Black Monolith | Encompass

Project

DSDLink

My role

Product strategy consultant

Business problem

Encompass Technologies builds supply chain management software for the beverage industry. Their product DSDLink was suffering from poor UX causing the company to lose customers. Initially, the company leadership only wanted to redesign a small portion of the site, but it was clear that they would need an entire ground-up rebuild. The challenge was that, while they agreed to a full redesign, they lacked the resources, including PMs.

Solution

To compensate for the lack of any sort of project or product management, I used an early form of XenBuild to scope the project and track progress. To make the most of limited time and budget, I used e-commerce best practices, applying consumer-grade usability to this enterprise product.

Outcome

The new DSDLink launched on time, under budget, with a much greater scope than had been originally been planned.

The old site was chaotic

The company originally hired me to fix their invoicing system but a quick survey of their overall site revealed a chaotic user experience. Each page had no commonality with the others. Not even the top menu remained consistent. The company leadership agreed that the best course of action was to completely redesign their entire digital experience. The problem was that there was only budget allocated for the original scope. It would not be possible to allocate adequate project management resources for the full redesign.

I used XenBuild to track progress without PMs

In the absence of product or project managers, I used an early version of XenBuild to scope out the project and track changes on both the design and development ends. I and the UI lead co-managed the XenBuild documentation, with both async updates and post-sprint syncs to keep it current. This approach enabled prioritization of work and eliminated redundancy.

We delivered the site under budget and ahead of schedule

The final site was a consumer-grade e-com site that brought a level of convenience to wholesale beverage distribution that has yet to be replicated elsewhere.