« A Tale of Two Customers | Main | Inbox Blogging Fodder »

June 23, 2009

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

the storage anarchist

One risk I see from such competitions is that the submissions and voting are heavily weighted to the perspectives of the developers, and there is little "voice of the customer" in either the submissions or the voting.

Not that the contest is a bad idea, but how could you/we improve on it to provide more input from the customers and to add more weight to what they think is most important?

Steve Todd

Good point Anarchist. I mentioned in my post above that in our competition we had several ideas that related to "ease-of-use". The idea competition was open to everyone in my organization, including QA/System test, field support, product marketing, etc. Some of the collaboration came from the people that were either directly testing the product(e.g. system testers) or from field members that helped with installation and operation of products.

As far as improving the "contests as part of development" idea, I think that if we could find a willing set of partners and/or customers, ask them to contribute ideas, and then allow customers and developers to collaborate (e.g. comments and voting), that would be superb.

The comments to this entry are closed.

Blog powered by Typepad