On Wednesday, February 18th the whole team headed to VMWare to meet with TJ, a Principal Architect associated very closely with the sales side, with the intent to show him our newest prototypes and get his feedback. Although in his position didn't put him close to the IT Admins we aimed to serve, we were able to learn a bit about the enterprise sales cycle. TJ also let us know that he thought out 'Integrated Search' feature was very useful and lets us know of some of the troubles the clients he had contact with had dealt with in the past. We walked away from the meeting not changing our prototype much but knowing we added value with this product and met a well-connected individual at VMWare.
The next day, we returned to VMWare to meet with Vivian, Amit, and Denis again. This was the first meeting since our pivot, so we wanted to not only inform them of our new vision, but get some feedback on the prototypes we had developed. We focused many of our questions towards Denis, as he used to be an active IT Admin who would deal with ticketing systems.
The feedback we got was mixed. We felt that we had a hard time explaining to them our audience- we wanted to focus on those who have to deal with end-users who are often not technical submitting IT help tickets while it seemed that they believed we wanted to make a bug reporting system. This led into a large digression into Bugzilla and Helpzilla, which they walked us through. However, we did find that some features were definitely useful. Denis especially liked our Integrated Search feature which would allow for searching of internal documentation and Google simultaneously, as well as the Predictive Resolution, which would help to suggest ways to solve tickets. Amit, on the other hand, seemed very skeptical and asked questions about our user acquisition, infrastructure concerns, and other business aspects which we were not yet even thinking about. Amit later reflected his doubts about our direction in an email.
This interaction left us with the conclusion that our application had the potential for great improvements for the IT ticketing space, but perhaps we were not presenting our value propositions clearly and concisely enough.