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November 29, 2004
The Director Advisory Council (DAC)
Today on dirGames-l, a Director game development mailing list, a thread came up discussing 3D and where Macromedia fits in. Part of that discussion brought up a question about how, if at all, our feature planning involved folks outside of Macromedia. The truth is that we are using developers to help us guide our release planning and I felt it woth posting that information here. Read on.
From dirGames-l:
> Maybe Tom should use "us" a bit more for business model
> planning, and we be a bit more constructive in terms of viable
> ideas. Problem is of course that Tom cannot reveal MMs plans
> fully. Maybe if he set up a small "group" of developers and
> others, to work out ideas with on a more detailed level, I
> believe that some good ideas that MM might be able to
> take advantage of, will arise. I must admit that I do think
> about these things quite often :)
Ahhhh, but we are doing this! In previous releases of Director we would gather a small group of developers from our previous beta program and have them take a look at pre-beta builds of the coming major release in order to solicit feedback from them on how things looked. The problem with that was the fact that the feedback came after we were supposedly feature complete thus leaving only wiggle room on features and not wholesale changes or shifts in the release plan. That stunk...
So as part of becoming product manager one of my desires was to get that feedback early, well before we ever reached alpha with our next release. We invited about 40 people from the DMX'04 beta program to participate (and I've since pulled on an additional 6-10 people by direct invite later) and they've been under NDA, testing the dot-releases and offering feedback on our thoughts and ideas for the next major release, including some of our thoughts and ideas surrounding 3D functionality. This is being done in conjunction with a new way of planning each release in which we do multiple waves of customer visits (on site) through which we solicit additional feedback directly from those using the product and some not using the product, all before we decide on a final and finished feature set. This second part about visiting customers is true across _all_ Macromedia products now, not just Director and it wasn't my idea but the work of others that I'm very happy to be working with.
To make a short story long, we are doing just what you said we should be doing, _right_now_. :) The existence of the Director Advisory Council is not confidential, but what we discuss there is as it pertains to future plans and whatnot which can be sensitive information. Obviously I think there will be a lot of you asking "well how do I get to be a part of the advisory council?" and my answer is this: get into the beta program! My plans going forward are to seed each new DAC with folks from the previous beta program, then to fill that out with additional developers as needed (based on their skills or development specialties). To apply for the beta program go here:
http://www.macromedia.com/support/programs/beta.html
And follow the instructions. No, we don't yet have a survey for our beta users like a few other products, but that's something I'm working on. Other than by invite following beta participation in a major release, it's by direct invite only so just being an active member of the community is all you can do. We understand that many folks want to participate in this program, but we must keep the size limited in order to keep things manageable, so not everyone can be involved.
Posted by thiggins at November 29, 2004 09:57 AM