CompuGroup Medical
CompuGroup Medical
Company Founded

1987

Location

Europe

Challenges

Challenge:

“It was essential that our strategy could be digitized in every way, that we would have immediate information with one push of a button — so that there would be no need to ask several people inside the organization what we’re doing with customers.”
Stefan Zorn | CompuGroup Medical

Stefan Zorn Chief Product Architect, CompuGroup Medical

CompuGroup Medical

CompuGroup Medical

Learn how CompuGroup Medical’s CLICKDOC product team has improved visibility and stakeholder alignment while maximizing Engineering resources.

Powering a secure information platform between patients and practitioners, the CLICKDOC team is now: 

  • Providing transparency at the highest level, offering unlimited CGM product business units access to CLICKDOC’s insights, feature, and roadmap
  • Getting to market 20% faster with Productboard by effectively tracking and incorporating insights to market relevant features
  • Adding structure to CompuGroup Medical’s international product management strategy and streamlining workflows
  • Improving collaboration between international product business units
  • Strengthening external and cross-functional relationships by contacting customers, prospects, and internal stakeholders directly when a feature they requested is live
  • Saving time using a single source of truth, with teams no longer having to ask questions of a lot of product managers, search on different sites, in excel, or PowerPoint files
  • Maximizing the impact of product messaging and launches in an enterprise company

An end-to-end healthcare solution spanning patient consultations through pharmacy followup, CompuGroup Medical’s reach is remarkable:

  • 1.6M professional users — patients, doctors, pharmacists, and others
  • 8,500+ employees — work together to synchronize healthcare
  • 56 countries — offer CompuGroup products

Yet, when a product grows to this scale, it can become harder and harder to understand what’s happening in real-time, let alone ensure alignment for the future. 

CompuGroup Medical Chief Product Architect Stefan Zorn illustrates the struggle. 

“You create a lot of silos — everyone is different and working differently,” he explains. “It becomes unclear what is going well and what is necessary, what the mission and goal are behind every initiative.” 

Here’s how Stefan empowered the CLICKDOC team to change course, adding visibility and centralizing information to help product managers more effectively collaborate with both their customers and cross-functional peers.

How it started: limited visibility, disconnected tools affect efficiency & resourcing

When Stefan started at CompuGroup Medical in November 2020, he quickly identified that the CLICKDOC team’s use of disconnected tools was straining visibility into feature progress and dependencies. Relying on multiple systems also affected the team’s ability to easily incorporate valuable customer feedback into the prioritization process. 

Stefan shares the consequences:

  • Version control confusion makes it tough to address risks, devote the right resources 

Without a single source of truth encompassing feedback through roadmaps, Stefan says it was difficult to understand the progress of features in production — an essential first step to addressing roadmap risks or devoting additional developer resources where necessary. 

“I saw that in the Product area, teams were using Excel and Confluence, and creating roadmaps in PowerPoint, so it was hard to understand if something was changing from a roadmap perspective, or to understand the timeline and context of that product,” Stefan says. 

“Since many people were creating new PowerPoint decks, it was difficult to understand which was the latest version.”

  • Product misses chances to incorporate valuable customer feedback, affecting growth

Leading CompuGroup’s CLICKDOC product in its early days, Stefan also saw room for improvement in the realm of customer feedback.

“When you start to implement a product in a new market, you need immediate feedback from the customer, and then you need to be able to respond. That helps you understand if what you’re doing is right, wrong, or if the problem is something bigger — something you want to implement over months or never. You have to build up a close collaboration with the customer, which is very important or you will fail. This is the transparency we needed.”

Stefan Zorn
Stefan Zorn
Chief Product Architect, CompuGroup Medical

Missing a central home for feedback, product managers needed a way to easily synthesize customer data and immediately act on it.

Stefan stresses: “when you have a feedback session with customers and a bunch of different working documents result from it, that becomes dead content if you can’t easily turn the information into a next step; if you can’t easily look back weeks later and know what to do.” 

This disconnect between discovery and prioritization leads to two problems, Stefan explains. On the one hand, teams can’t easily identify an emerging pattern wherein many customers share the same pressing need. On the other hand, teams may waste resources solving a problem experienced only by one or two loud voices in their customer base.

“It was very important for us to find a system where we could understand what was really important to customers — to determine how many of them were asking for a solution, and what the business value would be in building it.”

Stefan Zorn
Stefan Zorn
Chief Product Architect, CompuGroup Medical

This last part, Stefan explains, was particularly important. 

If Sales had promised prospects that a new feature was in the works, Product would need to be able to address any wrinkles in the plan. Enter: Productboard.

How it changed: a platform to digitize processes, inform execs, engage stakeholders

Searching for a comprehensive product management platform, Stefan says the following were must-haves: 

  • Digitizing product strategy 

“It was essential that our strategy could be digitized in every way, that we would have immediate information with one push of a button — so that there would be no need to ask several people inside the organization what we’re doing with customers,” Stefan says.

  • Giving leadership real-time visibility 

Additionally, Stefan wanted to be able to give leadership much more visibility into prioritization and roadmapping. “It was important for us to create a roadmap that offered transparency to upper management,” he explains. “Instead of asking why a feature was taking so long to complete, they would be able to see the development work, how many dependencies affect the process.” 

