Learn how we helped Solitwork's team define a high-impact product strategy and create an intuitive onboarding experience for their new carbon accounting software.
Bringing simplicity to the complex world of CO2 reporting
- Led strategic workshop with core team
- Delivered comprehensive, outcome-focused product strategy
- Reimagined and improved the product architecture
- Delivered product concepts for smooth onboarding
BACKGROUND
Why this project was launched
Solitwork is a B2B digital finance company specializing in state-of-the-art analytics, forecasting, and consolidation services. With over 20 years of experience, Solitwork provides advanced software platforms that automate financial and accounting operations.
With impending legislation requiring companies to report carbon emissions across their value chain, Solitwork recently launched AFC Carbon Accounting - a CO2 accounting software with a vision to become the most reliable, practical path to compliance for carbon emission accounting in Europe.
The software enables companies to append carbon emission data to their financial transactions via automated spend-based tagging functionality, and also includes data transfer back to Solitwork's core application.
CHALLENGES
The key challenges we faced on this project
The existing software was in its early stages of development and didn't provide an engaging user interface, particularly for onboarding.
The main focus of the project was to improve the customer's onboarding experience by developing a cohesive product strategy - providing as rapid a time to value for users as possible.
The main challenges we solved included:
Creating a foundational product strategy
The product strategy was the core challenge in this project. With a new product coming to market and time in short supply, it's vital to form a clear strategy to ensure the value proposition, user profiles, metrics and other key inputs are all considered to ensure the new onboarding experience is strategically aligned, effective, and works for all stakeholders - from customers to Solitwork’s sales team.
Reimagining the onboarding flow
Upon logging in, users faced a lengthy list of transactions that needed to be tagged, either manually or through rule-based tagging. Creating these automated rules is also a manual task, with limited guidance from the UI. This issue was particularly overwhelming for larger companies handling millions of transactions, creating friction in the onboarding experience for the core target customer group.
Setting the path for success
AFC Carbon Accounting was an early-stage product only recently launched to the market, making the job of onboarding a critical requirement to attract and engage a sustainable flow of customers in a domain only set to increase in importance in the years to come.
SOLUTION
Phase 1 - Product strategy
The product strategy phase began with Solitwork’s team completing the Stoked Digital Product Assessment - a comprehensive survey benchmarked against other digital & SaaS brands at differing levels of maturity.
The assessment gave the team at Solitwork time to reflect on the current state of the application ’s strategy and quickly identify areas that needed to be addressed, such as the analytics and North Star Metric.
Following the assessment, we held a strategy workshop running through the results and defining all of the key inputs for the strategy - including vision, buyer profiles, value propositions, plus more. The North Star Metric was of particular importance as–given it measures the exact moment a customer receives value–it would play a fundamental role in the UX, architecture and concepts for the new onboarding.
SOLUTION
Phase 2 - Product Architecture
After finalizing the product strategy, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of the fundamental structure of the product's user experience. By focusing on the navigation architecture and core functionality of the solution, we revamped the user experience architecture to be in complete alignment with the product strategy. Our goal was to enhance the North Star Metric and optimize the time to value for users - making them see the value of the application as close to instant as possible.
Solution
Phase 3 - Product Concept
With a solid foundation in the product's strategy and architecture, we proceeded to elevate the onboarding process during the design phase. Our focus shifted towards improving the experience for new customers. To achieve this, our team created new menu structures and dashboards that were then refined and implemented by Solitwork.
OUTCOMES
The tangible outcomes and transformation this project achieved
With each phase of the workflow complete, Stoked had worked alongside Solitwork to form a foundational, high-impact product strategy and design a new onboarding experience. We devised a new dashboard view with the goal of getting new users to experience the value of the application instantly with clear metrics to show completion, along with a reimagined automation view to help users navigate the application easier and have complete confidence in their compliance efforts.
Stoked and Solitwork enjoyed a strong working relationship with open dialogue and collaboration leading to a cycle of learning and iteration that made the end result stronger. We look forward to continuing working with the Solitwork team in the coming years as AFC Carbon Accounting is adopted more widely in the market.
The collaboration with Stoked has been both pleasant and productive.
Stoked was able to quickly understand the issues and aspirations and provided much guidance in the process.
The results generated by our collaboration have helped us focus on bringing value to our customers in a very clear and concise way.
We look forward to a long and fruitful partnership with Stoked.
Asger Sørensen, CTO Solitwork