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The Years-Per-Feature Saga: Is Harvest under-capitalized?
There have been several instances of Harvest feature development being assigned a time frame that’s measured in years, while these things might be accomplished in months — or in some cases, possibly weeks.
A single line of CSS for changing from a mono-spaced font takes more than a year? No, of course not. But when a company is stuck in linear thinking and processes, a real problem arises when the development plan has a huge backlog. Even the small two-minute things end up taking years to happen.
You have a limited number of developers, and a huge number of pending features… so, naturally, progress will be slow. As more feature requests come in — often driven by features seen at other services — that backlog will only grow.
It’s good that the company is good at sticking to a plan or schedule… but when features that are vital to many customers are available form Harvest’s competitors now, while Harvest says those features will arrive sometime in the next year or two (or are not even scheduled for development), one has to wonder what’s going on.
So, Harvest, I’ll say it again— I’d say you’re under-capitalized.
I’m certainly no serial entrepreneur, but it’s not hard to see the pattern.
If you don’t raise development capital, you’re going to fall farther and farther behind. While you might be able to retain some core customer base, your growth is going to be severely limited by not having the features that your competitors already have, and which customers want and need.
Capital will provide additional development staff or vendor hours. Features will be developed in parallel, not in single-file fashion. You will move forward, and retain the customers who are clamoring for things they can find elsewhere. While there are many companies that can tell you that throwing money and coders at a problem won’t necessarily help (witness Microsloth), there’s a balance that has to be maintained.
I’ve seen this happen with a web hosting company I’ve been with for… 10 years now, I think.
Wonderful people. Super conscientious, super communicative, truly wizard-like staff. The service is incredibly reliable.
Their business model is one of slow, manageable growth, and that can be a valid choice. But over those 10 years, the value proposition has changed radically. Competitors now have so much more to offer in terms of control panel features and tools for resellers — not to mention larger capacities per dollar — that I’m forced to move, in order to provide my clients with what they need — and have come to expect — from a hosting service.
If a company does good things for me and is run by good people, I can have a fierce sense of loyalty to it. But at some point, business priorities win out, and a move must be made.
I think I’m fairly safe in saying that if Harvest doesn’t cap-up and build out faster, there’s a solid chance the company’s growth will plateau, and then decline — much faster than those of you at the company might ever have thought.
It’s time for those at the top to start thinking more big-picture. Otherwise, all this talk of feature requests and timelines will be moot.
No one from Harvest made any comment the last time I posted about this. I’d like to know what you think.
…Bob
Bob West
…and as if to underscore my point, here’s a tweet from Harvest, made 1 hour ago:
@harvest – harvest
bq. Stay on top of your game by researching the competition: http://hrv.st/kXioB3 #workbetter
…although research is just a start. Execution is the subject at hand.
First, we are not under-capitalized. We are supported by a passionate, growing customer base that pays us real dollars which we re-invest into improving Harvest everyday. Our customers have funded the product development, customer support and various business functions from day 1. We’ve made tremendous leaps on all these fronts in the last 5 years, and we have the resources to make many more leaps for the years to come.
Now as a product company, we are subject to a never-ending list of feature requests from our customers. We listen to each and every one of them. However, we are careful to not be reactive to each and every one of these requests. We can’t do it all, nor should we do it all. If we reacted to every request, we’d never get real meaningful things done, and we’d have an unusable product which would have more features than any one business need.
We’re not interested in becoming the jack of all trades, but master of none. We’re in the game to produce the highest quality product for our customers. This means keeping things simple, yet powerful. This means executing on the hard problems, which we know when solved, will impact a majority of our customers. These are changes that meaningful. These, to us, are the big wins for Harvest customers.
I believe we put a big effort in listening to customers and executing to solve their problems, more so than most companies. Try to think of a “capitalized” company that actually took the time to even listen to your request, nevermind executing against it?
We will continue to operate with our customer-centric approach, aiming to help as many customers at one time as we can with every focused effort. To us, this is the cornerstone of serving our customers’ true needs.
