This case study explores how Talogy, a leading provider of talent management solutions, uses Dragonboat to accelerate their roadmapping and product development lifecycle (PDLC). Talent management is a highly-competitive space, where speed and product innovation make a huge difference in closing deals, retaining customers and revenue expansion. At the heart of this story is John Field, VP of Product Management, who came into a new role and observed how roadmapping was fragmented across various product owners, with no cohesive single source of truth on what the product organization was building and why.
The Challenges
The overall lack of transparency across the portfolio of roadmaps at Talogy was leading to weeks of planning and organizational delays. New request intake and prioritization was a manual process, and it took days of spreadsheet and PowerPoint machination just to get a cohesive snapshot of what the organization was working on across teams.
Quarterly planning also took weeks of manual alignment, and even when roadmaps were committed, it was unclear that the team would be able to predictably deliver on those commitments – because the team was unable to predict and resolve delivery issues arising from resource conflicts (such as when multiple groups were each vying for the same engineering resources at the same time). This would cause weeks or months of delays in roadmap commitments, ultimately holding teams back from delivering on portions of their roadmaps altogether.
The true business impact of all of this extended beyond planning delays – it cut to the core of product velocity and innovation. Slower time to market and compromised delivery was leading to competitive disadvantage and revenue opportunity loss.
"When I first came into the organization, every product owner had their unique roadmap and spreadsheet with varying priorities. To understand their roadmap, individuals had to establish a personal relationship with each product manager, which wasn't feasible for a company our size."
The Objectives
John saw a number of opportunities to streamline the product development process at Talogy by:
- Streamlining request intake, idea prioritization, and top-down roadmap creation (prior to the execution phase).
- Creating transparency (in biweekly meetings) around challenges faced by product managers during the delivery phase and surfacing them immediately.
- Reducing the operational overhead on roadmapping, forecasting, and communication.
“We brought on Dragonboat because we needed a central source of truth with a standard interface that we could publish roadmaps people can understand. I didn’t want it at the Jira level, as that's for engineers, not the rest of the business.”
The Results
Talogy saw immediate revenue and cost upside by bringing in Dragonboat:
- 50% faster time to market: Roadmaps that used to take 4 weeks to produce were now done in 2 or less weeks using Dragonboat. Overall delivery was also accelerated by eliminating delays. This meant that Talogy could get a full extra sprint in on each roadmap, and could deliver up to 80% more roadmap items due to better delivery planning.
- $200k+ in operational savings: One product operations manager was able to easily do the job of three people it would previously take due to manual tracking efforts in spreadsheets – Dragonboat paid for itself with the license cost representing a small fraction of these savings.
- 360-degree visibility: All cross-functional teams had real-time access to their individual roadmaps as well as the company-wide portfolio roadmap.
- Planning reduced weeks -> days: Quarterly planning went from weeks to days to complete on a regular basis, unlocking additional available sprints and better alignment on execution.
- Delivery confidence: Committed, targeted, and projected features on the roadmap became more consistently tracked, predicted, and delivered – which created untold confidence in the product team’s ability to deliver on their commitments quarter over quarter.
"Dragonboat ensures our GTM teams are in the loop on both current and long-term plans."
Conclusion
Immediate cost and time savings aside, Dragonboat unlocked new revenue potential and fundamentally lifted the confidence of the product development process John and the Talogy team created. When a product team begins to deliver outcomes consistently and on-plan, the entire organization feels the impact.
From having the confidence to commit and deliver on their roadmaps, to having the visibility across the entire company-wide portfolio roadmap, Talogy is continuing to build on its 75 year legacy of providing world-class talent management solutions.
Talogy is a renowned talent management company that specializes in providing comprehensive solutions for screening, selecting, developing, and engaging talent worldwide. By uniting the leading psychologists, data scientists, developers, and HR consultants, they bring the power of psychology and technology together so you can make the best data-driven people decisions. With more than 30 million assessments delivered each year in more than 50 languages, Talogy helps clients discover organizational brilliance. Visit talogy.com to learn more.
600+
Human Resources & Staffing, Business Services
Accelerate roadmap outcomes and increase visibility across the entire company.
