A Moment with Product: Introduction to Scenario Planner

Transcript

Hi, I’m Dawn Henderson and I am a training specialist here at Workfront and today we’re going to be talking about our scenario planner. So joining me today is our product manager, Kyle Silberbauer. and he’s going to help us unveil the mysteries of the scenario planner. Hi Kyle, thanks for joining us. Hey Dawn, how are you? Good, good, this is kind of an answer to a lot of customers requests, I believe, but tell me a little bit about how this product evolved. It came from a lot of feedback from customers, who were asking them how they were choosing which projects to work on, how they were prioritizing work and what we found is that a lot of them didn’t have a good process in place or that they were doing this in Excel spreadsheets and it’s really manual and hard to maintain, and they just didn’t have any confidence in their plans. They felt like they could execute on things once they started work but they didn’t know what they should be prioritizing, what they should be working on. So we wanted to help them solve that problem. And this product, again, as you just said kind of allows you to start that process earlier than ever before within Workfront. So can you tell me a little bit about when you would maybe begin to use this product to find value in it? This really comes at the start of the work life cycle, when you’re planning, when you’re comparing different scenarios for your future roadmap and that could be a year into the future, maybe even five years in the future. Who would find value in this? I mean, is the project manager going to find value in this? Yeah, I think a lot of different personas within any organization are going to find value but the primary user is that kind of upper management level, director of ITPMO, as you see in this example, director of marketing, director of product development, it’s somebody who is a manager of teams of teams. Yeah, 'cause you can actually get in and obviously if you’re training on this, you’re going to find out how to do this. But you can compare scenarios here and say if we increase our, you know, resources, whether that be people or you know, budget, we’re going to be able to do different types of things, right. Yeah, that’s one of the coolest aspects too is this ability to do what if analysis by creating multiple scenarios and then comparing those and understanding, you know, if we got a really aggressive scenario that takes a lot of resources, that’s great, but we’re going to have to increase our budget, we’re going to have to increase our headcount and then you could see what the trade-offs are going to make between that versus a more conservative scenario that might not deliver as much but comes in at a lower cost. How easy is it to use? How easy, I mean, is it a ton of training? Is it very complex? What does that look like? It’s super easy to use and that’s how we designed it and that’s one of the first things that stands out to all of our customers is just how quickly, even high level executives within a company, they look at this and they just understand what’s going on. This is how they think about plans, this is how they think about roadmaps and so that it just immediately resonates with everybody who sees it and yet under the hood there’s a lot of complexity. So we’re able to keep that complexity kind of hidden behind this really simple, easy to use visual, intuitive user experience. Kyle, I was going to ask you to show us the coolest part that you thought about within this tool, but I think you might have already done that. Anything you want to add to that? Yeah, there’s so much that’s cool. It’s hard to pick just one thing. If I had to mention another thing that I personally like and it’s a little more subtle but it’s the fact that it’s not a rigid tool. You can progressively add data to the tool and it becomes more powerful, more helpful. It’ll help guide you with the more data you add. But when you first start, when I first kick off a plan here, and I’ll jump back and start one, it’s just a whiteboard you know, whenever I’m starting new plan, it’s just a whiteboard for ideation. I can just start adding things quickly to it and as I have more information on these initiatives that I want to tackle, I can add that information about time, I can ship them out. I can tell the system what sort of resources are going to be required, but it starts out as just this free form canvas where I can just put my ideas into software and then eventually get to more complex capacity planning. Well that’s amazing Kyle and I really appreciate you being with us today. It’s really helpful for those that are beginning their training journey to know really kind of what to expect and the big picture behind it. So thanks for sharing that with us and helping to provide that for our customers. Happy to help. Super excited to be launching this product soon so thank you Dawn. -