Dragonboat Delivery Co-Pilot Surfaces Visibility Across Cornerstone’s Product Operating Model
This case study explores how Cornerstone, a leading in cloud-based learning and workforce agility platform, uses Dragonboat to manage a complex, multi-product portfolio of investments across multiple instances of Jira. Darren Angeles, AVP Product Strategy and Operations, and Karthik Suri, Chief Product Officer, came together when they realized that their teams had outgrown their existing solution. They needed a better way to see and optimize how their product organization was investing R&D resources across all initiatives.
The Challenges
Complexity and Fragmentation Across a Multi-Product Portfolio
With over 25 years of experience and a history of growth through acquisitions, Cornerstone faced the challenge of managing a complex, multi-product portfolio with interdependencies across six different product areas. To add to the complexity, each team had its own ways of working, custom portfolio hierarchies, and operated out of multiple Jira instances. This complex structure made it impossible for product leadership to plan and deploy their product strategy or to allocate resources across their portfolio of initiatives without fearing that they might break something or cause ripple effects that derail delivery across multiple interdependent teams.
With aggressive growth and operational efficiency targets, Cornerstone’s global product teams needed a better way to operationalize their product operating model to provide:
- Holistic product portfolio decision-making: Without a complete picture of all product investments across the business, the team was unable to prioritize, see synergies or spot duplicative work across the entire product portfolio.
- Increased product agility: Forecasting the impact of roadmap adjustments was cumbersome, reducing overall product team agility.
- Stronger resource forecasting: Teams found it difficult to consistently track and forecast planned vs. actual resource allocation – overspending/underspending on projects meant big sacrifices in opportunities.
- Unified visibility: With each team operating out of its own views, there was no company-level visibility on what everyone was building – making it difficult to manage and report on product initiatives company-wide.
- Predictable delivery: Lack of visibility into trade-offs and cross-team dependencies hindered the team’s ability to reliably execute roadmaps.
"There was simply no way for us to see and optimize our product investments at a company level—our existing tools did not give us the portfolio view we needed to make smarter product decisions."
Realizing They’ve Outgrown Their Existing Tool
Multiple teams at Cornerstone had been using an existing product management tool to try to address the challenges they were facing. With multiple attempts at configuring the tool, teams still:
- Were unable to optimize product investments at the company level.
- Couldn’t accurately forecast and pivot resources when priorities changed.
- Were unable to predictably and efficiently deliver on roadmap commitments.
- Couldn’t establish visibility, alignment and active participation with internal stakeholders across the portfolio of roadmaps.
Simply put, their existing tools could not support the team’s need to understand and allocate investments across multiple product portfolios with complex levels of hierarchies – or to get the entire organization to actively participate in Cornerstone’s product operating model.
“We needed to transform how we prioritize our investments—so that we could ensure we were working on the highest impact things—and reliably delivering every quarter.”
The Solution: Centralize Orchestration Across All Product Roadmaps and Jira Instances
Cornerstone selected Dragonboat to run their product operating model, serving as a centralized orchestration layer across numerous product roadmaps mapped across multiple Jira instances. Dragonboat enabled the Cornerstone team to:
- Seamlessly integrate multiple product portfolios across multiple Jira instances without requiring lengthy system migrations.
- Support complex product portfolio hierarchies, making cross-product planning, allocation, and reporting more efficient.
- Enable agile, data-driven planning for product and engineering teams working in varied workflows and tools.
- Enable strong collaboration between product and engineering teams throughout the PDLC for best planning outcomes.
The Results: Faster Product Delivery, Increased Revenue, and Significant Operational Savings
By using Dragonboat to run their product operating model, Cornerstone achieved:
- 2X Improved resource efficiency with every business leader seeing and prioritizing for business impact.
- 100% alignment against outcomes with every portfolio mapped to business benefit.
- 25% faster time to revenue every quarter with on-time delivery of promised features.
- $400,000+ in operational savings with quarterly planning reduced from weeks to days.
Conclusion: Product Operating Excellence Achieved
Dragonboat empowers the Cornerstone team to operationalize excellence in their product organization, through a transparent and systematic approach adopted across all product teams. Ultimately, this put the organization on a transformative path that evolved the collective product organization from building features across multiple disparate teams, to efficiently delivering on their product commitments and being able to capitalize on the best product opportunities to drive business outcomes.
Cornerstone OnDemand is a global leader in cloud-based learning and human capital management software, providing organizations with tools to develop their workforce through online learning, performance management, succession planning, and other talent development features, aiming to help companies realize the full potential of their employees by empowering them to learn and grow through accessible education; essentially focusing on improving access to education on a global scale through online learning platforms. Visit cornerstoneondemand.com to learn more.
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