Case Study > Harmonize > Prioritization in Product Strategy

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The Challenge

Our materials engineering SaaS customer wanted to launch a new product in 3 months to meet market demand. As was evident with the customer, prioritizing and organizing a product roadmap is a qualitative exercise that evokes unnecessary debate between product management and in-house engineering teams. Engineering teams respond well to empirical techniques, while product management methods often use qualitative methods for the right reasons. Lack of an analytical prioritization method during roadmap creation results in a volatile backlog, adversely impacting the engineering delivery metrics like time-to-market, quality, and wastage.

The Solution

Vitessence has developed a product management toolkit that uses empirical and quantitative techniques. The product management team can utilize these methods to construct a prioritized roadmap quickly. These techniques help the engineering teams rally behind roadmaps with gusto while enabling product teams to seek investments from business sponsors effectively. The Vitessence toolkit uses two parameters to quantify roadmaps "epics", viz. 

1. Strategic Value, and 

2. Customer Value.

The toolkit enables score assignment to each sub-element, deriving a composite strategic and customer value score for each epic. This score helps order epics and create a more impactful and strategically aligned backlog for releases and sprints.

The Result

Using the Vitessence Toolkit, our product management and engineering teams delivered a product for a customer to track Covid-19 samples and test results for employees at many manufacturing facilities. When all businesses were shutting down to contain the virus, this product helped manufacturing facilities utilize our customers' products to open operations safely in record time. By embracing empirical techniques innate to our toolkit, our customers could quickly deliver to the market, exceed market expectations, and, more importantly, improve business profitability by gaining a first movers’ advantage.