Product Savvy Consulting, LLC

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm an investor with the Inova health system. We run a corporate venture fund.

What challenge were you trying to address with Product Savvy Consulting?

We needed an expert product manager to train seed-stage entrepreneurs.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Part of our commitment to driving innovation in health technology in the region includes bringing new products to market. Product Savvy are our go-to company for product management training. They provide good outsource capabilities and engage directly with entrepreneurs. They help define minimum viable products for software, get customer feedback on appropriate features, and develop an agile development process to build prototypes. They’re incredibly good at teaching strategies that develop human capital, budget, and financial models.

What is the team composition?

We work directly with Jonathan (CEO & Founder, Product Savvy Consulting).

How did you come to work with Product Savvy Consulting?

They reached out to us when we were making investments and recruiting. I’ve worked with a generation of early-stage entrepreneurs who don’t always understand the discipline, especially in software. Product Savvy has significant experience in product management, which is rare in the Mid-Atlantic region.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in October 2017. We've made three investments in seed-stage companies and work is ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We are 100% satisfied with the work they provide.

How did Product Savvy Consulting perform from a project management standpoint?

Jonathan is really good at project management and everyone is happy to work with him. He provides a hands-on approach and we communicate mostly by phone.

What did you find most impressive about them?

A lot of other service providers try to lock in their client base. Product Savvy provides product management and development discipline until there is a prototype and enough capital to bring those disciplines in-house. They’re structured to be temporary and manage those transitions very smoothly.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Trust them. They’re very good and have their clients’ best interests at heart.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I was a general partner at MACH37 Cyber Accelerator at the time of the project.

What challenge were you trying to address with Product Savvy?

We needed to teach our earlier-stage cybersecurity companies about product or program management. We needed to teach them how to define customer personas and how to build out the product plans necessary to the deliver a general release from product to market.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Product Savvy was part of our regular curriculum to set companies in a position to build up their products. They educated them on the entire lifecycle of developing and deploying a product to market. Over the course of 14 weeks, their team conducted eight-day instructional phases on how to define customer personas; how to present their message; how to understand their competition was; why their product was being made; and what key features their product needed to be. Sorting through customer discussions and product details, they helped build out roadmaps and milestone plans.

What is the team composition?

We worked with a team of four employees.

How did you come to work with Product Savvy?

We reviewed seven different vendors and gave them an opportunity to conduct sessions with our companies. We asked our participants which vendors they received the greatest value from, and Product Savvy was noted as the most satisfactory.

How much have you invested with them?

We invested $75,000 in total.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started in October 2013 and ended in July 2017.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
 
Their work helped create 161 jobs in the state of Virginia, generated 19.5 million dollars of additional funding, and 70% of the companies that participated in our program created a stable environment and were starting to grow. While we had a hundred different speakers involved in the program, Product Savvy was one of our core pieces and critical to our success. They even worked with our companies after our program to help them evolve into self-sustaining companies. Their team was always rated as one of the top vendors in our participant evaluations.

How did Product Savvy perform from a project management standpoint?

Their project management was phenomenal. Their methodology was extremely well-defined, and their skills in improving program management were one of the best I've seen in the industry. They were easy to work with and used Slack to communicate with us and our companies.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They had a good handle on what it takes for a company to get a product in play. They work exceedingly well with early-stage entrepreneurs and are incredibly good people. Their work consistently proved to be successful and was one of the best expenditures we ever made. Their methodology perfectly matched our model of program management and product management to get these companies up out the door. We're planning to use them again to help a health accelerator company and three venture investment companies.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I wish I could've used them more. 

Any advice for potential customers?

Define specifically what it is you want to get accomplished and clearly communicate your expectations. 

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the VP of engineering for PFP Cybersecurity. Our relative startup company works in a niche area of cybersecurity. We use side channel analysis to determine if devices are in a bad state or have been tampered with in some way.

What challenge were you trying to address with Product Savvy Consulting, LLC?

I needed experts who could train our team and prepare us for the Agile process. We don't have a large or experienced engineering team in-house. Product Savvy Consulting is helping us develop our next generation cloud-based software.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Product Savvy Consulting is helping us outsource development and build the entire cloud infrastructure from scratch. We had previously conducted all our work on a PC basis. Moving to an entire cloud infrastructure is a new endeavor. 

Product Savvy Consulting helped us plan this project by setting the requirements documents and preparing to begin the Agile process. Before starting development, we identified the developers' specific skill sets.  Our software has a Java backend, a MySQL database, and Docker microservices. It required a full stack development process to build, which includes both frontend and backend engineering. 

What is the team composition? 

The CEO and founder serves as our project management resource. We're currently working with three full-time developers. 

How did you come to work with Product Savvy Consulting, LLC?

I launched a startup company a few years ago through the state of Virginia's MACH37 cybersecurity accelerator. Jonathan (CEO and Founder, Product Savvy Consulting) was one of the mentors and teachers at their training program. He worked closely with us to help my previous startup and clarify our goals by creating user stories. 

