We were actually talking about this in my office this morning, since we’re all web application and usability junkies first, and recruiters second… It occurred to us that perhaps y’all have a development team full of single men?

Seriously, every time I have encountered a missing “duh” feature in any web product I’ve used, the reason for it has always been that the people developing the product would never need to use such a feature, so it either doesn’t occur to them, or they underestimate how useful it would be to everyone else.

I don’t know what was elevated while this feature was being shuffled off to “non-critical,” and for all I know I would agree with those choices- please don’t think I’m casting aspersions upon your product management process. But that said, while women certainly don’t ALL change their names upon getting married, it’s still the more common choice. There are also an increasing number of couples who change both names, and people who change their names again after divorce or remarriage. Meanwhile, there’s a non-trivial number of women who use one name in one life sphere and the other name in another, and would at least need to be able to claim summaries using two different names.

And the societal trend is to get on the internet earlier but get married later, so the number of people who are going to have to sort out these issues after they’ve already established an identity on the Internet is only going to get bigger.

So I guess what I’m saying is… maybe it’s time to rethink how many users are going to need that feature the next time it’s up for debate?

Thanks agin for your comment, Russell.

Part of the difficulty of delivering a product that has thousands of customers is that we’re always hearing about ways we can improve the product, but don’t always have the resources to act on every request. I’m constantly trying to weigh the value of one feature vs. another, and often those that seem really important to some end up losing out to ones that are of equal importance, but to more of our users.

Believe it or not, the feature you requested has been on our list for about 12 months now, but because of resource constraints it has been moved to “non-critical” multiple times and hasn’t been developed. The good news is, we’re planning to get it in our next release. Hopefully your post will raise it’s status so it doesn’t get dropped!

Regarding your second concern about the freshness of our information, we recognize that fresh information is critical to our customers and are tackling this head-on. We’ve worked hard on improving over the past few years and by early next year, we will be making nightly (vs monthly today) updates to our index, in addition to crawling the Web at many times the speed that we do today. The combination should solve much of the latency you’ve noticed.

We pride ourselves in our ability to listen to users and respond as quickly as possible. In the meanwhile, I hope you’re still getting good value out of ZoomInfo as many of our customers are, and I appreciate your feedback.