TL;DR If you’ve been using our Stack Overflow for Teams product and are part of a growing company, we’ve got exciting news. Today we’re launching a new tier, Stack Overflow for Business, that includes a lot of features customers have been asking for. You can learn more here. If you’re not familiar with what the private version of Stack Overflow can do to help your organization work smarter, read on.
It’s been nearly two decades since Tim O’Reilly coined the term inner sourcing, which advocated for applying the principles of open source development beyond the IT department, leveraging those ideas to improve communication and collaboration across corporations of varying sizes and industries. Since then software has become a critical piece of nearly every business, and in order to succeed the best companies need to draw on ideas from across their organization and find ways to ensure that the best contributions bubble to the top.
How do you crowdsource great information from within your own workforce? Stack Overflow learned a lot about community building and knowledge management in the decade we spent building our public facing website. It became a living compendium of great questions and answers for software developers. A few years ago we realized that this same structure might be valuable if turned inward, and so we began to launch private instances of Stack Overflow for clients like Microsoft and Bloomberg.
That product grew into Stack Overflow for Enterprise, now used by Fortune 500 companies across tech, finance, and telecom. A year ago we launched Stack Overflow for Teams, allowing smaller organizations to tap into this same offering. Since then we’ve signed up 1,500 customers and 30,000 users ranging from startups to universities. At Expensify, one of our early customers, our Q&A offering has become an indispensable tool for the engineering team, but it has also been adopted by the entire company in order to access knowledge on topics such as customers success and data collection.
| It originally started as a place just for engineers because engineers were kind of used to it with the original Stack Overflow. But as we started to use it and see how nice it was to have a repository of information we started to see it spread to other teams so our customer support team started using it, our people success team started using it. Next thing we knew we had integrations all over the place and Stack Overflow being used across the company. |
As Teams and Enterprise have grown, we’ve begun to see a few areas where we could improve the fit. In classic Goldilocks fashion, there were some customers for whom Enterprise was a bit too big, and Teams was a bit too small. So today we’re rolling out a third tier, Stack Overflow for Business, which will sit in between those two. We think it’s best suited for organizations with 50 to 1,000 users, but we’re happy to chat with anyone who is interested.
At a high level, the product will remain the same, but there are a couple of key features to note:
- Single Sign On (SSO)
- Invoice or Credit Card
- Analytics dashboard
- Priority Customer Support
- Stayed tuned! We’re working on lots more features geared to Business users
When it becomes simple for anyone in your organization to share questions and answers, and when great ideas are rewarded and recognized, it’s like creating a giant incubator that exists to grow your business. A living dialog of this kind gives managers superpowers, the ability to see around corners and anticipate what problems need fixing and what products might be used in ways the original creators never imagined. If you’re interested in learning more about your own private version of Stack Overflow, get in touch here.
Author: Chance Heath, Product Manager
