Helping a Top 4 Professional Services Firm with MVP Slack App Design and Development
Have an idea for a new or improved offering? That’s a great place to be! But whether you want to build a new app, an AI-powered chatbot, or reimagined digital experience, there’s still a long road ahead and a lot of questions to ask. How do you know if that idea will work? How will you test it? When will you seek feedback? And how will you bring everyone else on board? Robots & Pencils supports clients at every stage of product design and development, including advising you on what ideas to test and how. Then, we help you get those ideas out into the world as minimum viable products (MVPs). By doing so, you can gather early feedback that will guide your future direction. Below, we share how we helped a major professional services firm test their idea with a Slack app MVP.
Recognizing the Power of Slack
One of the best things about Slack is its ability to bring together people, systems, and processes all in one place. If your organization uses Slack but doesn’t integrate other technology and workflows into the platform, you’re missing out on opportunities. Being able to interact with your systems right from Slack to get the information you need is a huge win. It benefits the employee experience and the entire organization by making work faster and more efficient.
Knowing the potential and promise of Slack, a top 4 professional services firm approached us with an idea. They wanted to give users of their Salesforce-based supplier lifecycle management solution access to the tool’s features inside Slack. This access, they hypothesized, would allow users to work more efficiently and effectively. Now, they wanted to build a Slack app MVP so that they could test the theory and demonstrate the benefits of integrating the two systems.
Creating a MVP Slack App to Test with Potential Customers
An experienced Slack services provider and longtime Slack partner, Robots & Pencils was well equipped to help our client. We provided expertise for the product strategy, UX/UI design, documentation, and development for the proof of concept Slack app. For this app, the team honed in on two important employee use cases: onboarding suppliers and collaborating on tracking issues.
In the resulting Slack MVP app, users can easily access and share new supplier details and onboarding statuses from Salesforce in Slack. Depending on their needs, users can share supplier info in channels or conversations. For issue tracking, our developers set up the integration so that new incidents added in Salesforce automatically post in Slack. As issues arise, users can discuss and collaborate on problems in real time. After an issue posts in the incident channel, users can also share it to other channels and conversations. Additionally, the Slack posts contain links that users can click on to see more details about the supplier or incident in Salesforce.
Robots & Pencils also assisted in configuring Slack and Salesforce to automate the app deployment process to the client’s internal AWS environment. Now, the client is demoing the MVP to customers and potential stakeholders to gauge interest in the app and its features. Already, the process has provided valuable insights for improving their product and refining their roadmap.
How to Get Started on Your Product Idea
If you’re ready to take the next steps on your product idea, Robots & Pencils is here to help. Early on, we’ll leverage stakeholder and user interviews combined with quantitative studies to uncover unmet needs and opportunities to innovate. In design and product vision workshops, we’ll align your team on goals, plans, and priorities. When you’re ready, we’ll partner with you to conduct technology and creative experiments to test the feasibility of your ideas and how they resonate with users. Of course, we also assist with agile product development, from designing and building products to measuring performance and learning in ways that power continual improvement and growth. Rounding it out, we deliver change management strategies and services that maximize business impact.
Want more information? Contact hello@robotsandpencils.com today!
