ServiceMax's Jason M. Lemkin argues SaaS teams can't fully test their own software if developers never see how customers actually use it. He regularly visits oil rigs and power plants to watch field technicians work, uncovering usability problems that office testing misses.
For many SaaS businesses we're able to apply that we all something that we all call eating your own dog food. Right? So you use your own software and you have a good sense of what could go wrong and where you need to fix the product. Well our customers, they go out and fix things like oil rigs and power generation plants, things like that. There's no way we as software folks are going to be able to eat our own dog food. So I started when I would have meetings with my customers I say hey can I go out with your guys? Can I go out and see what they do, what they're fixing, what they deal with on a day to day basis. And it was amazing to see the business from the end user's perspective see what they were dealing with when they were using our software which wasn't always perfect, right? You don't, you just don't know until you actually live the life with your customers.
