Learnings from Developing a New B2B SaaS Product (Suryaveer Lodha (Sunny) Product Stream)

Copyright © 2016, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. |
Learnings from developing
a new SaaS Product
Suryaveer Lodha (Sunny)
Senior Eng. Manager, Product Development
Utilities Global Business Unit
October 1, 2016

Our Mission
We aim to provide the industry with the most complete cloud platform
for the entire utility value chain, from meter to grid to end-customers.
Network Meter-to-cash End consumer

over
50%
of US residential
energy data
600+
billion
meter reads
nearly
2/3
of US residential
smart meter data

Opower’s customer engagement platform combines insightful
analytics, behavioral science, and cutting-edge UX to help utilities
elevate the customer experience

● 20-60% boost to
cross-sell
● 4x email open rates
vs. industry average
Marketing
DSM
● 11 TWh saved to date
● 3-18% peak reduction
savings
Customer
Experience
● 4x more web registrations
● 5% boost to J.D. Power
scores
Contact Center
● 19% fewer high bill calls
● 40 seconds task time saved
● 7% more digital users
AMI
● 40% of AMI customers
online
● 15% higher customer
sentiment
Opower has evolved with our utility clients to provide more
value from customer engagement

Customer Service Interface
Customer Information System
Demand-Side
Management
Digital Customer
Experience
SaaS customer engagement product for utilities

CSR Billing Advisor
• New cloud based Customer Care Solution
• Developed on Opower’s new NextWeb
Platform
• Helps CSRs answer High Bill Calls

Ideation → Launch (9 months)

#1 : Pre-mortem

#1 : Pre-mortem
● Premortem is the hypothetical opposite of a
postmortem
● Imagine that the project failed spectacularly
○ Team members generate plausible reasons for the
project’s failure.
Additional reading:
https://hbr.org/2007/09/performing-a-project-premortem

#1 : Pre-mortem
● Benefits:
○ facilitates a positive discussion on critical failures
○ increases the likelihood that main issues are
identified
○ analyze the magnitude and likelihood of each
failure
○ Plan for preventative actions to protect against
project failure.

#1 : Pre-mortem (in practice)
● Very useful to identify potential blind-spots
● Discuss various points of failure and responses
● Involve individuals outside the product team:
○ UX
○ Sales
○ Marketing
○ Business Development
○ Customer Success
○ Delivery Teams
● Active team involvement essential.

#1 : Pre-mortem (Example)

#2 : Ideation & Validation

● Build vaporware, with inputs from Engineering.
○ Led by Product & UX
○ Multiple client visits
○ Use Paid Online portals to get more feedback
■ Mechanical Turk
■ Ads on online portals for paid user research

● Verify feature parity with Market Requirement Docs
(MRDs)
● Focus on easier interactions
○ Iterate quickly during prototyping
● Use Alpha Clients to fine tune the product to hit key
metrics (equivalent to soft launch)

Go where the customer is! (conferences, workshops etc)

#2 : Ideation & Validation (Comparative Analysis)

Try different mocks & get user feedback ...
Agent profile
Case form Main screen Customer
profile
Customer
history
Filt
ers
List
Agent
profile
Navigation
Navigation
Tabs
Tabs
Module 1 Module 2 Module 3
Navigation1
Navigation 2
Module 4 Module 5

#2 : Ideation &
Validation (final design)
Customer Insights
Home energy analysis
Feature A
Feature B ...
Customer InsightsData Browser
4. What can I do in the future?
● Focus on specific categories
● Learn tips to save
● Get proactive communications
2. What caused the discrepancy?
● Impact of weather, bill length, and usage
3. Can you give me more detail?
● Details on costs, usage, and weather
1. Was this bill higher than usual?
● Last year, last month comparison

#3 : Be Agile, define your own Scrum

#3 : Be Agile, define your own Scrum
● Fixed length iterations (1~3 weeks)
● Active team involvement in Sprint planning
● Daily Stand-ups
● Sprint Demo
● Sprint Retrospectives
● Well Groomed & prioritized backlog
● Track Work In Progress (< # of devs)
● Bias towards increasing velocity
● Iterate & be flexible! (Individuals over processes!)

#4 : Research Spikes

● Every feature preceded by a research spike 1
iteration ahead.
○ Useful for ramping up new developers
○ Strong participation from Product, UX
○ Include Core team member if needed

● Verify assumptions/reduced scope with core team -
avoid blindspots. Add these to a FAQ list.
○ Avoid isolated decision making
○ Minimizes scope creep
● Underestimated importance of recording discussion
- record videos and upload them on the shared
space.
● Spend time to document decisions!

Benefit of Research Spikes & Pre-mortem

#5 : Track & Measure everything!

● Use Data/ metrics to decide:
○ Feature prioritization
○ Bugfixes
○ Client comms/rollouts etc.
● Spend time upfront to think about metrics collection
○ Specially, if client reporting needed
○ Set up a Data Curation Advisory Board for
consistency across the org.

● Metrics (Web) help us understand exactly how the
product is being used.
○ Use it to iterate on a FTUE
○ Use data to take advantage of scale!
■ Specially for Cloud B2B products
● Put an effort to make the metrics easily accessible to
the internal stakeholders.

#5 : Track & Measure everything! (Example)
RUEL (Reach Usage Effectiveness Love) Dashboards

#6: Maintain Launchbooks & Runbooks

#6: Maintain Launchbooks & Runbooks
● Focus on documentation from the very beginning
○ Add acceptance criteria on tickets to update the
docs as you deliver features
● Have the new/Junior engineers feel comfortable with
Launching the product on lower tiers: QA and Stage
○ Let them figure out how to launch
○ Ask them to suggest updates to make these
more streamlined.

#6: Maintain Launchbooks & Runbooks (Benefits)
● After first 3 launches, we got delivery teams to lead
Alpha launches to big clients, with minimal support
from dev team.
● Devs could focus more on feature development, and
not client launches.
● Easier path to GA

#7: How to run a successful UAT
(specially for B-B)

#7: How to run a successful UAT (specially for B-B)
● Engineering Manager, along with Product should
attend (drive?) first few UATs
● Work with System Integration Testers (SITs) and QA
to identify different data scenarios we support
○ Also clearly state the edge cases not supported
○ Dedicate resources to Anonymize PII & Dog-food
the product internally
○ Bug bashing parties for devs!

● Account for Delivery Team time for the following:
○ Find actual customers on Production data with
various data scenarios.
○ Load latest production data on Stage tier
○ Test these customers internally leading to UAT
● Work with Customer Success - to develop a training
story around these customers and guide Business
buyers during UAT and on-site training.

Celebrate Successes & Failures!

Thank you!

Learnings from Developing a New B2B SaaS Product (Suryaveer Lodha (Sunny) Product Stream)

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