Startup to Scale - Using Kaizen at Unmudl Product

At Unmudl, we’re developing tools to provide learners, particularly working learners, with skill paths to learning and employment, while slashing time, cost, and uncertainty. Via Unmudl, every learner can get skills to go from Skills-to-Jobs on the shortest, most flexible, and affordable path possible. You can learn more about us here.

As we moved in the year 2023, our product team needed to change their mindset from startup to scale. This included how they thought about what is important to ship and deliver. During the initial startup stages of a product, a lot of new features are getting launched. When a new feature is being added to a product, everything is exciting, creates a marketing splash and often results in getting featured on a press release.

In majority of the cases, new features are the only improvements that your external stakeholders or competitors hear about. New features helps you attract new customers or help you upsell your product to your existing customer base. On the other side, improving on your existing product requires your team to work on problems that might not give an immediate marketing splash or press features, however these improvements are equally as important (if not more), improving on your existing product:

1. Improve experience of your existing customers (& helps in retaining them)
2. Helps your team understand your product usage from a customer’s perspective
3. Learn from previous product launch and subsequent improvement and scale to the 10x.

This aligns with the Kaizen principle for continuous improvements,Kaizen is an approach to creating continuous improvement based on the idea that small, ongoing positive changes can reap significant improvements.

Below are examples of product improvements that Unmudl team did following the Kaizen principle.

Different Views for Different Teams

After talking to our learner success team and college partners, and as our enrollments increased, it became harder for them to keep track of financial transactions with the enrollments and filtering them based on different variables. It also involved too many clicks to get the information required.

User Notes

As our enrollments and employer partnerships increased, we needed a way for our learner success to be able to share pertinent information about a learner, enrollment, reimbursements and discount vouchers. We added notes as telling a story with context is very important. Below is the example of the user notes.

Advanced Filtering & Flex Reporting

Our previous filters didn’t scale for complex queries or for large amounts of data. In addition, there were far too many clicks involved to arrive at the right information. To solve this we re-designed and re-positioned filters as shown below. The table views can also be configured to specific views for better visibility.

There was also a need to create a flexible reporting and filtering on our existing reporting feature. We can now export every data-point and generate reports based on our requirements.

Summary

During the initial phases of the product, startups can move quicker and adapt faster, technical debt isn't an issue and compatibility issues are easy to resolve, or enterprise customers restricting their movement. However, this speed and agility also leads to ambiguity in product direction.

To truly adhere to Kaizen, product managers need to balance two goals while delivering consistent value to customer.

1. Find improvements that will benefit the business and its customers,
2. Ensuring to prioritize those improvements as the product evolves and scales.