One of the most important priorities in my role as a Product Manager is continually ensuring our company understands what our global community of customers and partners need and want in business intelligence software.
Our software is deployed alongside ERP and accounting systems in many different countries around the world, each of these markets can be very different to each other in terms of what is important when discussing business intelligence needs. If our goal is to always provide the most value to our customers, we need to be carefully listening to and understanding the unique dynamics of each market.
We’ve learned very early on that there is no secret formula for providing a single great business intelligence product for every market in the world, if you want to be the best provider of BI software you need to be the best listener too.
User feedback is our chance to listen to our user’s opinions which is used to improve our existing products in numerous ways, even though we have specialists in the field of BI continuously providing great advice into our product development cycles we are always prepared for the reality that an internal design concept just might not be what our customers actually need. This is exactly why we make great efforts to stay close to voice of our users and keep them involved from as early on in our product life-cycles as possible.
We don’t like to set an inflexible concrete plan way ahead of time about what we are going to deliver to market because we know very well our market’s needs change and so we have developed the ability and agility to respond to this change as it occurs. Through increased customer collaboration at many points during the development of new product releases we are able to effect change in our business and software to avoid delivering lower value releases and thus avoid making costly mistakes.
If you haven’t already, be sure to check out the Ideas portals for Sage 50 US Edition, Sage 50 Canadian Edition, Sage 100 ERP, Sage 300 ERP and Sage 500 ERP – this a great way for anyone to contribute ideas and feedback to our Sage Intelligence line of business products integrated into each ERP by submitting ideas under the ‘Reports / BI’ or ‘Report’ categories.
Sage 50 Canadian Edition (formerly Simply Accounting) Ideas Portal
Sage 50 U.S. Edition (formerly Peachtree) Ideas Portal
Sage 100 ERP (formerly MAS 90/200) Ideas Portal
