2016 Year in Review

As happens during this time of the year, I have been reflecting on what a momentous year it has been. While searching through my notes, I realized that not only are we closing out 2016, but the AwardSpring platform is two years old. Given that, let's take a look at what we've accomplished in those two years.

Two years ago, we had our first customers start using the platform as a beta. We had three customers daring enough to start preparation work in December for January 1 go-live. We added conditional (skip) logic into the software just three days prior and it wasn't yet possible to delete a scholarship. We were hurrying to prepare our platform for real customers and closing lots of bugs. We didn’t sleep much.

We learned a lot from our customers during that first cycle. Features that we thought were important got put on the back burner, features that we thought could wait were needed immediately. In a lot of ways this exemplifies how we work. Being responsive to customers is crucial to our success. In the first six months, we shipped the following:

- Reviewer Blinding
- Help Center
- SIS Integration
- Single Sign On

We also revisited the design of several pages on the site. For example, we completely redesigned the awarding screen to make it customizable. This was a common theme for work that we have done since our initial launch. Each customer has a unique process and features we build need to allow for this wide variation.

We continued to improve the software through the back half of 2015 and into 2016. In total, we have updated the software with 29 feature releases in 24 months. The frequency of releases is important to us as it means we can quickly address smaller issues and customer requests. In previous lives at other companies, my team was only able to address concerns during quarterly or yearly releases.

It is easy to focus only on the software when looking back. The software has many tangible, visible changes. However, one of the biggest, less visible changes has been to our support process. Prior to taking over STARS Online, support was… interesting. Since then, we have introduced a dedicated support team, added the ability to message our support team from inside the software, and expanded our phone coverage. We have also added dedicated implementation specialists to guide our customers through their first award cycle to ensure they can effectively use the software.

As you can see, our customers are the center of nearly all of the changes we've made in two years. To help formalize the feedback process, we automatically ask customers for feedback after every support interaction. Our client development team also reaches out multiple times a year to see how things are going, address any issues, and schedule additional training.

In many ways, we're an entirely different company than we were two short years ago. However, our core values remain the same which keeps us focused on customer needs and drives constant improvement.

We couldn’t be more excited about the future. We have some amazing ideas about how to continue to make scholarship management easier and expand the kinds of tasks the software can help you accomplish.

If you have feedback, questions, or ideas for where we should head in the future, feel free to send me a note or give me a call.

Thanks,
Daniel Orofino
VP, Product Management

Contact me: 847.859.5017 x 7325 | dorofino@awardspring.com