Having experienced the transition from start-up to bona fide company, we can relate to the advice given by Ralph Ewig in his blog article for Systems Engineering in the Entrepreneurial Space Industry. Here’s an abstract from his article:
To achieve the functions of “team alignment” and “customer input capture” you’ll need a requirements management tool. When choosing your tool, the most important rule is to select a tool that accommodates how you want to work, not a tool that forces you to accommodate how it works. Aerospace industry mainstays such as IBM’s Rational DOORS software are not only ridiculously expensive, but have evolved over many years to cater to their largest clients – using exactly the kind of overly formal practices you are trying to avoid.
Instead, consider web interface driven tools which evolved from the people who know software best (the software development industry). Jama Software’s Contour tool is my first choice, exceptionally capable at enabling a team of engineers to stay in synch, while also giving your customer real-time insight into how their input drives your efforts. It acts as the direly needed inbox-filter for teams suffering from “design by email” without placing any extra levels of bureaucracy between the technical team and the result of their labor. In addition, it is highly flexible to your way of doing things, and all but guarantees that no customer input will ever fall through the cracks again.
“Jama Software’s Contour tool is my first choice, exceptionally capable at enabling a team of engineers to stay in sync, while also giving your customer real-time insight into how their input drives your efforts.” – Ralph Ewig, 15-year veteran of aerospace systems design, chief engineer at Holder Aerospace
Prior to the article, we had not met Ralph, but appreciate his unsolicited feedback on the experience he had with Contour and his recommendation of it to others in the aerospace industry. It validates the differentiators of Contour, and our mission of building an application that our peers in product development want to use and find easy to use (instead of being mandated by management to use).
I’m always curious about how people learn about Jama, so I connected with Ralph via LinkedIn and found out he learned about Contour recently on a project with one of our customers in Australia. It was a desirable skill for the project team to have previous experience with Contour. How about that?
I like to refer to it as an entrepreneurial company’s “path of bonafication” where you hit key milestones with your product that indicate you’re on the right path to disrupting the market leader’s grip on the category. You know you are bona fide when…
- Global deployments with thousands of users (check)
- Fortune 100 customers adopt your product (check)
- Top government agencies adopt your product (check)
- Competitors buying your brand as keywords searched on Google (check)
- Consecutive years of 100% + growth in revenue and employees (check)
- Community of users recommending your product on their own to others (thanks)
- Professors and universities incorporating your software into their curriculum (check)
- And, companies listing your software as a desired skill for hiring employees and consultants (check)
It’s an interesting theme that’s occurring across businesses driven by the Web and social apps. Where the big, traditional vendors try to win by spending millions on advertising (brute force) versus the new breed of companies try to win by building innovative software that works and helps people do their jobs faster and easier (grassroots). We’ll see which approach wins.
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