The Packet Scoop

We are please and proud that over 30,000 users are seeing value in our pt360 Diagnostic Tool Suite. You may have seen the release this morning that we have registered over 1 million runs of our network management suite. For a product that was released less than six months ago, we are happy that we’re on the right track, and that users are coming back to the product time and time again.

I recently had lunch with a friend who said that the mantra of his company is to “build products that people lust for.” While at first it sounds a bit corny, when you apply the ramification of that statement into your product analysis, design and development process, it starts to make a lot of sense.

Why would a network engineer lust for our product? First, it needs to solve a pain point that is specific and quantifiable, and it needs to save the user either significant time or money. Second, the interface must be intuitive, simple, and easy to use. Believe it or not, the top feedback we get is how easy our products are to install, configure, and use. Not only does this keep users coming back, but it also provides a user experience that is differentiated in the market. It’s amazing how many products on the market are “designed by network engineers for network engineers”. However, our user community knows all too well that they’re better at building and managing networks than creating the most intuitive GUI and product workflow.

So, as a company, as my friend said, they concentrate less on keeping up with the competition feature by feature, instead they talk to customers in a continuous feedback loop, and ask them what products and features will they lust for. In this age of rapid software development and deployment, feature differentiation is no longer a leading competitive edge, but if you build products that users lust for they will continue to come back to you. Seems subtle, but it’s not.

We are looking into implementing a lust factor into our process here at PacketTrap. Every feature we build should have a lust factor. But it’s not just the feature; it’s also the workflow, the interface, and the overall experience.

Rather be corny and make our customers happy, then just build another network management product “designed by network engineers for network engineers.”

Steve