The Prodify Blog

The following is adapted from Build What Matters. At HelloWallet and Morningstar, we used to reserve some product development capacity each quarter for exploring new ideas and technologies in the form of Innovation Sprints. There were only a few rules for product, design, engineering, and QA during our one-week Innovation Sprints:

The following is adapted from Build What Matters. We’ve worked with Paul Fredrich for many years and across multiple companies. He is currently head of product at Ordergroove, an omnichannel commerce platform that makes subscription purchases and reordering easy. The company has effectively created a new category, which they refer to as “relationship commerce.” While exciting, it has yielded an interesting challenge for Paul at the same time. The abundance of feature ideas, problems to solve, and potential strategic opportunities require him to be highly selective about what to invest in with limited development resources. Although ruthless prioritization is an important function of the head of product, there’s a risk of him being perceived by stakeholders as the “head of saying no to good ideas.”

The following is adapted from Build What Matters. Octopus Interactive is a rideshare media company based in Washington, DC. Co-Founder and COO Brad Sayler explains the history of the company and an early product feedback issue they encountered their first few years:

The following is adapted from Build What Matters. In late 2017, Elizabeth Weiland heard Ben’s This is Product Management podcast episode on mentorship and reached out to Prodify to find a mentor as she stepped in to become the first Product Manager at MarketSmart. MarketSmart’s products are designed to help fundraising gift officers at nonprofits land more meetings with major and legacy donors, whose donations play a huge part in helping a nonprofit achieve its mission.

The following is adapted from Build What Matters. One of my most important responsibilities at GoCanvas was being the author and steward of the product vision and strategy. After I had worked to get executive alignment, it was time to present the package to the whole company. The team had done a great deal of customer discovery, quantitative research, stakeholder interviews, and more, but there was still a risk that employees who were unaware of those efforts might think we were operating out of an ivory tower. Rather than bore them with a long preamble about our process, I decided to let the customers simply speak for themselves.

The following is adapted from Build What Matters. Since 2000, DrFirst has pioneered healthcare technology solutions and consulting services that securely connect people at touchpoints of care to improve patient outcomes. DrFirst calls its product portfolio the “Healthiverse, an interconnected healthcare universe where information silos are shattered and where all stakeholders aspire to a higher purpose: improving patient care.” Prodify started working with their consumer product managers in July 2019, a few months before they launched Huddle, a mobile app to keep medication and medical records organized. The product manager for Huddle, Valerie Garrison, saw how important a detailed vision and strategy are at product launch:

The following is adapted from Build What Matters. WHOOP was an advisory client for years prior to Ben joining the company as Chief Product Officer in 2020. Founded in late 2011, the company produces a higher-end wearable device and mobile app for tracking overall health. Will Ahmed, Founder and CEO, had a unique customer-focused vision based on a paper he wrote while he was a student at Harvard University titled “The Feedback Tool: Measuring Intensity, Recovery, and Sleep.” His thesis was that properly understanding any one of these physiological statuses requires measuring all of them. Thus, heart rate and other metrics need to be tracked continuously.

The following is adapted from Build What Matters. At energy-efficiency startup Opower, a question that was constantly asked throughout product development was, “How well are we adhering to the design principles we defined at the outset?” If we weren’t doing so well in one category or had taken a step backward in another, we would prioritize an initiative to more closely match the principles we’d laid out.

The following is adapted from Build What Matters. Many companies struggle to connect the dots between early user behaviors in the product and later business outcomes like new logo signups, yet understanding how user engagement correlates to business results is essential for making a business case to invest in UX improvements. When I joined GoCanvas as the Chief Product Officer, this was one of my first tasks.

The following is adapted from Build What Matters. I had no idea what behavioral science was until I joined Ben at Opower. There, I learned that our entire company was founded on a behavioral experiment by Dr. Robert Cialdini, who found that the most effective way to get people to reduce their home energy usage was to tell them they were using more than their neighbors. This peer comparison was more effective than any message about saving money or the environment.