Well, I have been reading Seth Godin too much now, right?!
Honestly, that is not the case. I have been thinking a lot after I read his Purple Cow book and how vtiger can provide ‘that’ experience. In fact, the tags and the chat features are a result of those lessons.
I am not sure what will succeed but I am sure that if we do not try different things, we will never succeed.
We need to think differently, do different things, experiment and keep moving. The UI
- is a result of almost 14 reworks
- is a result of almost 10 iterations esp the related list ie the code was re-written almost 10 times led by Minnie
- chat was almost scrapped as we were not able to make it work and toiled with the idea for almost a month before deciding to go with what we have
- message that you see scrolling was something that we wanted to put in the footer
- theme -bluelagoon, woodspice almost never made it out of development as we were not sure if it was good enough; most of the theme thought bluelagoon was too jarring
- calendar was built almost 11 times as we were not really sure of the positioning of it and kept toying with it till the last minute
- tax calculation was something that we kept working on for 7 days to get it right on the UI front alone and then only could we proceed on the server side
- dashboards were something that would not work with PHP5 because of the way PHP5 handled arrays but Jacque solved it and helped us. It took close to 2 months to find out what the hell was happening there.
There were times when I used to question myself if I bit too much. I have toyed with the idea of being told that vtiger5 is crap and that used to leave me very very worried. I embraced that fear and decided to do all that I can to ensure that we do not get that kind of feedback. In fact, even after 2 weeks of the release, I kept my fingers crossed and prayed that all should go well. My team had done well, the contributors had done well, matt esp had done very well and we did not deserve failure but then no one ever knows what will happen, right?
In fact, my manager once called me and told me that we have had too many Alphas and he did not want the Betas to be in the same manner! It was tough as I intended to do a sequence of Betas. It was a question of doing what is right and I was not sure if what my manager said was right. I went ahead and decided to release anyway. The RCs went into the sequence style releases. Each RC, I would think – Well, this is the one at last! and then I would look into the feedbacks and say- “No, not good enough. Should fix and release further” and again we would go into development. Those days were tough indeed but then there was no success and I did not want to release something that I will regret throughout my life. I felt – if vtiger5 does not go well, vtiger will not survive too long.
What you see now is an experience, a journey filled with all feelings that can be lived through and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did and do.
