Creating a new revenue stream inside Promethean
We partnered with Promethean, a global leader in interactive displays for education, to help them enter a new market, diversify revenue, and future-proof their business.
"We were able to put together a compelling vision for a new product that was substantiated by customer insights to share with senior leadership.
This work allowed us to get the investment and support we needed to move our goals forward."
Stephanie AllenVP, Product Management and Design, Promethean
Business Challenge
Interactive displays are an important revenue generator for Promethean in 2022, but leadership thinks hardware will become less relevant to the education industry in the future.
To mitigate that risk, Promethean is placing a bet on software -- innovating now to diversify future revenue streams and create a more resilient business.
Promethean hired Stephanie Allen to introduce SaaS products that deliver revenue and serve teachers. Stephanie brought on New Haircut (her third time working with us!) to help the team achieve an ambitious goal: shift Promethean’s revenue mix to one where at least 5-10% of revenue came from SaaS products.
How'd you do that?
Challenge: Software was an unknown space
Promethean is a heavyweight in educational hardware -- but software revenue generation was a new challenge for the organization. Market opportunities felt unpredictable and unclear to the team.
Tactic: Customer research + Problem framing
We led Promethean's team through lightning rounds of customer research to uncover market opportunities, then conducted problem framing workshops to make sense of an unknown space.
Challenge: Too many potential opportunities
Customer research uncovered lots of untapped potential. The team wasn't sure which market opportunities would have the greatest impact or which ones should take priority.
Tactic: Collaborative discovery + Prioritization
We realigned the group around a clear why, then used collaborative discovery techniques to prioritize opportunities as a team. Together, they chose a compelling, focused direction based on organizational context and market opportunity.
Challenge: Organizational skills gap
Design thinking and collaborative discovery were underdeveloped muscles at Promethean. While the team was hungry to be more customer-centric, they lacked processes and practices to get there.
Tactic: Teach-to-fish leadership techniques
We didn't just run a sprint with Promethean -- we taught the team how to solve problems in collaboration with customers so that future solutions could win in the market, too.
Where they are today
Stephanie and her team got buy-in and budget from leadership to build the solution we identified, prototyped, and tested together. Promethean is well on their way to bringing a defined, clear, customer-centric product to market.
Stephanie said, "I'm proud of the results we were able to achieve. We achieved our goal of getting project sign-off and we’re now the middle of a really significant opportunity and investment for the company to move it forward."
Want results like these?
Next sprint story: Credit Sesame
See how we helped Credit Sesame’s cross-functional product team and stakeholders discover and test a completely new product line.