An agile way to reach a long-term product vision.

At the beginning of 2023, we started on an exciting journey to introduce a completely new way to manage the charter booking process in our platform. It’s a project that aims to improve the experience of the end customer but also making the booking workflow for buyers and sellers more intuitive. It’s not a small feature but a core workflow that will be introduced to our users in iterations over a longer period.

This means we are starting with a simpler workflow for a defined target group of customers, to then add more functionality that supports more types of customers. This style of agile development is a great way to incorporate customers’ input and feedback along the way.

Customer feedback influences our decisions.

We’ve always worked with constant feedback loops at Avinode Group, where feedback coming in from a support case or in a conversation with a customer can generate anything from an instant bug fix to taking a larger grip in an area of our platform.

In the discovery phase of every product development, we explore what it is we want to achieve and what the alternatives are to get there. We proactively collect input from our customers by reviewing historical feedback, asking a direct question to users in our platform, or by doing 1-on-1 interviews with a smaller group to really understand the needs.

Development partners can make a larger impact.

In a large project like this we take it one step further and invite 6-8 members to be development partners. It means we are working in close collaboration with them to get their thoughts and input all the way from discovery, development and finally testing the functionality we release. It means they need to allocate some more time and effort, but it also ensures that the functionality we release works better for everyone’s needs.

The benefit for our development partners is that they gain a better understanding of how we work in Avinode Group and can influence what they get from us. Working this closely means we also get to know each other better, which makes work more fun for both of us!

ABOUT TOBIAS
Tobias Gunnesson joined Avinode Group as VP Product in 2019 with over 20 years experience from product management in B2B software companies. Tobias is based in Gothenburg, Sweden.