Atera presents: The making of a roadmap

Webinar transcript

Anna: Hi everyone! I am watching some familiar names come in the chat, so it’s really nice to see you. We’re going to give folks a few more minutes to join us. In the meantime, please feel free to let us know how everyone is doing and where you’re from. Hila, it’s so nice to have you here with us for the first time and hopefully not the last time. 

Hila: Glad to join you. Thank you, Anna. 

Anna: Just maybe another minute or so, and we will dive right in. I’m seeing Ella is doing a wonderful job making sure that everyone is greeted. We have an amazing moderator here with us in the live chat. She’s going to be taking some of the questions that you have, but that’s in addition to a Q&A we’ll have at the end of the session. So, I think generally we can get going. You’re joining us today for a session we’ve been planning for quite some time. We’ve heard you and seen a lot of questions about the making of the Atera roadmap. This session is very unique because it’s going to give you a sneak peek into the actual process behind the Atera roadmap. I’m joined today by Hila, our VP of Product. Again, really excited to have you, Hila. A few housekeeping notes: as you know, this webinar is being recorded. We will be sending the recording post-session to everyone that registered. Any questions or comments for Hila, please place them in the tab under Q&A. We’re going to try to pull some questions from the chat as well, but help us stay organized and we’d love to prioritize these questions, so make sure you really put them under the tab in the Q&A. At the end of this webinar, we’ll run through as many questions as possible until time runs out. So without further ado, I want to invite Hila to really take us through what she and her team are working on. Go ahead, Hila, take it away. 

Hila: Thank you, Anna. Hi everyone, I’m really happy to be here with all of you today. Today, I will offer a glimpse into the behind-the-scenes of our process and methodologies that the product department at Atera uses in order for you to get a deeper understanding of how we shape the product for your better experience. I want to talk in this session about the content of the roadmap. We have a dedicated great session in two weeks from now, the second day of Ateraverse, where our Chief Product Officer Tal Dagan will go over the roadmap in detail. You will see any kind of feature we are planning and working on, but here you will have the chance to see what we are doing behind the scenes in terms of processes. So, in our agenda, what is our product strategy for 2024? What is our approach for building a roadmap? And we’ll end the session with a live Q&A, so I would love to answer all your questions. Like every successful company, we are starting our year with a product strategy. We have intensive days of workshops together with our senior management and relevant stakeholders from different departments in Atera. Together, we are gathering to try and look at very critical aspects to help us define the product strategy. One aspect is the customer voice. We have tons of feedback from you guys. I will go over how we are collecting it and how we are prioritizing it in a couple of slides from now. But we are taking all the requests and trying to fit Atera to any size of business, starting from small up to enterprise, and see how we help you grow your business. Then, we are looking at the business aspect. Where are we, as Atera, aiming to be when the year ends, and what are the business opportunities and targets we set for ourselves, and how can we meet them? Next, we look into the technology aspect. We will go and discover and analyze the evolving technology trends and what opportunities we can use to boost the products via this technology. I guess you can all guess what the technology is that not only us but the rest of the world are looking into in 2024 and onwards—the generative AI, of course. This is a core part of the technology world we are looking at. Last but not least is the IT ecosystem—the market, the environment, the dynamics of the IT ecosystem, and what kind of opportunities we have there. 

Here is our product strategy for 2024. The first prioritized area that we are focusing on will be productivity and proactivity. We heard this loud and clear: you want to save time and give the best service to your customers to get the highest satisfaction. We believe that with the right features and the right technology, we can make you much more productive and proactive. You will hear us talk a lot about 10x productivity. I really believe that we can get to much more than that. Productivity can start from small things like immediate actions from the devices page, but it also can be detection of issues, prevention of issues, recommendations for automation, and so on. All-in-one is the second focus area for 2024. We know and hear that customers find huge value in the all-in-one capabilities that we are offering. We want to enhance the functionality and create and add new ones. All-in-one can be enhancing the connection between our PSA to our RMM, enhancing the asset management capabilities, deepening the integration with third-party software, AI capabilities that connect them all, and so on. Best onboarding and setup will be the third topic. We are releasing features every two weeks, really every two weeks, and sometimes even less than that. But we know that your day-to-day doesn’t allow you to track. We believe that utilizing Atera’s product first will provide the value for money that you are searching for, but more importantly, it will make you more productive. We want to put some effort into discoverability and helping you define the best setup that will help you set the system right. 

