New Product JumpStart for Pet Healthcare Technologies Provider

Challenge:
IDEXX is the global market leader in diagnostics and information technology solutions for veterinarians.
IDEXX was behind their competition in the emerging pet owner communication product category and faced the possible loss of customers of their existing software products. To compete successfully, IDEXX needed to:

• Get a product to market quickly to defend their existing customer base 
• Create a compelling product to win customers from established competitors 
• Shorten the traditional lengthy product planning, design and budgeting process in order to meet business goals 
• Eliminate the lengthy back and forth between business and technology to define requirements and development plans 
• Leverage a partner with experience in product ideation and developing consumer-oriented applications 

Solution:
Alliance’s JumpStart solution provides accelerated software development by leveraging agile best practices and successful fast start framework to turn ideas into reality at subsequent stages of the project life cycle.

• Developed and defined user stories as product requirements and prepared the master story list of features prioritized based on business and technical priorities and dependencies
• Designed technical blueprint
• Logical architecture of the data entities managed by the system and how they are related
• High level systems architecture defining primary system components and interactions between them
• Tools, technologies, products, and frameworks planned for implementation
• Prepared release plan mapping User Story Epics to Releases and initial plan for first 3 iterations
• Initial sizing estimated for functional modules prioritized

Impact:

• Accelerated product development through Alliance’s JumpStart solution in 4 weeks
• Changed the perception of product plan from “impossible dream” to “what is possible”
• Defined an achievable plan to deliver the first release to market in only 4 months in order to showcase a user conference
• Product road map defined for sales, customers and management team
• Agile planning process improved collaboration between business and technology and created overall team commitment to shared goals
• Business was able to prioritize features with understanding of cost and time to market impact