This is a post by Mike Sheeley, who has been moonlighting with RunKeeper since January, and recently left his job to join the team full-time as Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer.
I’m excited! Flat-out, I’m excited about RunKeeper. I’m so excited that I left a very promising and exciting position at a company that I’ve been with for the last four years to focus on the development of RunKeeper. But as exciting as RunKeeper has been, I didn’t leave my job because of what RunKeeper is today, I left because of the excitement I have for what it can become and for what our users want it to be.
My role on the RunKeeper team isn’t going to change. First and foremost, I’m the product guy. I answer the product development questions of what and when. What features and capabilities do we develop and when do we do them. Sound challenging? Well, don’t tell Jason this, but it really isn’t. I basically delegate my job to you, the users. I’m not kidding. Here is what I do:
Step 1) I listen to you, the user.
Step 2) I write it down
Step 3) I ask you, the user, if you like what I wrote
Step 4) See Step 1
I won’t bore you with the details, but the core of what I do is simply to listen. You might not know it, but I read all your forum threads, all blog posts, blog comments, FaceBook page comments, twitter tweets, support emails—I read them all. I even read up on what you all say on Nike+ sites too 
. I am constantly listening and staying in tune with what all of you are thinking. Don’t believe it is that easy? Go check out the RunKeeper user forum. There isn’t a feature that we have built that wasn’t mentioned on the forum in one form or another. Going forward, we’ll continue to do the same. That is why I am so excited. We have so much left to do for our users that I can’t help but be excited to make these requests a reality.
Thanks to all of you for making my job so easy
Mike