Doing the Right Things.

I had a professor in business school tell me that running a successful business requires just two things:

Do things right.

and

Do the right things.

Of these, it turns out the “Doing the right things” is the more difficult one.  There are many things we are capable of doing.  We need to distil all those items down and focus on the ones that will make a difference to our customers.

Our company, Trilogy Software, released our “VIP” edition of Doxcycle today (free until January for the first 500 registrants).   Doxcycle is “Intelligent Source Document Management for Canadian Tax Professionals”.  It takes T-Slips, charitable donations receipts, RRSP receipts and other tax documentation and organizes it into an indexed, compact PDF file that you can use to prepare a tax return or keep as an archive.  It's very handy should you ever require back up documentation for CRA.

We've been working on Doxcycle since October of 2010. Over the past year, we've made hundreds of decisions about how it will work, the features that we'll present and how we are going to market and sell it. We’ve spent significant effort deciding what the “right things” are.

We are a small group, so we've not held any formal design meetings or followed any product plan laid out by a knowledgeable product manager. Instead, all our team members are involved in monthly meetings with potential customers. We invite our customers to meet us in the coffee shop downstairs, and then we go up to the "big" (relatively speaking) office that three of our team members share.  In these customer meetings, we usually spend 10 or 15 minutes discussing some of the things that are difficult to manage in their business. Then, we give a five or ten minute demo of a prototype we've developed. We follow that with a 30 minute discussion of other ideas that could improve our prototype, or might improve the processes in their business. We ask questions, and avoid making statements.  We draw a few pictures on the whiteboard. When we run out of space on the whiteboard, we make notes on the windows.  In all, we'll chat for an hour or maybe an hour and a half, and then we'll thank our guest for their time.

We stay together as a team for another 30 minutes or so, and make a few more notes. We draw stars beside the things that are important. Over the next few days, the good ideas get underlined and highlighted. The ideas that can't work, don't fit our present design or aren't important get scratched out or erased. The ideas that remain after two or three days get recorded in our task tracking software and assigned to a developer.  They'll evolve into the next prototype, or, if we've got it right, will survive to form a part of a future release.

Today’s Doxcycle release is a culmination of all these discussions, as well as 163 completed tasks and 267 fixed bugs.  To request a free trial, click here.

We’re also pleased that we can now incorporate your feedback, and the feedback of your colleagues, in our future releases of Doxcycle.

There are two ways for you to be heard:

First, visit the support page of our website.  There, you can submit ideas, bugs, problems and even praise if like.  This is a public forum where others can comment on your ideas and build on them.

Second, you can use our in product feedback.  This is a great way to help us improve our slip recognition, or fix a bug that may be unique to your system.  All the comments and files you provide using this method are encrypted before they are sent to us, and we keep them in an encrypted database for utmost security.

To use the in product feedback, you can click the “@” symbol in the “quick” menu in the upper left hand corner of Doxcycle:

Or, you can provide feedback which includes a specific page of your document using the “page menu”:

In either case, you’ll be given this screen, where you can enter your confidential feedback:

We’re looking forward to your comments and promise to “Do the right things” with the feedback you offer.