Why Did We Build Symphony?

There’s a question that I don’t think is asked enough in our tech filled world; why?

It’s a simple question, but one that can be expanded into a question that may be difficult to answer: why did you build your product?

But there are a few more “why” questions that I think are necessary to answer to get at the heart of the above question.

• Why are you/your clients having that problem in the first place?

• Why is technology the appropriate solution to solve that problem instead of process change, etc.?

• Why are you the best team to create the technology that solves the problem?

I believe that by answering these questions, I can give you an answer to the question “Why did we make Symphony?”

When it came to the first two questions, we turned directly to our clients. They came to us with similar pain points over time and we made the difficult decision to simply listen to them. Trust me, your users will tell you what’s working for them and what’s not. In these conversations it became apparent that the problems they were having centered around the scattered nature of their data across platforms, communication channels that weren’t linked to any of their data, and how to best relay their findings to decision makers.

While some process changes could have helped ease the pain slightly (and were helpful in the solution process for some clients) we saw these pain points as ripe opportunities for technology to come in and make their lives easier. Especially when the pain came from handling mountains of data and effectively communicating the story that data tells.

That leaves us with the final question, “why are we the best team to create this technology?”

I’m going to adapt a saying penned by author Frederick Buechner who said “[Your calling] is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” We found that our clients all had a similar problem that needed solving—their “deep hunger.” Using technology to solve said problems immediately excited us—our “deep gladness.” Sounds like a dream scenario for a development team right?

In the beginning though, it could have just as easily been a nightmare. Picture a scenario where all your clients seem to come to you at once with a similar issue that’s causing them a lot of frustration, and you need to come up with a solution that will work for each and every one of them. This means a solution that works across multiple business sectors, handles several types of technology, and can adapt to different workflows and company structures. A solution that is secure enough for Finance and Healthcare, without looking or feeling to the user like your bank’s old website that was nearly impossible to navigate.

So, we got to work building tools to address those pain points. And as we spent time together brainstorming solutions, testing new technologies and approaches to solving these problems, that nightmare situation turned into the dream that it always was. Our deep gladness of solving difficult problems together was finally met by a set of problems that we could see making a real difference for our clients.

We realized (through more than a few iterations and plenty of feedback sessions) that the tools we built to help our clients were powerful, but they’re only part of the solution. What our clients needed was a place for all their data and all our tools to mingle together in productive harmony. If you’ll allow us our metaphor, we needed to combine the disparate instruments together into a cohesive Symphony.

In short, our answer to the question is relatively simple. Our clients came to us to help solve their difficult problems, and we love building solutions to difficult problems. That helped us quickly turn that “why” into an eager “why not?”