Today we start to Ship it!

Hi everyone.

Last week I wrote my first blog post for XING as the company’s new Chief Product Officer, introducing our new concept of “Ship it!”.

Ship it! is all about building the future of XING with our users.  Under the Ship it! model, we will launch new products and enhancements on the XING website faster than ever before in a rapid agile development model and then gather user feedback on how to make our products better.  Ship It! means we will launch products early in their lifecycle, before they are finished, and then work with you to evolve them and improve them.

I’m excited to report that right at this moment we are doing our first “Ship It!”

The new "Company Pages" button - including a shiny BETA.

About 20,000 XING users now have access to a new feature, “Company Pages”.  Work on this new feature area was underway at XING for many months but it was previously not scheduled to be launched on the site for many more months. Under our new Ship It! model, we’ve decided to go ahead and starting introducing Company Pages (beta) to our users now – before it is finished – so that we can build it with your feedback. 20,000 users were granted access to the new XING Company Pages today.  That number will increase to more than 500,000 in the coming days, and then ultimately the entire XING user-base will have access to our Company Pages.

XING’s new Company Pages aggregate information on XING on more than 96,000 companies, organizations and professional associations, free of charge.  Each company gets a unique page on XING which is automatically generated by our system based on XING members’ profiles.  Each Company page currently shows a list of all the XING members from that Company as well as some key data about the company that we are able to infer from our membership information.  We’ll be talking more about our Company Pages in the coming days as we expand from the initial 20,000 test group to over 500,000 users.

A sample Company Page from XING itself.

And, remember, this is just a start … As I said, it’s beta.  And we need your help in order to make it better!  You may encounter some things you don’t like or don’t understand.  That’s part of beta.  We need your feedback and advice to make features like this work better for you.

So …

That’s why we are also simultaneously piloting a public user-feedback forum which will enable our users to publicly suggest and vote on which features we should add next.

More on all this next week …

SHIP IT!