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Leadership Wants to Hear From You

J_Marquardt

We've received many great ideas - thank you! Interested in addressing some of the topics shared in the comments below? Please attend a brainstorming session Thursday, Nov. 4, at 8:30 a.m. ET. Details here.

It’s an exciting time at JMP.

We’re becoming a subsidiary of SAS. And that means we have more control over our destiny than ever before.

In the spirit of continuous improvement, leadership wants to hear from you. What do you think we could improve at JMP? Ideas should have high impact and the potential to be addressed within a year.

Please share your ideas by Friday, Oct. 22. Just post a comment below or email Robin Betters.

Some of our best ideas have come from JMP employee feedback. Employee ideas led to important initiatives like:

Corporate subscriptions.
InsideJMP.
JMP Academy.
A current effort to standardize JMP messaging.

What will happen after the idea collection phase?

JMP managers from around the world will gather to review the topic submissions, brainstorm ways to address them and then prioritize based on our greatest needs.

Comments

MarilynWheatley

As someone new to JMP, I may be way off but have a few suggestions anyway.

1) It would be awesome if the JMP help pages could be translated to Spanish for customers in Latin America.

2) Making the purchasing/licensing process a little easier with a click-wrap agreement would reduce the time to sale. From what I have noticed, competitors have found ways to make the license agreement a little simpler.

3) The JMP interface looks a little bit dated. While that may not be an issue for legacy customers (engineers & scientists) that are mainly interested in "getting the answers", a sleek look is helpful in other market segments where the user-base may be a little less sophisticated, like manufacturing quality, banking, marketing, and logistics. Updating the appearance of some of the windows and making some changes to the default colors could go a long ways in modernizing the feel of the interface.

Thanks for reading!

YvesJMP

Hello Everyone,

I think the most important thing for our continued growth is the increase the focus on Industry. The more we have industry specific messaging, the more recognition we will have, the more our user base will grow.

Let's keep moving forward!

MeichenDong

When running multiple scripts/datasets, there are multiple small windows pop up and it's hard to organize sometimes. The good thing is JMP has the project format which can organize the scripts, data, output all in one big window. I would suggest to either enable the default UI to organize all small windows, or set JMP project as default.

Aurora_TiffanyD

I am hopeful that we can improve our process for approving software purchases. Ideally we will have an IT organization that can guide us regarding privacy & security concerns, and can vet new tools and systems properly - but much more quickly than we have seen with the larger SAS IT org.

nick_shelton

Improved license management capabilities - The technical capability to determine the identity of the individual using JMP.

John_Powell_JMP

With growth in mind and post pandemic resignations in the software industry expected to be higher than usual, I think we should be quicker and more flexible in hiring development staff. Some of this may apply to other departments too.

We should start the hiring process as soon as someone announces they're leaving.

We should anticipate attrition and have developers ready to take over before someone leaves.

We should increase the number of interns we hire.

We should consider part-time developers.

Diana_Levey

In-Person Internal Meetings: Where and how often? I believe this topic needs a global committee working on it that can take into account our carbon neutrality goals AND our need to create a cohesive community of co-workers.

Chris_Kirchberg

I would like to echo and add to what @Diana_Levey has presented. I expect that travel will be dramatically reduced in the foreseeable future given carbon neutrality goals and that we have demonstrated that it is possible to do well from a sales perspective without the travel.

This does create some new problems or increases existing ones. The first one is what Diana pointed out: a cohesive community of co-workers. This directly impacts remote employees (those who do not work at HQ), those who work in region offices, and those who work from their homes. While those who work at regional offices around the world are likely to be able to interact with local co-workers, it will become more difficult to interact with other regions.. For those who work from home, this existing gap will dramatically widen.

Another note on this is the types of amenities that working at HQ affords for which remote/home office employees do not have equitable access. This would be a nice thing to rectify in the future especially in light of less future travel.

Meg_Hermes

A few thoughts...

I so agree with what @Chris_Kirchberg and @Diana_Levey have said about striking the right balance balance between in-person and virtual meetings. Even if it's just a couple of times a year, a few face-to-face gatherings would go a long way. I also think that perhaps there is more that can be done, as Chris suggested, to offer more meaningful amenities to those of us working remotely. For example, it seems sensible to me that high-speed internet service be reimbursed.

I also think it's really important that we have a mechanism for providing JMP licenses free of charge to not-for-profit organizations that share in our values and mission. And -- this is not my idea, but one I've heard talked about and strongly support -- data analytics influencers who can help us to appeal to a younger generation of more code-savvy scientists and engineers. I would love to be involved in thinking creatively (/strategically) about how to best do this.

