Opportunity

Our Client and APG Emerging Tech worked together for the full design, build, and go-to-market strategy for its innovative B2B sourcing platform. This followed the successful completion of an initial discovery and rapid prototyping engagement to explore the possibilities for the platform. Our Client chose to partner with APG because of our team’s beyond the build capabilities.

Our Client is a rapidly scaling FinTech based in Atlanta, Georgia. Its original service offering helps small and growing businesses get paid faster. The new network is a natural extension of the company’s offerings. It creates an online marketplace to connect suppliers with buyers for lucrative contracts.

APG Emerging Tech’s consultants shared our Client’s vision of the opportunity to connect these two entities. To meet the the product goals, we created a dynamic product approach that married Product Management, Software Engineering and Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy.

Approach

Product Strategy and Go-To-Market

Our software development efforts always begin with a review of the product strategy and an update of the competitive market perspective. We complete a market pulse check to confirm the solution is still meeting market needs. Once complete, we look ahead to the end of the MVP delivery and outline a roll out and adoption strategy. After all, what good is great software if no one is using it? Taking this step ensures as we build, the product backlog is always assessed against the most important goals for the business. In the case of this B2B network, the goal was to drive adoption of the platform by suppliers and buyers.

Kanban Engineering Methodology

Following the Kanban methodology, we were able to align our software development engineers to work on the highest priority items and develop features that the combined team was able to test and evaluate against the product strategy and adoption plan. Why use Kanban? It allows the team to quickly pivot and react to feedback with minimal waste. It is less rigid than full scrum Agile methodology and provides the team flexibility to package the right features into appropriately sized releases. We believe this is important during the earliest part of development when infrastructure, database, and application features are all being created at the same time. Relying on a Kanban board also provides full transparency to Stakeholders, Product Owners, and engineers as to where the team is and where it is going. Through regular discussions with Now, we were able to groom the backlog features and ideate on new features to consistently deliver value agains the product and GTM strategies.

Strong Roll Out and Adoption

APG Emerging Tech was much more than a Product and Engineering partner for our Client. Our decades of experience with software design and build meant we were partners in the areas of product management, project management, software engineering, operations readiness, marketing, and reporting on results (data and analytics). We developed communication recommendations to help marketing teams understand the intricacies of a successful product launch. We also engaged with our Client’s SaaS licensees to assist with communications, training, marketing, and public relations for their respective launches.

Outcomes

APG Emerging Tech's team is nimble and enjoys the challenge of ensuring business strategies are in place to accompany any good software roll out. Our competitors typically end their engagements when the software is built. We support our clients during and after build. We enjoy seeing the results of working on the product and GTM strategies from the point of MVP to the completion of the build and entrance into the ongoing support phase. In this engagement, our team led and participated in critical conversations with the team and the platform’s SaaS licensees. In under a year, we delivered a solution that rivals products that have been in the market for many years with much larger teams.

“This is so much easier to use and more intuitive than Oracle’s supplier management system!”SaaS Licensee Director of Vendor Management

The B2B networking platform supports the goal of matching buyers with qualified suppliers. Buyers can find suppliers that are qualified, but not a part of their current supplier network. Qualified suppliers can expand their buyer network by showing up in search results that are specific to buyer’s needs.

In addition to delivering a working, scalable platform, APG Emerging Tech delivered artifacts useful for the platform’s initial launch and beyond, including:

• Secure and scalable platform

• Robust roadmap with many creative, original ideas for the future

• Marketing and media communication for new platform users

• Business case evaluation and validation

• Reporting and metrics to measure that the expected results are being met

• Project management for the entire effort from high fidelity design, through engineering and on to implementation