Insight is critical to get the right actionable insights. We are planning to put significant effort into reporting, including classic reporting, advanced reporting, dashboard customization, and more. Insight will be our focus area for 2024. From this high-level strategy, we drill down to concrete plans, defining our yearly roadmap. We have a full roadmap ahead of us, but this is our guiding star. It’s not something we are committed to; we see ourselves as an agile company. We know the market and technology are dynamic, especially in recent years, so we want to keep ourselves relevant and develop the right features at the right time. Most of the time, we meet what we define, but the more concrete plans we are committed to are our quarterly plans. Towards the end of each quarter, we have intensive planning sessions to determine what will be delivered in each week. We communicate these plans internally, and 90% of the time, we meet all our committed items.

How do we define the content for each quarter? It’s not only top-down from strategy; it’s also bottom-up. We always collect feedback from you through various channels. The main channel is our feature board, our user voice, where most customers leave their required features and others rate them. We also send surveys via emails, social networks, and in-app feedback collection. When launching a specific feature, we sometimes release a survey to understand if we did it right and what should be improved. We love to visit you on-site, so invite us if you want. We love to see your day-to-day operations closely. Our internal departments, such as customer success, support, and sales teams, collect feedback from you continuously and share it with us. We also meet customers and prospects via Zoom meetings and on-site visits. Additionally, we have our data analytics to track your usage in the products and monitor if you are encountering problems and if we can improve our offerings.

With numerous requirements, how do we choose what to do and when? We use a methodology called RICE: Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort. – Reach: How many customers and users will be impacted by the new features or capabilities we release? – Impact: The level of impact, meaning whether it significantly changes your day-to-day operations or is just a nice-to-have feature. – Confidence: How confident we are in the impact that we will make. – Effort: The time required to develop the feature, considering both major and minor features. We calculate these parameters and score all relevant features, aligning them with our strategy. We prioritize them from the highest RICE score to the lowest, which helps us choose what will be part of our upcoming quarter.

Despite the extensive planning process, we like to remain agile, even at the quarterly level. We have a method called “quick wins,” which are small, delightful capabilities that we add ongoing to the product. Regardless of how many people requested them or their impact, if those tasks are relatively small (up to one or two days of development), we keep adding them. Examples include adding the last reboot date and BitLocker to advanced filters, BIOS, and battery information to the API. These weren’t the highest RICE scoring features, but they were delightful and quick to implement. 

Our development process is never-ending. Every feature we release undergoes extensive post-launch improvements. For example, our new devices page had three major releases. We collected feedback through surveys, met customers who chose to revert to the old devices page, and iterated based on their feedback. It’s an ongoing development to ensure better user experience. # Hackathons and Creative Initiatives We encourage our teams to think creatively and boost development velocity through hackathons. These are one to two full days from sunrise till midnight, focusing on specific topics like AI, security, user experience, and more. We have competitions and prizes, motivating the teams and yielding great results. Soon, we will have a user experience hackathon, aiming to fix between 100 to 200 small user experience issues in one day. We will share this with the community and invite you to contribute ideas for small fixes. 

We want to improve visibility and clarity around our plans and roadmap. Soon, we will share a public roadmap based on user voice. It will clearly show the items requested by users and the ones already released or planned. This public roadmap will be shared in two weeks during Ateraverse, where Tal will go over the content itself.

Anna: Thanks, Hila. That was super interesting. I’m seeing a few questions come in the Q&A tab and those are also questions we’re seeing in the community. I think we can start with a recurring one. Let’s start with an understanding of how we pull and treat feedback coming in from User Voice. I see Maas is asking specifically about how it gets moderated, seeing potentially requests appearing too often or disappearing. It would be really interesting to understand how we weigh that in as part of all these other channels you’ve just talked about. If you can touch on that, that would be great. 

Hila: Sure, sure. There is a lot of work that we are doing on a daily basis with User Voice. The requests there are not always aggregated; they are sometimes repeated, as you can see. Each and every product manager has their own domain and gathers all the requests weekly. When we plan our quarter, we take all the requests and put them in the RICE framework as I mentioned. We consider the number of people who requested it, the effort it will take to develop, the reach, and so on. User Voice is our main source of features, but we also gather features from other channels. Most of the time, these channels complement the User Voice features. User Voice is a very valid and our main resource for prioritizing our features due to its historical depth and the continuous addition of new requests.

