Half of Indonesia’s 260 million smartphone owners do not have a bank account. DANA is a digital wallet that allows the unbanked to make cashless payments in-store and online using their phones.

The company behind the app is driven by its mission of boosting financial inclusion in Indonesia and beyond. But DANA’s product team found that new ideas for helping the service’s 40 million users were getting lost in the cracks between the organization’s different departments. Though united by the goal of enabling financial inclusion, their efforts were often divided by the product development process.

Divided Divisions

DANA’s Product department consists of Discovery, which defines the product vision and develops new features, services and partnerships, and Delivery, which implements these ideas.

While Delivery uses Jira to manage a relatively straightforward Agile workflow, Discovery involves a wider variety of workflows from market research and customer feedback to product brainstorm and design stages.

As Jira did not suit this more complex process, Discovery relied on spreadsheets to coordinate its efforts. Aside from inefficiencies around document version control and capturing ideas from different sources like Customer Success, using spreadsheets hindered DANA’s prioritization efforts as they did not integrate effectively with Jira and other tools used by Delivery.

“We did not have a seamless end-to-end pipeline that linked our Customer Success function to Discovery and all the way through to Delivery,” explains Rangga Wiseno, SVP of Product at DANA. “We identified a need for more alignment between the customer perspective and our product teams that would help make our technology more valuable.”

Integrating Insights with Productboard

DANA’s thorough search for a suitable solution led them to explore Productboard as a single repository for all product-related insights, ideas, initiatives and implementations. At a basic level, the platform gave DANA’s teams the integration they craved to a variety of critical tools, including Jira, Slack and Zendesk.

Now Customer Success, Discovery and Delivery teams can come together in one place without completely changing how they worked. This simple integration then powered the range of valuable Productboard solutions, such as Insights.

When developing new product ideas, Discovery relied on an array of important sources, including market research, user interviews, usability tests, churn interviews, cold calls and feedback gathered by DANA’s Customer Success team. After collating and analyzing these reams of data, the key insights were typically shared and discussed on Slack.

Productboard’s Slack integration makes it easy to capture and collaborate on the results of these conversations using an Insights board. When the process moves into the design stage, the team uses Productboard to share prototypes and UX flows effectively by linking directly to tools like Sketch.

“Productboard has quickly become the glue that sticks our Discovery process together,” adds  Rangga Wiseno, SVP of Product at DANA. “It helps connect product development with DANA’s wider business strategy.”

Evaluating Effort

However many great ideas Discovery develops, making them a reality always depends on Delivery’s capacity to implement them. Prioritization is a critical part of DANA’s product development strategy, but using spreadsheets made it difficult to coordinate which features were most important and when they could be implemented. 

Discovery now uses the Effort estimate of Productboard’s Feature Prioritization tool as a starting point for determining priority. This helps scrum masters to coordinate engineering capacity and identify quick wins and longer-term aims, as aligned with the company’s priority framework.

Productboard’s drag-and-drop Prioritization Matrix lets you evaluate each feature in terms of its value and effort in order to set its final priority.

DANA’s product managers created a custom Prioritization column in Productboard to assign projects across three categories of importance. They also use an additional priority category for high-level strategic initiatives suggested by the company executive team, board or investors.

“We’ve seen real improvement in terms of alignment and focus thanks to Productboard,” says  Rangga Wiseno, SVP of Product at DANA, “It helps us to deliver more high priority features that benefit our existing customers and drive new growth.”

Uniting for the Unbanked

DANA’s improved organizational unity and alignment around product development with Productboard is highlighted by the recent success of its new “battle format” teams. Created to deliver on specific key business objectives, these cross-division teams meet weekly, using Productboard to track and update progress.

The company is now expanding its target audience to include more small and midsize businesses who would benefit from facilitating digital payments. As the needs of this new audience demand increasingly complex solutions, DANA’s development process continues to evolve with the help of regular check-ins with Productboard’s customer success team.

“Productboard’s real value is orchestration,” concludes  Rangga Wiseno, SVP of Product at DANA. “Our stakeholders, from high-level internal executives to partners like Apple and KFC, are now happier with the product team’s output because of the alignment we all have on what’s most important to our business and customers.”