AskIzzy Product Management

Overview

AskIzzy is a Community Services website which sees around 600,000 users accessing it each year.

People in need are often dependant on individuals who provide face to face Expert Service Provider guidance. This capability is mostly concentrated in urban areas & major cities, however the social problems help seekers face are widespread across Australia’s population of 11 million people. AskIzzy is well placed to provide support for this sector, my challenge was to work out how they could do this sustainably and effectively.

Building strategic capability

The AskIzzy team had done some brilliant user centred discovery work with Code for Australia, identifying 6 key opportunity areas. These included referral tracking, capacity and wait times, lists and sharing, data and insights, custom team notes and team management features. They had however, struggled to move beyond this stage.

Where I was able to provide value was in building a robust business case, implementing a way to actively manage, prioritise and estimate the work and successfully delivering this work to market.

Operational improvements included

Target audience

AskIzzy is a Community Services website which sees around 600,000 users accessing it each year, around 50% of them are Community Services workers and 50% actual Help Seekers.

Responsibilities

I was responsible for Product Management. Overseeing the development and launch of a new SaaS product features at Ask Izzy, implementing new features and strategic marketing initiatives. Improvements to product management processes and continuous learning capability were introduced to the product team.

Building a CRM of Service Provider organisations that use Ask Izzy. Over 1400 business contacts registered in the first 3 months Delivery of the 'My Lists' feature utilising AWS SNS push notifications, In the first 3 months there were 16,494 lists created and 3,957 informal referrals shared with help seeker clients

Strategy for sustainability

Given AskIzzy's growing user base and revenue will rise while our cost basis stays relatively stable, we predict we will reach our break even point when we acquire approximately 6.6% of our obtainable market.

This would be a total of 6,728 paying customers. Providing we can obtain seed funding of 2.2 Million dollars we will be able to cover the first year of our operating costs, allowing us to reach the break even point within 2 years of launching, allowing us to continue operations as a commercially sustainable business.

Constraints

As opposed to a not for profit model, our new commercial business model will put AskIzzy in a much better position to serve the needs of their customers and communities. This will be a huge culture shift for the way they work so will need to be carefully change managed.

Results

This was a great example of what it actually takes to innovate in a resource thin organisation. Proof that setting the right foundations, a coherent strategy and a framework to actively manage your team is what empowers them to deliver great things.