Fri, Feb 19 2010

Increased Design & Corporate Transparency

By ben kaufman at 5:56 pm

Thank you all for your influx of comments and participation over the past few days. We appreciate constructive criticism and high expectations from community members.

Taking some of the feedback that has been piping in on our support site, the forum, and emails to our community ambassadors, we are happy to announce the following changes to the design/influence process which will be put in effect beginning Monday:

1.   At least half of the Quirky design staff will provide highlighted comments to each of the top 10 designs in each project. These are the designs that are considered serious candidates and that go through the full vetting process.

To date, the vetting process has consisted of looking at the top 10 highly voted concepts for each project in a live internal discussion about a few main factors:

-  Feasibility

-  Marketability / Competitive Landscape

-  Potential IP issues

-  Overall (cool factor, value-add, size of opportunity)

Instead of doing this in a vacuum, I have now encouraged each design team member to voice his or her expert opinion on all four of these factors as an individual comment on each of the top ideas under consideration.

This will allow community members the chance to understand and/or refute our findings prior to the end of a project/a winner being chosen.

2.   Jess will chronicle/produce a video each week called ‘The Quirky Roundup’.  The video will capture internal discussions that occurred in the past week (platform/tech, business, product development, and manufacturing/ops).

The idea behind this is to invite you all in to the day-to-day here at Quirky with the hopes that there is better understanding for the global/business impact of each product design opinion.

3.   In December of last year, we completed a 12 month plan which included our growth plans, feature additions, product sales expectations, etc.

I am working on getting approval from our investors to make this information public. This will allow all members to share/comment on the global vision for the brand, which will help in understanding of why certain decisions are made. Hopefully this will allow us all to think more globally about this business together.

4.  Re-Votes

One thing that I have encouraged the team to do from now on is not be shy of a re-vote. If we ever feel unsure of something, we should put it back up and add more time to the clock. It’s in everyone’s best interest to be on the same page and be excited about a project rather then it being a one way discussion.

5. Open lines of communication:

I want to re-iterate the fact that we are striving to provide members easy access to our team. Whether it be the community form, Twitter, the support site, emailing a community ambassador, or calling us up on the telephone (yup, we’ve got those too). Are there other forms of communication we should be using and aren’t? Let us know.


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With all of the above said, I encourage all of you as members to understand the fact that we are doing our absolute best to keep you guys as involved as possible. As always, if there is more we can be doing… say so.