As we innovate - we believe a great way to validate our product developments is by allowing our customers to try features out in the context of their own data - in their own accounts.

Rather than spend months working on a project, then releasing it into production hoping it will meet expectations, we release constantly to production but have the ability to activate functionality for a proportion of new customers in order to get quick feedback and to accelerate our ability to deliver value incrementally to our customers.

There are a number of reasons we might use beta for features:

• It can include things that we want to collect data on before public release so we can share success stories in our launch materials
• Sometimes we want to determine how useful an idea is in the real world before committing to supporting it indefinitely. For example if we see low adoption of beta, it might not make economic sense to pursue the full release and product lifecycle management and maintenance that feature incurs.
• Where we are not sure about the best way to deliver a new feature to customers, beta allows us to rapidly iterate and make adjustments to improve the experience without needing to rewrite our documentation and training materials every time.
• Sometimes a feature can be expensive to provide and maintain, so we are also looking for product/market fit to ensure we will see a return on our investments

Then, if we can prove value, the feature can be fully released and supported with all the usual materials like documentation, training, technical support, etc.

There are a number of ways we might go about a beta in Akeneo:

• Open beta. In this case we will mark a feature with the label “beta” to indicate it is a beta feature. When we do this we will provide an admin setting to control if the feature is visible to users or not.
• Closed beta. In this case we might recruit specific customers to participate.

To help us validate if a beta programme is successful we need feedback. And if you use a beta feature we may contact you to help us understand your beta experience either by direct contact or by in-app messaging.

Please note, beta features are not supported in the usual way. As experimental or pre-launch items, they will not have the same level of support as a full feature with documentation, training and product support.