John Alexander Discusses Importance of Customer Involvement in Product Development

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alex_07employeesCustomers

I just mentioned, we do it with about 230 equivalent employees and that number grows proportional to sales because we're pretty much a service company. The other group of workers that we have that doesn't appear on the org. chart, but which is probably more important even than our 230, are our users, our customers. Twenty years ago, long before it was popular, we started having user group meetings once a year, here in Ithaca. Bringing all of customers back here, having them meet all the employees, which was about twelve. There were like twenty of them and twelve of us. But this user group is an empowered group of customers who we rely on to provide us with feedback on how we're doing, what's the next product that they need, that bowling all thing. In order to do that successfully, you need to stay in close touch with the products that your customers demand, and we found that by bringing them together for three or four days of bonding and food and good times, they open up to us. They become more like friends, and they share their secrets, and they share their ideas. A lot of them come to us with ideas for new businesses, and so this user group, while it's at the bottom of the list here, is probably one of the most important aspects of our company's growth, and our ability to stay focussed. And I think for any company, if there's a mechanism that you can put in place that forces you to be close to a customer, it's a really good thing because as you're growing it's very, very easy to drift from that, or to get all excited about your own ideas without doing all the reality checks that are necessary to test them on the real market.