Find Opportunities That Fit Your Focus

One of the most important ways we find our opportunities and discover where they exist is by maintaining and growing a dialog with our customers. In Seth Godin's Survival Is Not Enough, the author talks about the idea of conducting small inexpensive experiments, testing the results, taking the resulting feedback, and integrating it into your business processes. I believe this is very similar to the approach we have always taken with our customers. We constantly solicit our customers for input and then implement changes that meet their needs.

We often send these engaged customers incremental releases to see if we've met their needs, and if we've been successful, we include those features in a future public release to a broader audience. It can be hard to predict the future in terms of where opportunities will be, but by consistently listening to your customers, you can identify many opportunities that have serious potential to translate into measurable results.

Another way to stay close to customers is by being customers. We tend to focus on developing products that individuals within the company can use on the job every day. This is often referred to in the industry as "eating your own dog food." One of our goals when we work on a new product or a new release of an existing product is to get it to a "dog food" stage, where we can use it internally, day-to-day. Many of our employees have backgrounds that closely resemble our customers'. For example, many of us, including me, have at one time or another worked as network administrators. By making sure every product meets our own standards for usability and reliability, we're better able deliver something our customer will be satisfied using and confident recommending.

Our biggest opportunities have three things in common. The first is alignment with what we do well. We deliver our products directly to the customer over the Internet. We develop small products built by a small team of developers. At times we have had a product literally developed by one person. Most of our product development has occurred with teams of fewer than 10 people. We will not take on projects of a certain size. We will focus on the small. We will focus on products that can be marketed directly to our customers. We will stay in areas where there is a corporate focus. We don't contract with one customer to do one piece of customer software; instead we focus on developing a $30 or $99 product that we can sell thousands and thousands of times to different companies and individuals.

The second thing our biggest opportunities have in common is that our projects tend to be built on ideas our employees are passionate about. Our second product, AbsoluteFTP, was written by an employee whose number one reason for coming to VanDyke was so he could write an FTP (file transfer protocol) client that would be significantly more usable than anything available at the time. He turned down an attractive counteroffer from his previous employer and left a secure position with a more stable company to build a piece of software he was passionate about.

The third is that we are always looking at what we've already developed. When I look at the history of our products, I see that since we released our second product, every product we've developed has leveraged some component or portion of an existing product. By building on the effort we've put into existing products and integrating some or all of that work into new ones, we're able to get an increased return on investment and reduce our development time. And these products tend to fit the needs of the markets where we're strongest. Every year we reevaluate the opportunities we see for the next year or two, but our product roadmap is drawn on those factors.

Getting back to the notion of small projects, we like to go from committing to an idea to putting something in our customer's hands in three to nine months. Then we start that feedback. The product might be small. It might not have every feature they want or can envision, but it allows us to get the feedback and focus on those features that are most important to the majority of our customers, as opposed to those we imagine might be useful. We recently introduced a new tag line for our company: "We Listen. Then We Make Software Better." I think it sums up our approach nicely.

In discussing how VanDyke Software tries to find opportunities in technology, I can't help considering the impact of our core value of getting employees to think like an owner. When every employee thinks like an owner, in terms of both trying to satisfy customers and looking for growth opportunities, we're more likely to find those opportunities. One of the things we encourage is something called bootleg projects. This is an idea borrowed from 3M. At 3M, employees are allowed to spend 15 percent of their time pursing ideas or projects that don't currently have an official status or budget, without management approval. The idea is to create opportunities for employees to explore new ideas and create some momentum prior to pitching their bootlegs to management. Within VanDyke, we occasionally have a "bootleg Friday," where individuals or small teams can spend the day working on such projects. This gives each employee an opportunity to explore some of the new technologies they are encountering and learning about. On more than one occasion a bootleg project has been used as a prototype for the development of a full-blown product.

To capitalize on these opportunities it is imperative for us to focus on what we do well. With a new product we concentrate on identifying critical functionality, building rock-solid quality software, and offering the product with a price and level of service that ensures it is perceived as a good value in the marketplace. We won't deliver a terminal emulator that has every feature including the kitchen sink. Instead, we'll deliver a product that has the key features that the vast majority of our potential customers need.

When I think in terms of software in particular, one of the big untapped opportunities is in interaction design. In The Inmates Are Running The Asylum, Alan Cooper makes a clear argument why programmers shouldn't do interaction design. This design discipline includes the graphical user interface, but goes beyond that to include any behavior or interaction with the user. Cooper's argument is that programmers will gravitate to the simplest solution possible, but this orientation often doesn't lead to the most usable product. This appears to be a fairly new opportunity, in part because very few schools teach interaction design. I think this area has a huge potential for growth and eventually will influence any successful software company. The software companies that shine in future years will be those that do interaction design well.

The last area I'll mention as a good source of opportunity is our membership in organizations such as The Internet Society (IOSC). For the past several years we've been involved with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and have actively participated in shaping the future of protocols such as Secure Shell. IETF working groups focus on a wide range of issues, from Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to calendar standards to Secure Shell. Each of these working groups can be working on one or more drafts that may become an Internet standard. That a draft comes out of a working group doesn't guarantee success in the marketplace, but our participation provides an opportunity to get involved and get a sense of what the future might hold for the Internet.

And we have an opportunity to help define what that future may look like.