This week marks the ten year anniversary of Mission Control and what a decade it’s been!
Humble Beginnings in Technology
Mission Control started life out as a spreadsheet that our CEO and Co-Founder, Colin Johnson, put together nearly 20 years ago. Over the years it’s developed into one of the most popular Project Management solutions on the AppExchange, that’s now been adopted by 11,000+ users in over 25 countries around the world.
From day one, Colin and Co-Founder Chris Woolcott, wanted to ensure they were building something that they would be proud of, whether it was the product, support or the culture of their team, they were committed to applying their ‘Driven to Exceed’ mantra to everything they did.
Laser Focus
Additionally, there was a laser like focus on customer success, way before it was cool. To ensure that focus and customer commitment Colin and Chris set up the organization to be financially independent of external funding – which meant customers drove the product and business direction and not stakeholders and shareholders.
This has meant that Mission Control can centre itself, and it’s product development, squarely around the demand of their customers and the expectations of the industry, genuinely, many of Mission Control’s product enhancements, improvements and features over the journey have been customer-led, some of these have included:
- Gantt Charts and Whiteboard
- Resource Scheduler
- Dashboards
- Billing Management
- Role Utilization
- Project Status Reports
- Retrospective Boards
People before technology – Product Performance
CEO, Colin Johnson observed “I hear great things from our customers, which is always super pleasing, but when you look online at independent software review sites, like g2.com, and you see our Net Promoter Score up at 83, when the industry average is 41, it not only vindicates product direction, but all the hard work that Chris, myself and all our staff have made over the last few years.”
And in that time Mission Control has doubled staff, doubled customers and doubled users. Those results have been driven by the businesses leaders, but more importantly, the grit and growth mindset of their staff. Colin Johnson added “Beyond our tireless staff, I’m extremely grateful for having access to an amazing network of mentors, peers and friends who are always so willing to listen, offer opinions and share experiences.”
What’s on the roadmap
Lots! Mission Control is expected to continue its growth curve so we will need to wrap resources around that to maintain the level of support and product expertise that our customers have rightfully become accustomed to.
“We want to continue to build excellence within Mission Control to become the ‘Go To’ solution for Project Management and Professional Services Automation within the Salesforce eco-system. We’ve got so many ideas to push this product even further and being an independent team we have the flexibility to pursue all of these exciting features and make them a reality as quick as we can build them. I really want to see us double down on the success that we’ve had so far, really continuing to push forward in our product offering and to further build and support our customer base.”
Mission Control are in the midst of reimagining their Partner Program, which will significantly improve the referral experience. And not surprisingly, there are several exciting new features being added to the product that will improve utilization, platform efficiency and team-wide collaboration.
Colin Johnson added “We pride ourselves in living and breathing our ‘Driven to Exceed’ culture from all aspects of our business, whether that is internal employee engagement through to our exceptional customer service and how we approach every product in our stable. We’re so excited about the next phase of the business and can’t wait for all our customers to join us on the ride!”
