How do we prioritize the development of Recranet Booking
With Recranet Booking we have undergone a strong development since its launch. With our all-in-1 solution, we have helped a lot of rental organizations to automate, save money, save time and generate much more online revenue through a strong increase in bookings. We constantly conduct market research, spot opportunities and implement them in our reservation software.
The success of our reservation software is not only due to us. We listen carefully to our customers; the input of the users of our reservation software contributes strongly to further development and keeps us focused on what is really relevant. In this blog post we would like to give you more insight into how we process customer requests.
How do we determine which ideas are really relevant?
As a user of our reservation software, you have probably shared ideas with us about new functionality that we could develop. There is a good chance that we have already developed relevant functionality at your request. But how do we determine whether something really has added value?
During the 'sprint' meeting, which we hold every few weeks, we evaluate developed functionality and introduce new wishes and ideas from our customers. We keep a record of all relevant customer requests on our 'backlog' and we compare these requests with previously obtained input. Based on the input from our customer, we gain insight into the most relevant functionality to be developed. We focus on developing functionality with which we can serve a broad customer group. Requests that allow us to help multiple customers at once always take precedence over requests that should be developed specifically for one customer. An idea that saves a lot of our customers 15 minutes of work every day is given more priority than an idea that saves a single user time. We also check whether the idea is in line with the long-term goal we have in mind.
This focus not only helps us grow, but also help our customer grow. We would of course prefer to offer a direct solution for every issue for every customer, but we are critical; no customer is happy with irrelevant and ill-considered functions in the reservation software.
What about the long-term choices?
We don't plan months ahead of exactly what we're going to develop, that doesn't mean we don't have a long-term goal. Of course we have a vision and we have an idea of which important functionalities we want to launch in the long term. In terms of working method, however, we strongly believe in iterative development, in which we analyze, design, develop and implement over and over again. This keeps us sharp on the market and allows us to switch quickly and develop further. We use new insights to make timely adjustments in development.
Our method
We work in our team with so-called 'sprints' (a defined period of time) of a few weeks. Various (major) functions have been defined for this period, which our developers are working on. In addition to the sprint, we always reserve space for minor updates and extensions. If we proceed with the implementation of new functionality, we will once again critically check whether everything is working properly and we 'deploy' the new functionality. The great thing about this is that as a user of our reservation software you can immediately use these new functions, without our software going offline or losing data. If you want to know more about how this works, read the blog: the advantages of reservation software in the cloud.