I led the creation of an internal data product from concept to launch to support an existing customer notification tool.
This was an innovative solution that opened up many possibilities in the organization.
Customer Problem
The data that powered the existing notification tool met the needs of fewer than 40% of customers. Many customers were confused and frustrated by missing or irrelevant notifications.
I prioritized solving these data issues to improve the customer experience and elevate our brand reputation.
Product Inception
Initially, I believed the data quality issues could be solved with the existing tool. I held detailed stakeholder feedback sessions to identify the business requirements from all impacted teams.
Based on this feedback, I quickly realized that the existing tool could not solve the complex data issues. I created a vision for an internal product that would centralize and transform data for consumption by end user applications.
Best of all, it incurred no additional cost and automated several manual processes.
Development
The development of the new data product required collaboration with numerous teams. By presenting a clear value proposition, I influenced these teams to make the necessary changes.
I held frequent demos with stakeholders as development progressed, so that we received immediate feedback on what was working and what was not. This enabled rapid iterations of the design.
Increased Trust
The new data product solved the customer problem of inaccurate notifications and increased trust in the company brand.
Additionally, the new product made possible new use-cases for other teams and product features that had been previously unattainable.
An Inside Look
I completed this project at the software company PROS, where I worked as a product manager for four years.
The customer facing notification tool had a public component built on status.io (pictured) and an account-specific component built on our support site. The account-specific notifications were powered by data from Jira, Salesforce, and a CMDB.
The new product added hosting data from Azure, IBM, and our SSO platform to make the customer account records much more accurate. We created about 20 new database tables that used scripts to automatically transform the master data into a common data model that the customer-facing tools could retrieve by API.
The stakeholders were cloud services (3 different teams), operations (2), customer support (4), customer success (2), and product management (2), in addition to 200 customer accounts.
One of the customer facing tools that benefited from the new product.