Section 7.1. One Program for Productization

7.1. One Program for Productization

If you ask a CTO who has lived through creating a commercial software product when productization occurred, usually the answer is "At the last minute, only when we had to because we started to sell more software." At that point, productization becomes a huge priority, because the number of newly arrived customers at the beginner and intermediate levels starts to grow. They need to be educated and must be able to perform simple tasks for themselves. If productization is lacking, the company pays in terms of support costs or frustrated customers.

For open source projects, this "last minute" comes when the number of users participating in the project overwhelms the core development team, which frequently becomes annoyed that so many beginner-level questions are flooding mailing lists. The first response is usually to create a parallel support structure of user-only mailing lists and other community features, out of which the developers hope that users can create materials to help themselves.

Alert open source developers should try to stay ahead of their users and provide some support before becoming frantic. Here are some guidelines for providing this help for users at different skill levels:

• Provide basic information and community support for beginners and intermediates.

• Reduce the skills gap for getting started through installation scripts and administrative interfaces.

• Accelerate learning by providing architectural documentation and sample code for advanced- and expert-level users.

• Add features and functions to support integration with related systems.

These guidelines will help in terms of planning productization so that an open source project has a chance to perform productization before it becomes a problem for the user community and thwarts wider adoption.