"It has been our experience that when venturing to deliver meaningful change, your previous experience, opinion, belief system and view of the world (including the problem you believe needs solving) can actually be a detriment to delivering that meaningful change.
The truth is - the more experience you attain, the more humility you must learn and thus should be driven to create and continuously update your peer group in order to keep on delivering the best version of yourself, which you can then embedded in the products and services you aim to deliver value.
At Skunkworks Den we have a combined 130 years + of senior management experience, spanning across 9 different industries, across 5 continents. We have team members who have went over and beyond the corporate contribution to become now scholars, historians, authors, coaches and psychologists in their spare time.
While this sounds impressive, we would have been nowhere had we not invested effort individually and jointly into creating a community / peer group that can challenge, inspire and drive us forward. This has proven to be key to being fullfilled in both our personal and professional lives.
When it comes to delivering digital tools, one of the best ways to perform the sanity and quality check required is through creating a community of professionals in different phases of their careers, to ensure receiving a wide range feedback and suggestions, rating them with the same community and accordingly incorporate the feedback into the relevant feature set."
Among many types of tests / checks one can use, beta testing stands out when it comes to digital tools. Why? Because it provides you with the actual customers’ point of view.
Why is this important?
1. We might think that we made a perfect product, but we don’t develop software products for ourselves. We do it for the customers, and their opinion matters the most for the product’s success.
2. Beta testers will interact with our tool in ways we might not even think of. This means we can receive surprising results and feedback, which when implemented, increases the probability of delivering the ultimate customer experience.
3. It saves resources and money especially when it comes to time-to-market. Beta testers can provide invaluable insight and assistance in avoiding pitfalls you would have otherwise had to face while in live production.
4. All the different environments, devices, browsers, locations, and every other variable you can get by giving your tool to beta testers is another priceless benefit of this type of testing.
Therefore, getting feedback from beta testers who use your product in a real environment, who check the usability, security, speed, and many other elements that contribute to their experience, will shape how we develop Brick, Mortar & Daughter further.
We personally have been beta-testers ourselves, and some of the benefits of being one we find are:
1. Being a part of creating something new.
2. Being a part of a community of international community of professionals will open new avenues for different and at times more intelligent synapses to start forming in our own brains (we learn new things) – through interacting, providing feedback and seeing how the change / suggestion actually delivers value.
3. Being able to assist in solving a bigger world problem above our own daily frustrations, to a point which is more aligned with our values and vision of how our society embeds the same values in everyday lives of people or workforce using the same.
In summary: we get to learn, interact, be a part of creating something new that aligns to our values and not only do we usually get a badass discount for the services, but we also get to provide much-needed feedback that improves the service / product for us and the next person.
This is why we are putting together our community of beta testers before we launch Brick, Mortar & Daughter to the market.
