Lately, it seems there is a plethora of people running around giving their unsolicited opinions. In part, I attribute this to the growing popularity of social networking sites where people feel free to share their thoughts and beliefs for the masses.
Just last week, I shared a picture of my child’s text to me and it caused a complete uproar in my online social circle with mixed opinions on when you should introduce technology to children. Believe me, I try to be a friendly, conversational person and I certainly find value in educated perspectives, but there are times in my personal life that I just want to scream out I don’t care what you think!
My professional life on the other hand is a different story. Here I seek out the opinions of others in abundance because it’s those opinions that help drive our product line in the right direction. And CA Communities is the perfect tool to facilitate that exchange. Product Managers like me can hear from customers like you on what features are positively influencing your world improving productivity and increasing efficiency and what features are failing to meet expectations. It’s an opportunity to provide valuable, real-time feedback that can help shape the next product iteration.
In the CA LISA® Global User Community, I’m able to communicate with customers in a variety of ways:
- Announcements Time-sensitive (i.e. end of service) information that benefits an entire customer base can be conveyed through urgent announcements.
- Message Boards Announcements can be directly linked to message boards, giving users the chance to discuss the latest news. But, their utility doesn't end there. Message boards are also a good collaboration tool for users to learn about how they can maximize a product’s full potential. Members can ask questions, learn about best practices and help each other through alternate configurations.
- Ideas Users are encouraged to share their ideas for product changes or enhancements. As ideas are voted up or down, it’s easy to distinguish those that will have the greatest impact.
- Polls While individual customer requests are fantastic, there are times when I want to ascertain general consensus around a specific feature. That’s when I turn to the polls.
- Customer Validation Program Those who sign our pre-release NDA are invited to a private message board where they can view new technology before it comes out to the public and interact with CA engineering and project management teams.
Before CA Communities, it took months to obtain the type of feature and road map feedback I’m now able to acquire on a daily basis. Not only is it a time-saver in terms of customer data collection, but it’s making an already agile product development cycle even more nimble. So while, in my personal life, I may need to unplug the invisible neon sign above my head that tells people, Talk to me, in my professional life particularly in CA Communities it’s always on and shining bright.
Stefana_Muller is the product manager for CA Service Virtualization (aka LISA/ITKO) and is working to help customers remove the key constraints in their Software Development Life-Cycle. Stefana has been with CA technologies since March of 2000.