the feature at all).  If very little or no feedback is provided, or the feature is not as useful as we thought, we will not spend any more time on the feature and we can focus our efforts somewhere else that will provide customer benefit.

Rivet now puts out a feature and benefit table as part of the release notes. This is because every feature we develop must have customer benefit – or why do it?

Help us continue to develop and enhance the correct set of features. Please email me any comments or suggestions you may have at kevin.berens@rivetsoftware.com.