Before I joined Money Dashboard, I spent some time teaching small technology companies about Product Management or the art of defining the right product. The right product is not what you or I want it is what the market wants the market being a significant number of people who have some problem that needs solving.
In our instance we wanted to help people to manage their money more effectively a real problem in today's world especially after the comprehensive spending review last week. And so we have tried to produce and launch a product that would help people with this issue.
However, and incredibly importantly, the work does not stop there. What is required is a constant feedback mechanism that allows people who have the problem to mould the development of the product.
Money Dashboard has a full time Product Manager whose job is to study how people are using the product, take feedback from all of the emails into our support site and develop a change plan based on the real users of the product.
For example, we were told our help was poor in the early days after beta launch so we significantly enhanced our help files. Feedback helped us to remould the bottom menu screen (do the early users remember the big green bottom menu?). We were made aware that people needed different functionality in the accounts page in Myprofile, so we rebuilt and enhanced it so that errors were reduced and aggregation became more stable.
Our next big step is in relation to the setup wizard and panels. Feedback from our users has been:
Panels are too small and inflexible Setup wizard is too complex The home page really needs to be a dashboard.
So, at this time, our development and test teams are producing what I think is a significant change to the client interface. Sure we'll still have the carousal, but the panels will take up the full width of the application and they will be more flexible in relation to different resolutions. A real dashboard will appear to give a quick summary of all the important parts on the application and a new welcome screen will replace the setup wizard.
Next in line is the track spending graph where we have made significant progress in drilling down from group level to tag and transaction levels.
We will continue to focus on taking feedback from our users and making improvements to our product. If you have any feedback please contact us or leave us a message on the forum.
by George Hall, Managing Director
