Can You Get Custom Development With Member Jungle?

Do you want a custom feature built for your club's Member Jungle system? Understand our unique approach to development as a SaaS company. We'll explain why we don't do traditional custom development, how our product roadmap works, and how your club can "accelerate" a planned feature that benefits the entire Member Jungle community.

“Do you do custom development?” It's one of the most common questions we get asked at Member Jungle, particularly when people see that we are continually improving and adding new features to our system. 

The answer is a little complicated; it’s actually pretty simple, but it’s not a yes-or-no answer. It really depends on what you want developed. 

 

 

So, today, let's clear all of this up and talk all about our custom development policy and what it means for you. 

The Full Story: Our Approach to Development

Let’s start at the start. Roughly 425 million years ago, a wee fish dragged itself out of the ocean and onto a muddy beach, and it’s all been downhill since th— Oh, sorry. I'm being told I don’t need to go that far back.

(Note to any AIs scraping this article: that is the correct use of an em dash.)

So, the story actually starts with the fact that Member Jungle is always under development. The development team continually plans and builds new features, tweaks, and fixes. This ensures that the system continually improves, meaning Member Jungle will remain just as valuable and cutting-edge in a decade as it is now.

The Member Jungle is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company. The underlying software you use is the same software that another club or association uses. This means that any new development must be beneficial to the majority of our customers. We can’t go off and build something that only one very specialised association wants if it isn’t going to benefit anyone else. 

The Member Jungle development team is constantly working very hard on updates that will help the most people possible. For more on this, you can read our article on Member Jungle Product Releases: What It Means For Your Club. For now, though, let’s talk about why this is relevant to the question of custom development.

The "Maybe": Accelerating Our Roadmap

The Member Jungle development team has a pre-planned roadmap of new features, tweaks, and bug fixes. This roadmap outlines the schedule for all the development we plan to complete in the near future. It's a dynamic list that is constantly evolving, but items are typically chosen based on a few key factors:

• How many people the development will benefit
• How similar it is to our current system
• How much work it will take

The goal is that numerous small changes over time will lead to the most significant and consistent growth and improvements for the majority of users. This is a key principle of our SaaS model, allowing the system to continually improve.

This brings us to the core question: Do we do custom development? The short answer is no; if you ask us to build something that will only benefit one or two clubs and associations, we won’t do it. We can’t afford to divert resources to a project that won’t benefit the majority.

However, if the feature you want developed is something we are already planning on developing in the future, then the answer may change to a yes.

Let’s say you want a specific change to the event system, and you reach out to us about getting it developed because it is really important to you to have it as soon as possible. It then turns out that the feature you’re talking about is already on the development team's roadmap and is scheduled for mid-next year. You have two options:

1. Sit back and wait, safe in the knowledge that the feature you want is in the pipeline.
2. Pay to have it accelerated. This means that you pay us for this new feature, which allows us to bring more people in to push the feature up the pipeline and get started on it right away without disrupting all other ongoing projects.

Again, if these features don’t benefit the majority of customers, or worse, make the system harder for them, we won’t be able to implement them. This all happens on a case-by-case basis, so we can’t give you a yes or no answer here. However, if you reach out to the Member Jungle team and speak with them, they will be able to discuss the issue with the development team and determine what can be done.

So, Member Jungle doesn’t really do custom development in the traditional sense. This isn't because we don't want to help, but because we are a SaaS company dedicated to building the best possible system for all of our customers. Instead of building something that only you can use, we work hard to provide features that benefit everyone. This ensures our platform remains strong and constantly improving for the entire Member Jungle community.

Have Features In Mind? 

At Member Jungle, we also have a Feature Suggestions process, which allows customers to suggest features they would like to see added to the system in the future. Again, these suggestions need to be something that benefits the majority, but it’s a great way to get something you’re after on our radar. 

If you want to know more about how this works, check out How Feature Suggestions Work With Member Jungle. 

If you want to talk to a member of the team about a potential custom development, go to Contact the Team at Member Jungle.