Notes from the Product Manager, September Edition

I’ll start with a quick introduction. I’m James Koole and since early August, I’ve been the Product Manager for Hover. Basically that means that it’s my job to ensure that Hover keeps getting better.

I’ve been a Hover customer since Hover was launched way back in 2009 and I love it. I “get” what Hover is all about and believe me, the last thing I want to do is mess it up.

Working alongside me is a great team of developers that actually do the work, and a keen marketing department to tell you all about it. And of course, we also have a stellar bunch of customer support people to back us all up and help you out if you run into trouble or have any questions.

What’s Happening?

One of the things I’d like to do as Product Manager is to provide a semi-regular update on what’s happening with Hover.

To help keep you in the know, I’m going to post to the blog every little while and give you a rundown on what’s changed.

I’ll hit the highlights and make sure that you have some visibility into what’s new and what’s improved. Who knows, maybe I’ll even provide a sneak peek at what’s coming down the pike.

To kick things off, here’s a quick list of some of the things we’ve done in the past month or two. Some of this stuff you may have noticed already, and other stuff maybe you didn’t. It’s also far from a complete list, but I’m guessing you might not care about mundane stuff like fixing a typo or swapping out an image on the homepage.

• Added support for .IO domains.
• Added support for .NL domains.
• Added email notifications and an activity feed entry when a domain registration attempt is rejected by the registry.
• Improved the .CA and .IT domain registration process to provide clearer help and better guidance to ensure compliance with registry rules.
• Improved domain name and service renewal emails to alert you if the credit card on file is expired.
• Improved invoices to show the correct payment type (VISA, Mastercard, AMEX or PayPal).
• Improved domain search to provide faster results.

We’ve got a big todo list and lots of ideas on how we can make Hover even better. I can’t tell you how excited I am about what we’re working on right now. That said, part of being a good Product Manager is listening to what the customer says could be better, and what new features or products they might want to see added. I’m all ears—feel free to add your suggestions in the comments.