Siftery Track is a SaaS management web application that helps organizations streamline and optimize their internal software spend, utilization, and contract renewals. The product provides finance, IT, and operations teams with a unified tracking system to increase visibility and control into their company's SaaS environments and expenditures.
As one of the first designers in the Track team, I was tasked to design a new B2B cloud application from scratch. I led the end to end product design process from problem definition to our public launch. I worked directly with the CEO and engineers to help define and execute on a product roadmap that supports Siftery’s broader go-to-market initiatives. Siftery Track launched in February 2018.
In 2017, Siftery has built a large database of over 40,000 software providers and customer adoption trends. Based on the data collected, our Product team found that the number of SaaS tools used by SMB's, mid-market, and enterprise businesses has doubled every year in the last 5 years. Companies find themselves wasting about $1.2M annually on excess licenses and contracts, paying for redundant and unused software apps across multiple teams and departments.
Help organizations better streamline and optimize their internal SaaS spend and usage?
Our discovery stage was a quick, high‐intensity effort that allowed us to define milestones, review the competitor landscape, understand our product team's vision, and begin research into user needs, behaviors, and workflow processes. We conducted 1 on 1 interviews with 26 companies targeting budget owners and IT personnel within their company. We mapped participant responses on Trello to find overarching themes.
We identified six archetypes which we used to facilitate discussions regarding users needs, frustrations and varying contexts of use. Through careful analysis of our research, we extracted sufficient behavioral variables to segment our target audience. We narrowed down our personas to three primary archetypes that we wanted to target.
At Siftery, we valued speed to production over perfection. In order to remain agile, I participated in scoping sessions with the CEO and CTO to get alignment on technical estimates and limitations so we can prioritize shipping smaller working features to test our assumptions quickly.
Our team held a 2 week design sprint to generate as many ideas as possible. The goal is to visualize the longer term vision while narrowing down our feature list and eliminating those that are not technically feasible for early releases. We prioritized our first set of features based on high impact and low effort functionality that are introduced to our first 100 beta users.
This was a period of effervescence for the team as there were many outstanding questions. How can Inflect’s data team source latency and pricing information? How easily can we obtain KMZ files for route path information? Which techniques can we use to estimate latency? Do we need to restructure our data model?
A single system of records that enables users to filter through
While your SaaS system of records can store a lot of important information about your SaaS, it should at least contain these important attributes, per application:
1. SaaS application name
2. Description
3. Category
4. Link to website
5. System owner
6. Cost
7. Legal and compliance info
8. The system of record can be stored in Excel, another database, or
a dedicated SaaS management tool.
A single system of records that enables users to filter through
While your SaaS system of records can store a lot of important information about your SaaS, it should at least contain these important attributes, per application:
1. SaaS application name
2. Description
3. Category
4. Link to website
5. System owner
6. Cost
7. Legal and compliance info
8. The system of record can be stored in Excel, another database, or
a dedicated SaaS management tool.
Our engineering and dev teams are based across India and Ukraine, therefore, not every team member was able to attend our white-boarding session. In order to gain consensus with team members abroad, I created detailed documentation on Lucidcharts to further iterate and improve on our early concepts drawn from our whiteboarding sessions.
During its pre-launch early access program, the service has already been used by over 300 companies with a total of $2.3 billion USD in annualized spend – including $132 million in software.