Over the past 16 years, I have exclusively focused on building NPact’s grant management software. It’s been about design, development, testing, deployment, and all the other components of full life cycle software development. I’ve concentrated on the apps, while sales, implementation, and support of our software is lead by others within our company. When NPact was acquired just over a year ago, new leaders joined our team to lead engineering and quality assurance. Their leadership has freed me up to focus on product strategy in a more wholistic way. As Chief Product Officer, I still drive our development priorities and product roadmaps, but I can now spend more time working with our implementation and support teams to set the vision for our products. I also now get to spend time engaging with customers to gather feedback and design enhancements ideas for our products. It’s an exciting time to be in product development!
As I move beyond the code and I meet with our users, I’m being asked questions such as, how should we be using this feature? What’s the best way to configure that module? What’s the difference between this and that? These questions are typically covered during a foundation’s initial implementation and training. With Foundations welcoming new members to their team, sharing knowledge and expertise is necessary. Some users have a general idea of how a particular feature works, but they’re not always sure of the best way to set things up. Even with our online knowledge base and free training courses, I still see a need for new product documentation.
With this in mind, our Product team has decided to undertake a new initiative this year to publish white papers for various functions within our software systems. The intent will be to address business processes and define best practices. We will cover topics such as:
- Building and Publishing Web Applications
- Grant Dockets and the Board Member Portal
- Check Run Processing
- Designated Grants
Our first white paper on Correspondence and Mail Merges is being released today! It covers how correspondence works in GENXT for letters and emails, how to set up templates, and how to generate correspondence in GENXT for specific records or in a batch. It can be downloaded here via NPact’s Knowledge Base here.
I hope these white papers, along with our knowledge base and our online training materials, will go a long way toward overcoming product knowledge gaps and empowering our users to take full advantage of all that our systems have to offer. I’ve focused for a long time on making our products powerful and flexible. That’s still important, but my vision is now centered on making our software more intuitive and approachable. I’m confident that we have world-class products, and I’m excited to be sharing them with our community!
Jeff Armstrong, Chief Product Officer