Product impact story: VTS and simplifying a complex sales process through custom quote-to-cash implementation

How do you become the fastest adopted product in PropTech history? If you’re VTS, it’s by empowering the commercial real estate industry to transform how strategic decisions are made and executed across the asset lifecycle.

Challenge

Working within the dynamic world of commercial real estate presents numerous inherent challenges throughout the end-to-end sales process. From varying quotes to fluctuating square footage, in order to continue to scale and maintain their rapid growth trajectory, VTS knew that they needed to remove the data disparities across departments to create a single source of truth. Unfortunately, that was easier said than done.

“The challenge really arises from complexity. You’ve got sales with their specific growth goals & parts of the play, finance with another set, and the implementation team with another; all with different bandwidths across an already complex quote-to-cash process. We had processes that worked for each team individually but lacked a scalability that integrated teams towards a common goal, and that’s what we needed for this to work. We needed someone like Thoughtworks to help remove the complexity and provide a solution that could align our teams on a single vision of having a scalable quote-to-cash process.”

Surya (Prashanth) Sanagavarapu – Head of Platform Engineering, VTS

To help VTS simplify and solve the complexity of data hindering their QTC implementation, we deployed a team of product practitioners, including a Product Manager, a Designer, and a pair of Engineers, to work alongside existing teams.

Activities

Following quick and seamless integration, our team began a series of discovery activities, including:?

• User surveys and interviews to gain critical insights and determine what success would look like
• Value proposition creation to map the “pain relievers” and “gain creators” of the product to the identified pains and gains of a customer profile canvas
• Service blueprint, where we outlined the user experience along with all required business operations required to deliver it
• User story mapping, where we illustrated and plotted the user’s goals, helping define and prioritize features for an MVP and beyond?
• Concept generation and prioritization workshops, showcasing 3 QTC concepts
• High-fidelity prototypes to showcase the unique features of QTC in an immersive and intuitive method for stakeholders
• Usability testing with a subset of users to identify the efficiency, effectiveness, and opportunity areas for the QTC MVP
• Release planning to coordinate feature deployments, work with stakeholders to identify priority features, and perform a phased rollout of the QTC MVP to support user testing
• Weekly strategy reviews and alignment sessions with stakeholders to validate product vision, product backlog and upcoming feature development

For more details about the activities above and other discovery techniques in product development, check out Thoughtworks Product Thinking Playbook.

After meeting with VTS stakeholders, it quickly became clear that an essential factor of success would be the alignment of people, product and process within a growing and dynamic organization operating within an already complex industry.

“Quote-to-cash was a unique opportunity for us to partner with VTS and find ways to empower their internal employees and customers with more robust and accurate data. VTS does a fantastic job being a data-driven organization and product, but with Quote-to-Cash, we were able to expand their product capabilities, introduce standardization and bring to light more mission-critical data that could be used for decision making. Ultimately, the goal was to minimize administrative burden within the existing Quote-to-Cash flow, while also tackling key user needs as it relates to client data being onboarded.”

Sahil Luthra – Product Manager, Thoughtworks

Outcome

“Thoughtworks delivered a simplified solution to a complex problem that could work across multiple products while accelerating our QTC implementation.”

Surya (Prashanth) Sanagavarapu – Head of Platform Engineering, VTS

At its core, the “what” was data, the “why” was growth, and the “how” was Thoughtworks. With our help, VTS broke down silos while unifying departments to work towards one vision, with clear visibility of the role each played in the process.