Community Ideas and Product Managers

[flamy]

Hello PTC Community,

For several years now the PTC Community has been collecting product ideas and suggestions from customers. We currently host ideas boards covering all business segments and major products. Every Community member with a customer support contract can post an idea. However, all Community members can vote on published ideas. Beyond the practical details, your contributions need to be placed in the right context to better understand their value.

Product ideas typically attract new users who are on their way to mastering a product and see an opportunity to improve it. Experienced users also post ideas. Such users have a deep understanding of the product—sometimes decades of industry experience and expertise. They are actively helping others on the Community and publish suggestions for the product managers.

You might ask, what is the role of a  product manager? At PTC, they are responsible for the business strategy behind the product. They establish a roadmap for the development of the product and its capabilities. Product managers are responsible for the regular launch to the public of the newest version of their product. They’re the voice of the market and in fact, they’re your voice to PTC’s internal organization. 

Our product managers receive feedback from many sources. Internally, Technical Support, Marketing, Sales and Customer Success teams bring valuable information. The PTC corporate strategy impacts the product strategy as PTC makes decisions that shape the market and to adjust to it. Externally, product managers receive feedback directly from customers through various means. The Working Group program allows a refinement of some ideas. PTC/User, a third party entity, plays a role in the process.

One of the critical aspects of a product management team is to continuously and ruthlessly prioritize the development of some features over others to fit limited resources— a familiar problem for all engineers!

The ideas published on the PTC Community are one of the streams of customer input among many. They are probably the most visible since it is a public, searchable and curated repository. Product managers don’t take the ideas as individual orders to fulfill. They review and use them to identify patterns, which helps them lock in on what is most important. When they combine this with other streams of product feedback, they are able to better understand pain points, expectations, and how they fit with a product and market strategy.

PTC acknowledges that the state of the user generated ideas on the Community has not been satisfactory for some time. It is incumbent to PTC to reassure our customers that their product ideas matter. Even though Product managers may not engage as often as they would like, they are always interested in reading the ideas as a market signal and take cues for their strategy. It is equally important to frame user generated ideas on the PTC Community in larger context where each individual idea is like a particle of insight that is aggregated to many others.

In the coming months, the PTC Community team will launch a series of changes on the idea boards to ensure that we collect more information upfront and use this to assess the merit and feasibility of each idea. The votes that the ideas gather will be an additional element giving weight to a suggestion or to a group of suggestions. In order to make the body of ideas more manageable, the PTC Community team will archive the oldest ideas that have received the least votes. Details per products will be announced.

Rest assured that PTC values all the thoughtful and numerous contributions that you've made so far. Our continued commitment remains to deliver world class products and solutions to all our current and future customers! This sentiment is also echoed by the attached video featuring, Kevin Wrenn, our Executive Vice President of PTC Products. Please take a few minutes to watch and thank you.

Sincerely,

Francois Lamy
SVP Strategic & Products Planning

[cbaldwin]

Hello ThingWorx Community!

I am Chris Baldwin and I am the VP of Product Management for the ThingWorx platform.  I would like to update you on a few items!

The product team values your ideas and inputs through the Community and reviews them regularly.  ThingWorx is a very flexible and broad platform, and used in so many different ways inside and outside of PTC.  All ideas can’t be acted upon of course.  We wanted to really be able to make best use of your time and ours when reviewing idea submissions.  I am excited about our latest process which allows for more details to be shared to fully convey the idea, more collaboration from the community at large, and best use of some of our domain expert community leaders.  To give you a better idea of how the ThingWorx Product team works:

• We release patch releases (e.g. 9.3.x) roughly every 6 weeks for our supported versions, and release major (e.g. 9.0) and minor versions (e.g. 9.3) about every 6 months.
• Each release vehicle can support different scopes of changes and present opportunities for your idea enhancements.  Patch releases can have bug fixes and small, non-breaking enhancements.  Minor releases can have medium sized changes and feature improvements.  Major releases will generally represent larger enhancements and architectural improvements.
• During planning, the product team casts a wide net to canvas all stakeholders internally and externally to evaluate changes we should sponsor for our development teams.
• Like most software teams, we prioritize based on PTC strategy, business importance, level of effort, availability of resources, etc.
• Some releases have themes, like security or availability or upgrade.  We attempt to swarm around some of those features or system areas when we want to make a bigger dent.  Other releases we sprinkle some goodness in many different areas.
  
  

Looking ahead, we have some good things cooking this year.  Here is a sneak preview of coming attractions in 2022 releases:

1. Azure Kubernetes examples and expert guidance, for IT teams leveraging containers in their IT environments
2. Kepware+, a new SAAS offering that manages configuration of ThingWorx Kepware Servers across the enterprise
3. InFluxDB 2.0 support, which allows use of InFlux Data’s latest capabilities for time series analysis with ThingWorx platform
4. Solution Central API, now available which enables use of packaging/publishing and deployment of content to ThingWorx servers via REST API
5. New web component widgets like Combo chart and donut chart for better dashboards and KPI analysis
6. Digital Performance Management 1.2 solution, with new features for Bottleneck analysis and a Scorecard to track your improvement progress

Lastly, I thought I would also highlight two of my favorite “ideas” that we have done in recent releases that came from the user community to show you that ideas do become reality!

Undo/Redo – Like many productivity tools, sometimes you make a mistake!  Mashup Builder now can undo/redo with history, so that no change is irreversible. Thanks @PaiChung for having suggested this idea, as well as all who voted for it !

Referenced By (Where Used) – Building enterprise software is complex!  Making changes in a large codebase with many developers can be scary!  The Referenced By feature allows you to find where things are used, how your changes affect things, and let  you make changes with confidence. This excellent idea came from @iguerra and thanks your votes .

From the product team here at ThingWorx, thank you for being loyal customers.  I appreciate your participation in the community by asking good questions and providing great answers.  Keep sharing your ideas and voting on others.  Who knows, maybe the next ThingWorx release will have your idea?!