The beginning of the second quarter feels like the start of a new year. Let me explain.

Coming on board in the beginning of the year felt like a new year as well –it was an opportunity to drive new ideas, in our new building, under our new leader Lou Castle. The strategy team formed and we worked very hard assessing the competitive landscape, market opportunities, and new, long-term visions. We presented our ideas to the executive leaders many times. We refined, debated, and consolidated until we had a unified mission.

It was a lot of hard work and the process that we went through reminded me of dependency hell which was the term we used to describe the serialization that occurs during strategy planning. When product managers asked me a question, I didn’t always have the answer because the strategy team was either still researching or still debating. We went into the process knowing it would be challenging –and it was.

At the same time, GDC was looming. A conference like GDC consumes a lot of time. The dependencies of the strategy team also affected GDC; however, it’s even more challenging since the week of GDC may be our only chance to talk to people that we might not see until next year. A week is a small window to set the expectations for 12 months.

We solidified high level strategy plans two weeks before GDC. That gave us just enough time to share the strategy team’s information with the internal team and consultants. While at GDC, we affirmed and tweaked the strategies by learning about the competitors and listening to you and our partners.

Lou and I discussed my personal and business goals early in January. One of the goals was to have a budget and portfolio road map in place by March 22nd. We had our meeting last Monday at 8:00 PST, I presented him with our progress and he approved.

So, by now it should be fairly clear why this quarter feels like a new year. Strategies are in place, the budget is in place, managers of products are merging existing plans to meet a budget and unified strategy. This structure gives managers more autonomy and flexibility while still maintaining responsibility and accountability. Motivation thrives in this type of environment.

Updates

So while it’s not strategic to share with you our entire strategy, there are some foundations that I can share.

Firstly, for all of you who were waiting for a direction for TorqueX, we have an answer for you. TorqueX has its own line item in our budget. We think John has done a great job working on TorqueX given his resources; but those resources are not enough to keep a product from feeling like a, dare I say it, a red-headed step child ( no offense to step children or red heads it’s just the term I saw in our forums ). We’ve allocated real funds to TorqueX for 2010 and look forward to working with John and others on our aggressive plans. We are building product plans around that budget and we plan to staff-up to meet our new goals with this product line. At this time ( I will update everyone after we do some more work ) we expect to have a major update this year and some near term updates as well.

Secondly, we are looking to improve the experience of the Torque 3D binary. As many of you know by now, we expect to have a draft version of our Torque 3D docs available next week; that’s the first step. We have other plans as well. I’ll let Michael fill everyone in on the details of the docs in an upcoming blog. I’d like to thank everyone on the forums who gave us the great constructive feedback. The thread started out like a lion and is ending like a lamb –appropriate for the month of March I guess. The constructive criticism helps us move quicker and meet your needs faster.

Next, we are looking to improve the quality and user experience of our products. The Full Sail University QA and Usability Lab will be a valuable resource for us on this front. We’ve also brought on Scott Burns as a full time employee. He starts on April 1st ( no joke ) and will work on-site at the University and will help coordinate the lab, intake bugs from the community, and refine the QA and usability process. Welcome aboard Scott! Torque 3D will benefit from the lab as well. Matt Fairfax will be updating everyone in another two weeks on the status of Torque 3D -but I'll give you some hints now because I'm excited. After we finish Torque 3D 1.1, we will be moving to faster deployment of updates and tighter feedback loops from our community. Many of these feedback loops will focus on usability and quality. Lastly, as we are moving forward we are looking for opportunities to converge and consolidate functionality. It took us a long time to have all of the different products and branches that exist; it will take a long time to merge that functionality under common tools and runtimes. This process will reduce cost, increase quality, and reduce confusion across for new customers who are learning about the differences between all of our offerings. This is clearly good for both us and the community.

In closing, I’d like to remind everyone that our GDC promotion for Torque 3D Pro and the binary is ending on April 1st. The coupon code is GDC2010 and it only works for Torque 3D Pro. Um…let’s make that April 2nd to reduce any confusion. The response to the Torque 3D Pro promotion has driven a lot of new users –many more than I expected. It seems like there were a lot of people waiting for an opportunity to buy Torque 3D at the pre-release price.

This promotion will be available for only a couple more days so get in while you still can.

So I’ve covered a lot, but there are still many things that I didn’t cover. In the next coming weeks, the people driving each of our products will be filling you in on more details, so look forward to their blogs.