AUTOMATION VICTORY
INMARKET – 2022
Because of a signed agreement with InMarket, I must keep most details vague around this project, so as to protect proprietary processes, prototypes, and designs. The general strokes, however, are a prime example of how good Product Design can improve the bottom line.
costly human processes pervaded a main revenue generator.
A cornerstone product was stuck in the past: an underwhelming deliverable that was slow to deliver and prone to human error. Under my leadership, with a very small team of designers and engineers, we substantially improved margins for this deliverable across four distinct offerings.
The goals:
Reduce waste, redundancy, and time to delivery
Improve the customer experience
Reduce the workload of a department in order to improve the quality of their services
In the research step, I discovered four teams were providing virtually the same deliverable four different ways. Indeed, there was redundancy and waste here to improve upon.
Being intimately familiar with this issue in the company, I saw that we could meet these goals by designing a single, automated process to replace most if not all of it.
It WASN’T OVERNIGHT.
This issue was, after all, systemic over many years, and our product team had to prove out the concept if the company was going to agree to overhaul such a fundamental business process.
6 months prior, thanks to my advocacy and efforts, we had prototyped a solution in a tiger project. Utilizing parts we had already made in engineering and design, we whipped together a successful proof of concept that served as a custom deliverable for a single client ask.
While this provided the fundamentals, there was still the matter of automation: making this a template that could apply to all products of this kind throughout the company.
Research made the solution data-driven
Sure, we had assumptions that this idea would reduce overhead and streamline the process, but we did the due diligence in surveying and previewing prototypes to internal account managers. This resulted in consensus buy-in from the various players and stakeholders, and improved our understanding of some crucial, detailed issues along the way.
The solution reduced the process to three human steps and one new application.
The response was huge.
After the MVP was 1/3 complete, we demoed it to two more teams, and they both picked it up immediately to overhaul their human processes.
The bottom line estimate of this solution showed margins increasing from 55% to 88%.