An Australian entrepreneur with deep IT project management expertise envisioned a product to digitize project governance for organizations in various sectors. The product to be developed aimed at enabling the PMO to gain a high-level view of their projects’ health. The entrepreneur was trying to raise capital at the same time. Hence needed quick and incremental builds of the product that he could showcase to prospective investors to gain investment.
The entrepreneur approached Zogato to create an MVP based on his vision. Zogato brainstormed the concept and analyzed the high level product features.
Zogato advised on the best suited technology stack, infrastructure platform and development methodology based on Zogato’s extensive experience in working with products. The challenge however was working out a mutually suitable engagement model.
As this was a self funded product at that point in time, the entrepreneur was not comfortable commiting to a standard time and material based engagement model. At the same time, Zogato was unable to work on a fixed price model as the details on most of the features were not known then.
Zogato suggested a hybrid engagement model where Zogato would provide a fixed price quote for the features which are groomed and detailed properly. This way the entrepreneur could do a cost benefit analysis for the groomed features. The entrepreneur was able to re-prioritize development of some features based on the costing. This enabled him to use his funds most effectively.
Given the nature of the product Zogato suggested rapid prototyping and building the product based on Agile methodology. Zogato helped the entrepreneur expand the product idea expressed in a few lines into detailed product specifications. That resulted in creation of proper user stories which were later split across epics and sprints. The high priority user stories were picked first. However once a rough time and effort estimate for development of the user story was worked out, the same could be priced and the entrepreneur could reprioritize it if needed. A set of the reprioritized user stories were grouped in a sprint and developed.
A functional product was delivered at the end of each sprint. This enabled the entrepreneur to align his product demos and fund raising activities in line with the sprint end dates. As the development progressed with more functionality to the product the entrepreneur was able to solicit feedback from prospective clients and also tweak his “Go to market” strategy.
The product included a feature rich component based UI and a robust backend built to be extremely secure and scale on demand. It was designed to be deployed in a multi-tenant model with each tenant having exclusive access to their data. The product integrated with multiple third party systems like finance, project management, HR etc. The product features covered management for risks, assumptions, issues, dependencies, schedule variance, budgeted vs. actual spending, role-based access, encrypted financial data, notifications and alerts on the budgetary threshold and other critical parameters for program managers to make timely amends.
The entrepreneur was able to build the product iteratively with complete visibility and flexibility through the process.