Digital Innovation and Transformation With An Industry-Leading Construction Supply Company
In 2021, an industry behemoth and incumbent in the building materials industry acquired a software solutions and services provider to kickstart their digital transformation journey. The acquisition was made as an effort to advance the larger company’s strategy to deliver technology solutions that help customers build more efficiently.
In May of 2022, the Crafted team was brought in to help push our client’s digital innovation strategy forward with the creation of a platform where builders could access project document storage, 3D home previews, online material estimates and ordering, delivery status, job scheduling, and much more. Read on to learn how through a combination of digital transformation, greenfield software development, and lean methodologies, we collaborated closely with our client to ship a valuable product quickly, which contributed to them hitting massive revenue milestones in 2023.
Challenges
Our client wanted to continue leading the pack in an antiquated industry while providing cutting-edge solutions to homebuilders. While the aforementioned acquisition was the first step, our client wanted to build more momentum and speed up their value delivery even more. Enter Crafted to help with their vision to make the dream of home ownership more achievable for everyone, positioning our client as the most valuable partner in the industry.
Goals
When our client engaged Crafted, they had three main goals:
Bring a product to market in under seven months
Balance speed to market and quality of product
Be able to demo that product at the 2023 NAHB International Builders’ Show (IBS)
The Crafted team would partner most closely with the team at the acquired company, which at first operated as an independent business incubated within the larger enterprise. As momentum and scope grew, the teams eventually integrated with the larger business strategy. Therefore, it was also incredibly important to build trust and get stakeholders bought in and aligned while balancing the breadth and depth of our client’s overall product offerings.
Approach
Crafted’s work was a mix of digital innovation/greenfield product development and application modernization via a Balanced Team. Initially, the team consisted of one designer, one product manager, and four engineers, and at its peak, grew to two designers, two PMs, and twelve engineers. We also worked with an internal team who translated all the data between the old platform and the new one we were building. Crafted enabled and helped grow our client team by onboarding/ramping new employees and pairing closely with our counterparts in design, product management, and engineering. We were able to teach some of our best practices like automated testing, TDD, CI/CD, and Kanban, while learning from their team about the nuances of the construction industry.
“A Balanced Team is like a braided rope. It’s strongest when the three disciplines are tightly woven together.”
At the start of the engagement, the team started working on a “super” minimum viable product (MVP) that could be tested with real users. In just 30 days, we were able to start shipping software in which artificial intelligence (AI) would analyze plans (blueprints and other associated documents like budgets) and send the builder a summary list of materials they would need to build the house. To increase the speed of development, we leveraged components from a well-known design library. While it wasn’t a fully baked product, we were able to collect internal feedback and demonstrate iterative progress, which got stakeholders to understand the vision and helped us gain momentum and trust.
Five months later, the engagement evolved quickly to a broader scope still focused on an alpha and beta set of users. Because our client already had 60% of market share, priorities shifted again four months later from a product for only new users to one that would include existing customers. In other words, we pivoted from greenfield software development to app modernization to be able to roll out the product to all existing users. We were able to do this quickly because we started small and ran a very lean project. Over time we built up certain features, like having a plans and documents section and the ability to annotate documents in realtime between different people.
Outcomes
Not only were we able to ship demo-able software to a production environment within 30 days of starting the engagement, but our client was also able to unveil and launch the new product at IBS in early 2023. The product then scaled to full enterprise usage by May of 2023. During their Q2 2023 earnings presentation, our client made several mentions of the platform and how it was helping improve digital adoption across the organization and the construction industry.
What Our Clients Had to Say
“Any company serious about high-quality software and digital transformation should consider Crafted as a partner.”
“All of our tools coming together with the new features being added in...creates a much more efficient process from design to construction for homebuilders. It’s very exciting.”
Conclusion
Our work here highlights four main things:
Crafted’s expertise in working with companies of all sizes, including massive enterprises
Our collaborative, hands-on approach that enables us to deliver value faster than large consultancies
Our ability to build trust with stakeholders to gain momentum and innovate
Our lean product development best practices that allow us to rapidly iterate and pivot based on what will drive key business and customer outcomes
Whether you need help with digital transformation, net-new software development, or implementing lean methodologies, reach out and we’ll craft the right engagement structure for your organization.
