Behind the Curtain - Altru Product Development

Ever wonder what happens to the ideas you suggest or Me Too on the community? I’m here to tell you how we take your suggestions and make them reality in the product. First let me introduce myself though. I’m Courtney Grainger Goodin, the new Altru Product Manager. I joined the team this summer as Jonathon moved on to a new role here at Blackbaud. I can’t say enough how awesome it is to be back home with my Altru family.

So ideas – in the Community as you are entering and voting for ideas, we’re regularly reviewing the feedback to identify ways we can address your it. Some ideas are smaller and we can quickly tweak functionality to meet the needs addressed in the idea. Other ideas are larger in scope and require more investigation that we can capture through a survey, comments in the Community, or emails. For these ideas we work through a process internally called Discovery – we’re working to “discover” what the right answer/solution might be. We do this as a team called a triad. The Triad consists of a lead engineer, who grounds our conversation to ensure we’re on the route to a high quality/feasible solution, a user experience designer, who helps draw on industry best practices and design patterns, and myself, the product manager, who helps keeps us focused on the what and the why of the opportunity we’re currently working on.

One example of this is the idea to enable recurring donations online. This idea had 47 followers and 72 Me Too’s. So the first place to start was with you! Over the past 6 weeks we’ve met with over a dozen clients talking through what their needs for what an online recurring giving solution would look like. We start the process with a conversation – where are you today with your recurring giving program?

Once we have a baseline of where you are today, we start digging into what you are looking for. We utilize low and high fidelity prototypes to test out different scenarios, settings, and workflows. Between calls, we tweak and edit the prototype until we get to a point where we have maximized the options within the system that we can expand, build upon, or modify. The goal at the end is a functional prototype that we can then present to our development team to review and then determine the best way to implement the feature or functionality.

So ideas may start with one person, but as more votes are submitted the ideas are pulled into this discovery process for development to make the idea a reality. For perspective, since the community has been launched 134 ideas have been implemented in the product and 5 more are planned for our October release!