Cornerstone Eliminates Fragmented Context to Maximize ROI Across Multiple Product Portfolio

Dragonboat Portfolio Intelligence Powers Unified Decision-Making Across Cornerstone’s Product Operating Model

This case study explores how Cornerstone, a leading cloud-based workforce agility platform, uses Dragonboat to manage product and strategic portfolio orchestration across its expanding portfolio. Darren Angeles, VP of Product Strategy & Operations, and Karthik Suri, Chief Product Officer, came together when they realized that their teams require a more scalable solution; they needed a unified decision platform with shared data and context  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: Eliminate Disconnected Context and Transform Product Portfolios Into a Unified Experience

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 – creating fragmented context and decision latency. This growing portfolio required product leadership to make faster, more confident product investment decisions and 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:

• Portfolio Intelligence for decision-making: shared data and context across all product investments across the business. Enabling teams to prioritize, see synergies and align work across the entire product portfolio.
• Increased product agility: Reduced decision latency when adjusting roadmaps while improving 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: A single system of record that fosters 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 with full decision context to mitigate impact to velocity and customer commitments.

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

Cornerstone selected Dragonboat as their AI platform for product and strategic portfolio management to run its product operating model – serving as the unified decision system and 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 into a single system of record 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, VP of Product Strategy & Operations at Cornerstone

The Results: Unified Visibility, Faster Delivery and Significant Operational Savings

By leveraging Dragonboat’s AI platform with embedded portfolio intelligence for their product and strategic portfolio management, Cornerstone achieved:

• 20% 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.
• An estimated $400K cost avoidance with quarterly planning reduced from weeks to days.

The biggest efficiency gain has been our say-do ratio. With PI planning and a clearer process, we hold ourselves to what we commit and adjust based on real data. When we analyzed the first year, we unlocked roughly 2,000 story points — not from new headcount, but from the same pods getting better at estimation.

 

– Greg Shintani, Sr. Principal Program Manager, Product Strategy & Operations at Cornerstone

Conclusion: Product Operating Excellence Achieved

Dragonboat empowers the Cornerstone team to operationalize excellence in their product organization through portfolio intelligence and a unified decision system adopted across all product teams.

Ultimately, this put the organization on a transformative path—from fragmented context across disparate teams to unified visibility enabling them to efficiently deliver on their product commitments, and make confident product investment decisions, capitalizing on the best opportunities to drive business outcomes.

Hear more about Cornerstone’s approach in our fireside chat, How Cornerstone Elevates Product Portfolio Management with Dragonboat.