Back in February, Intalio unveiled its Demand Driven Development (D3) program, as a way to essentially outsource major parts of our product management process. Since then, we have scoped over 60 projects, but we found it quite difficult to actually secure sponsors for them, irrespectively of the financial incentives we could offer. Today, I am pleased to announce that we signed our first customer for it. Here is what we learned along the way.

When we launched the program, some experienced industry insiders advised us that it might be more difficult than we thought to actually make it work. One of them was Larry Augustin, certainly one of the most knowledgeable experts in the field of commercial Open Source. Larry used to sit on the Board of Directors for JBoss, and shared with me the fact that JBoss had tried to develop such a model in the past, without much success. The fact that others tried it before does not necessarily mean that it’s impossible, but it’s something that one should pay attention to. I did, and gave ourselves about six months to prove — or disprove — the overall model.

What we found is that even though customers intuitively understood the benefits they could get from the model — I won’t describe it in details here, for it’s already explained there, and would be quick to suggest very many projects to us, they had a hard time pulling the trigger and committing hard cash for them. There was some kind of psychological barrier that prevented them to move forward in a timely manner.

When asking candidate sponsors what they needed to commit, the answers we got more often than not was for us to get another sponsor for the same project first. Essentially, they did not want to be first in putting up with the money. This made us realize that one of the rules we set for the program might have created some unnecessary barrier to adoption. Indeed, we decided that in order to prevent the development of customer-specific features, at least two sponsors would have to participate in the funding of any development. While the original idea was legitimate, it put everybody in some kind of catch 22 situation that locked everything up. Once we decided to remove this constraint, at least temporarily, things started to move again.

We cannot disclose the identity of our first sponsor, for we are under NDA with them. That being said, we’re free to indicate that the project is related to the integration of Intalio|BPMS with the Apache ServiceMix ESB. This particular feature had been on our roadmap before the customer requested it, which made the decision to develop it an easy one from a pure product management standpoint, and made the requirement to secure at least two sponsors for it one that we could live without. As this project is being developed, our customer is building a higher level of comfort with the partnership model, and we expect them to sponsor additional features down the road.

Another thing we learned is that the simple fact of sharing our roadmap and gathering feedback from would-be sponsors on our community website helped us assess internally where the actual needs of our users could be, and gave us a very clear direction from a product development standpoint. In that respect, this participative program is acting as a very powerful helper to the product management process, far beyond our original expectations.

At this point, it’s too early to tell whether the program is actually working or not, for we only have anecdotal evidence. That being said, having made it work for one customer proves that it can be done, and that’s all we needed to convince ourselves that we should keep developing it. We’ll keep you posted on the tweaks we’re making to the model in order to make it even more effective.