How much have you invested with them?

We've spent $100,000 and plan to continue working together. Product Savvy Consulting is training our developers to take on more of these roles so we can eventually outsource less and have our own developers do more work. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We've been working together since April 2018. We're still early on in the development and are nearing the end of the second sprint. Much of the work upfront was organization. It took substantial effort to get us moving in the right direction.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Product Savvy Consulting provides a very valuable service. They facilitate the development, write real code, and program databases at a competitive price. There's no way we could afford this level of service with a local team or by hiring in-house employees with the same skill sets. 

How did Product Savvy Consulting, LLC perform from a project management standpoint?

As the project manager, The CEO set the pace of our project and trained all our staff. He helped us organize and plan as we started this project from scratch. He carefully explained the documentation we lacked the internal expertise to understand. Slack is our primary means of communication. We used Atlassian tools on an ad hoc basis, rather than having an established process. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Product Savvy Consulting’s support was invaluable as we turned a technical idea into a product. The CEO, in particular, has an excellent way of getting people to focus on user stories He helped us carefully think through how people will actually interact with our product. He has the experience to bring in several developers and quickly get started. That's really important when you're first starting a project, especially with younger or inexperienced engineers. He excels at helping us focus on what it means to build a product for users. That's why I recommended him to our CEO when I started my role here. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Have a serious internal discussion about what your project is going to mean. Consider the commitment it requires to start the Agile process. Preparing to use this methodology will ensure that everything isn't a complete surprise. Preloading your understanding of what the process will be like will help you adapt ahead of time and make things easier for you. 

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO of a mobile healthcare device solution company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Product Savvy?

I had some code that I brought with me from a different company, but I didn’t have any developers. I needed someone to take over the code base. The company I’d been working with was reasonably good, but they were all domestic, so more expensive than I could afford long-term.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They finished our product so that it could be used as a pilot. This entailed relatively minor modifications to the workflow. For instance, instead of inviting people to join, they could sign up themselves. Our device is a watch that can do an electrocardiogram, so they had to take ensure that data could be analyzed, displayed, and saved on it.

They worked on an iOS version and there’s a dashboard component for the web as well. We also provided an Android version, but they chose not to modify it and instead built the whole thing from scratch.

What is the team composition?

The team is made up of three to five people, including iOS and full-stack developers, testers, and some web people. We have an architect in the U.S.

How did you come to work with Product Savvy?

We found them through networking. I liked Jonathan (CEO and Founder, Product Savvy Consulting); he was smart and seemed to have high integrity. They seemed to have a good niche, trying to do product-based work, not hourly work.

Product Savvy was a little better at determining what the best architecture would be. They pushed me in certain ways, when my main concern had been the deadlines.

How much have you invested with them?

There were months when we spent $20,000–$30,000 on their services. I believe the total cost has been $150,000–$200,000 across two years.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them around July 2016. The collaboration is on-and-off. We still have a relationship and have another sprint queued up for August 2018.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We're still in business and I don’t feel that Product Savvy has ever significantly let us down on any deliverables.

There’ve been times when we were a bad client, because we didn’t lock everything down, we changed stuff along the way, or we didn’t give them time to do it quite the right way, which meant things didn’t come out well. I don't blame Product Savvy for those outcomes.

There were also times when I looked at the code and said “Guys, you shouldn’t be doing this,” but I had no problem bringing that to them and they would address it.

How did Product Savvy perform from a project management standpoint?

I give them a B+ in this area. They had the right methodology in place, our requirements were tracked, and they had daily scrums. They integrated with our toolsets, using standard Git, and another tool for internal requirements. They were never significantly off on anything; things may have slipped by 10–15%, but it wasn’t too bad.

All the basics for software development and project management were there. I think they might’ve struggled a little bit, being remote. It was hard to communicate sometimes, given the time difference and some communication challenges, but I’d say they did well.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re growing, which is a good sign. That confirms that they must have some level of success and processes in place, which is pretty valuable. Of course, it’s difficult to know exactly how well they will scale. When we started, their team was only 5–6 people, and now they have 14 members. It seems they’re growing in an organic way, and I would feel comfortable continuing to give them my business.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I hesitate to criticize them in areas where, in some ways, I’ve been the worst client possible. I’ve helped Product Savvy fix things at certain times, which is a little frustrating for me, since they’re supposed to be the experts.

They’re a bit sloppy with resources sometimes; they’ve spun up some load balancers that weren’t really necessary, and just let them sit around for a while. A little more of that attention to detail would be nice In the grand scheme of things, they might have created a couple of extra $30-month servers and let them sit around for a while, but, compared to $150,000, it’s not that big of a deal.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

There were a couple of times when I had to ask them why they were working on a particular item. Make the investment, at least at the critical phases of a project, and attend the scrums, even as just a fly on the wall. That’s a good way to make sure nothing bad happens down the road.