Jesse Dennis Sheather

Shinydocs Pro Summary

Shinydocs: Human Review

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by

Jesse Sheather
in

Quick Summary

  • HITL Review tool for massive data sets
  • Simple UI/UX
  • Integrated into our platform ecosystem
  • Value from pre-populating fields and data reducing time to audit/edit
  • Built and generated with client feedback and involvement
  • Significant product issues resolved alongside new features, sales was still unable to sell it after multiple attempts
  • Product put into maintenance only status to support development on more profitable products and projects

An NDA prevents me from sharing too many technical details at this time – contact me to learn more.

  • Metrics & Success
    • Searches resulting in Interactions per user per week
      • Northstar Metric
        • Cumulative interaction of users resulting in success
      • My impact: Increase from 28 to 35
        • 25% increase
    • Time spent in application
      • My impact: Increase from 86 minutes to 101 minutes average
        • 17% increase
    • Accuracy of pre-populated data
      • My impact: Increase from 32% accuracy to 65% accuracy
        • 200 ish% increase
    • Reduction in time/skills to setup system
      • My impact: New data extraction and analysis engine built to replace the old manual-training version (ShinyAI)
    • New Sales
      • Give the struggle to sell this product before and while I managed it # of new committed sales had to become a pivotal metric
        • IF new contracts per quarter > dev team costs per quarter – THEN increase investment
        • IF new contracts per quarter = dev teams costs per quarter – THEN maintain investment ONLY if new work is needed, ELSE minimize investment
        • IF new contracts per quarter < dev team costs per quarter – THEN decrease or stop investment and issue a final “shelf-life” release

Where I started:

  • I was introduced to Shinydocs in a “trial-by-fire” situation as described by my hiring manager
  • This meant taking over all product operations for Review only a couple weeks after taking over Enterprise search, my day-1 product
  • My role balanced introducing SCRUM to all teams, managing these products, and filling in for a terminated dev manager among other roles
  • Within 30 days I was managing 3 products and helping with 2 others

Human Review:

  • Review was built custom for a specific client before I joined.
  • That client declined the product on terms of it being too effective meaning they may need to lay off some of the team.
  • Later it was resold to a new client who expressed a similar yet unique need.
  • I started by auditing everything: backlog, support tickets, team opinions, ELT goals, and above all else; client/user feedback
  • It was obvious that Review had a limited market but did generate some revenue at this point, options for it’s future started emerging.
  • Our core product was highly powerful but only accessible via a technical CLI
  • My goals
    • Ensure the product met the commitments and demands for the sole customer
    • Make each change valuable for other clients in an attempt to resell it to other current and future deals
    • Trial 3 main product changes to see if new market was gained, or the product should be decommissioned or sold off to the sole client.
  • My success pillars
    • Integration parity with other Shinydocs products
    • Automatic data detection and population quality
    • New workflow to support industry standard workflows
  • My Ownership (at various times – some roles were created to take over some duties)
    • Product Vision
    • Product marketing (later hired specific role)
    • Sales demos and solutions engineering (Only took this over in 2023)
    • Sales and cost strategy
    • Advertisement campaings
    • Funding and grant responses/submissions
    • Backlog refinement and cleaning
    • Backlog planning
    • User story creation
    • Support ticket delegation
    • UI/UX design (later hired specific role)
    • Scrum adoption and process implementation
    • Stakeholder management
    • Product team hiring matrix and competencies
    • Product team hiring interviews
    • Many more (we were a scale-up, if it regarded the product, it probably hit my plate)

My Success/How the product ended:

  • Some details cannot be shared due to NDAs – this is my best summary – contact me to learn more
  • Review had the major upgrades committed to the client and some new system parity upgrades to match.
  • Ultimately Review did not have much roadmap after these changes and was put into support-only status to redistribute developers to Shinydocs PRO
  • Review’s investment was minimized until new revenue was achieved to better utilize resources and ultimately increase company bottom-line finances
  • Review had an “events based” future roadmap outlining why, when, and how future investments could be made based on external factors such as new sales, Shinydocs PRO release and other more specific cases

Shinydocs changes:

  • Due to notable changes in August 2023 the entire product team among other teams was terminated without notice or cause
  • I do have an NDA in place and will not be able to share many details
  • I am left hunting for a true product opportunity today
  • I am spending more time on reviving HanDIY through the offshoot: PROjector leveraging all I learned from the first iteration of HanDIY – learn more in my other blog posts!