MACROMEDIA CASE STUDY

Macromedia is a successful software technology company with many well-known products; Flash and Cold fusion are examples. We spoke with Mike Chambers, Senior Product Manager, Developer Relations about Macromedia's experiences with blogging.

Mike Chambers' Weblog
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mesh/

Product Development

Macromedia has run blogs for about three years, initially blogs were started to build a better community and get information out to customers more quickly than existing channels. Over time Macromedia discovered that blogs could be used for the development of their products. This shift in product development thinking was gradual, and required a substantial change in thinking about the Macromedia product development process.

Formerly a Macromedia product would not be announced until 2-3 weeks before a release.

Customer community has always been a strong element in Macromedia's brand, a merger between Macromedia and Allaire Corporation in 2001 brought the very strong ColdFusion customer and reseller community of Allaire to Macromedia. Macromedia has a strong community through forums and local user groups, the company gets product feedback from talking with customers directly, at user groups, and by visiting specific customers.

Building on both companies experiences

Macromedia experimented with the use of blogs to build a stronger customer community. Early on Macromedia used blogs to get information out to customers quickly. The company wanted to be more open and transparent with their developers.

Over time developers gave their input through blogs on feature suggestions, as time passed Macromedia started to ask what features developers wanted and what they wanted changed in new versions of products on their blogs. The Macromedia programmers would discuss in open on their blogs what needed to be done and reported back to customers if they were able to make any suggested customer changes. Macromedia came to understand that the tool of blogging would help their company to get more information from their customers on product development.

Chambers explained that the software development process "was a very closed process, the blogs made it are more open and transparent process." Chambers had been working on the Flash team for about eight months, and the he thought it was very important to be working directly with customers on the development of future release updates. Chambers said, "customers use [our products] more than we do, they know them better them we do, we wanted to tap into that."