Turning a service into a product, I established processes to standardise and reduce project delivery time, and created new metrics to accurately measure impact.

My role: Joining Viamo in a new Product Lead role, I was responsible for helping the company transition from a service to a product business model. I inherited the company’s biggest revenue product - Digital Training - and was tasked with streamlining implementation, understanding impact and creating best practice that would allow it to scale while maximising return.

Process; By spending time with the project managers who implemented the projects, I was able to spot inefficiencies like duplication and bottlenecks for approvals. From these conversations I built-out a creation funnel that highlighted how long each step was taking, what was involved, and where there were opportunities for improvement. 

When it came to tracking project outcomes, the metrics being used were not reflective of the project’s goals. Despite it being a training programme, there was no visibility on overall course completion, and instead Viamo were measuring the success of individual lessons based on the % of the audio listened to. This was a huge opportunity to create more insightful metrics that aligned with the outcomes partners were looking for, i.e. to understand how many of the teachers who they’d signed up for the training completed the course and demonstrated a change in knowledge, and even better - a change in behaviour.

Outcomes: A quick solution I implemented was the creation of templates for the most common lesson formats and series. This meant project managers didn’t have to start from scratch each time, and instead could upload a pre-populated phone tree into their project. This also reduced tagging errors for reporting as the templates were pre-tagged. At the same time I created a set of data-informed best practice recommendations about things such as the number of lessons, length of audio and style of quizzes to empower project managers to make informed decisions about their trainings. This saved them time as they no longer needed to look for guidance and approvals about their training programme.

I was able to track the new metrics in the new templates. Adding new tags to the phone trees meant Viamo could now start tracking the number of learners that made it from the first to the last lesson. When I first analysed course completion it averaged 33%, but analysis showed that some training programmes had 98% completion while others were as low as 3%. This highlighted the importance of creating standardisation across the projects so we could create a reliable, consistent product for our partners. Having awareness of this data point was the first step in knowing it was an issue, and when I left, initiatives like certificates were being rolled out to increase course completion (I’d discovered data that showed a positive correlation between course completion and certificates).

Key Takeaway:

In order to scale a service it often needs to become a product. Implementation and measurement need to be standardised and meaningful to improve efficiency, maximise returns and create consistent outcomes.