I woke up this morning and found an email from Kordami’s OG: Paul. Paul is a fantastically enthusiastic guy and his passion for Kordami — life in general, but Kordami specifically — is infectious. His email was an email to a local startup about a really cool update for knowledge management and sales enablement that we recently released that he knew could help them.
We recently pushed a release that allows teams to pull up knowledge and domain expertise in Slack from Kordami. What that means in terms of use case is that customer facing folks can access tech information and identify experts in different knowledge areas in real time without having to search for it. We’re shooting to make knowledge management and access simple with this release.
The result: more in depth conversations with prospects and customers due to quick access to key information and stakeholders via Slack and sales enablement via rapid knowledge access.
I was planning on putting together a blog on the release in the next week or so, but after reading through the email I realized that Paul’s enthusiasm was a far better conduit for that information than any blog I could put together.
I just a had a really cool PM experience that made me think about you last week. I was having a 1-1 with a colleague and he mentioned how we need to come up with a way to track our __capabilities__ so sales people know who we have with certain skills and, at a higher level, what those skills are. This became a brainstorming session where I pretended to be a Product Manager, and walked away with a user actor and stories :).
The actor is an account person who want immediate access to information. If the client is asking about some tech like NodeJS, the actor –a sales person, for instance– may not know what NodeJS is and __urgently__ needs that information while possibly being on a live call. Googling is not an option, because it requires focus to parse through the results and figure out the details. What this person needs is a __quick action__ cheat sheet something no __knowledge management__ systems that I’ve seen provides.
The first idea was to create a google doc. But in the 30 seconds it would take to find the sheet and 30 more to find the right row etc, the moment in the conversation would have passed and the point would have been lost.
So as we looked at how the actual account people worked, we realized that they loved it when they could use __Slack__ to reach out to people and just ask them questions in that tool. But just like at CS, we do not want the field to be hitting up the internal functional groups all the time.
So right about then it dawned on us; we need __Slack__ to be a repo for this knowledge! Armed with that understanding and use cases I worked directly with a developer and by the end of the week we had a solution!
An account manager in a panic can type a fragment of a term in Slack and get a sales friendly description of what is it rather than the harder to find and more technical breakdown you’ll get from a knowledge management system:
Sounding more confident with some information, the AM pushes on until they get to the “but do you have developers who are skilled in node?” question.
Quickly the AM types the right command in Slack and voila!
There are also __/klist__ (shows all) and __/kcontact__ (get contact information of team members) commands for convenience. We rolled this out at our Monday morning all hands as a new tool and the team went nuts with excitement :).
I think this is the secret sauce of excellent agile software development: *Know the actor, define the value driven use cases, engage an agile team with a well understood objective and watch them fly*. A developer within the team has no chance of running into this use case. They need someone outside of the group to be hunting for value and bringing that information to them.
This was __fun__ :).
-Paul
The power of centralizing information from different systems (JIRA, Salesforce, Google Apps) in a central hub without spending time on integrations allows teams to create a single source of truth for everything from account creation to the completion of certain tasks.
With our new release, access to that centralized hub (Kordami) enables teams to have more in depth, more accurate conversations with their customers and future customers by giving them access to the technology they’re using and the experts in that technology in real time. Knowledge management and sales enablement made easy directly in Slack.
Passion like Paul’s is infectious and he’s an honor and a joy to work with. Similarly our customers, their engagement, and their investment in us is extremely humbling. They too are a joy and an honor to work with. As we continue to centralize our customer’s workflows to increase their accountability and productivity we look forward to posting more stories like this.
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