Case Study: Product Dojo

Product Dojo is a space for professional and personal growth. Dedicated especially to product managers and leaders, but also product teams - designers, engineers and innovators, who want to be on a fast track to their dream product career.

They approached us with an ambitious goal in their minds - to build a Knowledge Management System to support their learning programs for various organizations.
They wanted to launch an MVP of this product before a big conference they are organizing, but the scope was demanding and deadline was approaching quickly.

Discovery & Scoping

• For discovery we held an all-day Event Storming session
• This allowed us to map their customer journey into interactions between user and the application
• By seeing the big picture, we were able to quickly find areas that can be supported by existing tools, to reduce the scope and launch in time
• It also give us a clear view on risks in such integrations and helped us prioritize them
• Another effect was that it gave our team good understanding of their processes and helped to rapidly kick-off the project

Process

• For development, we used agile processes to ensure maximum alignment with business needs.
• We based the process on week-long sprints, to shorten the feedback loop and to address potential issues as early as possible
• We encouraged daily communication and updates with Product Dojo team, to achieve transparency and alignment
• As we were working together with a team located in California, we treated the whole team (Upside's + Product Dojo's team) as a remote one and used proper tools
• To ensure efficiency despite time zone difference, we adapted remote communication as a standard

Results

By taking a smart approach to scoping and reusing existing tools, we were able to launch the MVP within 2 months.

The MVP allowed Product Dojo to gather feedback from their customers using a real product and define further product roadmap based on that.