Billing Manager Blog

When we build products, we start by trying to deeply understand our customers.  It drives what we build.  What’s interesting is that the true deep understanding of your customers starts AFTER you launch your product.  Once you have something real, that people use, you can start really engaging with them and figure out what’s next to truly build a great product.

 So, we’re real now.  People are using it.  And we are engaged.

In fact, last week we were fully engaged watching 7 prospective users give Billing Manager a try.  We ran a 3-day usability session at our facilities where each participant spent 90 minutes trying to complete a series of activities related to billing and invoicing in the product.  It’s always fascinating to watch.  You learn so much about what you have built.  It is rewarding and humbling all at once.  The learnings will result in a better customer experience (coming soon!) and some cool new features too.  The team is really jazzed about this real life customer feedback and can’t wait to implement this stuff.

Here are a couple of examples of the great nuggets of learnings we had.

(1) Free is suspicious.  A lot of folks wondered “what’s the catch? nothing is Free”.  We live in world of fine print and exceptions and rules.  Yeah.  But really, this is free.  It will cost you money if you want to use our payment solution (so you can accept credit cards in Billing Manager, and your customers can pay their invoices online).  But if you don’t, it’s free.   We’ll definitely blog more about this, but the bottom line from our perspective is the more people using Billing Manager the better.  So if you like it, tell a friend, OK?

(2) Our “More” button is wearing an invisible coat.  In an attempt to keep things clean & uncluttered, we over-disguised the “More” button (which takes you to some very cool stuff).  Many folks just didn’t see it or even try clicking on it.  We are re-thinking this.  Don’t be surprised if you see a bunch of neon “More” buttons next week.  Just kidding ; )

This is literally just the tip of the iceberg of what we learned.  As we start rolling out some new stuff, we’ll definitely be sharing what customer insights helped us make decisions for change.  So you’ll be hearing more about this fun we had last week in our usability labs.

What else could we improve to make the product ideal for you?  Comment on the blog or send us an email.  We read this inbox everyday.