Social by Design

Nothing explains the power of community to drive innovation better than customer stories.  At the recent AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford, I shared a couple of customer stories to demonstrate how communities can be used to co-design products, crowd-source insights, provide peer-to-peer care, fuel word-of-mouth marketing, and even bring entirely new products to market.  I'd like to share the details of one of the stories here:

Rally Software, the leader in agile development tools, is using community to collaborate with its customers and drive product design.   Using HiveLive's LiveConnect Platform, Rally has created a Groundswell award-winning community called Agile Commons.  It is now the largest online community dedicated to advancing Agile software development practices.  In this community, Rally customers, product managers, and industry experts interact and fuel Rally's innovation process.  Here's a brief description of how their community works (note that you have to be an AC member or Rally customer to see some of these areas of the community):

In Agile Commons, customers provide feedback on Rally's roadmaps and generate new concepts for products and features.  Members can build on ideas and crowd-source priorities through voting.  Rally product managers pull ideas from the community into their life-cycle management system. They weave customer-created concepts directly into their real-time roadmap -- without having to run traditional focus groups, use off-line surveys, or wait for an annual user conference.  It all happens 24x7.  Rally engineers can then more efficiently develop the right features, already vetted by customers.  In fact, by Rally's last count, nearly half of the features recently released were attributed entirely to community participation.  Customers can participate through the entire process -- they track the features they care about, and are notified when they are released.  Full cycle.

And, this is just one of the activities that energizes this vibrant community. There are more:

• members spin up on agile by educating and supporting one another
• they share integration examples, and best practices
• the community even attracts new members (and Rally new customers) by invitation and by word-of-mouth

By placing customers at the center of its product development process, Rally is rapidly delivering the products and services its customers truly need.  What excites me about Rally's effort is that they are actively designing and shaping their community to drive change in their business.  The result?  Increased business agility and a company culture of routine innovation.