This month we had the opportunity to speak to Colin Claverie, Skore’s CTO, to learn more about the Product Roadmap for Skore software and where he sees the future of Skore and the digital transformation market in general. Colin is responsible for all the technical aspects of Skore and also leads the development team.
Hi Colin, thanks for taking the time to speak to us today. Let’s start by talking about the Skore Product Roadmap – how often do you look to update and review it?
As a strategy team we commit to a quarterly review of the roadmap and check that we are still aligned with our plans and objectives. Twice a year we will take the opportunity to really review whether the product is still aligned with Customer needs and desires. The roadmap itself can be very high level however. For Skore it is a framework for our decision making and our strategy. It gives us room to adapt and reprioritise when necessary. Part of this is really the beauty of Skore and the Skore team – we allow features to become opportunistic and therefore extremely reactive to Customer feedback and requirements. This also links back to the way we work as a team in the office.
Could you tell us a little more about the Skore Product Roadmap?
Sure, the Roadmap in 2020 has really evolved, especially in response to the covid-19 crisis. With so many people working and collaborating remotely we’ve really had to re-prioritise these elements. It’s exciting to see how this positively impacting our customers during such a tough period. Today we really see the Skore Software product as having three main pillars –
- Collaborative Change Management – Focussing the product to ensure engagement and communication with all stakeholders. We want to remove the barriers – allowing people to engage with Skore – whether this be allowing new users accounts to be created seamlessly and quickly to enabling emails to be sent out instantly the moment a new process is published.
- Process Mapping Analytics – Continue on the path of ensuring that Skore allows Customers to find it even easier to map processes, and gain insights. Commiting to a slicker, faster and easier to use product for all.
- Initiative Management – viewing processes in the system grouped by business objectives. A higher level approach to give context and clarity to organisations and allow them to compare their own processes. It will enable clients to measure their own success and change progress.
Below these three pillars are the other essential threads we will be working on this year. Firstly improving the Customer experience and visual identity of Skore – essentially how do we make Skore even simpler to use and easy on the eye. Secondly and importantly to continue our commitments on Enterprise Integration – ensuring that the product fits within the architecture of an enterprise – through user integration, user management and security.
What new and interesting features can we expect this year for our Customers?
There will be lots of little features arriving over the year especially as we have updated our infrastructure enabling it to be much easier to release. However I think most of our Clients will love the new overview of their organisation through processes. Originally each process was separate to the others, we have been gradually integrating process data so that Skore has more workspace level search and analytics capabilities enabling workspace wide reporting and insights.
How and who will the Skore Product Roadmap impact this year?
What is exciting is that we are working towards giving more tools to Project and Program managers within the Skore platform. We want to be able to provide a better way to understand and prioritise processes. They’ll be able to see and understand which processes are key in an organisation and be able to gain greater insights. They may want to ask to see all the processes that the Marketing Manager is affected by for example. It’s great to think about what more analysis we can give a Manager at project level as well as at process level.
So, what would your dream Customer Feedback tweet be?
‘I was using Skore in a workshop and I felt like a superhero!’ seriously though this would be the ultimate for me. We want to make our Customers feel like heroes in their organisation. The best feedback is if I hear that our customers are amazed at how much information they discovered that was previously hidden by their organisation. It’s incredible what appears – roles, risks, systems etc. Information that people never knew about.
What are you hoping to disrupt?
I think for me it’s still so key that Skore enables the ‘Self Healing Organisation’, Organisations should understand that they don’t need expensive tools to effect change. You can make short, sharp, impactful changes often. Changes can be made often and digital transformation doesn’t need to be a daunting huge project destined to disappoint.
What problems did Skore need to solve to get where it is now?
Skore as a product has always grown organically, this was great when we were smaller but as the company grows its been really important to ensure that we have solid foundations. In the last year we have been rewriting the software to ensure stability and a strong base for growth. Whilst that has meant we have taken time off from releasing features we are now reaping the benefits and we’ve learned so much about working as a team and improving the product.
How do you think the Skore platform can stay agile?
We ensure that we focus on releasing one thing at a time, but we release early and often. This ensures that we start a feature but most importantly that we finish it. We also use feature flags which means we can enable features for selected customers in our Community – which allows us to test with a limited audience before releasing to all.
What is the future of Skore and how will you measure its success?
I think again – we need to look at that idea of a ‘self healing organisation’ – that Skore can make a change to an organisation with the biggest impact and the lowest cost. Indeed for us to measure success, alongside licence sales of course!, is to see more and more people taking Skore with them as they change company. A trend we can already see the beginning of. We are also seeing more general users using Skore. Often people don’t realise that they are doing business improvement or process led change. As people begin to recognise that my hope and wish is that Skore will be there right at the forefront as the obvious solution to use.
What do you think is the future of the market?
I can see that Process isn’t a bad word anymore. What is great is that people now understand more that process doesn’t hinder creativity. Companies such as Spotify and Amazon, who are big on process, have shown that process creates room for creativity. When processes are managed and documented well then that leaves more room for the ‘fun’ stuff.
I also think that companies are open to getting more insights for their money and open to trying new software which is really exciting.
Finally – people are doing small change more often, organisations are getting people to adopt change before situations go bad. When you transform your business you create value, and that is where Skore comes in – showing you the value and missed opportunities in your organisation and empowering you to do great things.
Why not find out more about Skore and learn what it can do for your organisation. Colin’s training webinars are now available to join or download – find out more here
