Which locations have the potential to be top sellers? How and where to cut costs? Where is the competition gaining ground? What are the best regions to promote marketing actions? Geofusion offers Geographic Business Intelligence solutions that can help answer questions like these. With over 20 years of experience, this company is a reference in Geomarketing in Brazil.
Their current product, OnMaps combines market information and client data to provide spatial analysis that is extremely valuable to support business strategies. Largely used in the Retail sector, OnMaps started sparking interest in organizations from different market segments. In order to expand to new verticals and to respond better to the changes in the market, which increasingly require dynamic, effective and innovative solutions, Geofusion identified the need to create new products. And they asked Thoughtworks to help.
The first step was understanding that the verticalizing strategy involved several dimensions: product strategy, product marketing, sales channels, price models, service models, user experience, and the software itself. To include all of these dimensions in the process, it was imperative to create innovative teams capable of working in a digital product innovation perspective. To achieve this, we adopted lean enterprise concepts, encouraging teams to learn and experiment with problems, ideate on new products and evolve them incrementally.
We used to take between six months and two years to develop a product, from start to finish. Now, our cycles are shorter. Now we can have results, deliveries, value for the company, within shorter time spans.
During the team building process, we ran discovery workshops using lean and collaborative techniques, bringing together product managers and people from software development, user experience design, commercial and marketing teams, using a hands-on approach which helped contribute to technical development. We also introduced Continuous Delivery, hypothesis-oriented development and the concept of 'products above projects' by applying agile principles and practices to a distributed product team, thereby helping build a flexible, autonomous and cross-functional team.
As a result, Geofusion reduced the uncertainty of business choices regarding the product, the cost of testing product ideas and the time-to-market of new features from semesters to months. They also introduced the continuous improvement practice in the product team, affecting fifteen people in two months and empowering them to work with more robust engineering, to support the agility that the product required.
Besides bringing us gains in innovation and in the time needed to place a product in the market, it allowed us to scale, to have more than one product being developed at the same time.
More than creating or tailoring a product to specific needs, our main mission was to help Geofusion reinvent its way of developing products, enabling autonomous cross-functional teams to create flexible digital products. The experience proved to be so effective that it is being disseminated throughout the enterprise.
