Our client is a dynamic supplier of innovative high-quality health products and supplements. It is a multi-level marketing company that sells its products to consumers via chain of distributors. The company has consumers and distributors in 28 markets across the globe. It is aimed at transforming lives around the world by providing the most innovative and highest quality health solutions. Our client has a number of digital solutions to accelerate their sales and increase customer engagement.
Business Challenge
Our client’s expansion to new markets, a number of acquisitions, and rapid customer base growth resulted in duplication of software solutions in each market, and misalignment of product management processes. The process of product discovery and delivery differed from market to market, resulting in different customer experiences and satisfaction.
The company was seeking a process to create products that would deliver exceptional value to its customers, and at the same time, ensure rapid time to market. Specifically, our client sought to address the following issues:
- How to set up product management processes to bring exceptional customer value across different markets
- How to arrange product portfolio management to successfully align with company business goals
- How to deliver faster to guarantee quick time to market
- How to develop the right product and have the efficient feedback loop
- Considering expected market growth, how to efficiently scale software teams without increasing costs for development
Project Description
Assessment discovery
SoftServe initiated an assessment discovery stage during which SoftServe:
- Aligned on the client’s company goals and objectives
- Assessed current company product management processes, product planning, and development
- Researched and conducted end user interviews to understand their level of satisfaction with the product, experience, and pain points
- Validated that current product management processes support company strategy
Product management processes design
The design process involved stakeholders across the company to efficiently address the needs of product portfolio management level, product design and development level, and regional markets goals:
- Conducted a series of workshops to brainstorm on desired process
- Together with the client designed future product processes based on market-proven best practices, company strategy, and organization specifics
- Determined gaps in existing and future product processes required to increase customer satisfaction and company optimization goals
- Created an actionable roadmap for new process rollout
Piloting new product process
The product process piloting incorporated the potential solutions identified in the previous stages. The results of the testing phase provided the insights required to redefine the original problem statement. SoftServe and the client defined an MVP scope and used the lean approach processes to eliminate waste and continuously improve incrementally:
- Pilot project was launched for the development of new products to test and validate the new approach with predefined success criteria
- Pilot project included the whole life cycle - starting with idea generation, market validation, development and launch, taking into account the market specifics
- During and upon project implementation, the metrics were tracked to ensure the pilot meet success criteria
Scale
Upon the successful pilot project launch, covering product design and development processes, the decision was made to move forward with the rollout and scale the approach across the company. SoftServe introduced centralized development within one unit, unlike parallel and duplicated decentralized development of similar products for each market.
Value Delivered
SoftServe defined and established a scalable and efficient product management process based on proven best practices to facilitate our client to scale with decreased costs and increased customer satisfaction.
- Increased customer experience by introducing lean product ideation, design, planning, and customer feedback gathering and analysis. Customer satisfaction rate increased 25% for our client.
- Faster time to market by introducing an Agile product development approach. Previously our client experienced delivery delays of 6-8 months. With SoftServe’s implemented approach, projects are now delivered on time and on budget.
- Decreased cost of product development and support by eliminating wasted time and resources on duplication of solutions. With SoftServe, our client’s costs of implementation decreased by 18%.
- Allowed for scale with reduced costs by centralizing product development into one unit.
SoftServe also provides value to the client through ongoing education and training on the latest trends, which allows the client to efficiently adopt new approaches and best practices.