From a single niche use case to an upmarket-ready MVP in 3 months
Key Results
- Geneia went from a lightweight Salesforce product to one that allowed the management of custom care plans, enabling upmarket pipeline generation
- Achieved a minimum viable product (MVP) in time to launch and demo at Dreamforce
- Increased subscription lives on the platform by 50%
The Background
When data science and healthcare analytics company Geneia came to CodeScience, they had a Salesforce product already, but it only addressed a tiny subset of functionality of their off-platform product. They were interested in finding new avenues to reach their existing customer base, as well as new customers they hadn’t been able to reach before.
In order to sell their solution upmarket to the big BlueCross BlueShield organizations, they needed a product that provided a consistent look and feel from the Geneia suite to Salesforce as well as integration with Theon, Geneia’s back-end platform. And — more urgently — they needed an MVP in order to demo the solution at Dreamforce, which was three months away.
Due to the complexity of their project, the Geneia team began looking for a product development outsourcer (PDO) partnership that offered the strategic Salesforce platform expertise they needed. Heather Staples Lavoie, Geneia’s President and CEO, described their needs:
“We were looking for a team that had scale and experience developing complex apps. We weren’t really straightforward in what we were going to build, so we needed a sophisticated partner to help us grow.”
With a hard deadline that was rapidly approaching and a hard cap on their budget for the project, Geneia also required predictability and transparency.
CodeScience checked all the boxes.
“With CodeScience, it is very clear what it’s going to cost, when you’re going to get it, and what’s going to be delivered. And we knew they had the experience, they had the knowledge set, and they had the team that could really move over to us right away and help us.”
Building a Partnership
Geneia had spent years cultivating a strong internal team of developers to handle the continued enhancements necessary for their product but they didn’t have the specific skill set needed to support an initial launch that could pass Salesforce security review and get their app to market quickly. CodeScience brought a team with deep platform expertise as well as a solid understanding of the unique obstacles of the healthcare industry.
“As our project evolved, we discovered that our needs were more complex than a typical MVP,”
Lavoie explained.
“We’re in a highly regulated industry with very risk averse partners. We needed a partner who could understand our needs specific to our industry and level of complexity.”
Geneia sought to establish a partnership model to create a culture of trust, transparency and collaboration, with a partner who could provide strategic guidance on Geneia’s vision and critical decisions. CodeScience knew that success would come from the synergy of the two teams working together as partners to better understand their respective domains while building a successful product.
Tackling the Solution
Exercising prioritization is key when dealing with short timelines for product builds. The CodeScience team scrutinized each feature, process, and flow to ensure that the product would be released on time and provide the functionality of Geneia’s core value proposition: achieving healthy outcomes while ensuring cost efficiency.
“What the whole CodeScience team understands is that to do things well, you have to invest in planning and analysis at the outset,”
Lavoie noted.
“Everyone wants to shortcut the work upfront in the false belief that they will save money. But in the end, you spend as much or more at the tail-end because you didn’t plan well enough.”
Knowing this, CodeScience leveraged key elements of the Salesforce platform including the Lightning Design System and Lightning Web Components to get the MVP to market quickly. The team collaborated with nurses in the system to iterate during the design process and ensure that the product was a good fit for end-users. CodeScience also created a unique security model that ensured each user only saw the personally identifiable information (PII) suitable for their job function.
“Every sprint felt like a win,”
Lavoie declared.
Continued Success in the Future
Geneia launched its product and was able to increase revenue and land a sizable BlueCross BlueShield account by the end of that same year, followed by another. Geneia also went on to build a secondary app on the AppExchange with the help of the CodeScience team.
“We didn’t need to look anywhere else,”
Lavoie explained.
“We knew we wanted to continue our work with CodeScience to launch a secondary product.”
When Geneia moved to Health Cloud, they were able to push data to more end-users, opening up more use cases, user personas, and value for their clients. They’ve successfully been able to migrate existing customers over to the new app and sunset an earlier version of the product, all while gaining net new customers. Geneia’s product and development teams also became more knowledgeable about the Salesforce ecosystem.
As Lavoie described the partnership,
“CodeScience went far beyond being a development partner; they were a business partner in a lot of ways, and continue to help us, long after our formal contractual arrangement completed. If we look to do work again on other apps on the AppExchange, we absolutely would look to CodeScience again.”
Whether you’re a long time partner or just now evaluating the Salesforce ecosystem, we would love the opportunity to help you build for success.
