The acquisition of Bankerbox brought a vested interest from Product to understand the deal marketing functionality they had just acquired and how it could be integrated into the primary stages of the deal lifecycle—a key stage that was missing from the Intralinks product offering. In partnership with Product Management Senior Director, I set the goals and agenda for a three day event of workshops focused on the following goals:
• Understand the deal marketing user journey
• Understand the deal prep user journey
• Identify functionality that addressed the various stages of both journeys
• Group common functionality into themes
• Explore how deal marketing and deal prep phases could be incorporated into our current VDR solution
• Understand the deal prep user journey
• Identify functionality that addressed the various stages of both journeys
• Group common functionality into themes
• Explore how deal marketing and deal prep phases could be incorporated into our current VDR solution
The workshop was a diverse group of Product Management, Bankerbox founders, Engineering leads and developers. I lead the design studio and story mapping portions of the the event. At the end of the three days we had met all our goals and had a shared understanding of the user journeys and a story map artifact. Product Management would then use story mapping information to build a backlog of prioritized functionality aligned to business goals and enter into discussions with Engineering on level of effort needed to implement.
Building a Shared Understanding of our Customer - Light-weight Persona
First, I lead the team through a light-weight persona-building exercise. Via an online collaborative doc everyone was able to quickly contribute...we then discussed each section. This step was vital to ensure we that everyone had a common understanding of key persona as this product was a new portion of the Deal Lifecycle that our Product team had never worked with.
Customer Journey
Story-Mapping*
I led the team through a series of exercises where we:
• Identified the core functionality needed to support the customer journey
• Grouped similar feature/functions into themes
• Identified key themes and items to prioritize for an MVP product
• Identified the core functionality needed to support the customer journey
• Grouped similar feature/functions into themes
• Identified key themes and items to prioritize for an MVP product
* To learn more about what story mapping is visit: https://www.jpattonassociates.com/the-new-backlog/
Information architecture
It was important to first understand the full architecture of the current product.
I then worked on how this product could seamlessly integrate with our current flagship product, the Virtual Data Room.
Concept - Transition from Deal Marketing to VDR
The final step of the integration would be the ability to transition users from the deal marketing phase to the due diligence phase of the Deal Lifecycle.
