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Putting the Customer Up Front with Studio 8

In his keynote speech at Flashforward San Francisco 2005 Macromedia's Chief Software Architect, Kevin Lynch, commented that this release of Studio was perhaps "the most customer-driven release in the history of the company." That may sound like something that company executives always say, but in this case, it's really true.

Now that we've announced the Studio 8 products, it seems fitting to reflect on the path we took to get here. As you may recall, we were caught by surprise by the reaction to the MX 2004 releases, so much so that we did several dot releases to get to the stage where customers told us they were satisfied with product quality and performance. At the onset of the Studio 8 planning cycle, we were determined to make the next release intensely customer driven—to engage earlier and more actively with users around the world.

We introduced a new product development process—intensely rigorous and highly structured. The process, officially known as the Synchronous Product Development process, involved a series of five waves of customer visits—30 half-day visits per product team to be exact. Each week-long wave involved pitching our product "hypothesis" to customers, gauging their reaction, and rapidly iterating on what we heard. Across the Studio products, we visited nearly 100 customer sites, talked to over 500 users and logged at least 1500 Macromedia employee hours with users.

To be honest, some of us were initially skeptical about this new process. We were overwhelmed with the amount of structure, the time commitment required, and the thought of having so many team members on the road for weeks at a time. (The process is premised on the fact that the product marketing, product management and engineering team leads need to be present at all customer visits – like a jury in a court trial, they must all share the same information and weigh the same evidence in making product decisions). Despite the time and resource investment required, we knew that the end result would be well worth the effort.

Who and Where Did We Visit?

This was one of the hardest parts of the process—determining who to visit to reflect our varied and geographically dispersed customer base. Across the teams, we visited multiple cities in the US, Europe, and Asia. We tried to visit a geographically and demographically representative sample of customers for each product that would define the essence of the release.

My first week on the job at Macromedia was actually spent in Seattle, looking over the shoulder of Dreamweaver developers as they worked. These customer visits were not your typical casual meetings where you come in and vaguely ask "so what don't you like about our product?" Like everything about the Synchronous Product Development process, the visits were highly structured. Each three-hour meeting began with the "over the shoulder" session—where we would literally watch one or two users work with our products for an hour or more. As they showed us their work and used the tools, the challenges that customers were facing with our products often became obvious. We were able to feel their pain in a very palpable way—a Flash user struggling when Normal Mode was removed, a Dreamweaver user attempting to get pixel precision without zoom, a Japanese developer iterating countless times to get his content to work properly on a mobile phone. These were the "aha" moments.

Part two of the meetings always involved (again, by requirement) a broad and representative team from the customer including the key business owner, the designer/developer, and any other purchasing decision makers. This part of the meeting was where we went through our hypotheses—a detailed description of the products we were planning. Not only did we have them rank features and prioritize, we actually showed them demos of all the major feature areas we were planning so they could comment on the proposed implementation and workflow. We took detailed notes and spent hours after each meeting "debriefing" on what we learned.

And now, over a hundred visits and four continents later, we're excited to let you see the results. Overall, we think we've struck an optimal balance between groundbreaking new functionality and major enhancements to workflow and productivity. Based on our experience watching customers, you'll see significant workflow enhancements in all the primary Studio products—things like code collapse and background file transfer in Dreamweaver and the Object Drawing model in Flash. You'll also see jaw-dropping new features like alpha channel support in Flash, visual authoring with XML data in Dreamweaver, and 25 new blend modes and CSS pop-up menus in Fireworks. We think you'll find there are great new features and improvements to the ones you use on a daily basis.

Early response to the Studio 8 products has been overwhelmingly positive. Lately we've been on the road a lot, showing the new feature set to press and customers. After all the hard work, it's truly gratifying to hear the reactions. Each time we demo the feature set we tend to get a "how did you know?" reaction along with applause and cheers. People are amazed by the little things (like the Library panel in Flash and guides in Dreamweaver) in addition to the larger, more visible features. We believe this is a result of a process that made our teams truly listen and understand customers' most pressing issues.

We hope you'll enjoy using this release as much as we enjoyed creating it. Even though we couldn't visit all of you personally, we hope you'll feel like we heard your pain and your inspiration. And, if we've missed something, we trust (as we've come to expect) you'll let us know for next time!

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