I’ve worked at WebWorks for nearly 14 years.  In that time, content delivery costs and methods have changed significantly.  WebWorks Publisher enabled technical writers to escape the joys of hand coded WinHelp files.  Browsers opened up the web and enabled sophisticated HTML help run-times.  Google made it possible to find your heart’s desire in the world wide world.  Today, the Social Web lets you find what you need with the help of people you trust.

So all you have to do is put your content on the web…

Right?

Well…

Perhaps there are a couple of more things to consider.  Lessons learned and validated by what we experienced here at WebWorks: The Reverb Effect.

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Google Chrome.  You know it.  It’s that way cool, very fast browser from the folks who gave us all a better way to search.  Well, that browser, Chrome, from Google?  Sometime around March, 2010, it completely forgot that your desktop exists.

What are you talking about Ben?

Oh, you don’t know this story?  Sit back and I’ll get you up to speed.

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Market research is tricky business.  Knowing how to help your current customers is an easy affair (Focus, Focus, Focus).  Keep your ears open and they will tell you what they need.  Finding something new that both your current customers and potential customers find exciting is quite a bit more difficult.  I can’t ask a customer focus group from 2011 what I should be working on today.  So, like everyone else, we just do our best by gathering market data and reading the tea leaves.

Recently, I blogged on our approach for validate market directions with sketches (Sketching the Future).  Now I’ll show you how we are working to locate those potential directions.  Our goal for each market is to simply understand:  Is anybody out there there?

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Back a few weeks ago, I wrote “2009.4 and the missing feature“.  Customers gave that post some great feedback. People seemed to understand our goals for end-of-year releases.  It made sense to them that we dedicate time in our annual release cycle to focus solely upon stability.

As validating as it was to receive that feedback, concerns were expressed regarding the pace of ePublisher releases.  The message?

Slow down!!!

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It never fails.  We ship the quarterly ePublisher release and the challenge begins anew:

What are we going to ship THIS quarter?

Marketing is analyzing, Sales is requesting, and Support is demanding.  And on the other side of those groups are our customers.  Some, we will delight. Others will curse our names, shocked to find that we have chosen a challenge other than the one they face.  The choices are never easy even when the strategy is clear:

All we have to do is choose wisely.

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Bugs!  Isn’t that a great topic to blog about?  Well, maybe not.  Still, I wanted to talk about this subject because we’ve been missing out on an opportunity to learn from each other, make people happy, and improve ePublisher.  There is one catch.  Making this change happen requires a partnership between WebWorks.com and you.

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