Tech Product Release Cycle
At a Glance:
Client: Fortune 500 national healthcare enterprise
Challenge: Increase adoption of monthly product iterations amid waterfall change, suboptimal user awareness, and legacy release management
Approach: Build agility into release readiness, cultivate understanding, and develop user-centered release analysis
Value: 2x tool adoption, increased clarity and consistency
Challenge
The client was implementing an automated tech product that simplified data intake and improved data quality.
To satisfy the needs of various end users (providers, market representatives, and internal tech support), the client matured this product over several monthly releases.
However, several factors undermined sufficient adoption of these releases:
Traditional change management was too prescriptive, linear, and time-bound to support the constant iteration of product updates
End users lacked a baseline awareness and understanding of the product system to adopt changes
Product-centered, jargon-heavy release notes lacked user-specific impacts and information
The result? After one year of implementation, end users were submitting 23% of their data through the new tool – a rate far below target.
The client partnered with TSI to improve user readiness and drive product adoption.
Approach
TSI helped the client develop stable readiness structures and processes that supported monthly iteration from a holistic, user-centered perspective.
First, we shifted product owners away from the traditional waterfall change management system and toward a more adaptable, agile approach – Readiness & Adoption.
Readiness & Adoption is Talent Solutions’ unique approach to navigating and driving change. Both a strategic mindset and a tactical framework, R&A brings together interdisciplinary approaches and capabilities to connect, prepare, and enable the holistic ecosystem of change – people, process, organizational structures, and technology.
To help client leaders keep up with the constant churn of monthly product iterations, we developed a series of release-agnostic structures that focused on readiness as a dynamic state of being – not a box to check off:
Provider-back thinking encouraged product owners to design updates from the perspective of the end user that would be inheriting them
Readiness standards defined a ‘North Star’ of what ‘good’ looked like and codified user-centered thinking into product release preparation
Readiness snapshots asked product owners and end users to evaluate readiness for a particular release – any discrepancies in sentiment between the groups highlighted gaps in alignment
It’s hard to prepare for a future state that is always changing. However, these techniques and tools gave the client the necessary framework to follow the moving target of digital adoption while upholding general standards of success.
Next, we partnered with L&D, comms, and change teams to design and deliver several training opportunities and content campaigns. Office hours, tiered classes (101, 201, 301, etc.), and provider-centered tool guides gave end users the foundational understanding they needed to engage meaningfully with the product and its iterations.
Finally, we helped product owners develop and implement holistic release analysis. Each month, a cross-functional team representing product, L&D, comms, and tech support reviewed release notes for key people and readiness needs: impacts to the end user, impacts to existing workflows, opportunities for comms and training, and any other Readiness & Adoption concerns. Translating jargon-heavy release notes into tangible action items and audience-specific impacts, we brought increased clarity to the entire product ecosystem and maturation process.
Outcomes & Value
Doubled end user adoption of product
~1,830 people trained in data upload system
4.5/5 - average confidence measures after training
Clarity and consistency amid a constantly shifting release cycle and within a highly decentralized change ecosystem