Gunjan Doshi

Before I joined Community Connect Inc., it was already a leader in online community destinations for US ethnic groups and multicultural audiences. It had more than 16 million registered members and 500 million monthly page views. In short, the company was doing well - very well. However, it wanted to be great. So, the engineers started working on a new platform called C9. The new platform was designed from scratch to enable Community Connect to rapidly launch new niche social networks in less than 30 days. As Jim Collins mentions in his best seller book - “Good to Great”, the route from good to great is not easy and takes some time. The C9 platform was a massive undertaking was estimated to be completed in 6 months. However, after 18 months it seemed to have lost the path. The engineering team was very smart and dedicated to achieve the goal; but the business was getting impatient. When I joined Community Connect last year, I saw a great dynamic team, great management team and great leadership ready to take the company to new heights. I am very happy to say that in less than a year, we are successfully on the route to greatness. We have achieved the following in less than a year:

1. Launched C9 platform and re-launched all the three sites - AsianAvenue, Migente and BlackPlanet based off C9 platform.
2. We are ready to launch another niche social networking site in fall 2006.
3. In less than a year, we have released more than 40 new products and major enhancements to the platform. We have gone from not releasing anything for 18 months to releasing new features and enhancements every month.
4. Productivity of engineering team has almost doubled

For e.g., our last release had the following new features:
* Enhanced photo management including unlimited photo storage, editing tools, sharing and privacy preferences as well as rating functionality
* User-generated news allowing the community to post, rate and comment on events and articles impacting them
* Professional networking tools providing new ways for users to connect — establish contacts, find employees and new jobs
* New video section, free instant messaging and improved Personal Page tools provide new ways for members to express themselves, share and connect with the community

Lot of kudos to the product development and product management teams on this 180 degree change in less than a year. With perseverance and persistence and right set of techniques, good to great is achievable and manageable. It is not a easy journey, but even the initial results are very fulfilling.

If you are interested in working with the superior team of product development, check out the current job openings.

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