Cornerstone Maximizes Holistic Experiences and Product ROI Across Multiple Product Portfolios

Dragonboat Delivery Co-Pilot Surfaces Visibility Across Cornerstone’s Product Operating Model

This case study explores how Cornerstone, a leading cloud-based workforce agility platform, uses Dragonboat to manage a holistic set of product experiences across its expanding portfolio. Darren Angeles, AVP Product Strategy and Operations, and Karthik Suri, Chief Product Officer, came together when they realized that their teams require a more scalable solution; they needed a better way to see and optimize how their product & engineering organizations deliver unified experiences for their customers, while efficiently managing cross-portfolio R&D resources across all initiatives.

The Opportunity: Transform the Collection of Product Portfolios Into a Unified Set of Experiences for Its Customers

With over 25 years of experience and a history of growth through acquisitions, Cornerstone strives to bring the collection of products and brands to a unified and holistic experience for its customers. From Cornerstone’s recent acquisitions, each portfolio had its own ways of working, custom portfolio hierarchies, and operated out of multiple planning tools. This growing portfolio required product leadership to thoughtfully plan and deploy their product strategy and to allocate resources across their portfolio to the highest-value outcomes for its customers.

To deliver a complete workforce agility platform, we must bust Conway’s Law. We need planning tools that enable our teams to move from a collection of products and brands to a symphony of talent experiences for our customers, while providing our talented teams the freedom to keep their magic and practices that empower them to innovative.

– Karthik Suri, Chief Product Officer at Cornerstone

With a goal to deliver unified experiences, Cornerstone’s global product teams needed a better way to operationalize their product operating model to provide:

• Holistic product portfolio decision-making: a complete picture of all product investments across the business. Enabling teams to prioritize, see synergies and align work across the entire product portfolio.
• Increased product agility: managing for the impact of roadmap adjustments while reducing overall product team agility.
• Stronger resource forecasting: consistently track and forecast planned vs. actual resource allocation, delivering to the highest customer-value outcomes.
• Unified visibility: fostering innovation and team ways of working while maintaining transparency and alignment to company-wide initiatives and goals.
• Predictable delivery: managing tradeoffs and cross-team dependencies while mitigating impact to velocity to customer commitments.

The Solution:  Centralize Orchestration Across All Product Roadmaps and Jira Instances

Cornerstone selected Dragonboat to run its 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.

With Dragonboat, we have become more focused by aligning our teams to our strategic priorities, more intentional with our resource investments, and more predictable in our delivery to customer outcomes. In addition, the flexibility of Dragonboat’s platform simplifies convergence of tools and processes without sacrificing the innovation and ways of working of our diverse talent.

– Darren Angeles, AVP of Product Strategy & Operations at Cornerstone

The Results: Faster Product Delivery and Significant Operational Savings

By using Dragonboat to run their product operating model, Cornerstone achieved:

• 2o% 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% increased predictability of on-time delivery of promised features.
• Estimated $400K cost avoidance 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.