I’m a little behind on my reading, but just read a great post from Brad Feld on how software companies can often forget to fix the little things in their application that may seem insignficant, but that drive customers crazy.

It would seem to me that the mark of a customer focused, highly successful software company would be their ability to take care of the little things as well as the big things for their customers.  To do this, a company would need at least a couple of capabilities.

First and foremost, they’d need engineers that are smart enough to actually fix the problem.   Given Brad’s appropriate characterization of how hard it would be to fix some of the little things that are bugging him (sorry for pun) lately, let’s assume that most software companies have that capability (if not, they probably don’t have that many customers and should be worried about the big things that probably don’t work either)

Second, they’d need the ability to rapidly fix the issues and get those fixes out to their users.  I guess it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for a user to have to wait a year for the next annual software release to have some annoying bugs fixed, but it is certainly better when the software company can push fixes and upgrades in a more continual fashion.  MVaaS (and SaaS providers more generally) have a leg up here as they can push changes out to their entire installed base as frequently as they want – with most doing monthly or quarterly pushes of some big things and some little things.

Finally, and here’s where the most talented technology/software companies can fall down despite all of their technical prowess, the company needs a mechanism to hear what the little things are directly from their customers.  Sounds like common sense, but if you don’t have a simple and easy way to ask for and collect feedback from your customers on the little things, your development team will keep cranking out the sexy new big things and will build an application or service that is really advanced (and really annoying to a not insignificant portion of your users)

That would be a shame.