Behind the Scenes: Our Product Team

At Nourish, we are constantly working on new ideas and developing and improving on existing features. This is how we stay fresh, up-to-date and can provide the most sophisticated system on the market. It also ensures that your experience with Nourish gets better and better – making your work just a little bit easier.

Understandably, attending to all requests, managing a complex infrastructure and developing new features all requires a lot of work and a strong team to get that work done.

My name is José Reis and this is exactly what I oversee as Product Manager at Nourish. A lot goes on behind the scenes in our awesome development team, and I want to give you a taste of how we improve on the product you all love so much.

There are several input streams that provide us in the Product Team with feedback – all of which are carefully recorded, reviewed and processed. Your feedback – or the clients we work with feedback – is essential to this process. We also have feedback from our company vision and strategies, from our internal team members and from the support team, who are in contact with our care providers daily.

All of this valuable information is pulled together and we focus on understanding one thing – what is the specific need we are trying to address. Our design is all led by Ux (User Experience), which means we first understand what problem our care providers would like resolved and then use our expertise in technology to find a solution that delivers.

The first step we take is to map out the full user journey, with the key touch points within Nourish. We define a set of user stories, workflow, create prototypes and define a solution with all the different components it may involve.

At this point we create an internal feature specification – this not only helps to align the different internal teams, but it also gives our company the opportunity to provide any further feedback or insight.

What we do next depends on the complexity of the new feature, and the amount of prior research that has been completed. If the feature is complex, we share a prototype with a small group of our clients – usually around 5 different providers as Ux research suggests this is the optimal amount – and ask them to test out the feature and give us any feedback. If there’s something we need to address, we go back to the drawing board. If not, we move onto developing the feature.

If the feature is more straightforward and we have a very good picture of what is needed, we can bypass this stage and go straight to developing the first version.

Once the prototype has been confirmed, we develop the feature on our development platform. When it’s ready to go, we push the feature to our ‘Beta’ site where our ‘Beta’ clients have first access to the new feature and are able to provide direct feedback as to any amendments they think are needed. If we’re developing a particularly complex feature, this step can take some time while we release, review and reiterate until we have a feature we are all happy with.

Once that’s done? It goes live to all of our clients.

To an extent, it is – it’s a process that has proven to be effective and successful time and time again. However, there are many components to ensuring we get the feature designed and developed in the best way for our clients – and it’s important we invest the time to do that.

Our system is easily the most friendly-to-use and intuitive care management system, and the reason for that is because we take our ongoing development seriously. We do the research, put in the consideration required and always make sure it is tested directly by our clients.

When we release a new feature, we often do this in different stages. For example, we may release a first version of the feature that has the required basic functionality. We will then build on this version and develop both the functionality and complexity of the feature, as is required. This is called incremental build and it works with great success.

We use a platform that allows us to measure the adoption of all new features and we keep a close eye on this as it’s a great indicator of the utility of the feature within the care environment.

We release a feature, monitor adoption, make small improvements, and re-release. Job done.

Only joking – our job is never done.

We are always receiving suggestions of new, exciting features we could add in and it’s our job to take that all on board and manage our ongoing roadmap. Our future roadmap of developments is the holy grail of our development team – it keeps us on focus, ensures the overall system has a coherent user experience and keeps our target always in mind: to the make the life of care teams easier.

Rather than specific features, our roadmap focuses on initiatives, outcomes and objectives that allow us to maintain a comprehensive view on what we’re doing and why it will be of value to our clients.

Put simply, without a roadmap, you’d end up with a product that has no consistency, looks unfriendly and is difficult to navigate. This is why so much thought goes into each new suggestion – and why we, sadly, can’t always say yes right away!

Improvement after improvement – that’s really what we’re here to do. Last year we focused on improving our internal processes and have had great success in reducing the time from idea to developed feature. We’re now focussed on delivering the same high standard as always, but in less time. Challenging? Of course, but when you see a feature being used and hear how it’s improved the experience for care teams? It’s all the reward you need.

We have so many exciting developments coming this year that we’re building and we really can’t wait to share them with you all.

Hopefully, this blog has given you a peek into the world of our product team as we work behind the scenes to give you a consistently amazing experience.

Have any feedback? Want to ask some questions? Drop us a message.

To many more incredible developments to come.