How Nectarine Health improved their cross-team collaboration and product development process

The Company

Considered one of the most promising Swedish health-tech startups, Nectarine Health's vision is to transform elderly care using IoT and Machine Learning. With increasing pressure from ageing populations and limited budgets, this is a task more important than ever. Their idea is that deeper insights can help to deliver better healthcare at a lower cost, without losing the human touch.

Since the start in 2015, Nectarine Health has massed a dedicated and talented team of 35 people from 12 nationalities, drawing on experience from Nokia, Ericsson, Philips and Resmed.

The Challenge

The end users of Nectarine Health's product and services are elderly people and their caretakers. Identifying and understanding challenges these groups are facing, and coming up with solutions to mitigate them requires several departments to collaborate and share insights.

Anton Smith, CTO and Head of Product at Nectarine Health: "We have five departments that collaborate in our product development process: Product, Tech, Marketing, Customer Success and Service Operations”.

Having five different departments involved in the development process has historically also meant that work is happening in a few different tools.

• Google docs has been the primary documentation and collaboration platform for the marketing, customer success and service operation departments. These documents are used to create Marketing Requirement Documents (MRDs).
• Confluence has been the primary tool used by product, and to some extent tech, when creating Product Requirements Documents (PRDs).
• Jira has been used by product and tech for development tasks and technical details.

This meant that there were at least three different places where conversations relating to the same feature were captured. The disconnect often led to misalignment and frustration between the teams, and created redundancy.

"We didn't really have an effective way of communicating the customer experience and product proposition we wanted to develop. Customer insights, concepts, user experience ambitions and the MVP were all captured in different ways, in different tools. There was no easy and efficient way to collaborate and align all the teams from marketing through to product, tech and engineering." says Anton.

The Solution

When Anton originally approached Delibr, it wasn't so much about fixing the problem of collaboration and alignment as it was to find a tool better suited for creating their PRDs.

However, he quickly realised that the entire flow of MRDs, PRDs and subsequent development tasks fitted nicely within Delibr documents, which had the potential to help bring the teams closer together.

They now use Delibr to tie together the whole flow, from Marking and Service operations, via product and design, and onwards to engineering. This way there's a red thread throughout the process, which ties together the workflows of the departments. This enables individual contributors to work within the same context.

The Result

Bringing the teams’ workflows together and making it easier to collaborate has been one of the biggest improvements so far for Nectarine Health.

"Using Delibr as the single tool in which we capture marketing and product requirements has helped us to align and refine our product development process." says Anton.

Anton is also enjoying the structured documents that Delibr offers, which has helped them to be more effective for laying out ideas and requirements.

"The outliner format in Delibr helps steer us into a form factor for laying out ideas and requirements that helps us to be more effective. We use a Delibr document to start with a high level MRD describing the users needs or problem statements, which is then used to generate lower level PRD Delibr documents which are more specific and that try to describe how to meet those needs. This means we're all working in the same place, making it much easier to collaborate." says Anton.