Anna: Thank you for that. I’ll jump quickly to Nathan’s comment and question. Nathan is saying he really likes the use of new in-app feedback for newly launched features but wonders if we will see more engagement in User Voice, as it is rarely updated or commented on. How do we access the area in the app to give feedback, and can we make it more visible? 

Hila: The feedback in the app is used very softly. We don’t like to do it a lot because we don’t want to disturb your day-to-day work. Your work sequence is the most important thing for us. We use it lightly in some places with new features. While some users like it, not everyone does, so we don’t want to bother you too much with collecting feedback. We use User Voice and, whenever we plan to start a feature, we send a survey to the specific customers who asked for and rated it in User Voice. We do this a lot. Sometimes we also invite you to meetings to share your feedback face-to-face, which we always prefer. 

Anna: Thanks, Hila. I’ll jump into a question from Sai. If it is diving too deep into what Tal is about to show in two weeks, we’ll see you at Ateraverse. Sai is asking if we can get more visibility to network devices’ vulnerabilities while performing network scans. Is this something we’re working on? 

Hila: It’s not something we are working on this quarter, but we are planning to put some enhancements around viability soon. Tal will share more details in two weeks, and you will see these things in the public roadmap we are sharing.

Anna: Great. Let me jump into another common question from the community boards. How do we decide whether to develop a feature internally or partner with a third party for integration, especially in domains like MDM? 

Hila: It’s a great question and a balance that every company deals with. Being all-in-one sometimes means developing more functionality in-house, but the tradeoff is that we may not be best in breed in every single domain. We want to be your best RMM and PSA and all-in-one experience tool, but we are not planning to be the best in every domain. If we can’t be the best, we will usually integrate the best-of-breed solution for you. This is what happened with MDM. We encounter this dilemma every time, doing intensive market research to see the leading players and the effort required to be there. If we can’t be the best, we prefer to integrate. 

Anna: Another great question is what happens when we develop a feature that gets negative feedback. Have we ever scrapped features, and how do we treat that feedback? 

Hila: I’m happy to say we haven’t had to do it often, meaning we are probably developing something right and iterating all the time. But of course, there are cases. For example, with the attended/unattended access from Splashtop, we found some bugs and rolled back immediately. Another example is the new component of scheduling a ticket. We thought to take the experience one step ahead with an AI-based approach, but users didn’t like it. They wanted the old familiar experience, so we listened and will roll back to the previous functionality. 

Anna: Let’s dial back into questions about the roadmap. Nathan is asking if folks will be able to comment on different items, similar to Trello where you can add an upvote or comment. Can you share anything about how that’s going to be designed? 

Hila: We are using User Voice for the roadmap functionality. The feature board will be connected, and you will be able to see what you asked for and where it is in the public roadmap. User Voice allows commenting on the items themselves, but not on the roadmap directly. You can comment on the items in User Voice, and we will see it. I’m not sure about voting on the roadmap, but I will check. 

Anna: Rob is asking for clarification on whether folks will be able to see when something is actually coming out. Will this information be shared on the roadmap? 

Hila: Yes, it will be on a quarterly level. You will be able to understand when it will be shared. Most of our plans are nailed into the quarter, so you will see the maximum of three months ahead. 

Anna: If anyone has more questions specifically about the process Hila and her team are taking on when working on the roadmap or what’s coming up, we are nearing the end of this webinar. If anyone had questions that we weren’t able to answer, please drop them in the Q&A. Nathan: Can we please announce upcoming changes on a Friday so folks can test and plan for them, instead of updates coming through the weekend on a Sunday? 

Hila: If you are talking about User Voice updates, we usually update on Sundays because it’s an offline task and we have quiet on Sundays. But I will ask the team to do it on a different day. 

Anna: Wonderful. Again, please feel free to reach out to us through various social channels. We’re also very active in our community and are there to funnel your feedback and requests back to our team. We’re always listening. Join us on May 15 and 16 for some great news and updates, insightful conversations with folks from Microsoft and Wiz, and a live Q&A with our CEO and CTO. Thank you so much for joining us, Hila. Thank you for the very insightful session. 

Hila: Thank you. Have a great day. Bye-bye. 

Anna: Bye-bye.