Elyvate

An analytics product for consultants, stuck before it started

Berylls' consultants ran their client projects through endless manually-updated PowerPoints — decks that already looked like dashboards, rebuilt by hand every time a client needed a status update or a final deliverable. A huge, recurring waste of expert time. So they'd started building the obvious fix: a dashboard that turns project data into live reporting.

When I joined, there was already something — plus a large backlog, several managers involved, no user interviews, no prioritisation, and one question sitting under all of it, unanswered: who is the client? An internal tool? A service to offer clients on the side? A standalone product to sell to anyone? Without that answer, no amount of backlog-grooming meant anything.

I was the sole strategic designer. I didn't touch the UI. My job was to figure out what this product should become — and get the people around it to agree.

Understanding the workflow before trusting the backlog

I set out to understand the reporting workflow myself, rather than take the backlog at face value. I interviewed consultants in the field and senior managers alike — and some of those managers told me I was asking questions they'd never thought to ask themselves. That was the first signal that the real problem wasn't the product.

From that research I produced what had been missing:

• prioritised features, tied to real steps of the consultants' work;
• the product logic and its dependencies;
• a business model for each possible direction;
• a multi-year product roadmap.

The transparency was missing inside the company first

Two findings, and they turn out to be one.

The surface problem was strategic: the team couldn't decide who the product was for, so they couldn't prioritise anything. But the interviews showed why they couldn't decide — the organisation was siloed. Different parts didn't see each other or share a picture of the whole. The dashboard was meant to give clients transparency; my research showed the transparency was missing inside the company first.

They couldn't define the customer because they couldn't see themselves whole. I'd come in to help build a tool for clients, and the real work turned out to be one level deeper — making the organisation's blind spots visible to it, and only then saying what the product should be.

No authority, one workshop, a shared decision

I had no formal say over the managers or the budget. What I had was evidence: what the interviews showed about how the work actually ran, and where each part of the organisation stood.

I brought it to a large workshop with the stakeholders and laid out the strategic fork — internal tool vs. client service vs. standalone product — with what each path would demand and return. The point wasn't to present my favourite; it was to give a siloed group one shared picture to decide from.

From a stalled dashboard to a product on the market

I gave the product a direction and a roadmap, and left after presenting it — so I don't claim what came after as mine.

But it's worth seeing where it went: the product took one of the paths I'd mapped. Today Elyvate is a live commercial platform — a turnaround and launch-management SaaS with multiple modules, run under Berylls / AlixPartners. A stalled internal dashboard with an unanswered question became a real product on the market. I worked on the early, defining stage; others built it out from there.

Strategy for a complex, multi-stakeholder product

My other cases go from research into screens. This one is the earlier, harder half: deciding what a data product should be, for whom, and getting an organisation that doesn't see itself whole to agree on it. It's the clearest example of how I work in enterprise settings — see the whole system, including the organisation, not just the artefact.