After buying lots of businesses in the last few years, the education division of Iris Software<\/a> found it had a problem: a raft of products<\/a> that weren\u2019t easy to integrate and product teams that had different ways of working. It turned to ProdPad to bring these disparate aspects together and deliver transparency, simplicity and a consistent approach to product development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Having all our products together to use in ProdPad has definitely helped us to work together, and to feel, culturally and psychologically, that we\u2019re all the same team.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n From its beginnings 40 years ago as an accounting software supplier, Iris Software today is owned by private equity firm HG Capital and fields about 120 products spanning three divisions: accounting, HR and payroll, and education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Its education business has arisen from about half a dozen acquisitions in as many years – all the products that now make up Iris Education come from acquired businesses. Iris Education is in turn split into three divisions. Product Director Tim Cropper Williams, who came to Iris as part of one of its earliest acquisitions, heads up the engagement portfolio, dealing with parent and school engagement products.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Iris Education employs about 60 people across Product and Engineering, and about 500 people in total. It has products in about 17k of the over 22k schools in England and Wales. \u201cThat was the motivation behind the acquisition strategy,\u201d says Tim, \u201cIris Accountancy could see education technology was a huge market. There were a lot of strong players in ed tech, and a lot of smaller businesses that were 30-80 people strong. It made sense to buy rather than build.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n But the acquisitions meant there was a mixed bag of tools and capabilities and lots of different ways of working within Iris Education. \u201cSome of the acquisitions didn’t have product people – in fact most of them didn’t have a product person – and some had a delivery manager who worked alongside the dev team,\u201d says Tim. <\/p>\n\n\n\n He explains the next steps: \u201cThe first thing we did was formalize the product organization. Now in the engagement portfolio, I’ve got four product owners, two product managers, two content designers, and four dev teams with about six to eight people in each one.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Next Tim looked at standardizing the tools used. The teams were using all sorts – spreadsheets, Word docs, Trello, Aha, you name it – to manage their products. \u201cBuilding and publishing a roadmap<\/a> for one product is easy,\u201d Tim says, \u201cbut building manual roadmaps for multiple products, taken with the demands of working for a larger organization, is a nightmare. Managing the communication out to the wider business was a complete time sink for me. Then there was the cross-team aspect: there was a huge opportunity to integrate all the great products we\u2019d bought but it was very difficult to realize that opportunity because of all the different product work streams.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tim first came across ProdPad at a product conference: \u201cI went with one of our product owners to MTP Engage in Manchester in 2019, and we met some of the ProdPad team there. Then I went to a Product event at the HG Capital offices and listened to a talk from ProdPad\u2019s Chief Commercial Officer, Liz Love. It piqued my interest. I thought it was what we needed across our product teams.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n He looked at a couple of other possible platforms but settled on ProdPad because it particularly suits the engagement portfolio\u2019s Agile way of working. Says Tim: \u201cWe build and release all the time, so we don\u2019t put dates on our roadmaps. It\u2019s not the way we communicate.\u201d Tim and his team have had to put in some work to teach the rest of business about this. \u201cWe showed them the \u2018now, next, later\u2019 approach and educated them on what that means,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Three years on and Tim is delighted with his choice of ProdPad. The platform saves his team time and money. Integration between products is much easier: \u201cWe all work in one ProdPad space and everyone can see what everyone else is doing. It\u2019s easier to build links between products.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n He loves the management visibility and the easy publication of roadmaps that ProdPad delivers. In fact the roadmap sharing feature is probably Tim\u2019s favorite feature. It saves him a lot of time, and, he says, the roadmap now lives somewhere visible and is transparent to everyone. \u201cNow I can just go to my sales and marketing updates and add the link to my roadmap. I just say \u2018remember it\u2019s live, this is what now means, this is what next means\u2026 any questions give me a shout\u2019. Before ProdPad I would have to update a PowerPoint presentation and talk people through it.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The engagement portfolio is also just starting to use ProdPad to measure success. All roadmap cards are now linked to at least one of Iris Education\u2019s strategic objectives<\/a>, and will be reviewed quarterly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Impact\/effort analysis is now also done in ProdPad. Tim and his team use Mural for prioritization – they\u2019ll typically go through several rounds of prioritization, validate with customers and internal stakeholders, and then put output from that into ProdPad\u2019s impact\/effort scoring. Tim previously produced a graph for this manually, \u201cand it was just laborious\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tim and his team aren\u2019t finished yet. They want to use ProdPad\u2019s JIRA integration<\/a> for ideas so they can push ideas<\/a> over as tickets but are still moving all the dev teams over to JIRA, another impact of multiple teams coming from different companies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n ProdPad is now well embedded in the engagement portfolio – it\u2019s where most of the product activity takes place. More significantly, it has brought the people in the portfolio together as a team. They\u2019re more self-sufficient and autonomous than they were before. Says Tim: \u201cSeven years ago we were all direct competitors. Then we were acquired into one larger corporate machine. Having all our products together to use in ProdPad has definitely helped us to work together, and to feel, culturally and psychologically, that we\u2019re all the same team.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":78699,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"pp_customer_story_meta":{"contact_title":"Tim Cropper Williams","contact_desc":"Product Director","contact_img":"https:\/\/www.prodpad.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/Tim-Cropper-Williams.jpg","hero_bg":"https:\/\/www.prodpad.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/IRISEducation-hero.jpg","logo":"https:\/\/www.prodpad.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/IRIS-Education_white_400px.png","hero_content":"How ProdPad Helped Support Growth in a Mature Company "}},"pp_uni_tag":[],"class_list":["post-78494","pp_customer_story","type-pp_customer_story","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nNo consistent approach<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Choosing ProdPad<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Integration is easier<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Coming together as a team<\/h2>\n\n\n\n