Monday, January 17, 2011

Satisfaction

Recently I was forwarded an article in Event Marketer Magazine where the author reviewed 5 products that have allowed "the last of the low-tech event sectors [to plug] in."  One of the products reviewed was built on the WorkXpress Platform, and is competing with no less than 4 software solutions built to serve the industry of Event Staffing, directly.  This level of success is very exciting to me personally because it shatters the depths of removal that our engineering team is constantly buried beneath.

A screenshot of the homepage of their WorkXpress product.

Feature development at WorkXpress is very abstract. On any given day I might make a change to how values of a certain field type sort, or are searched. I might add a new type of field, defining how it looks when edited, and viewed, how it's searched, etc. I might add a new type of action, adding power to our logic engine. Often times these additions and changes are done inside a contained development space so that I know what will go in, and can tweak what will come out. Seldom do I get to see how a builder uses this new feature, and even less often do I get to see a customer using this new feature in a way that impacts them. Unfortunately, without seeing how what we do impacts feet on the ground, there is a certain satisfaction missing from our role as engineers.

Granted, we hear things like "Tom from ServoLift told me yesterday that this past year was the best year they've ever had and in large part it's thanks to their WorkXpress product" from the support team, but that pale's in comparison to actually seeing a product built on our platform adding real value to a company's employee's day to day work.  Even that pale's in comparison to the satisfaction I got when I found out that not only does a product built on WorkXpress (EPS Tracker 2.0) power EventPro Strategy's day to day business, but it does it so well it was featured in a tech magazine about that industry.

Our vision is to build a platform that is business agnostic; anyone should be able to use it to build solutions that can solve any business need regardless of size or shape.  We believe that if we do a good enough job in delivering our vision then businesses will be free of the non-customizeable, 'You will run your business this way,' industry products that are out there now.  They will be able to produce software that's custom fit to their needs so they are free to run their business as they see fit on software that works with them instead of against them. 

The satisfaction of seeing that vision deliver so well to EPS that they not only have a solution that's helped them be more successful, but that it competes with industry specific products, is immense.