Kevin_ODonnell

I would like to echo what @MarilynWheatley said about the software's interface. JMP is an extremely powerful and expansive software but it could benefit from a more modern look. Some data visualization software tools, like Tableau, have fewer capabilities than JMP, but have very smooth and minimalist designs that make them more appealing to new analysts. In particular, young people coming into the data analytics field are attracted to this type of interface, so updating the look of JMP could go a long way for marketing to young professionals and increasing customer retention.

arati_mejdal

I have heard what @MarilynWheatley and @Kevin_ODonnell said from my son, who is an engineering student who will be working at Tableau after graduation: JMP's interface is a deterrent to using it.

I also would like to make it easy to put a free copy of JMP in the hands of key influencers, particularly young influencers in stats, engineering, data science, etc. We need to get others to carry our message.

I would like to see our Partners program grow. This is another way we get others to carry our message.

LauraCS

Great feedback re: product appearance and in-person meetings! I'd like to add that, having a social/behavioral sciences background, I think we're well positioned to expand our user base in this area. If we're not already being intentional in our efforts to target social/behavioral scientists, I'd suggest adding more resources to do this. This is in line with @YvesJMP suggestion about industry-specific messaging.

martindemel

Some things have been said and I want to echo their importance:

Diana and Chris about getting together
Nick about ways to understand who are the actual users
John about the hiring. In other companies there is an internal growth plan, e.g. starting in Support, qualifying for testing, quality, development or any of the technical sales roles. These people could be experienced ones or very sophisticated and outstanding PhDs or students from universities. These would allow for a bunch of people a year to select on if there is any sudden occupancy
Kevin's and jmp_is_fun's topic, which would mean a multi-year effort, and also some compability topic. I remember having this at MathWorks with their version 13 back in late 2000s, they switch to fully Java supported interface which was a very big thing and effort and the years after they had a quality initiative to fix all bugs from >10k to <1k within the following years. Of course there were some hiccups and also some complains from customer side, but it allowed the product to evolve and and incorporate new features and add-ins in a nicer and more attractive way which attracted more younger people. I say it's not easy but probably worth a severe consideration for the future.

Some other things came into my mind:

Legal, it is important for the worldwide roll-out to have people specialized in the different country laws, especially thinking about Europe/UK and APAC with all it's differences.
IT: really minor, but please get rid of DELL, use Thinkpads or any other professional laptop which are more robust and don't have so bad cooling systems (though the support is good I have to admit) would be a great relief. (And of course I hear the Mac users "get rid of MS" )
Consider a web/cloud-based student lab, where they can work on exercises for courses or homework. Or a general cloud based demo version. Tracking the way JMP is used by these (almost new) users could help development to improve the first experience for JMP users. Where are their challenges, why did they stop using or testing it further, did they find the relevant things, was it misleading and they did the wrong analysis and needed to recreate it to make it right, do they find context menus and other options to adjust graphs and reports...
Along with the previous point, focus on usability and the first impression of new users more than in the past. People who know JMP a long time (most of the times) understand how to use it, but that's all but not true for new users. Making the barrier for new users lower will be a major differentiator to other software on the market or potential new software developed in the future.

smencia

I agree and would love to work on the feedback from @MarilynWheatley , @Kevin_ODonnell, @arati_mejdal and @LauraCS. We need to overhaul and update the look of JMP so we can compete with other modern looking platforms. This will take a significant amount of effort and going along the lines of @John_Powell_JMP points, ideally hiring more UX Designers, UI Developers, etc could help us achieve this. I believe having a whole team dedicating the majority of their time to this effort would be really beneficial and a very exciting task to take on.

anne_milley

So many great comments and suggestions thus far!

While I hear there are plans to give students free access to 2-year colleges starting some time in 2022, it would be great if we could extend this to more academic institutions. Some of our competitors, like Tableau, give software to all students.
I echo the comments on the interface improvements: while some of the newer platforms look nice, much of the other (older) platform output looks could really use an overhaul—e.g., not enough white space, pane placement could be better optimized, etc. While UI resources may be focused on newer features, it would be nice if there were at least a plan to start to improve older platform appearance.
Agree that we could enhance our brand equity with a program for nonprofits—not all nonprofits, just the ones that align with our values: conservation, education, social justice, etc. (see Tableau’s: https://www.tableau.com/foundation). This could also provide an opportunity to get more references, more JMP Public content, and more crowd-sourced reviews on sites like G2, Trust Radius, more social media engagement, etc.
Similar comment for the partner program. We could grow this program and similarly, use it to get more references (including 3-way references with the partner’s customers), more JMP Public content, and more crowd-sourced reviews on sites like G2, more social media engagement, etc.

