Talogy Cuts Decision Latency to Accelerate Roadmap Outcomes by 50%

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 suffered from fragmented context and disconnected data across various product owners, with no single system of record on what the product organization was building and why.

The Challenges

The lack of shared data and context across the portfolio of roadmaps at Talogy was creating significant decision latency—leading to weeks of planning and organizational delays. New request intake and prioritization was a manual process with information asymmetry across teams, and it took days of spreadsheet and PowerPoint machination just to get a cohesive snapshot of what the organization was working on.

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.”

– John Field, VP of Product Management at Talogy

The Objectives

John saw a number of opportunities to enable faster product investment decisions 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.”

– John Field, VP of Product Management at Talogy

The Results

Talogy saw immediate revenue and cost upside by implementing Dragonboat’s AI platform for product and strategic portfolio management:

1. 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.
2. $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.
3. Portfolio intelligence and unified visibility: All cross-functional teams had shared context with real-time access to their individual roadmaps as well as the company-wide portfolio roadmap.
4. Planning reduced weeks -> days: With decision latency eliminated, quarterly planning went from weeks to days to complete, unlocking additional available sprints and confident product investment decisions.
5. Delivery confidence: With a unified decision system, committed, targeted, and projected features became more consistently tracked, predicted, and delivered.

“Dragonboat ensures our GTM teams are in the loop on both current and long-term plans.”

– John Field, VP of Product Management at Talogy

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 eliminating fragmented context to having confidence to commit and deliver on their roadmaps, to having unified 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.