You’ve built something. It isn’t fully ready for a proper launch, but you want to let people start using it anyway. You’re thinking about running a public beta.

As a developer advocate, I've had a fair bit of experience with user testing and public betas, and I want to share some of the things I’ve picked up along the way. For example, when does it make sense to use a public beta? How do you handle documentation when something isn’t quite official yet, and might be replacing an existing feature? When is it too early to go to beta - or too late?

In this talk, I’ll discuss why and when you might want to run a public beta, and what you can expect out of the experience - good, bad, and ugly. I’ll talk about user feedback: ways to collect it, how to interpret it, and whether you should act on it. Finally, I’ll talk about how to decide when it’s all over, and what to bear in mind as you take the plunge into General Availability.

This talk is aimed at anyone with an interest in feature launches and user engagement. The audience should come away with a good idea of when public betas make sense as a strategy, what the goals of that beta should be, and how best to achieve them.