robin_moran

I would love it if we could re-visit how we support JMP Users Groups. Traditionally, we have followed the same path as SAS, with users groups operating very independently from us. Some of the ways we/SAS have supported users groups made more sense for SAS, but perhaps not as much for JMP. For example, we strongly encourage JMP Users Groups to formally register as a non-profit if they are located in the US. This is because on the SAS side, they traditionally collected dues ($$$ = IRS may become interested) and many of the small users groups grew into the regional SAS Users groups we know today who hold their own conferences. A few things come to mind for me- 1) This seems like a somewhat old-fashioned way of doing things. I think this transition could allow us to modernize how we do users groups. 2) JMP already has the Discovery conference series. If the vision for Discovery is to continue to develop new regional conferences, then the place of JMP Users Groups is a little more clear for us than it is for SAS. I'd love to see us have a chance to provide more support for users groups going forward if possible.

Bryan_Fricke

I agree with previous comments that suggest we may have an opportunity to broaden the appeal of JMP by focusing on the UI/UX. I think it may be worthwhile to distinguish between UI and UX since changes to one don't necessarily entail changes to the other. Ken Norton, a product partner at Google Ventures, has distinguished between the two this way:

UX is focused on the user’s journey to solve a problem, UI is focused on how a product’s surfaces look and function

Ken also provides a potentially useful analogy:

UI is the table, chair, plate, glass, and utensils. UX is everything from the food, to the service, parking, lighting and music.

Some comments suggest updating colors (reminiscent of lighting and music in the restaurant analogy) while other comments seem to suggest usability is an issue.

Byron Wingerd conducted a book club for the Design of Everyday Things back in the spring. Notes from the meetings are here:

https://rndconfluence.sas.com/confluence/display/JMP/The+Design+of+Everyday+Things+Book+Club

Also, near the beginning of the year, there was some discussion about UI/UX at the JMP 16.0 retrospective:

https://rndconfluence.sas.com/confluence/display/JMP/JMP+UX+retrospective+conversation+page

Finally, I think a style guide can help mitigate spending too much time debating the merits of one approach vs. another. For example, both JMP Live and interactive HTML leverage Google's Material Design, which provides stylistic direction. SAS has also developed a style guide that may be helpful:

http://livingston-stable.guides.sashq-r.openstack.sas.com/9-0/?theme=illuminate

smencia

To echo @Bryan_Fricke there is also this: http://designsystem.sas.com/latest/

Daniel_Valente

We should invest in the infrastructure to make us the premier place to be a remote or hybrid employee. One example was mentioned by @Meg_Hermes (broadband internet), but we should broadly think about how we can set up our teams to be the optimally productive while working from home.

And this further pertains to how we present our virtual selves to customers or capture ourselves to present content to others.

This comes in the form of both equipment and training. For a minimal investment, employees can be provided high quality microphones, basic signal processing equipment and reference webcams as well as basic lighting equipment. And training to ensure that it's used correctly.

Give employees the flexibility to pick the technology equipment that works best for their role without an arduous review process. Investing some of the expenses saved by not traveling in configuring an home office will pay big dividends. As part of this, also have a budget for desks/chairs and other equipment for ergonomic considerations -- and make this a recruiting selling point. Have an office build-out be something new hires (and existing employees) get excited about doing instead of dreading requesting.

Phil_Kay

So many good ideas here.

In the wider world of Pre-Sales, demo automation is the big topic at the moment. Should we be looking at this kind of technology? SE time is a precious resource. Can some demo work be automated so that our SEs can spend more time on the most valuable activities? This might also link with a cloud-based environment as an alternative to demo download. How can we use technology to make evaluation of JMP as simple as possible for the buyer?

arati_mejdal

100 percent agree with @Daniel_Valente on making infrastructure great for remote employees.

paolo_chiappa

It is so great to have such a chance to share thoughts and ideas with the goal of increasing JMP's success in the world.

