Example Reflection – Learning Launch

Challenge

I am a Product Owner in a Software Company. My team is responsible for the development  and maintenance of a Human Resource Management software platform. Our clients are  private and public organizations. We are well established in our market and with high  customer satisfaction. Having more than 20 years of experience, we realized that the rate of  acquiring new customers was decreasing every year.  With more than 1000 installations our  revenue was based more than 80% on the maintenance agreements. The team is profitable  and has a small loss of customers. No reasons for worries. Our comfort zone was very well  protected. Τhe rate of new customers has remained low. That was our main problem. What  could we do to gain new customers? Our team worked together with existing customers and  potential new customers.  We realized that the core problem of our customers was under- staffing. We decided to involve in our meetings members of the management but also  employees from other departments and not only from the HR department. We conclude  that the only way to solve the problem was to involve all the employees in the HR processes.  Our users were not only the HR department employees but all the stuff of the organization.  Traditionally all the applications were made from the employees and send to the HR  department for further processing.

Selection

Now we had a new point of view. We believed that this could be the solution to our  problem. We decided to use the learning launch tool to see if this works.

Application

We chose to develop an online form for the application for a holiday permit. Every employee  could apply online and receive approval online. We needed only one sprint (2 weeks) to  develop and deploy. We launched the new online application form in one of our customers  with 100 employees. We trained all the users (2 hours ) and monitored the process for one  month. We responded to every user request almost immediately. Our goal was to make the  whole process easy and comfortable for everyone. Employees were satisfied because of the  simplicity and transparency of the process. We had a green light to work further in this  direction. We prioritized all the processes and begun to refactoring our software platform.

Insights

We had a very narrow point of view base on the traditional way of the structure of an  organization. Εverything was ready to welcome the change. With small steps, we could make  a big difference. Now we had a new story: HR Software for all. This story could expand to all  of our software. We organized a small campaign in some of our open leads and realized that  our new story brings results. One of two of our potential customers was willing to make the  deal.

Approach

The learning launch combines perfectly with our scum/agile methodology. We love to trie  out new ideas and to experiment with new concepts. Always when we look forward to new  challenges, it makes our job and our products better.

