It’s been a quick four weeks since I started working as the product marketer for Billing Manager. I’ve been busy with a lot of different things ranging from building out the development roadmap with our engineers to answering some tech support requests (we also play tricks on Dan, my boss’s boss’s boss). What has given me the most energy over the last month, however, has been talking with customers and working to understand how we can make Billing Manager better. That’s why I created the Customer Council, a way for us to have a dialog with customers.
Our Customer Council event will be next week on Tuesday, July 7th. If you signed up for the Customer Council via replying to this post, I have already contacted you about this opportunity, but if you haven’t, please reply to the post and also grab some time on our calendar for July 7th.
Here’s how you can reserve a spot:
1. Follow this link to see my calendar. The calendar is called Jiffle and is web-based scheduling tool. Click here: http://www.jifflenow.com/grp/Will_Hambly
2. Navigate to July 7th, where you can see 30 minute slots from 1PM to 5PM Pacific time available.
3. Go ahead and set up a meeting through the tool (please only 30 minute meetings)
4. I will provide a dial-in number for the meeting.
I haven’t used Jiffle before, but so far it’s working great, so also let me know what you think about the calendar tool and if I should use it again. Looking forward to our conversation!
In the last week, I’ve spent the bulk of my time responding to customer feedback and putting together what I’m calling a “roadmap” for Billing Manager. The roadmap is a set of initiatives and product changes that we’re going make to improve Billing Manager. Let me be clear on this: customers are the boss. At Intuit we believe in customer driven innovation, so I thought I’d ask for your feedback now on where we should be spending our time. Here are some of the top requests, but if there are others, please mention them by adding a comment. If you’re really passionate about sharing you can also 
In the last week, I’ve immersed myself in customer feedback, reading and replying to your thoughts, opinions, ideas, and complaints. The team and I have spoken with a handful of customers over the phone and we’re going to continue to do this for one very simple reason: you’re the boss.
If you’re a Mac user, you probably already know this, but last night and today we’ve been experiencing some issues with the Safari 4 web browser. I’ve been hearing from customers via the Feedback button that some pages in the product aren’t loading or that it looks like invoices have disappeared. These problems are isolated to the Safari 4 browser, so rest assured, your data and invoices are still safe.
Update 4:45PM: I just spoke with quality extraordinaire Mehul. He’s done some extensive testing across different browsers and operating systems to get to the bottom of this problem. Mehul notes that “objects either don’t appear at all, or the page is rendered only partially and existing links do not work. A quick fix in most cases is to refresh the page in Safari.” I don’t have an exact time for when we should have these issues all hammered out, but again, your data is safe and we’re working on the browser issue.
As I’ve ramped up on Billing Manager, one thing I’ve been focusing on is speaking with customers and learning what you like and don’t like about Billing Manager. The goal of this is to figure out what we need to start working on now and also what else customers want to see from our invoicing app. If you’ve got feedback you want to share or are willing to meet over the phone or in person (if you’re near Mountain View, CA, consider this an invitation for lunch at our campus), go ahead and reply to this post and we’ll arrange something.
