Posts by Adam Wright
Hiring a Great Beta Program Manager
Posted March 8th, 2012 by Adam Wright in Beta Guru. View CommentsThere’s a lot that goes into hiring for your beta program and a lot that rides on your decision. The person will be managing a process that can make or break your product, saving or costing you large sums of money. But you don’t have to approach this undertaking without guidance. Whether you call the position Beta Program Manager, Beta Test Manager, or Beta Test Engineer—we’ve got advice that will help you target the right qualifications and candidates. Keep reading and you’ll even find a sample beta job posting that you can use as a template.
Mike Fine Talks Beta Recruitment on The Startup Slingshot
Posted February 2nd, 2012 by Adam Wright in Beta Guru. View CommentsOur Director of Client Services and resident Beta Testing Guru, Mike Fine, was a recent guest on The Startup Slingshot, where he gave a video interview on beta testing recruitment, motivation, and more. If you’re not familiar with the site, The Startup Slingshot is a great online resource for entrepreneurs, with videos and articles on a wide variety of topics that help startups achieve better results. We recommend checking it out.
Scheduling Meetings With Your Beta Testers
Posted January 16th, 2012 by Adam Wright in Beta Guru. View CommentsThere’s a long-standing practice in Marketing, Product Development, and Usability Testing called following your customer home—Intuit’s famous Follow Me Homes are a great example. The practice is also gaining traction in beta testing, so we thought now would be a good time to discuss some best practices and caveats for scheduling meetings with beta testers. Done correctly, these meetings can have a great effect on participation and open doors to insights that are hard to obtain through other methods.
Free Whitepaper: Getting Ready for Beta Testing
Posted December 29th, 2011 by Adam Wright in Beta Guru. View Comments
With 2012 rapidly approaching, we’re releasing another free beta testing resource that we hope will be very helpful as companies get ready to launch new products in the upcoming year. The whitepaper, entitled Getting Ready for Beta Testing, explores tips and best practices that product developers can rely on as they grapple with the question of when to begin their beta test.
5 Big Picture Beta Test Planning Tips
Posted December 13th, 2011 by Adam Wright in Beta Guru. View CommentsWith the release of our software and hardware beta test planning kits, there’s been a lot of focus on beta planning details recently. So we thought this would be a good time to step back and take a look at the big picture. After all, what good is all the time spent on planning if you can’t see the forest for the trees? These five tips, taken from our free eBook 100 Tips for Better Beta Tests, will help you approach beta test planning with the necessary perspective.
Our Free Software Beta Planning Kit is Now Available
Posted November 22nd, 2011 by Adam Wright in Premium Content. View Comments
A detailed beta test plan is one of the key components of a successful beta test. When your beta test is well-organized from the start, it allows you to stay focused on your product during testing, rather than playing catch up. To help more people develop great beta test plans, we decided to create free beta test planning kits. We started with a hardware beta test planning kit, and today we’re publishing a kit for software betas that caters more to software-specific topics like digital distribution and product keys. So whether you’re running a desktop, mobile, gaming, or web beta, our beta test planning kit can help you do it better.
Announcing our Free Hardware Beta Planning Kit
Posted November 9th, 2011 by Adam Wright in Premium Content. View CommentsLike all projects, a successful beta test begins with a well-developed plan. Our objective is to make that planning easier by offering resources built on our 10+ years of experience in beta management. One important lesson we’ve learned is that creating a hardware beta plan is decidedly different from creating a software beta test plan. There are subtle nuances in areas like budgeting and product distribution and completely new problems like acquiring beta hardware and replacing defective units. We’ll help you prepare for all of them.
Is Big Data the Future for Big Beta?
Posted November 4th, 2011 by Adam Wright in Beta Guru. View CommentsGenerally, we try to keep our blog posts focused on the here and now. Our primary goal is to give people practical advice on how to manage better beta tests. Sometimes, though, it’s interesting to think about possible futures for beta testing. And recent research from HP on data mining unstructured textual data, like social media and product reviews, is great material for that kind of thinking.
Rewarding Your Beta Testers with Incentives
Posted September 30th, 2011 by Adam Wright in Beta Guru. View CommentsAs you might expect, beta testing incentives are a popular topic. In fact, “incentives” is one of our most common Google search keywords. Testers want to know what they get for participating in betas, and companies want to know what’s appropriate to offer them. As it turns out, being conscientious about your approach to incentives is very smart. There are several key things that companies need to be aware of when it comes to rewarding their testers. We talked about many of these issues in our free eBook, 100 Tips for Better Beta Tests, but they’re important enough to warrant a second look in the blog.
Announcing the Centercode Community Forums
Posted August 25th, 2011 by Adam Wright in Connect. View CommentsWe often hear from beta managers that they’d benefit from a broader sense of community among people who have that job. It’s easy to get information from peers within your company, but what if you want a fresh perspective from other people who have beta management experience? As it turns out, there’s an invisible thread that connects a lot of outgoing and helpful people in this industry—they’re Centercode customers. So we’re helping to spur interaction between them by launching the Connect Community Forums as part of our help.centercode.com site.
