FeaturePlan Follow-up
A couple of months ago, I made a post regarding a product called FeaturePlan, which is produced by a company called Ryma. I was contacted by one of Ryma’s product managers, and he was nice enough to give me a demo, and send along access to a 45-day trial of FeaturePlan.
It’s a great product. It’s essentially based all around the Pragmatic Marketing best practices, and provides a ton of flexibility. However, at the end of the day, I decided it’s not the best tool for the situation I’m presently in.
FeaturePlan has a ton of capabilities. It is flexible, but no tool can be as flexible as the Excel spreadsheet you can do whatever you want with at the end of the day. We’re simply too small a team at this point, and putting the structure in place that a tool requires (yes, even Agile tools require structure) is too much of a hindrance. It would slow us down rather than help us work faster or more effectively.
Basically, our product requirements (split by release) are written on sketch pads and I tape them up behind my desk at the office. Sure it’s nice to have pretty reports that are printed out, and formatted and can be e-mailed out to everyone, but there’s something about having those items readily available for all to see that make them interesting tools to use.
In addition to building a damn fine product, Ryam also scores extremely high points in the service / support spectrum. Even though I was a nobody trial user, and one they understood to only be looking for 2-5 licenses at the most, they still gave me their utmost attention when I encountered some issues during the installation process.
I was able to walk through a WebEx with one of their support reps, show him what was happening, he took that back to his team and they came up with a solution. I hope that it goes in their knowledge base for the future, or it may have been something that could be fixed within the core of the product - either way, they reacted extremely well.
Even though I decided the team I am working with needs to remain loose and shoot from the hip, that does not mean I think FeaturePlan is lacking in any way. I would recommend it to any product manager looking to create a smooth flow of communication between their market, product development team(s), and back out to the market again.
Great work, guys. Special thanks to Stewart Rogers and Roman Kotchetkov for helping me out — I really appreciate it!
