Having a Great Product Helps

by Bryon D Beilman

I was talking to an engineer at one of our customers.  We have been supporting this customer since their inception in the Venture Capital Headquarters where they were planning their business. In the last 3 years they have grown to 80 employees, multiple sites and have experienced success in the launch of their product.  The engineer that I was talking to was a customer support engineer, who helps their customers understand and effectively utilize their product. As he described his hectic schedule and long hours, I said something about how it must be challenging to support all of those customers and he looked at me and said, "We have a great product and having a great product helps."

I was pleasantly surprised by his comments and attitude and it helped explained perhaps why they were successful.  I think this can be summarized into three concepts.

1) Not to be too obvious, but make your product the best it can be.  Our product is our consulting services, managed services and our people. We are always trying to improve it and make it the best it can be.  Customers want to know they bought and own the best product and people want to have the pride that they are working for a company that makes a great product. This customer makes a great product that was designed well and created to meet their design specs.

2) Make a product that meets a business need.  This particular company makes a product that meets a business need and it was forward thinking enough that if they were able to execute on creating it, there would be customers that would flock to using it.  In some cases, you hear of leaders like Steve Jobs who make things they want because the customers don' t yet know they need it, but this is rare. There are many other examples of people who create a technology and hope there is a product that evolves, but it turns out that the end product has no value to people or at least enough value to make money.

3) Success is attitude.  I think this is almost more important than the other two.  Talk to anyone who is part of a successful company or product and you will not hear about how they wrote some code, built a device and it all magically just worked and they all made boat loads of money.  There are always challenges, issues and barriers. How you handle those challenges is critical to your success. Some people look for excuses for why something cannot be done, while others look for solutions to very challenging problems.

At iuvo Technologies, we are work hard to have all three components. A great product that our customers want while providing those services with a great attitude. Seeing the same qualities in our successful customers just reinforces what we believe.