3 Ways to Speed up the Enterprise Software Cycle

Making enterprise software is profitable and useful. But, it sucks in other ways. One of the biggest problems facing enterprise innovators and product developers is that their customers don’t want new versions. It’s too much hassle for them to test and explain new versions. If the dogs won’t eat the new dog food, you don’t get any feedback to drive your product development. While you are waiting, cheap on-demand SaaS vendors are forcing their customers to eat new versions every day, and driving forward on their disruptive path.

I get this complaint a lot, and I recommend three strategies to get around the problem.

1) Instrumentation. Your customers are . In the modern era of metric-driven product management, you need the data.

2) The CD Dial (from this picture). Run continuous delivery up to the point where you have a release candidate for some test group, even if you do not release. In this scheme, the quesiton is not “how often can I release”. It’s “who can I release to?” This drives you to the next strategy …

3) Partition the user base. Some of your customers will try new software. Can you put some of them into a beta program with automatic updates. Can you release an on-demand version that gets updated with continuous delivery?

Remember that customer satisfaction is an important thing, but it is not the only thing. It might be worth making your customers LESS satisfied, by forcing them to do some testing that helps your product management and product development move forward to a better future.