Hi Puneet!
Thanks so much for this question and for joining this – it’s my first ever time doing an AMA, so I hope I can keep up with all the amazing questions from people like yourself!
We absolutely use GoSquared internally – in fact it’s pretty core to our product’s evolution, and part of what motivates us to make the platform better every day.
We highly value customer feedback, and I am more than happy to share more on how we gather, digest, and ultimately address customer feedback, but we absolutely look at our own usage and use that to drive the platform forward.
A few key benefits we’ve seen from using our own product
- We are a very product focused team – we all have a desire to build a great product, so everyone – whether they’re a developer, owning marketing, or in operations, everyone has an opinion on how the product can be made better. This is exciting and creates a bubbling melting pot of ideas.
- We catch many tiny details about the user experience internally that we know customers may never care about to the point where they would tell us. We know about these issues only because we use the product obsessively.
- We feel the frustration of customers when the platform can’t do something that we also want it to do – everyone wins when we deliver on those needs.
- We can often bring features to life that customers have not asked for, but we know we want. We can often deliver features to customers without them asking, because we understand their cases so well, by doing them ourselves, so it can often feel like we’re reading our customers’ minds.
A few challenges that come from using our own product
- It’s not all roses and rainbows though – as I’m sure anyone who uses their own product will know – you can sometimes risk prioritising features that you yourself want, over other improvements that can impact more customers. We try to avoid this by thoroughly researching the impact of product changes before committing to them.
- Sometimes we are trying to perform an action with the platform that, gasp, we haven’t built yet. We haven’t built everything on our roadmap yet! So, for example we may want to run a report that doesn’t exist in the GoSquared Analytics product (yet). This is really frustrating because it means either: we find an alternative tool to do something we believe should be possible in GoSquared, or we must delay completing that task until we build that functionality. It’s often an opportunity to see what other products are doing, to learn from them, and to fold that back into our own platform over time.
I hope this helps answer your question, Puneet. Happy expand further on any of this if you’d like me to!