The traditional product release model keeps everything under wraps from potential customers until the eleventh hour, finally revealed with a grand announcement and expensive marketing spend, with a hope it's a hit with the intended audience. This session looks at how collaboration with customers during the product's development can be used in place of traditional marketing, resulting in a more refined product and immediate traction upon public release.

Presented by the Managing Partner of Australia's largest Drupal services firm, the session goes behind the scenes of the development of aGov, an open Drupal platform for Australian Government websites, and provides insight into key aspects of the project, including:

* Initiating a product idea off the back of paid client projects
* Evaluating the market potential for your product concept
* The challenges of building a product within a professional services business
* Including potential customers in the early stages of product planning
* Letting potential customers road test your product
* Using Drupal.org as your product distribution and collaboration platform
* Building partnerships around your product
* Keeping your product open to facilitate ongoing collaboration from your customers and competitors
* Generating revenue from an open-source product