Some ideas and wishes:

We really need easier access to JMP Academic Suite licenses. I feel like as long as we remain with this model of academic licensing deployment, we will always be at the mercy of the will of IT managers to make the software easily available or not across the institution covered by campuswide and departmentwide licenses. I guess technology today would easily allow us to set up a very simple hosting service where academics and students should just insert a code associated with their site license, download the installers, and activate the software. We have already had the opportunity to test such a service through a third-party partner with Hogeschool Gent (Belgium), and the results are certainly positive: users have immediate access to the software, without having to ask IT staff, and therefore prefer to install and use JMP instead of other software.
I think we should improve our credit collection processes regarding renewals. Personally, I spend an incredible amount of time every week contacting people who work in accounting, trying to retrieve order numbers and other useful information to get invoices paid on time. And obviously, this takes a lot of time away from prospecting and lead management activities.
And I totally quote @martindemel about the wish to have a cloud-based demo version, also for JMP Pro, JMP Genomics, and JMP Clinical, but also the usability point of view. On the latter point, we should really try to put ourselves in the shoes of new users. Based on the transition guides already available online, we could create mini videos to immediately show interested users what the differences are between JMP and Excel, between JMP and SPSS, between JMP and Minitab, etc., and integrate them into the trial version.

Sarah_Springer

Thank you for this opportunity to share feedback! We often receive feedback from customers who are on multi-entity agreements that the structure of reporting users by entity is very challenging and cumbersome. Many customers are asking for a more simplified licensing model, or alternatively, a license server where JMP can make it more streamlined to pull these numbers. Many customers are willing to easily report numbers, but want to do so in a way that aligns with their internal systems and is less manual. Thank you!

kathy_walker

For new users, create automated learning paths based off their needs. We have so many great resources and it can be overwhelming for new users – many don’t know where to start and what steps to take next.

J_Marquardt

Now that we are becoming our own company, we should think about our employer brand and how to use it for recruitment. We've relied on our connection to SAS, but JMP has a special culture too. Let's make sure people know about it!

DonMcCormack

I agree with what has been said about making JMP easier to use and maintain. I’ve heard similar feedback a lot coming from customers.

Profession development and involvement in professional organizations should be part of who we are. Any way this can be encouraged and supported (like the SAS tuition reimbursement for employees) would help. In a similar respect, I think it would be beneficial to have a liaison program where a technical staff member can spend part of their time working with an existing customer on a project of interest to them. This would be beneficial for both: they would get JMP expertise, and we would get insight into the types of problems and data they might encounter.

Tim_Pierce_JMP

I definitely agree with @Sarah_Springer on the need for a solution to automate license management. As we aim to grow our JMP user base to 1 Million, helping our license management stakeholders will benefit JMP growth, especially in the accounts that are poised for growing quickly. Historically we have seen customers with 10-20 licenses (and many more employees) as most likely to accelerate JMP expansion. While these customers may have been able to track licenses relatively well with that small of an initial number, the complexity of just double or triple that amount can start creating barriers to getting the software. If the administrators get behind on tracking or confused on their own data (multiple spreadsheets, how to count licenses, etc.), they are likely to suggest other tools and only provide JMP if requestors persist. We want to make it fast and easy for our customers to manage licenses, which in turn will grow JMP use.

Ross_Metusalem

Ditto to what @Daniel_Valente mentioned about remote work setups, to what many have said about modernizing the JMP interface, and to what @kathy_walker said about learning paths.

With respect to the latter, it could be helpful if we reviewed our strategy for developing video learning content and making it findable by our users. We produce large amounts of high-quality content that targets different audiences and needs, but it may be too much, spread across too many places, with both gaps and overlap in the tools and techniques covered. Numerous users have voiced similar concerns. Ideally, a user could identify a tool or technique they want to learn, go to one place, and easily identify the video that most closely meets their need.

Learning paths would obviate this problem for users who want to engage in a series of learning activities, and they certainly are worth developing for these users. But many users don't necessarily want a learning path, just a video demonstration that meets their need right now so they can get back to work.

Bryan_Fricke

To echo @DonMcCormack, it would be a nice perk to be reimbursed for professional development courses and membership in professional organizations. I've found Coursera and Udemy courses to be helpful.

Ryan_Lekivetz

Regarding meetings, it's more than just the internal. October seems to be the month of academic conferences, and for the design of experiments conference I've been attending during the month, and it’s been obvious just how much everyone seems to miss socializing. I've also previewed Brad's talk on "The Joy of Collaboration", and one thing that stuck out to me was that he met most of his collaborators at conferences. I hope that we remain encouraged/allowed to attend non-JMP conferences to keep JMP visible.

For internal, as someone who has been coming into HQ on a regular basis, there still feels like less of a community since very few people are coming in. The exception was the Discovery photo day at the end of August.

This came up in the Summit Wish List, but something like Gather Conferences feels much more “social” than Zoom or Teams. Would anyone show up if there was an occasional social event in different time zones? I’m not sure, but I would likely try and chat to both familiar faces and new hires (there are even those in HQ that I’ve yet to meet).