New feature: request any company to track and we’ll do the work to make it happen (Week 69)

Well the big feature is that teeny “Watch a new company” search box.

But first: some housekeeping.

Intermission: housekeeping.

Please welcome Tom Hulme to Job Garden! Tom is a General Partner at GV (Google Ventures). Check out Tom’s job board for all his GV and angel investments.

And some stats… we’ve passed some neat milestones in July:

• 211 companies tracked
• 11,017 all-time jobs synced (with 2,680 live right now)

Now back to your regular scheduled programming.

New feature: add any company with a careers page to your private watchlist, and we’ll do the hard work to make it happen

Already you can sign up and create a private watchlist. A watchlist lets you track new job opportunities, and get those jobs in a single weekly email.

But now you can add companies to that watchlist, even companies that aren’t already on Job Garden. Any company. We take requests.

Try it! Here’s how:

Go to the homepage and make sure you’re signed in. (There’s a “Sign in with Twitter” button in the top nav.)

Then go to your watchlist “Watching” tab and type “Beeline” which is a great startup I advise. Like so:

This is what you’ll see. Then tap Watch and boom it’s on your watchlist.

btw if you love cycling, design, and startups, you should know that Beeline is currently hiring for a UX/UI Designer. They make a gorgeous hardware+app navigation device for bikes and motorcycles and have sold a whole bunch to consumers, then just recently they signed their first deal with a city bike-share scheme. Check out Beeline jobs here.

Now trying typing “Pretend Startup” instead. It’s a company not tracked by Job Garden…

…so you’ll see empty search results.

And you can choose to request the company…

Fill in some details and hit Request company.

We’ll get notified behind the scenes and get right to work on building the integration to sync new jobs. It’ll be added to your watchlist when the work is done.

Finally: don’t forget to subscribe to your weekly watchlist email (it’s free) to get all those new jobs in your email each week.

Let’s see, what else has been happening?

You may remember from Week 64 that we were working on prototypes of premium features, and I was taking them round to existing users for feedback.

Well I’ve had a bunch of those customer interviews now, and they’ve been incredibly useful (thank you everyone I’ve met!).

What’s interesting is that the features have evolved hugely…

• not from feedback in the form “well you should add this feature and tweak these words”
• but instead mysteriously in the discussion, where as I’m presenting, discussing, and talking around the prototypes and the day-to-day work lives of these users… that’s where ideas come from.

And so now I have a pretty clear idea what the launch version of these premium features needs to be. But I couldn’t tell you how that was arrived at.

My guess: while presenting the prototypes, perhaps I’m having to also gently sell and explain the prototype by saying who it’s for and what the value is? And so it’s those foundational assumptions that end up getting challenged and evolving?

I would like to hear opinions from designers and product people about this, because I’m sure someone’s already figured it out and has a framework I could adopt.

Anyway. I have to run. See you next time.