Please note, this is an ongoing project that is in progress. This page is being further developed with imagery and details as the project allows.
About the Project
Source: My role as Portfolio Manager at CSG International
My Role: Acting Product Manager for Portfolio OneView. Own research, journey mapping, wireframes, and user testing. Leveraging Data Services team for building prototypes based on my wireframes.
Project Time: In Progress
When presented with a pain point from executive and product leadership, I began creating a tool to solve it. I am leveraging user experience methods to ensure that my team and I are building the most valuable solution.
The Problem
Our organization is complex. It is growing, building new products, combining them into new solutions, acquiring other companies, and investing in enterprise-wide initiatives. Data about the product portfolio is scattered throughout different work management, sales, and financial systems, and it is impossible to find a single view of everything the organization is investing resources in.
The Solution
Portfolio OneView is a new internal business intelligence tool being built from the ground up in a third-party data visualization platform. I am partnering with Data Services and with groups tackling similar challenges on the sales and customer support front.
The ultimate goal is to enable data-driven decision making and dynamic organizational planning. Our journey to get there begins with understanding, standardizing, and cleansing our data and then building reporting off of it. We will add analysis until the solution is able to provide true decision support. It's not enough to build the tool. We will work with owners of various collaboration or portfolio forums to embed the tool into their processes and make it indispensible.
Assumptions
I began with some assumptions of the audience based on my experiences as part of the Product Management and Strategy organizations.
1. This tool serves two audiences: executive leadership and product leadership.
2. These leaders are incredibly busy. A solution needs to be intuitive and display the most important information at a glance, with no need for additional voiceover or context.
3. They travel often and need to be able to use the tool on their mobile phones.
4. They want to be presented with summary information but have the ability to drill down into the data.
User Research
I began by researching the information that these two groups care about. I read about enterprise portfolio management and the metrics and information important to that discipline and also included in portfolio dashboards. I researched the metrics that Product Managers care about as well.
User Interviews
I coordinated my team and I conducting initial user interviews with twenty-two Product Managers across the organization. We asked standard questions and aggregated our findings. We asked about needs for Portfolio OneView. Another purpose was to create a baseline which we could compare against in the future to measure our impact.
I followed up with deep dives with a carefully selected group of product leaders to dig into the kinds of information that would be most valuable to them and help them do their jobs more efficiently and better informed.
Key Takeaways:
Product Managers receive monthly financial reporting in Excel via email from their Finance contact.
Product Managers don't feel they have enough visibility into what other areas of the organization are working on.
Having all of the data in one place is helpful.
Being able to filter the data in many different ways is important.
Product information is useful to Product Managers, but also for executive leadership to determine if we are investing appropriately as a company.
What Information Are Product Leaders Looking For In a Dashboard?
Product Maturity (growth, mature, declining)
Revenue Per Product
Gross Margin By Product
Year-To-Date Sales Bookings
Sales Pipeline (Aside from informing future Profit & Loss metrics, this is an early indicator of resourcing needs for delivery and operations.)
Ratio of Revenue to Investment
Support Ticket Macro Trends
User Personas
The insights I gained from reasearch and interviews led to the creation of two user personas capturing each of the two target audiences.
Executive Leader
The Executive Leader wants to see everything going on across the enterprise in one place and technology to support data-driven decision making.
Product Leader
The Product Manager cares most about the financials of their product line. They only want to see data that can help them do their job.
Wireframes / Prototype
I created low-fidelity wireframes to use as a backdrop for conversations with the target audience and with teams I am partnering with to build out the dashboards, Data Services, and to understand and make changes to the data, such as Finance and Sales Enablement.
Prototype
I coordinated with my team and with the Data Services team to build out a basic prototype of a couple of views in the data visualization platform using live data. These were made using default charts in Microsoft Power BI.