The Mantic Companion has been available for a couple of months now. If you’re not familiar with it, I’d encourage you to check it out. I think we can generally agree that the Companion is a good strategic direction for Mantic, both financially and in terms of customer value. But Mantic is not a software company, and since this is a new and different thing for them we can reasonably expect there to be some hiccups and areas they need to improve going forward.
I feel like it’s important to provide them with constructive feedback. I want to see Mantic be successful in the long term, and a big component of that is attracting new customers and retaining existing ones. So the best thing we, as their existing loyal and supportive customers, can do is help them improve. Potential new customers, who aren’t already invested in the game/community, aren’t going to give Mantic a pass on poor execution. It doesn’t do anyone any good, us or Mantic, if we give them a pass as well. So, here’s where I think they missed the mark for the Companion launch and some suggestions.
Product Management
At a really high level, the Companion feels like a product with no Product Manager. For those of you who aren’t familiar, there are usually more people working on a software product than just the engineers who write the code. Product Managers tend to handle things like planning, coordination, communication, etc. and these are the areas that I think were most lacking in the Companion launch. Sure, there were bugs as well, and software will always have bugs, but the launch could have been planned and communicated in ways to minimize their real and perceived impact.
I know that Mantic is a very small company in terms of head count, so I don’t expect them to hire someone new to manage their software products. I also know that it’s rare to find an engineer who can do both jobs effectively, so I’m not sure putting two hats on one head is a good plan either. But one way or another, they should find a head for the ‘Software Product Manager’ hat. So now that we know who this feedback is directed at, let’s get into some specific suggestions.
Launch Planning
The Companion launched on November 1st. Multiple sections were all available at launch, and, let’s be honest, there were a lot of quality issues. To their credit, Mantic was open and responsive to bug reports. But I feel like they could have managed the quality issues better if they had launched individual sections of the Companion over time instead of all at once.
Now, a new book had just come out, and one of the biggest questions people have when a new book comes out is always “when will list builder X be updated?” The only part of the Companion that we were really clamoring for was the list builder. I think Mantic could have just launched the list builder part of the Companion on November 1st, put a ‘coming soon’ graphic over the other parts, and no one would have minded. There wasn’t really any time pressure to launch the rest. They could have focused on fixing the issues people were finding in the list builder, and then launched the next section once it has stabilized.
By taking a phased approach to launching the Companion, they could have held the rules section for a month or so until the first FAQ for the new book was ready. Then they could have then turned to the TO tools, events, rankings, etc. after the rules and list builder were solid. There wasn’t a lot of demand for those other features, so they could had waited until this month and launched them in a more polished state.
Also, sections like rankings, events, and clubs launched with little to no content. These sections could have soft-launched in a manner that allowed the community to start populating them with content before they were open for general use.
Communication / Setting Expectations
Before the Companion launched, we got a several blog posts (1, 2, for example) and video to tell us what we could expect. The pre-launch communication told us a few significant things:
- The whole thing was free for everyone until the end of January.
- It was launching with a long list of completed features and a roadmap for future features.
- It was an ‘app’. Or maybe an ‘appy website’, as Ronnie said.
This set a high bar of expectations that wasn’t really cleared. It feels like they over promised and under delivered. All things considered, what they actually launched is pretty impressive and what really needs improvement going forward is what they communicate and how they set expectations.
First, we haven’t been using a complete product and we weren’t given a 3 month free pass. What we’ve been doing is participating in a 3 month open beta test. It was clear, especially in the first few days, that the product had not been thoroughly tested. Now, I don’t mind participating in a beta test. Hell, I’ve paid money to have early access to games that I knew wouldn’t actually be done for a year or more. I knew that’s what I was signing up for, so I expected to encounter issues and spend time reporting them. If Mantic had positioned this launch as a beta test, I don’t think the community would have had a problem with participating.
Second, and I don’t want to go off on a rant here*, so I’ll just say that referring to the Companion as an ‘app’ did not set clear expectations for everyone. That people were/are confused about it is a problem that needs to be addressed going forward, independent of whether it is or isn’t an ‘app’. Communicating what kind of device, platform, hardware, or connectivity your customers will need in order to use your product is a pretty straight forward exercise. If anyone is confused about what you’ve built, how you plan to deliver it, and what they need to do in order to use it, then your communication needs to be clearer.
Wrap it up already
Again, I think the Companion is a great move from Mantic and I want to see it be successful. If they keep talking with the community and working on it, then it will become an indispensable tool. I hope Mantic finds this feedback useful.
* – I will go off on a rant here though…
Listen, since smart phones became ubiquitous, using the term ‘app’ with no other context or qualifications is commonly understood to mean a native implementation of an application on a mobile platform. The term ‘webapp’ was only meaningful back when most websites were just static pages and you needed a way to differentiate your site that actually did something. Now websites are just assumed to have some amount of functionality, and end users only ever needed a browser to use either anyway, so the distinction between a ‘website’ and a ‘webapp’ is meaningless and the term ‘webapp’ isn’t widely used anymore. An ‘app’ and a ‘webapp’ are not the same thing and the terms are not interchangeable.
The Mantic Companion is a website, and it works fine on a mobile device, but it’s not an ‘app’. If you honestly don’t know the functional differences between a website running inside a browser on a mobile device, and a native mobile application, then that’s fine. Just take my word for it, it’s something that I know a thing or two about, there are things you can do in a native mobile application that you can’t do from inside a browser. It’s possible that the limitations of running inside a browser will never have a noticeable impact on the Companion, but ‘offline access’ is on the roadmap for later this year…
