At Ballast Lane we are agnostic when it comes to the industries we work in. Our clients are in Financial Services, Fintech, Healthtech, Pharmaceuticals, Construction, Materials Marketplaces, Education, and many more.
How do we set ourselves up for success, no matter the industry?
The members of our project teams need to have enough of an understanding of an industry in order to be able to work with the product owners on the client side, and be able to think creatively when it comes to contributing to the direction of a product. They also need to be able to take high level business concepts and consumer insights and turn them into detailed requirements, then user stories, designs, test cases, etc.
There are two ways that one could go about making sure that team members are prepared to work for clients in a certain industry. You can hire people that have experience in a certain industry and then train them to fit the role you hired them for. However, a project manager that has experience working in financial services is not necessarily the best project manager for a given project, or the best fit long term for your team. Alternatively, our preferred method is to hire smart, curious, flexible, driven people that are the best at what they do as well as being a good cultural fit for us. They also bring experience from different industries, which can be really beneficial in bringing fresh and innovative ideas to the table.
Ensuring Success with clients in a new industry
At Ballast Lane we make sure our team members are equipped with an initial understanding of the industry they are going to be working in and are therefore ready to work shoulder to shoulder with the client. This ensures that they build great products that add value to our clients’ businesses and to their customers, and will help them succeed. How do we do this?
During onboarding of a new project we allocate time for industry onboarding. This can include:
- Conducting research on the new client, their competitors, recent industry trends (particularly when it comes to technology), definitions and acronyms (some industries have more than others!). This can be self-directed research or ideally with some direction from the client
- Completing a quick course or certification, if appropriate
- Spending time with the client to ask questions, walk through existing product documentation and demos, review previous versions and the current roadmap. Often these sessions are recorded so that when additional team members join the project the client doesn’t have to repeat the exercise.
Throughout the project we stay curious, keep asking questions, and continue to spend time with the subject matter experts on the client side.
As mentioned above, having fresh eyes on an industry can be really beneficial and it can result in best practices being introduced from other industries. For example, when we worked on a Marketplace for Metals we tapped into best practices and familiar patterns from e-commerce work, from finding the right product with intelligent filtering, to increasing conversion by presenting product info in a simple way.
We are proud of our long term relationships with clients, which we believe come from our deep product knowledge, and the care we take to ensure that we know our clients and their business needs.