Reversing Decline Through a Product Development Transformation

Introduction

A Series-C healthcare tech startup had experienced significant growth, but as the company scaled, they began to notice a troubling trend: a loss of market share. Despite the company's rapid expansion, frustration was growing due to underwhelming returns on tech investments. New features were being delivered quickly, but the results were not meeting expectations. Teams were working hard, but there was a growing sense that something wasn't clicking, and the business wasn’t seeing the value it had hoped for from its technology investments.

Leadership recognized that something needed to change in order to maintain momentum and regain competitive strength. There was a sense that the company’s product development process lacked focus and that teams were not fully aligned with the broader business goals, but the exact changes needed were unclear.

We led the effort to transform the company’s product development team, shifting from a focus on output to one centered around outcomes and strategic alignment. By implementing the principles of empowered product teams, we helped the company focus on solving the most impactful problems, ultimately driving results that contributed to long-term business growth.

The Problem

As the company scaled, several key issues began to emerge, which became evident through symptoms like customer churn, low adoption of new features, delays, increasing tech costs, loss of market share, and a diminishing competitive advantage. These problems stemmed from the company’s product development approach, which lacked the necessary focus and alignment to deliver meaningful business results. After reviewing the situation, we identified the following critical challenges:

Stakeholder-Driven Prioritization: The product roadmap was largely dictated by the loudest voices, with priorities driven by internal demands rather than market needs or strategic focus. This led to a lack of customer discovery and left teams building features based on assumptions, rather than addressing the most impactful customer problems. As a result, the company was building features that didn’t resonate with users, leading to low adoption and a lack of customer engagement.
Limited Discovery and Validation Practices: There was minimal time spent on validating assumptions or understanding customer pain points. This lack of validation meant that features were often developed in a vacuum, leading to frequent rework and low feature adoption. The company’s development efforts were disconnected from what customers truly needed, leading to missed opportunities for product-market fit.
Weak Cross-Functional Collaboration: The product, design, and engineering teams operated in silos, causing miscommunication, inefficiencies, and misaligned goals. Without seamless collaboration across these functions, it was difficult to execute a unified strategy. Teams lacked visibility into each other’s work, which led to delays, confusion, and wasted effort.
Lack of Strategic Focus: There was no structured process for aligning product development with the company’s broader business goals. Teams were focused on delivering outputs—features—without a clear connection to the company’s long-term objectives. This lack of strategic focus resulted in missed opportunities for growth and contributed to the loss of market share.
Inefficient Use of Resources: The product development process was not optimized for efficiency, leading to wasted resources on low-impact features and unnecessary delays. Teams struggled to balance speed with quality, leading to higher tech costs and missed deadlines.

With these challenges compounded over time, leadership realized that to maintain momentum and regain a competitive edge, a fundamental shift in product development practices was required.

The Results

The 4-month engagement delivered measurable improvements that addressed both business objectives and operational challenges, positioning the company for sustained success:

30% Faster Time to Money: By streamlining prioritization and focusing on high-impact initiatives, the time required to turn development efforts into revenue-generating features improved by 30%. This acceleration helped the company capitalize on opportunities more quickly and meet business targets faster.
Achieved 85% of Projected Outcomes: Structured decision-making and clearer requirements enabled teams to focus on initiatives with measurable goals. As a result, 85% of initiatives achieved their projected business outcomes, compared to less than 60% previously.
40% Higher ROI on Development Investments: Improved prioritization and requirements clarity reduced wasted development cycles, delivering a 40% increase in ROI on development efforts. Leadership gained confidence in the product team’s ability to deliver impactful results.
20% Improvement in Team Engagement: Coaching and training empowered product teams to work more effectively and take ownership of their outcomes. Internal surveys showed a 20% improvement in team morale and engagement, fostering a more collaborative and innovative environment.
More Innovative Solutions with Strong Investor Appeal: Shifting the focus to solving meaningful problems and encouraging creativity led to more innovative solutions that stood out in the market. This strategic shift positioned the company well to potential investors, showcasing its ability to tackle complex challenges and drive meaningful impact.

These results highlight how targeted changes to the company’s product development practices delivered meaningful business impact and operational improvements. By accelerating the time to revenue, achieving measurable outcomes, and fostering innovation, the company is now positioned to compete more effectively, grow strategically, and maintain investor confidence.

How We Helped

Our engagement began with a comprehensive assessment of the current state of the company’s product development process. Through interviews, workflow reviews, and team assessments, we uncovered the root causes of the challenges hindering their success. Using these insights, we partnered with leadership to define a shared vision for the future state and develop a roadmap to achieve it. Over the course of 4 months, we provided both strategic consulting and hands-on coaching, training, and workshops to embed sustainable changes across the organization.

Establishing a Strategic Product Development Framework:

Facilitated leadership workshops to identify key business goals and align them with actionable objectives for product teams.
Collaborated with product teams to define a clear product strategy, focusing on solving problems that aligned with both customer needs and business outcomes.
Developed a structured roadmap that prioritized high-impact initiatives, set measurable goals, and created clarity for the teams.

Implementing Structured Prioritization and Clear Decision-Making:

Introduced a prioritization framework to ensure that product teams worked on initiatives aligned with strategic goals. This framework included clear criteria for evaluating potential work based on customer impact, business value, and technical feasibility.
Built customized templates for capturing business requirements and expected outcomes, providing teams with the clarity needed to make informed decisions. These templates were created in collaboration with product and engineering leaders and refined based on feedback from team members to ensure usability.

Training and Developing Empowered Product Teams:

Provided coaching and training to help product teams transition from a focus on feature delivery to ownership of outcomes. This included guiding teams on customer discovery practices, how to validate assumptions effectively, and how to prioritize initiatives that would have the greatest impact.
Worked closely with leadership to ensure that product managers had the autonomy to make decisions within their domains while being aligned with broader company objectives.

Driving Alignment and Collaboration Across Teams:

Facilitated regular planning sessions to bring product, design, and engineering teams together, ensuring alignment on goals, responsibilities, and timelines.
Established lightweight processes for cross-functional collaboration, enabling teams to work more cohesively while maintaining the flexibility needed for rapid iteration.
Shifted the focus from individual team outputs to collective outcomes, encouraging better coordination and accountability across all functions.

Embedding Continuous Improvement Practices:

Designed feedback loops to help teams evaluate the success of their initiatives and refine their processes based on results.
Supported leadership in embedding a culture of continuous learning, ensuring that teams consistently adapted and improved their workflows to better align with customer needs and business goals.

How Ready Steady Can Help You

If your company is seeing product launches fall short of expectations, underwhelming results from tech investments, or teams struggling to deliver on strategic goals, we can help.

Fractional Product and Technology Leadership: Interim leadership, team scaling, and training on best practices.
Coaching and Advisory for Leaders: Tailored coaching to navigate tough decisions and align teams on strategic goals.
Workshops and Training for Upskilling: Hands-on workshops to empower teams to deliver more value through collaboration and advanced practices.
Evaluating What’s Wrong and Developing a Plan: Comprehensive assessments to identify bottlenecks and create actionable plans for success.

If you’re ready to transform your product development practices and see measurable results, let’s talk.