Challenge
A financial services software company with a steady business in a niche sector wanted to shift business strategy and create a new product, effectively opening up a tremendous new market for the company. However, this change required a big shift in mindset internally from the engineering, product development, and sales teams. They needed to rally behind the idea and invest energy to develop the product. And the brand needed to be repositioned externally with clear, convincing messaging to communicate externally to existing and new audiences.
Solution
The goal was to establish messaging to communicate the benefits of the shift and to align teams on that messaging. Decker conducted a series of workshops with senior leadership to develop a cascading messaging strategy. With the product team’s support, we first aligned the engineering team on the business benefits of the product strategy shift. Engineers needed to understand and believe in the benefit of the shift to a new platform and become invested in working hard to build it and move from a single tool for a finite market to an enterprise solution across a significantly broader addressable market. The shift required significant time and energy to recreate the foundation of the software, which meant they had to pause working on the innovations that fueled them.
Once engineering was on board and development was underway, it was important to maintain alignment throughout the organization by keeping the narrative clear and consistent, both internally and externally. Our consulting team worked with the client to fine-tune the message before it was shared externally, which included navigating through a significant volume of tech bugs in the initial product launch.
Impact
A high-impact shift like this could have failed at any point. Alignment on the mission was key. It equipped product and engineering teams to capture feedback and quickly resolve bugs to make an even stronger product that gained traction in the marketplace. Following the company’s massive directional change, employees have embraced the shift, the market believes in the product, and most importantly, customers are buying it. Their market perception has shifted from niche software to an enterprise-level SaaS company with mass adoption in the financial sector. Sales are at an all-time high and the stock is priced at 4x the value before the shift and continues to rise.