The increasing role of community in Product Development

In my ongoing research about customer-integrated product development practices, I am increasingly seeing the role of community in shaping better products. Startups that start with a community oriented product development approach, meaning, the features and releases cater to a community request rather than a single customer or market extrapolation, release better products every time. For instance, take the example of Spiceworks, an IT software startup based out of Austin, TX. Spiceworks has a great product development model. They provide a free networking analytics and management software. I think the reason their software is great is because they base their releases on what their customers want. The Spiceworks community currently has 365 groups. In these 365 groups, these is a diverse mix of intent. The original groups that are directly related to Spiceworks are still prominently used to have product discussions. But, the ecosystem that has been created resulting in the huge array of user groups have led more interesting discussions and opened new product opportunities.

The question I ponder is how effective can a company be to continue following this approach of customer(s)-integrated product development when it starts shedding its startup clothes. For instance, with Spiceworks, they have a lot of things going right for them. When I was talking to Jay Hallberg, a co-founder of Spiceworks, he told me that the company made a conscious decision to get rid of the Marketing Research Document (MRD). They prefer working with the customers directly. To me, this is a paradigm shift in setting up a company's culture. In my experience as an engineer with Qualcomm, I never had an access to our customers. We had marketing documents that would dictate how things are done. The insight that a developer gets when there is a two way interaction with customers augurs well for the product. Spiceworks seems to have that thing figured out right. There are other companies that have been successful implemented a community powered product development model. Zappos and Threadless come to mind. There are bunch of others too. I am still in the early stages of my research. I will continue sharing my findings.

If you want to track my research findings, follow me on twitter too @saranyan and I will post micro-updates whenever I talk to someone interesting.