ISM: Flagship Financial Aid SaaS for Educational Organizations

Stage 1: Identifying Opportunities (8 Weeks)

Task 1: Understanding Clients, The Market, & Future Opportunities - With a successful early-market solution generating healthy amounts of revenue, ISM’s flagship product had hit a wall. Organically pieced together over several years, new development and client customization was too difficult and expensive to be feasible, leading to stagnating revenue and marketshare.

My initial task was to conduct in-depth UX research with clients and stakeholders to identify essential value, ideate new ways of providing it, and plan out a completely new SaaS implementation that could be scaled to the mass market of educators.

Planning for Feasible Success: Research Priorities & Target Deliverables

  • To gain as deep an understanding of the current situation as possible, comprehensive research was planned, reviewed, and approved.
  • I found a significant knowledge gap between evolving user needs and the ability of the current solution version to provide for them.
  • With sales and marketshare beginning to stall, an immense amount of pressure was focused on reversing this trend through “quick-fixes”.

Understanding the Problem-Space & Context: Market Analysis & Solution Advocacy

  • With pressure creating a tendency towards short-term thinking, leadership needed proof that a full-scale redesign effort was prudent.
  • A detailed market report was created and presented to leadership with strategic options, associated costs, & potential benefits.
  • Encouraged by this analysis and product roadmap, leadership asked me to extend my tenure to lead the full-scale design effort.

Task 2: Exploiting Opportunity with Product Clarity - With an identified market need and a solution concept to meet it, it was time to get into the details of how we would feasibly built it given our time and resources.

At this point, I shifted from a strictly IC role to mentoring a cross-disciplinary team through the requirements mapping and prioritization process, all with the goal of balancing realistic milestones with stakeholder priorities.

Granular Details to Create Alignment: Personas & User-Story Mapping

  • To make this complex project work with a small team, I needed to leverage the competencies, perspectives, and experience of everyone into a single source of alignment.
  • Structured as an intensive 5 day session, research insights and technical considerations were broken down into feasible requirements.
  • With more than 250 user stories produced, we needed to parse this massive initiative into feasible release milestones, balancing product value with an aggressive release schedule.

Stage 2: Feature-Block Design (2-8 Weeks per Block)

Task 1: Tackling Complexity Early to Mitigate Risk - With a detailed project plan in hand, my new mandate was to determine the best approach for implementing this ambitious project.

With projected milestone releases to achieve, I had to adapt my thinking towards tackling the most complex aspects of the product first. This would provide answers for design implications later on in the process, and mitigate the risk of complications causing avoidable rework that could lead to budget/time overruns.

Establishing Realistic Expectations: User-Story Milestones, Feature Prioritization, & Initial Performance Framework

  • With user stories prioritized into release milestones and fleshed out with initial performance indicators, our first task was to identify the best possible starting point to ensure the project ran smoothly.
  • Shifting away from a linear approach, I worked with the team to determine the central dependency that presented the most complexity for both design and development.
  • This provided a clear plan for design sprints that would solve for key technical challenges first, enabling us to mitigate the greatest risks and design implications before proceeding further.

Task 2: Maximizing Value with Mobile-First Design - With our research surfacing a diverse user audience that operated under a wide variety of contexts, our scoped solution needed to be accessible across devices at a moments notice. Not only did this make interface design more complex, it also raised the question of how certain functionalities would work on smaller screens (or if they needed to be included in that context).

Working cross-functionally with the wider product team, I established a cadence of design and review sessions that would carefully balance functionality and feasibility across a wide range of device types.

Collaborative Iteration to Drive Team Velocity: User-Flows, Sketches, & High-Fidelity Layouts

  • Rough design deliverables were shared and reviewed by the team, helping us catch and solve for granular complexity before spending time on more detailed deliverables.
  • Reviewed layouts were refined and shared to minimize the need for costly rework at the development/production stage.

Stage 3: Polishing (3 Weeks)

Task 1: Refining Milestone Releases - With an existing body of users, it was essential that this new solution be as approachable and user-friendly as possible; this would ensure that ISM retained existing clients while attracting new ones to expand marketshare.

As each release milestone approached, qualitative testing and optimization would be conducted as development caught up, gaining us valuable feedback that fostered a sense of investment and spreading word-of-mouth between education professionals.

Channels to Engage Users: Ongoing Feedback, Optimization Plan, & Industry Demos

  • Nearing each milestone release, we had to ensure the best experience possible for customer retention and acquisition
  • Feedback channels from “beta” builds and the usability-testing prototype were used for last-minute workflow refinements.
  • High-fidelity prototypes also served as demos for leadership and users (at industry events), generating word-of-mouth and sales leads.

Putting our Best Foot Forward: Prioritized Milestone Refinements

  • With a variety of minor issues to be addressed before each release, the product team needed to maximize the limited time & resources available.
  • Issues were reviewed, categorized according to frequency & severity, and prioritized as a group.
  • The biggest takeaway would be a “capping off” report for company leadership that set our refinement targets (and remaining items to be backlogged) for the imminent release.

© 2016 David Service

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