DiscoveryMining

Guest Blogger: Sam Carter, Director of Product Management, Discovery Mining, Inc.

As Director of Product Management, an essential part of my job is prioritizing feature development for our application. Sure, I spend a lot of time writing specifications, looking over developers’ shoulders at in progress implementations and providing input, but at the core it’s about prioritization, and mapping that to our vision. And why? Well, with so many innovative ideas brewing inside the company along with client feedback, it makes for quite a selection! 

In order to make sense of the mountain of features, I use several broad guidelines. The overreaching guideline is to determine the specific need the feature is expected to address:

• Features that prevent undesirable events or results from recurring
• Features that prevent human error - automation of repetitive tasks that do not require human involvement
• Features that clients / prospects are requesting
• Features that are high value and map to our vision
• Features that reduce support burden
• Features that increase our service to clients

The first category of features tends to trump everything else, because our goal is to experience one type of problem only once. But prioritizing features in the remaining categories can be a bit trickier. An additional company goal is to build a general purpose product and in order to meet that objective we have to strike a delicate balance across general purpose, market, client, and prospect requirements.

If we cater too extensively to existing customers, then we run the risk that our product becomes too specialized to their needs and does not solve the problems of the general market as a whole. But at the same time, we learn from our customers input as well as have the desire to meet client needs. This is where the skill of driving toward a vision, while at the same time meeting immediate needs comes in.

Our philosophy has always been to enable computers to do the ‘heavy lifting’ in the document review process. Moving from paper based review to native document review is just the first step towards eliminating the tedium. We want to automate as much of the repetitive aspects as possible. Our ultimate objective is designing software for electronic data discovery that combines human intellect with computer automation, brute speed and processing capability.