I think most Skuid employees can remember their “ah-ha” moment. When a lightbulb went off in their head and suddenly they realized how much of a difference Skuid makes in the lives of our customers.
For some people, it’s a conversation with a customer. “Skuid saved my Sundays,” is my favorite customer quote of all time. It’s from a guy who used to be so overwhelmed by his job that he had to work every Sunday.
Now, his weekends are free to do what he wants.But I’m a hands-on learner. I can hear about the benefits of Skuid all day every day. I can even talk about them and write about them.
But to truly understand the impact deep in my bones, I need to experience it.This is the story of my “ah-ha” moment.
I didn't think the perfect app existed.
In the past, when someone asked, “What events, blog posts and emails do we have coming up?” we’d send them to several different places, Google sheets, docs and calendars, to find out.
Sometimes that information only lived in someone’s head (guilty) or on a piece of paper.Our company is growing fast, and we need to stay on the same page. Sales needs to know about upcoming trainings.
Our leadership team needs to know which case studies we’ve published recently. And the calendar app I had in mind just wasn’t possible with existing tools on the market.I’ve tried it all, Google Calendar, Basecamp, and Trello.
I’ve tried spreadsheets, day planners and sticky notes. I found different features I loved in each of the tools, but nothing brought all of them together. None of the tools are bad, but they just didn’t fit my needs. I recently decided that no such thing exists. I’d given up on the perfect app.
Intern Rachel came to the rescue.
That is until Skuid intern Rachel came into my life. She was using Skuid to build apps to make our employees' lives easier, and she wanted to know if there were any apps the marketing team needed.
My heart raced. Could the marketing calendar of my dreams be within reach?I explained my requirements, and Rachel said the project should be easy. I mentally shook my head thinking, “Easy? If she only knew how complex this calendar needs to be. If she knew how many other calendar apps I’ve tried."
I thought I knew what I wanted, but I didn't.
Meet Skuid intern Rachel[/caption]A week later, Rachel showed me the exact app I asked for. But here’s the thing. What I asked for wasn’t exactly what I wanted. I wanted to tweak it.
“Move this there. Change the color on that. I don’t want the whole company to be able to add and edit things (that would be chaos), just the marketing team.” In a few more days, Rachel showed the app to me again, and I wanted more tweaks.
“On second thought, that doesn’t make sense sitting there. Can we move it here?” I’ve never understood the importance of iteration before this project. I always thought, “If the business users really thought about what they wanted, they could just say so.”
I was so naive. We kept reviewing and making tweaks until we were both happy with the finished product. And less than 20 days later, the app is done. It probably would’ve been done even faster if I’d been able to get her feedback right away.
The calendar app is live in our CRM, and I can’t wait to hear the feedback from the whole company. Because here’s the cool thing, the iteration doesn’t stop when we launch. It keeps going!
We’ll keep tweaking it until there’s nothing left to tweak. Until it fits our needs perfectly. Until it’s bespoke. Want to see what the hype's about? Get a free one-on-one demo of Skuid's user experience platform.
