Giving customers what they want
Technical Engagement Manager: says so right on my newly printed Ninefold business card. Technical Engagement Manager. So now I've joined the team at Ninefold and nabbed this impressive title, what actually does a Technical Engagement Manager do?
In the evolution of software and services, the clearest beacons for innovation come directly from the people using them. Look at the history of Twitter for example. Twitter launched without a hashtag system of any kind. That feature is a convention that users invented for themselves which everyone could agree was a great idea. So, Twitter decided to embrace it, allowing its users to become real agents of change in making the service more useful and relevant. Today, the hashtag system is an invaluable part of Twitter and Twitter users can scarcely imagine living without it. But it was once just a good idea that some unrecognised and forgotten Tweep conceived. The makers of Twitter had a progressive enough spirit to humbly take it on.
And that brings me to Ninefold. This is a small, high energy company filled with really passionate people. Ninefold is boldly embracing the entrepreneurial space and encouraging proto-companies to grow and mature under its protective, digital wing. This joie de vivre extends to embracing somewhat radical ideas, such as placing value and a certain amount of faith in the opinions and recommendations of its customers. Ninefold genuinely wants to connect with its customers, metaphorically opening the doors and listening. Really listening, to what customers are saying, and taking genuine steps to carry their ideas, criticisms and suggestions into action. This makes Ninefold an exciting place to be, at an exciting time for the industry.
It's far too easy, when tasting some degree of success and establishment as a company, to blinker your eyes a little bit. To muffle your ears from voices that criticise, saying to yourselves as an organisation "We've got this far quite effectively. Hey, we must know what we are doing by now! We'll plot our own course, because that's our prerogative." Unfortunately, especially in high-tech industries, this is a kind of dangerous hubris, the effects of which are all too familiar if you've ever used services run by single-minded people, without much external consultation with real, actual, breathing external customers. "Nobody will want that feature!" They rationalise, in a huff. "You don’t really want that. I've got other ideas. I’ll deliver those instead, for I am doing this thing, and I am in control of my own destiny." All too often, products created in a vacuum like this can be infuriating in small and large ways. As a person living in the real world, you don't always enjoy the luxury of a lot of choice in what software or services you have to use at work, so we all end us using these things in one way or another. I'm sure you could all name the single most frustrating software feature or service quirk that happens often and slows you down. Don’t you wish someone would just take your feedback directly for once, and quickly improve it?
The other side of this coin is that creating services in a vacuum is dangerous. Even as a specially gifted solution creator with a rare talent for intuitively understanding what customers want, you have to tune your output carefully in response to customer feedback so that you can deliver something that’s digestible in exactly the right way. Even if you had all of the world's research resources at your disposal, you can never truly predict exactly where users will take your product, or exactly how they will make use of its features — often in dazzling and truly surprising ways. At Ninefold, people often talk about the "Art of the Possible". What they are getting at is that in an exciting frontier of new technology like cloud computing, combined with entrepreneurial spirit, creative energies applied to discover new and inspiring things cannot be underestimated. The Ninefolderati truly believe in that sentiment, developing a twinkle in the eye as they tell inspiring stories about wild new entrepreneurial business opportunities: the glittering edge of all that is unknown, yet to be brought into brilliant and astounding existence.
Of course, all these inspired ideas and opportunities of the future are in you. Ninefold customers are really standing on the springboard of the future. Ninefold provides a solid, high-speed cloud infrastructure, but of course this is only an enabler for your idea, a convenient extension for your business. Of course, we will be doing do a much better job of supporting and enabling your business as we open up a genuine and direct channel of customer communication and use that to polish and improve. This is where I come in.
In my working life as a Journalist and Technical Writer, I have spent the best part of my career talking directly to the only people that really matter in these domains, you. The genuine, real-world customers making use of Ninefold. I live in your world, and I'm here to reach out and bring back the lessons that you can offer, using that golden information as a catalyst for change. I believe we’re yet to see the ultimate cloud application and, you never know, your ideas could well be the “hashtag” of the future cloud. Let’s make it happen.
Catch me on Twitter and say hi, or drop me an email at edwin@ninefold.com. I'd love to hear your thoughts.