As I look back over the last seven years since I took a leap of faith and stepped away from the norm of full time employment to start my own company, CATCH. It's been interesting to see the change in the organisation from a start up with no set operational base to one that has premises and is selling globally. People have come and gone over the time period and what we stand for has been refined, redefined, and refined some more to the point we are now at. It also fascinates me when looking at my own personal thinking over this time and how it has changed. What I thought was the best way to do things I look at now and think was immature and needed refinement, what we delivered I still believe in so aren't unhappy with what we achieved but the biggest thing I look at is the strategic areas, especially the business model and how it has been refined over time.
To reminisce, we started supplying services to organisations and grew the business at a rapid rate through long term contracts and a bigger and bigger team, was it the business that I wanted, I wasn't so sure so three years ago we enhanced the strategy to include our own products. A bold move at the time to invest everything we made back into the development of a product. But I'd done my research and saw that IBM, Apple, Microsoft etc grew at greater rates than the normal market when they had majority ownership by an individual or family. The truth be told I was naive as to the journey I was starting on, I remember thinking lets build product and sell it to our customers, it will provide a revenue stream and enhance what we provide. Hmmm so what really happened. Well we started to develop our product 'TMS' (Test Management System) we allocated staff to the analysis, design, project management, development and testing of the tool and there was our first challenge we utilised existing staff - what do you mean this wasn't a good thing to do? - well yes it means that you can use your services staff that have downtime from client assignments on product development - a good thing, and then the big big big no no... these staff now have two masters 1 - clients that they are assigned to and 2 -the product project manager... one pays the organisation while the other costs the organisation - you won't need three guesses to know who wins when push comes to shove. We (finally) realised that only dedicated resources would produce a high quality product and allow us to realise the vision.
Lesson One: Use dedicated resources
So we renamed TMS to Enterprise Tester http://www.enterprisetester.com/ and released it to the market. Looking back it was too early, not ready for the market and way undercooked (I'm probably being very harsh but I'm allowed to be) but you know what, it was the best decision we made. In releasing it to market we put ourselves out there smack bang in the middle of the market place for all to see.
Lesson Two: Get it out in the market as soon as you can so you can have more eyes on it and put the acid on the team.
We then sat back and waited for the sales to roll in... or not. What did happen was we received lots of people downloading and installing, then emailing us about enhancements, issues or feature requests they'd like to see.
Lesson three: Love the feedback
That was great, we had interest, what we needed now was to get sales to start the next part of the vision, but what we had to sort out first were the contact requests we had received, or did we? Well we decided to get further releases out to improve the software, and our thinking was the quicker the better so that in around four weeks we released a new version of the tool with new features, fixes and improvements. We received as many, if not more feedback from customers so the only thing to do was to continue implementing short releases, so we continued with around four weekly releases of the software. After several months we got into the groove and quick releases become a way of life, and not only for us but for our customers too. They looked forward to new releases, providing feedback and seeing the latest enhancements to the product on a significantly more frequent timeframe than anyone else in the Test Management space - pretty cool!
Lesson four: Release often and build community ownership
We continue to release new versions of Enterprise Tester in rapid fashion improving the feature set and bettering the way it works, making things easier and simpler for the users. The system is significantly bigger than when we started and the complexity has increased and I keep thinking there must be a point in time that it's finished... though I'm coming to the conclusion that it may never be finished, just continue to be improved and enhanced. We have a roadmap which sits at about 2 years and we (in my mind it's never fast enough) move through these planned releases on around a six to eight weekly timeframe now.
So after this time we have distilled things down to three principles we hold key:
1. Iterate quickly
2. Stay close to our customers
3. Platform play
We believe if we continue to be true to these principles then we'll continue to grow and develop a world leading test management tool that customers will greatly enjoy.
I personally hope you have enjoyed the journey so far, learnt a heap on the way and I look forward to sharing the next seven years, that I'm sure is going to be as much, if not more fun and contain many more growth opportunities.
Happy testing!
11 years ago