Hi, Danny…
Thanks for the reply— which may be, I think, the longest you’ve ever posted. :)
So, it sounds like I was wrong about Harvest being under-capitalized.
And that brings us to your process of prioritization and scheduling.
I certainly don’t expect your company — or any company, for that matter — to implement every feature request. That wouldn’t be sensible.
But from the posts in the forums, it seems there are some feature requests that you might want to re-think in terms of their positions on your To-Do list.
The most prominent one is invoice customization.
While many feature requests definitely fall into the it-would-be-nice category, for some people — like your UK customers (one of which I don’t happen to be) — invoice customization isn’t just a luxury… It’s a legal requirement.
For people like me – designers – customization isn’t required by law, but it’s a huge plus. And many designers might find the lack of this one feature to be the tipping point in finding a service.
It’s great that you want to execute on the hard problems – the ones that impact the majority of customers.
But it seems as though your company could allocate some resources to working some of the problems that are simpler. They may impact fewer users, but to those users, they’re very important.
I’m one of those people who hates doing maintenance. I live the big stuff. The overview. The impressive, creative projects that have the greatest impact. So I’ve learned to allocate maintenance to others, or to make sure I follow a strict schedule — and automate when possible — if I have to do it myself.
So, I can understand that it’s not only more impactful to a majority of users – and to your bottom line – to execute on the big stuff… it’s also more fun.
But when you focus only on those things, you can lose a lot of opportunities to make a big difference in some of your users’ worklives.
Environmentalists say it’s easy to get people motivated about protecting the “large charismatic species”. People like to get involved in the big stuff… Saving whales, or elephants or tigers.
It’s harder to get excited about the little stuff… Like the Pot-Bellied Toejam Fish (not his real name).
But that fish is part of the ecosystem, too, and has an impact.
I’m not looking for all the bells and whistles – or for feature bloat.
I’m just hoping that you can put some people on some of the small-yet-important items and do them in parallel with the Humpbacks.
For example, instead of waiting for a major overhaul of the subsystem, why not take a little time to add invoice email attachments, or allow changing invoice header text?
I know it could create some redundancy of effort in some cases, but it seems as though the easy-to-execute (but still important) things aren’t getting touched until they can be rolled into a major project.
I appreciate that you follow a majority rule approach to customer service… But you can generate a lot of good will – and deflect bad will – by slicing off a little time for the smaller projects.
That way, even more of your customers are thrilled with your responsiveness… and your forums aren’t polluted with posts about one-line CSS changes taking more than a year to happen.
I also appreciate the fact that you listen. Although, from your end, this might look like a kind of “careful what you wish for” thing. :)
…Bob
Bob West
As a new customer to Harvest I have spent much time looking through the forums and I feel this post is by far the most significant one in terms of feature related requests.
Since I personally own a web application of my own in another industry, I do understand what harvest is getting at with the “majority focus” talk but at the same time I would just like to hammer home what Bob has said.
While I have only used harvest for 15 days I can see a trend developing. In short I have requested 2 features myself:
- Rather than using a drop down box to select projects when entering time ( we have 500 currently open in our firm) use an auto complete box instead.
- Additionally rather than clicking on an invoice and selecting print each time, it would be nice to have a button that said print all in invoices for xxx time period.
While these are both very minor in terms of development time , I have been told on multiple occasions they are not currently in the harvests active timeline of to-dos.
Ill be the first to admit although these changes are frustrating at the least it probably wont be a deal breaker. However, the problem lies in the fact that by not implementing minor features or features that don’t cater to the “majority view”, no ONE person will ever really appreciate the application.
For instance, designers will always yearn for a custom invoice creator and freelancers will always be pushing for a time track-able flat fee billing feature. In our case (a law firm) we would like to see better management of volume in terms of projects and more automation in terms of invoicing (batch printing).
While catering to the majority of your users may yield high profits initially I do hope you change this view and start prioritizing smaller feature requests that can possibly win you over large additional audiences ie. law firms, freelancers, designers.
developing large and small features in parallel will most likely secure your future growth within the industry and result in many people appreciating your product as a whole rather than “just getting by” on its parts.
Just my 2 cents.
- Sean