So today I finally got my chance to present our product in a training-type format to a group of accountants thanks to CGA Alberta. I really value their opinions, so it was an excellent opportunity to get out there and meet a bunch of them.
The final count was 72 attendees; a larger group than I expected. I started getting a little nervous right before my presentation began. I hold these people’s opinion in the highest regard (professionally), and it’s been a long time since I’ve done that size of a presentation.
Overall, I’d say it went very well. The topics were quite technical, but I think everybody was with me throughout the presentation. It felt great to see people taking notes, and it was a wonderful opportunity to get some feedback from our users.
I was a little taken aback by how few of users had even heard of the features I was presenting. Many were long-time users who weren’t aware of quite a few things in the software. In some ways I think that’s a big problem with feature-rich applications… many users will never find some of the feature.
My key takeaways today:
- The vast majority of users are not aware of some of the most powerful features of our product.
- Accountants are actively looking for tools to make their lives easier and their work more efficient; there are still some areas of the workflow that are unnecessarily tedious.
- We could (and likely should) offer a lot more in terms of product education for our users including training, video demos, cheat sheets
I hope the attendees took away:
- I hope they feel that they learned something that was useful for them. I hope they try out some of what I discussed today.
- There is more to our product than meets the eye. More specifically, there are some pretty powerful features that are worth exploring.
- I hope that I helped them see our product in a more personal way.
I really enjoyed myself today. I hope to get more opportunities like this. Today, was a good day.
