The History of Whisperlabs

Byron Webster conceived Whisperlabs as the cure for managing customer ideas and customer suggestions gathered within an agile software development process. This requires the right tools, the right processes, and hours of time to rationalize, categorize, prioritize, and measure before this information can be used… The process often took longer than the time it took a product team to actually develop any features or enhancements. While most software packages are designed with one user in mind, Whisperlabs took an alternative approach, making it fun and easy for all stakeholders (from end users to the CEO) to participate. Whisperlabs applies the best of collaboration software to the customer ideas and recommendation process, making the process of managing customer ideas easy and insightful.


How we got started

In 2005, Byron was working as a product manager on a product that was undergoing the most complex transformation any product could undertake: simultaneously addressing the combination of three point-solutions into one, the introduction of a new platform, the introduction of support for internationalization, globalization, localization with language support, and the introduction of a new user interface to support these changes. The implementation times had far exceeded the initial estimates and the company was working hard to balance the needs of existing clients while developing the next generation product. During several heated conversations with clients, he recognized that during each meeting, each customer brought a spreadsheet that contained details of the priorities of their teams. The time and resources to host the meetings, collect the ideas and suggestions from those meetings, integrate it with the other ideas collected from other customers and other channels took days. Byron knew how important this was in driving client satisfaction and building products products people love, but he rarely had the time to gather and analyze all of their ideas. He wanted a way to make this process easier. It was during his time at McCombs School of Business where he partnered with Eric Mills to make his dream a reality.

Byron's personal experiences and Eric's pragmatic approach to technology drove the creation of two breakthrough approaches which make Whisperlabs so useful, intuitive and unique: