Pizza Toppings: What Makes a Good Customer Enhancement Request

By JP Nahmias, Director, Product Management

What’s the weirdest pizza topping you can think of? Corn? Pineapple? How about cold tuna? People all over the world have different tastes in their toppings. Most Americans prefer to stick with various types of meats and vegetables (and even the dreaded Hawaiian), but if you look across the rest of the world, you’ll start to notice some trends — specifically fish.

Italians love putting anchovies on their pizza, coming from their Roman ancestors who put smoked and cured fish on their bread, while our neighbors to the south in Mexico love putting shrimp on their pizza. In Russia they even have a whole dish dedicated to fishy pizza — Mockba.

So, what does this have to do with software? Everything (besides the fact that at CloudHealth Technologies we demo our new offerings internally every Wednesday to a different offering of pizza). Someone at some point had to request that topping on that pizza to start a new line of pizza wherever they were in the world.

Customers can play a very influential role in how the CloudHealth platform is developed. While we have internal sources of inspiration and look at what the market is telling us, we develop our software so that customers will use it. Customers have defined pain in certain areas, whether it be RI management, security policies and actions, or just general cost and usage of their infrastructure.

The role of customer enhancements is a way for your voice to be heard directly by the product team and a way for us to gauge how the features we’re thinking about play against your needs. We typically weigh factors such as revenue, number of clicks, cost of development, and uniqueness of the feature to determine how, when, and if we’ll create a feature.

For your voice to be heard and for us to better understand you, we wanted to give some examples of good and bad customer enhancement requests.

The Good

Good enhancement requests have a defined problem for a user as well as a thought on what it would take to improve the situation. Telling us about the problem is useful, but it’s only a small slice of the solution. Without a defined request on how to fix it, you’ll be leaving the decision up to another entity rather than getting exactly what you want. The best way to define the problem and the solution is to use a story. A story is a three-line paragraph that contains the actor, the problem, and what the outcome should be.

Here’s an example:
As a billing manager I want partner generated billing to support GovCloud accounts

So that my GSA customers can receive a bill from CloudHealth

In this example, the actor — billing manager — has identified the problem. The billing manager can’t bill for GovCloud accounts in partner generated billing. And the acceptable outcome is: they want to produce a bill out of CloudHealth for those accounts.

Good enhancement requests can have defined acceptance criteria as well. For the above story, they might look something like this:

1. When adding an AWS account to CHT, be able to mark it as a AWS GovCloud Acct that includes the credentials for both the billing account and the resources account.
2. When running partner generated billing for AWS accounts that are marked as GovCloud, be able to produce a bill that correctly matches the resource account’s RI inventory with the GovCloud’s billing account.

The Bad

A bad enhancement request is usually one that is generic and doesn’t cue the team in to what the actual problem is. Another characteristic of bad requests is that sometimes they are specific to the customer’s process or account. Here’s an example of a bad request.

“Perspectives need an overhaul.”

What is it specifically about Perspectives that needs an overhaul? Is it the workflow? The UI? The way assets are handled in the groups? The way that Perspectives are displayed in reports or which reports they are attached to?

As you can see, it’s really easy to write a bad enhancement request and much harder to write a good one. But that good one is the one that will catch our team’s eye and is more likely to get developed.

We always love getting customer enhancement requests and would be happy to discuss any that you have. You can drop us a request by using our support system and choosing the option “I have an idea to submit.” You may only get an automated response from the idea submission, but rest assured we’re looking at them and putting them into the product. And who knows, maybe that next fish on a pizza idea will be yours!

Interested in discussing enhancements with our product management team face-to-face? Join us at our first ever annual cloud management user summit — CloudHealth Connect18!

Originally published at www.cloudhealthtech.com.