Building Products That Meet Market Needs
It was Kent Bye from Lullabot who pointed out to me that my job as Phase2's Product Manager wasn't exactly a common one in the Drupal sphere. While being introduced to him before an interview for his Drupal Voices podcast, he noted that a "full time product manager isn't a position that a lot of companies have" and asked me to expand a bit on what the job entails and how we go about setting the strategy for our products at Phase2. Daunted as I was by the request to concisely but fully explain our product strategy (while being recorded), it was a great exercise in the age old "elevator pitch" concept: if you can't explain it in 2 minutes or less, your strategy is too complicated.
I get a lot of sideways glances when I talk about developing business strategies for open source software products. It's a lot of "who is the real "market" for an open source software product?" and my favorite, "how can you create a business strategy around something that's already free?" I like to remind these skeptics that the bottled water they're carrying around is not so different: the water itself could be considered "free," but the bottle it's in is something they paid for.
Open Source or not, these products provide a specific and real value to the customers they serve, who have very real needs around their content management and publishing software. Open source products like OpenPublish and OpenPublic compete in the space with proprietary content management systems, and are regularly compared to commercially available products.
For example, OpenPublish is our Drupal distribution for online news, and in this market, flexible workflow features are a top market demand. We developed OpenPublish with a customizable workflow that changes as the newsroom changes, or as new technologies are introduced that impact the speed of news. And as the news industry changes and requires new monetization strategies, OpenPublish has to keep up with that, building monetization features beyond just banner advertising. We use Calais to provide rich semantic tagging that enables people to continue finding related content without having to leave the site, keeping readers on the site longer and offering more opportunities for engagement.
Similarly, OpenPublic, our new Drupal distribution for the public sector, has a market with equally distinct and specific needs. For the public sector, security is primary, so we built a CMS that’s been retooled with data security considered at every opportunity. But secure is only part of the equation. Today's public sector needs opportunity to store, share, and visualize open data, and features in OpenPublic like Project Mapper and the open government data content type allow users to create and distribute that information quickly and easily.
The robust Drupal community has a huge hand in the development of our products as well. Development Seed designed Open Atrium as incredibly intuitive, user-friendly tool, and that has helped to build a vibrant community around it. This is where great Drupal design and usability come in -- in fact, the usability is essential to add, build, edit, find, and prioritize content that will facilitate the collaborative process for non-technical audiences. As we've begun supporting Atrium, we've see in the Drupal community that tools and products that are strong in usability gain greater community support, collaboration, translation, and extension. Open Atrium was the market response to a need for an intuitive, usable group collaboration tool built on Drupal, and now, its community is improving the product every day.
Finally, our work with ManagingNews and Tattler have common roots in that they’re products for news and data aggregation. But with increasing amounts of content being published on the web every day, what we’re tackling regularly is how to handle the enormous amounts of data that comes through on these feeds. Reporters in newsrooms use it to follow the topics in their articles and their competitors. Government users use it to track topics important to their constituents. So various user groups with their unique behaviors and implementations have ever-changing market demands that requires product evolution and adaptability.
Across all these products, there are some commonalities. The top challenges we address as the market evolves include how to manage big data; how to optimize the user experience on the front-end and the content administrator’s experience on the back-end; and how to tap into rich and semantic content to keep site visitors engaged.
These are big challenges, and we take them very seriously. Phase2 has built a reputation for creating beautiful, scalable web sites and web platforms for clients who expect excellence. Properly developing, maintaining, and extending these products is driven by the people and organizations who actually use them. That way, at the end of the day, we don't just have products that are cool - we have products that solve real problems for real people.
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