Engagement Management Platform
SAAS platform that allows institutional investors to track interactions with companies in their portfolio.
Summary
The origination of this product stemmed from a relatively small client request, "Can you please add a text box where I can record any engagement meetings that I've had with a company?". After several rounds of customer interviews, it became clear that the underlying customer need, and the segment of interested customers, was much bigger than initially expected.
Project Date
Started: Mar 2022
Launch: Nov 2022
Customer/User
Institutional Investors (Stewardship Teams)
Problems to Solve / Jobs to be Done
As a member of the Stewardship team at an investment company I need to engage with the companies that my firm invests in so that I can ensure the best ROI on my investment in the long term.
Link to Product Web Page
Product Discovery
Discovery Summary
After receiving a relatively small feature request from a client, to add a new open text field to a particular page of our existing Viewpoint proxy voting application, I scheduled a call with the client to better understand the underlying problem that they were trying to solve. It quickly became apparent that they had an entire business process that needed to be solved for, that of tracking and reporting on their engagement goals and efforts with the companies in their investment portfolio.
I scheduled customer interviews with a few other friendly clients to understand if they shared this problem and need, and indeed it was a source of difficulty for nearly every client that I spoke with. I felt there was enough potential value to warrant further discovery, so I put the idea into a “product one-pager”, a template that I created to guide and structure the ideation process so that all stakeholders could share understanding about the idea, the customer problems, our goals, business value, and early-stage potential solutions.
With executive approval obtained I next partnered with a UX designer and a lead developer to conduct further customer interviews and generate a click-through Figma prototype that saw iterative improvements over several subsequent discussions with clients, resulting in a reasonable MVP candidate for delivery.
Discovery Gallery
Product Delivery & Success
Delivery Summary
The delivery path for this Engagement Management Platform was quite unique and a great experience for building products through partnerships. After identifying the core features and needs of an MVP candidate I started exploring the marketplace for the existing solutions that clients might be using as a workaround. After some digging, I came across a very new SAAS company, named Esgaia, that had launched and niche platform to address this exact customer need.
Comparing the Esgaia platform to our MVP design was incredible, while the UI differed in many ways the underlying functionality, structure, and value props were nearly identical to what we had documented. It was clear that this company had also clearly identified the customer problems and introduced a solution well positioned to address those problems. With this new information I looped in several key business executives to discuss our next steps.
Ultimately, we decided that a partnership with Esgaia would be our best option, seeking the potential to “white label” their existing software as our own while finding a commercial arrangement that benefitted both parties. The main drivers for this decision were that it would allow us to get to market quickly and that we could test the real customer demand without a major technology investment. After several negotiations and conversations with Esgaia, and extensive work with our legal team to produce contracts and legal protections that everyone was happy with, we had reached an agreement and defined a scope for the desired “white labeled” version of the Esgaia platform, which we named the “Engagement Management Platform”.
Once we had an agreed delivery date for the software I started the product launch process, coordinating with legal, client services, marketing, and sales to prepare a product launch document to ensure all necessary tasks were completed to hit our target launch date.
Delivery Gallery
Measurement & Success
Launch of a new engagement tracking product from 0 to 1
$100K new revenue Y1