One of the hardest hit sectors during the pandemic was higher education. Schools and teachers scrambled to shift to remote learning environments. Times like these are imperative for Echo360. Educators were relying on them to help deliver engaging learning experiences to their students. Find out how Echo360 kept their roadmap responsive to the needs of their partners during this rocky time.
Why did your team decide to start using Roadmunk?
We make pretty pretty extensive use of Jira as our primary work tracking tool. Jira, however, doesn't help us do a great job of communicating upwards in the organization. It tells us what's getting built but it doesn't tell us how it's solving a customer pain.
That's what we've adopted Roadmunk for. Roadmunk helps us tell the story of the pain points that the features we're building will help solve. We use it as an internal planning tool at the executive level. We often use the swimlane views to map out different products and features with our CEO and VPs.
Where in your team's process does Roadmunk add value?
Although our team is small, we've broken them up into a number of different specialties across our products. So, there's a lot of cross-talk that needs to happen. One of the key visualizations for us in Roadmunk is a team swimlane breakdown. This helps figure out the balance of investment across teams.
For example, are we adding enough value with the analytics team or is it time to move them to something else temporarily? Because we're in ed-tech, we have to ensure that our focuses are in line with the needs of schools.
"It's between the strategic vision of the company and the very tactical layer where Roadmunk really shines for us. It helps up show the next hill we're going to climb on our innovation journey."
How do you keep your roadmap nimble enough to respond to challenges that may come out of the blue?
For the education sector, a great example of a challenge was the pandemic. When everybody started teaching on Zoom last year, we had to reprioritize.
Roadmunk was helpful in helping us decide which pieces of work to accelerate and what may get displaced. Being able to visually move our cards for the features in the pipeline was a big deal– especially when communicating with internal stakeholders. The real-time, almost WYSIWYG-like capability, helps us map out hypothetical scenarios with leadership.
What's one way your team uses Roadmunk that might surprise us?
Roadmunk actually gets the most external use for us when we do quarterly webinars with our customers. We put up our roadmap on the screen and share what we've recently released, what's in flight, and what's coming soon. Doing this with customers who are champions for Echo360 lets us know directly if we're focused on solving the right issues for them. Roadmunk also acts as a validation tool for us.
“One of my tenants of product management is that the cheapest time to change direction is before you've written any code. That's where having a tool like Roadmunk that has some institutional memory of it's own is important. It keeps track of where we are, where we thought we were going two quarters ago, and where we think we're going now.”
How would you recommend Roadmunk to a PM who's still shopping around?
Roadmunk is a lightweight planning tool that is customer friendly. I've used a lot of other PM tools in my career and Roadmunk does not have the overhead that a lot of those other tools do. The learning curve is low. Roadmunk helps you build roadmaps that you're also proud to show to your best customers.