The Art of Product

63: Running Successful Early Access Programs

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Ben and Derrick were hoping to share a great conversation they had with author, designer, and consultant Paul Jarvis. But, without warning, all was lost when Paul’s audio for the episode could not be saved. The plan is to have Paul back on the show in a few weeks.

Everything else is going pretty well for Derrick, who provides an update on Level. He met his goal and launched the Level Early Access Program two weeks ago. When it comes to testing Tuple, Ben plans to prioritize people early on who have good bandwidth and help guide them to be successful when using the tool.

Today’s Topics Include:

  • Takeaway and Wake-up Call: Derrick has 6 teams in the early access program; some are using Level a lot, some are not - people are busy and running their own business
  • Quality feedback for Level testing; offers unknowns, guidance, and clarifications
  • Derrick’s working on a feature to make sure users remember to check back into Level because it’s designed to be unobtrusive and not bother you
  • Make a good first impression; capture users’ vision and maintain their interest
  • Derrick addressed people’s questions about how Level works and will solve their problems via storytelling with concrete, mechanical product details
  • Derrick is battling perfection, but wants to generate pre-order revenue and set a rolling launch deadline for Level - ideally in January, to highlight new tools in the new year
  • Ben is doing a podcast tour to promote Tuple, which had its best week for sign ups so far
  • Tuple also experienced a technical breakthrough - it crushed latency; trust your team to get things done
  • Tuple adventure is predicated on a value proposition that Tuple can be better than off-the-shelf products because of its key differentiators
  • Ben is not your everyday developer; recently took a leap and hit the bigtime being a backup singer for Josh Groban!

    • Links and resources:

    Paul Jarvis

    Trello

    Elixir

    Slack

    MicroConf

    Drip

    CodeNewbie Podcast

    Bits and Trees Podcast

    Full Stack Radio Podcast

    Ruby Testing Podcast

    Bootstrapped Web Podcast

    Swift

    JSON

    Postmark

    Screenhero

    Josh Groban

    Derrick Reimer Website

    Derrick Reimer on Twitter

    Ben Orenstein Website

    Ben Orenstein on Twitter

    Level

    Level Manifesto

    Tuple

    Tuple’s Pair Programming Guide

    ...more
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    The Art of ProductBy Ben Orenstein and Derrick Reimer
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