Link Labs
ProductSavvy provided training, documentation, and templates for a product development lead of a SaaS company. They explained processes and gave suggestions for best practices.
THE REVIEWER
VP Product, Link Labs
Dominic Marcellino
THE PROJECT
Executive Training & Consulting for SaaS Company
IT Consulting & SI
THE REVIEW
"We derived additional value from their knowledge of our industry.”
Project summary:
ProductSavvy provided training, documentation, and templates for a product development lead of a SaaS company. They explained processes and gave suggestions for best practices.
Feedback summary:
The collaboration resulted in a better understanding of future project requirements and the potential for higher-quality outcomes. The templates that ProductSavvy delivered are still in use and can be modified to suit a variety of products.
BACKGROUND
Introduce your business and what you do there.
We're an end-to-end solutions provider for IoT. We provide enterprise companies with asset tracking and monitoring solutions for physical assets and people. Specifically, we design around process optimization, logistics, and telematics tracking for applications with hundreds or thousands of connected devices. The industries we support include hospitality, healthcare, logistics, and manufacturing. I'm the head of our product department, and I develop long-term strategy and roadmaps around new product development.
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
What challenge were you trying to address with ProductSavvy?
I hired them to train me to do my job better. I had some significant shortcomings and wanted to be a stronger team leader.
SOLUTION
What was the scope of their involvement?
They worked with me to create an overarching product requirements document to reorganize the frontend of our product. In that process, they taught me how to manage a product team, work with engineering needs, and run sprints. They walked us through Agile development processes and provided some best practices. They weighed in on some higher-level aspects of our backend and architecture, but the main focus of their work was on standing up product functions.
What is the team composition?
I worked one-on-one with my main contact.
How did you come to work with ProductSavvy?
Our CEO and I reviewed a presentation of theirs, and I reached out to them after that. We discussed how they could help us, and we started working together.
How much have you invested with them?
We spent between $50,000-$75,000.
What is the status of this engagement?
We worked together from March–June 2019. We hit all the objectives we laid out, but we ultimately hit an impasse when we discovered we didn't have the internal resources to move ahead any further.
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
We didn't use any formal tracking, but I have used the outputs of the work we did together to lead a process with a company we hired to help us revamp our backend and frontend design. I hit the ground running, and I now know what this kind of project requires.
How did ProductSavvy perform from a project management standpoint?
They were adequate project managers, and I was pleased with the overall outcome of our work together.
What did you find most impressive about them?
They really understood the technologies we use. We derived additional value from their knowledge of our industry. They had documentation and templates for everything we went through, and I still use those documents now. They taught me how to execute the work after our engagement ended, and all the templates can be modified to suit each project.
Are there any areas they could improve?
We would have liked more regularly scheduled reviews. Because we worked one-on-one, that review process would have been strange, but it might have helped justify working with them longer. In the end, I can't think of anything major that they should have done differently.
Do you have any advice for potential customers?
I don't have any suggestions. They will offer great value to anyone with a similar need to ours.