We obsess over creating a product that drives real value for our customers, and the CallRail development process is an integral part of this. Recently, we’ve received several questions about our product development process, so we’d like to break down how we make CallRail the best it can be.
Requests
Our process starts with an idea or a request—often from customers. These product ideas also come from sources such as market research, internal requests, and observations of user behavior. We receive ideas on a daily basis for features and enhancements that would make CallRail easier to use, more valuable for your business, and nicer on the eyes. So what happens to all these ideas?
Discussion and comparison
First, we organize each idea and request. These requests are discussed with product managers and product management leadership on a regular basis. The early discussions focus more on the root problem that prompted the request rather than the request itself. After preliminary discussions, we do a little research, determine the value that an idea offers our users, and gain a rough idea of what we’d need to do to build it.
Once an idea is approved, we determine where it fits with other requests, our current roadmap, bugs, and more. Not every idea that we explore aligns with our long-term product strategy, so this prioritization is the final step before researching how we want to build a new feature.
Research, design, and content
The Product Development team never stops our research, including customer and internal interviews, user surveys, competitive analysis, workflow whiteboarding, and lots of reading. From this research, we then write out the technical requirements and design the prototypes that developers use to build a given feature.
This is a shared effort between product managers, user experience designers, content strategists, and developers. Once this process is complete and approved through peer and leadership review, we schedule the feature for development.
Active development and testing
While the feature is in development, product managers and product marketing managers train our team on how to use it. This training includes all CallRail employees from sales, support, marketing, and customer success. Everyone must be on the same page and prepared to support our users when the feature launches.
Towards the end of development, the feature is rigorously tested by developer peer code review, our quality assurance department, and a review from the Product Manager. Once it passes these tests, it’s finally released to you, the customer.
But the conversation doesn’t stop there. We love to hear post-release feedback on a feature, especially from the people using it the most.
We take customer feedback and suggestions very seriously when defining our roadmaps at CallRail. Each of these steps are important parts of the product development process, but they couldn’t happen without the brilliant ideas we get from users like you. This ongoing conversation is an integral part of providing the best call tracking and marketing attribution platform available.
So please, keep asking questions, keep submitting feature requests, and keep letting us know how we can better serve you.
If you have ideas for how CallRail can improve our app, or if there’s a must-have feature you’d like to see added to our service, send our sales team an email.