DRI: Building the Right Products
 

 

Case 1: Listen to Your Clients

Making Gateway increasingly profitable required listening to our clients.  In particular, it required:

  1. Letting the most profitable clients lead the way.  Don't impose limits on the amount they can spend at one time.  Make repetitive tasks easier to encourage use.
  2. Encouraging customization and make it easy.  Customization should not require new software on the client end and should not increase maintenance costs - but remove as many barriers to sales as possible.
  3. Extending the product to capture new sources of revenue.   Clients liked DRI's mainframe based graphics but were moving to personal computers.  Adding support for pc screens and laserjet printers continued a revenue stream that would otherwise have been lost.

Case 2: Build Quality

Gateway continued to generate significant revenue long after the developers moved onto other things.  It is my understanding that it lasted five years with virtually no maintenance before being replaced with a Windows-based product.

Case 3: Understand Your Market

Not every project that I've worked on has been a financial success.  I am proud of my work on a political forecasting model.  However, not enough people were willing to spend a significant amount on a political forecasting model.  The model required copious amounts of data that in turn required impartial expertise - limiting its practical value.  In such a situation, you have to find one or two clients willing to bankroll the product for a couple of years (so you can build networks of reliable data collectors, etc.) or you are destined to fail.