Customer As Co-Creator
At Paylocity we put our customers unmet needs at the center of everything we do and truly believe it is through partnering with our clients that we create great software. For us this means we are scouring usage data, listening to feedback, having customer conversations, and working directly together in co-creation sessions to uncover the best ideas from deeply understanding customer unmet needs.
The process begins in a discovery phase, where we actively explore new spaces to invest and build working software. This could mean a brand new product, like our recently released Learning Management System, or smaller enhancements like the addition of automatically scheduling Surveys to launch. Our goal is to better understand the outcomes our users are looking for and what products, features, and new pieces of functionality will help them achieve a more automated, insightful and engaging experience.
With all of the observations made, information gathered, conversations had we start to create early concepts and prototypes that bring to life an experience that will solve for our customers unmet need. This is often a clickable prototype, screen designs, and conversations around how we can start small, learn quickly and iterate as we start the engineering process toward having working software.
As an Co-Creator, or early adopter, with Paylocity we seek feedback at every step of the way so that we can validate our thinking and ensure we are headed in the right direction. We refer to this as our iterative feedback loops and it is a key component to our process that gives our customers a voice and opportunity to share feedback. In every step from discovery, to working prototypes, to pressure testing the final feature we seek feedback and pride ourselves on our curiosity and desire to learn.
As the process iterates, and the feature comes to life we always exercise the software as users of our own product alongside early adopter customers. We refer to this as drinking our own wine, because it tastes better than dogfood. Whether this new functionality has taken as many months to build, or just a couple weeks, we put software in front of our organization, HR team and co-creators that are willing to use it and share feedback. This gives us incredible confidence in the products we launch to general availability. For instance, with Learning Management, we had confidence because hundreds of customers had launched thousands of courses, and employees had completed thousands of hours of training well before we even announced that the product was available to everyone.
I am passionate about building software, and believe this is an amazing process that promotes dreaming big, starting small, and delivering relentlessly in an effort to learn and continuously improve. Most importantly, the learning and delivery doesn’t stop at the release of a new product or feature. Every team at Paylocity continues this process as they listen to customers, enhance their product, and continuously delivery working software.
Check out highlights from one of our Co-Creator workshops below:
