Ship it!

Hello there!  By way of introduction I’m Jason Goldberg and I’m the new Chief Product Officer here at XING.  What does that mean?  Well, in short it means that I’m responsible for gathering feedback from XING’s users and translating that into great products and enhancements that meet your needs. In other words, my team runs the “give them what they want” department here at XING – and there’s nothing cooler than that!

Prior to joining XING I founded a company called socialmedian which enables people to get the news filtered by their networks.  One of the things I’m most proud of about socialmedian is the way that we built it based on direct input from our users. Every day we gathered user feedback as to what we could do better.  Our model was to ship early and often and then gather feedback, and repeat, repeat, repeat.

That’s exactly what we are going to be doing here at XING now, just on a much larger scale.Our awesome team of product managers, user experience designers, and software developers, have adopted a new motto at XING and it’s called, “Ship it!”. Ship it! means that we will be adding more enhancements faster than ever before and then relying on you, our users, to let us know what you like, don’t like, and want to see made better.

Our goal through all this is to increase engagement and reliance.  We want to build on the great foundation at XING and deliver a more engaging user experience – one that our users love and rely on every day for their essential business networking needs.  In order to get there though, we need your help.  We need your input and feedback now more than ever.

The new product development model

Here’s what you can expect to see from XING under our new Ship It! product development model:

1. We will launch new features on XING faster than ever before.
2. We will launch new features before they are finished.  Our plan is to get new stuff out there on the site and learn from our users as to how to make them better.  You tell us what you like, don’t like, and want to see improved – and then we’ll do our best to keep up with your input.
3. We will make XING more appealing and relevant to users around the world.
4. We will actively ask for your feedback and participate in a dialogue with you as to how we can improve and better meet your needs.  Expect to see a whole new social-media approach to how we gather feedback.  Expect to really get to know the people behind product development at XING.  And, challenge us publicly to deliver what you need.

For more information on our new “Ship It!” approach to product development at XING, see this interview with me from The Next Web last week.  I’m serious about this user engagement and feedback stuff!

You can also email me via XING with any advice or comments at anytime.  And, don’t forget to follow me on Twitter where I tweet on social media topics.

Our first Ship It! new stuff launches in a couple of weeks and then weekly after that….stay tuned for more details!  It’s going to be a fantastic spring for XING.

-jason