Inside Buildertrend

Product influencers: One year down, another one around the corner

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Did you know we have a product influencer program here at Buildertrend? It’s been going on for about a year, which is why we’re celebrating! It’s been an awesome first year of this program, and we’re so thankful for all the insights we’ve gained so far from this group.

We recruit product influencers, also known as PIs, because they allow us to glean insight into industry practices, give us input on potential feature updates and provide feedback on recent enhancements to ensure we hit the mark. And when we utilize this input from our customers throughout our update process, it gives us a much more defined direction for how to continue to evolve the software.

So, what’s involved in being a product influencer? He or she provides feedback at four different stages of the product enhancement process:

  1. Discovery Feedback – Prior to feature development, we need to understand what the customer needs are and if enough clients need and will use this feature to make its development a priority over another feature.
  2. Prototype Feedback – After we’ve decided to work on an enhancement, we share potential designs and workflows with these PIs to ensure that our future work will hit the mark with them.
  3. Beta Testing – When we’re close to rolling out a feature, we turn that feature on for our influencers to gather feedback on how the implementation works. Our Product Influencers also help test these new features to confirm everything is working correctly before mass release.
  4. Post Release – Once our influencers have been able to use the new feature for a short period of time, these influencers provide us with feedback on how the update has impacted them.

The perfect example? We just released a new reporting feature that allows our clients to run various reports off of the data they enter into Buildertrend. Our product influencers have helped to provide feedback on which reports were the most important to them and their businesses. We will continue to call on these influencers for their feedback over the life of this feature release.

Our Product Influencers are an extremely important part of our product development and release process here at Buildertrend. We know the success of Buildertrend depends on the success of our clients, so their feedback is invaluable to us.

Would you like to be part of the next generation of PI’s? Let your Buildertrend Coach know and we’ll add you to our list!

About The Author

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Buildertrend Staff

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