  • Involving the right stakeholders at the right time 

Serving the needs of many internal and external stakeholders, the CLICKDOC team wanted to engage these groups at the right stage of the lifecycle to drive the most value possible. Stefan’s team pondered: “how can we integrate our external stakeholders in roadmap planning and our internal teams in discussions on what we would like to build and when and why.” 

With these core needs in mind, Stefan decided Productboard was the right platform to drive the changes CLICKDOC hoped to see.

“There were so many construction areas in our product development process, and Productboard was the exact fit for our problems — with Insights, the feature creation process, prioritization, and the Jira integration. I also love the Portal function. That was, for me, a decision to say: ‘okay, we need this one tool for CGM,’ and we got started.”

Stefan Zorn
Stefan Zorn
Chief Product Architect, CompuGroup Medical

Of course, with the introduction of any new tool comes a bit of change management. 

Stefan first helped his team understand the areas for improvement in their current process, and then assured them: the transparency Productboard was set to provide would drive powerful results. 

From there, Stefan and the CLICKDOC product organization worked with Productboard’s Professional Services team to ensure the implementation process was as smooth as possible. 

From the beginning, Stefan says he had “a very good feeling from the support, from the people [at Productboard] — the engagement they showed to help us understand how the product works.” 

Partnering with Professional Services across multiple trainings, Stefan showed his team the use cases in Productboard spanning every stage of the lifecycle — how to easily push customer feedback into Insights, how to attach that data to a new feature in motion, offering engineers valuable context. 

He made sure the CLICKDOC team knew about the functionality of user impact scoring, assigning business value and effort, and much more. Critically, he showed leadership at CompuGroup Medical the benefits of having real-time roadmap access through Productboard.

“The roadmap view in Productboard helped us gain a lot of acceptance from management, as they saw PowerPoint presentations before, which made it very hard for them to understand dependencies and would have to ask questions such as: ‘was this for Germany? France? Clinical or ambulatory? What is the objective or business benefit?’”

Stefan Zorn
Stefan Zorn
Chief Product Architect, CompuGroup Medical

Importantly, Stefan ensured that the CLICKDOC team linked objectives and OKRs to features, providing more clarity around their roadmap decision-making to other teams and management alike, giving them a visual explanation of “why we are doing this earlier than this.”

One key piece of advice Stefan offers a large company training teams in Productboard? “We educated internal influencers so they could bring the benefits and emotions, the good feelings, to people in different business units.” 

After multiple training sessions with the Professional Services team that covered several functions within Productboard, Stefan says his team members really “saw the opportunity — they had fire in their eyes.” 

Here’s what Productboard is now making possible for CompuGroup’s CLICKDOC team.

How it’s going: driving efficiencies with visibility, improving cross-functional collaboration

These days, product managers at CLICKDOC are driving efficiencies across the product lifecycle and improving collaboration with internal and external stakeholders alike.

“We are pushing immediately the speed, the efficiency; people are happier, especially product managers and also Sales, Marketing, and Support. With the contributor license they now have access — before it was a black box.”

Stefan Zorn
Stefan Zorn
Chief Product Architect, CompuGroup Medical

Stefan explains CLICKDOC’s big wins with Productboard. 

  • Teams can better navigate risks and opportunities with a clear sense of dependencies 

“We have all dependencies from a product perspective [displayed in Productboard], and a lot of them overlap with other business units, so now we can see them together and talk about end-to-end solutions,” Stefan says. 

With this level of transparency, Stefan says the CLICKDOC team and those it collaborates with at CompuGroup Medical can now build what customers need in a more efficient manner. “Now, we can maybe implement a new AI solution for a doctor perhaps, and when we talk about it, we can have a lot of business units engaged in those workflows,” Stefan explains. “That’s the goal for us, to integrate the efforts of product teams.”

  • Teams have a roadmapping template other units can use to standardize processes

Stefan is pleased to report that, “now, we have a very important template to integrate in degrees more and more into CGM, for other big business units.”  This, Stefan says, could help the company develop a more standardized approach to product management, one that offers “more transparency into our OKRs and objectives.” 

  • Engineers benefit from customer context; CLICKDOC maximizes Dev resources 

Stefan is also excited to see powerful improvements in Product-Engineering collaboration. With relevant customer feedback and clear requirements attached to features in Productboard, developers working with the CLICKDOC team can now understand more about the value their work will drive for users. 

“From an Engineering perspective, what is the most important thing? They want to know that what they did was successful,” Stefan says. “They don’t want to create or develop something for the trash. Now, with Productboard, they have more of the feeling that they are working on the right things.” 

Lastly, with Productboard, the CLICKDOC organization is also able to more effectively manage quality assurance testing and allocate the right development resources for a given initiative. Stefan shares why.

“From the Engineering perspective and also the QA perspective, they can see now from the roadmap what is coming, what are the next topics. Everyone is more involved because they have more information earlier on. They can now say, ‘I need new team training to support something we’re implementing,’ or ‘we’ll need more resources to support the new app.’”

Stefan Zorn
Stefan Zorn
Chief Product Architect, CompuGroup Medical


Excited to help your teams collaborate more effectively? 

Sign up for a demo today!

CompuGroup Medical

Successful
customers

Previous Next Previous Next

Ready to make products people want?

Try it For Free