Start With Why

I’m a huge fan of Simon Sinek and his Golden Circle. I highly encourage you to watch his TED talk. So I decided that in order to properly introduce Pendo that I needed to start with “why.” Future posts will cover the rest of circle.

Bad software products frustrate me

Unfortunately, one of my many personality flaws is a lack of patience.  I just hate it when I start using a software application where I want to quickly accomplish something, and I get stuck. Maybe the page is slow to load or the button isn’t where I expected it to be. Maybe it’s missing something I assumed it had. Maybe I neglected to enter something “required” that wasn’t obvious. Regardless of the reason, these scenarios can drive me into a state of mini-rage, especially if it’s five minutes before I’m ready to leave.

Now being a product guy, the last thing I want to do is drive my users into a state of mini-rage. Sadly this can be at odds with other priorities that are important. Product folks have to balance these issues against direct customer requests, market changes, or possibly even compliance requirements.

Hard trade-offs

So how do great software products handle these trade-offs? It’s simple. They focus on them, collect what data they can and invest a lot of time and money. Throughout my career, I’ve had varying degrees of success with handling these trade-offs well, but it’s hard work. You need to invest in internal tools and infrastructure. You may need to invest in your team either through training or worse by upgrading certain roles.

In general, this is all hard work. Hard work that is really important, but isn’t work actually ON your product. It’s often too hard for smaller companies or even larger companies who have legacy practices.

Making the world better one software application at a time

This is why we exist. Our goal is to level the playing field by giving all product teams (large and small, legacy and new) a platform to help them create amazing products that last. We’ll give you what you need to understand your product and encourage user behavior, so that you can focus your efforts on making it better.

Marc Andreesen wrote that software is eating the world, and there’s nothing to dispute this. However, that doesn’t mean that the software is always making things better. I’m hopeful that as we evolve and grow that we help all organizations leveraging the power of software to ensure their software is actually helping their users and making the world a better place.