case study in SaaS

Project Stats:

Goal: Optimize product development processes and streamline customer onboarding for FireStart’s BPM platform

Teams Involved: Product Development, Engineering, Customer Success

Timeline: 9 months

Challenge: Slow iteration cycles, inefficient cross-team collaboration, delayed product launches

Outcome: 40% reduction in time-to-market for new features, improved customer onboarding by 30%, and enhanced team collaboration

The Challenge

FireStart, a rapidly growing SaaS company specializing in Business Process Management (BPM) solutions, was facing significant scaling challenges. Their BPM platform, which automates complex business processes for clients, had gained traction, but internally, they struggled with their own development processes.

The biggest hurdles were slow product iteration cycles and inefficient collaboration between the product development and customer success teams. These issues resulted in frequent delays in delivering new features to market and an inconsistent customer onboarding experience. Additionally, FireStart’s teams often found it difficult to adapt to fast-changing client needs, as their internal processes were overly rigid.

In the highly competitive SaaS BPM space, where agility and the ability to roll out frequent updates are critical, these bottlenecks were holding FireStart back from scaling at the pace they desired.

The Approach

Our team at Data Duke was brought in to help FireStart address these growing pains by implementing a tailored Agile transformation focused on optimizing their product development and customer-facing processes.

We began by conducting a series of discovery workshops with the key teams at FireStart, particularly product development, engineering, and customer success. Through these sessions, it became clear that while FireStart excelled at automating complex workflows for their clients, their own internal product management workflows lacked the same level of automation and clarity.

Introducing Agile Frameworks

We introduced Scrum as the primary project management framework for the product development and engineering teams. This allowed them to work in shorter, more focused development cycles, with a clear backlog of priorities that could be reprioritized quickly based on evolving customer feedback.

One key change was the introduction of sprint planning and daily stand-ups across all teams. This created a consistent rhythm, ensuring everyone was aligned on the goals for each development cycle. As a result, the team became more responsive and focused, enabling faster iteration on critical platform features.

Breaking Down Silos for Better Collaboration

FireStart’s product development and customer success teams often worked in isolation, which led to disconnects in how new features were communicated and rolled out to clients. To address this, we implemented cross-functional squads that included members from product development, engineering, and customer success. These squads were responsible for not just building features but also ensuring that client onboarding and success teams were fully briefed and able to support customers with the new functionalities.

This restructuring of teams ensured that product updates were aligned with customer onboarding processes, minimizing the friction that previously existed between development and customer-facing departments.

Automating Internal Workflows

Given FireStart’s specialization in automating processes for clients, it was essential that they “practice what they preach.” We worked with the engineering and IT teams to automate their own internal workflows using their BPM platform. By automating the manual processes surrounding feature releases—such as customer communication, internal feedback loops, and testing—we significantly reduced the administrative burden on their teams.

This allowed product managers and engineers to spend more time focusing on building new features and less time managing internal tasks.

Integrating Customer Feedback More Rapidly

One of the major challenges FireStart faced was incorporating customer feedback into their development process efficiently. We established a direct feedback loop where customer insights gathered by the customer success team were fed directly into the product backlog during each sprint review.

By shifting to a customer-driven product roadmap, FireStart was able to prioritize features that were in high demand, delivering real-time value to clients. This agile feedback loop also improved the customer success team’s ability to provide immediate, actionable updates to clients based on upcoming releases.

The Results

The Agile transformation at FireStart delivered tangible results that impacted both internal operations and customer satisfaction:

• Reduced Time-to-Market: The introduction of Scrum and cross-functional squads led to a 40% reduction in time-to-market for new features. FireStart’s teams were now able to release updates on a bi-weekly basis, which allowed the company to stay competitive in the BPM space.

• Improved Collaboration: Cross-team collaboration improved significantly, resulting in fewer communication bottlenecks. FireStart saw a 30% improvement in onboarding efficiency, as customer success teams were always in the loop with the latest product developments.

• Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: The ability to integrate customer feedback more rapidly led to higher client satisfaction, with NPS (Net Promoter Score) increasing by 20%. Clients appreciated the continuous rollout of features tailored to their specific needs.

FireStart’s Agile transformation helped them overcome the operational hurdles that were hindering their growth. By streamlining product development cycles, breaking down silos between teams, and automating internal processes, FireStart was able to accelerate innovation and deliver more value to its clients.

The collaboration between Data Duke and FireStart not only resulted in measurable improvements in efficiency but also laid the foundation for sustainable growth in the competitive BPM market. As FireStart continues to scale, the agile frameworks we introduced will allow them to maintain flexibility and responsiveness to customer needs, ensuring they remain a leader in the BPM automation space.

As FireStart’s VP Engineering Sebastian De Ro remarked: