As a SaaS company, Lyyti has always emphasised the importance of product development. A lot of work has been put in during the years, and now it's time to take a sneak peek under the hood. Lyyti's Marketing Manager Joonas Valkonen chatted with CTO Lauri Lehtonen about product development and future updates at Lyyti.
Lauri, tell us what you are most excited about right now?
"I'm most excited to see all the changes we've implemented during the past year to start bearing fruit. We began a big modernisation project which means more investments in product development and the team itself. We also changed the way we work. We started using “Scrum” last year. Adopting a new methodology naturally takes some time, but witnessing the results has revitalised us. I am very proud of the team and how they handled the changes. We have also paid a lot of attention to improving and automating processes that will help us test and publish new updates faster than before."
The modernisation project essentially means re-designing and changing the product's core. Has it required some balancing from the product team?
"Since we started identifying and designing the modernisation project, we have had to constantly balance between the development of new features that would benefit our customers right now and the crucial maintenance development that keeps our product up and running for years into the future. We want to be able to deliver new features right now, but also take our time to develop cool things for the future."
You seem pretty busy! What can be expected from the product team this year?
**Insert nervous laughter** "Even though re-building the core of Lyyti is the main focus this spring, we are still going to publish smaller updates on the features. These, for example, are related to our Paytrail payments in Finland. There are mandatory updates needed to keep our service going, but that is work as usual. In the latter half of the year, we can bring bigger updates visible to customers. What these updates are, I will be able to tell you a bit later."
C'moon Lauri, there must be something you can share with us right away?
"Ok, I'll let you in on a secret. We are releasing features related to Event Success Management. For example, reporting and dashboards for your events are one of the focus areas we are working on, and we will provide exciting updates later in the year. Users will also be able to ask Experience Value Score feedback without creating an event around it. This has been a very heavily requested feature from our customers."
Customers have always been the center of attention when deciding on future product development and new features to launch. Can the team fill all the needs and requests?
"When deciding on what we are going to do next, we evaluate the customer feedback as well as our Sales team's ideas they have acquired while on the field. Because the Product team works in the "engine room," we thrive on the insights we get about the customer's day-to-day work and how they use Lyyti.
After evaluating the amount of work an update would require and how the feature fits into our solution, we prioritise the updates. I can say that for most of our updates, the idea has come from the customers. When a development idea comes from Lyyti, it is usually related to aspects like user management or billing since they affect our internal work."
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