Governance Hub
SAAS platform allowing public companies to access Glass Lewis research, analysis, and data.
Summary
The core of Glass Lewis product offering, since its founding, has been to sell proxy-related research, advising institutional shareholders on how they should vote at upcoming shareholder meetings. This core customer segment was the foundation for Glass Lewis' business 15+ years, with little product development, marketing, or sales effort focused on the public companies actually covered by Glass Lewis research.
After identifying strong revenue potential and a good product/market fit, we introduced new products focused on the public company customer segment, and to incredible success. The foundation of this product offering is Governance Hub, the SAAS platform that allows public companies to access Glass Lewis research reports, data, and thought leadership.
Governance Hub was a greenfield product - starting from clear customer needs and jobs to be done, moving through customer interview sessions, UI/UX designs and customer feedback, into iterative software development and deployments.
Project Date
Started: Early 2022
Launched: March 2023
Customer/User
Publicly Traded Companies (Investor Relations Teams)
Problems to Solve / Jobs to be Done
As a member of the investor relations team at a publicly traded company I want to access the research and data available from Glass Lewis regarding my company so that I can ensure accuracy, understand best practices, and take action in cases where unfavorable analysis is distributed to my shareholders.
Link to Product Web Page
Product Discovery
Discovery Summary
The Governance Hub product discovery stemmed from a company level goal of increasing revenue from our corporate customers (publicly traded companies). Several potential non-technology solutions were first discussed with executives and department heads including new product packages, adjustments to pricing, and increased marketing and sales presence. While some of these were pursued in tandem, it was also decided that an improved product offering for clients was necessary and the best approach to achieve this business goal.
With the company direction defined I guided our new product through our product development lifecycle, including:
Ideation - to ensure alignment on business goals and problems to solve.
Business Validation - to complete a business model canvas, document success metrics, and evaluate high-level ROI.
Feasibility - to rapidly prototype, gather customer feedback, partner with development leads, and iterate quickly to define an MVP. Also to align with legal and any other necessary stakeholders to identify potential roadblocks.
Development - agile software development of the solution with iterative releases to deliver working software and customer value.
Launch - working with legal, marketing, sales, development, client services, and any other relevant stakeholders to ensure that we are properly addressing all launch activities including contract updates, client notifications, marketing materials, training materials, etc.
Measure- monitoring progress towards the success metrics defined and reporting to relevant stakeholders. Identifying new product improvements based on customer feedback and product analytics.
While the problems to solve and business goals were outlined at the start, the actual solutions to these problems didn't take shape until the feasibility stage, which is where most of the images shown in the gallery below were generated. We started with internal stakeholder interviews then moved into customer interviews, learning more and collating the similarities and trends as we progressed. Through rapid wireframing and prototyping we were able to gather customer feedback quickly and ultimately define an MVP.
Discovery Gallery
Product Delivery & Success
Delivery Summary
After our MVP was reasonably defined using a click-through Figma prototype, we kicked off our agile development process with a "Sprint 0". This involved all members of the scrum team, and we used the 2-week Sprint 0 to align on goals, success metrics, user needs, high level designs and architecture, and enough backlog refinement to prepare for our next Sprint.
After several sprints we had enough valuable code to ship a release. While this release didn't include everything necessary for the MVP, it was still useful for feedback and to ensure a smooth production deployment pipeline. We iterated through several sprints, releases, and stakeholder feedback sessions until we approached our MVP, and thus our product launch.
I coordinated with the relevant product launch stakeholders including legal, client services, marketing, sales, and prepared a product launch document to ensure all necessary tasks were completed to hit our target launch date.
Our MVP was launched on the target date, after which a few additional sprints were dedicated to supporting any high priority issues, feedback, or technical clean-up tasks.
Delivery Gallery
Measurement & Success
Increased corporate customer revenue by 18% in Y1
Increase corporate customer base by 16% in Y1
Increased ACV by 8% in Y1