Utilise the Xero support team to write the XERO Customer Requirements specification for XERO 2.0
Having developed and managed both hardware and software development products for many years, Xero has the best product support I have seen.
They are all very knowledgeable of the Xero product and the customers that continually moan at the short comings of a very poorly designed product.
My advice, is to utilise the product support team to write the customer requirement specifications of the Xero product, using the Product Idea portal and the "competition" as the starting point of Xero 2.0. Then the development team can write the software and then let the product support team alongside Xero customers "test" the product during the "beta testing" phase before release.
Also invest in automatic testing to speed up the bug fix / new release cycle.
Then, the Xero product offering would meet the customer requirements, the Xero product would be "fit for purpose" and better, faster and more innovative product releases, requiring less customer support because there are less bugs/missing features!
The number of staff doesn't decrease but Xero moves from plugging the holes in the sinking ship to rebuilding a new watertight ship.
Win Win
David Avery
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Really do appreciate the feedback, David and it's great to hear you've had such good experiences with our Xero Support team.
While we can't run every single feature that our product teams deliver through our support team, this is a very regular occurrence. Our product teams will often engage other teams internally to understand the pain points of users that they are trying to solve for and in many cases they may release features internally with Xero staff to test and feedback on features before they are released externally.
Just as you noted there are also other measures of testing that our teams have in place to evaluate the performance of features before they are delivered.
Our product teams will continue to evolve their thinking in how we test, and review features before they are released so we can build and deliver products that create positive customer experiences.