Mavericks as a Muse

Pendo has clear intentions for the features we build, but we don’t always know or have the resources to build everything that our customers want. When the choice is available, we expose more power to our users in our data and messaging features. To certain types of people and teams, these powerful options are part of a toolbox to create value from the product beyond what comes out of the box. These people and teams are Mavericks.

Mavericks are a valuable source of inspiration for features in your product. Mavericks don’t just ask the question “wouldn’t it be cool if” — they take the initiative to build it. There is little inhibition regarding the “intention” of a feature or API. We have Mavericks internally and externally including analysts, professional services engineers, and customers.

Adam Lohner is one of our Mavericks.

For a company founded by product people, it should be no surprise that NPS poll responses are of interest to a broad audience at Pendo. When we launched our NPS poll support, we used it on our own product to start collecting user sentiment. Over the first few months, nearly every response was copied into some Slack channel or DM.

After witnessing these isolated conversations in Slack and throughout the hallways, in his role of Customer Success Retention Analyst, Lohner decided there should be a common location to view and discuss NPS responses. And what better place to both automate new responses and have a conversation than Slack? As a side project over a few weeks, Lohner went from learning the definition of an API to using them to make NPS responses show up in Slack within weeks.

We embrace our Mavericks as muses to assist us in filtering the endless list of possible features. The solutions they come up with don’t need to be robust or elegant. They must only provide a hint toward an answer to the question “should we productize this?”

From the inspiration of our Mavericks, we released our official Slack integration. Now, any Pendo user can see NPS responses in real time via Slack. We will continue to build powerful features based off their hard work and support them by filling their toolbox with powerful features.