Finally we can officially give you the good news, or rather two pieces of news! A week ago the new software was officially released, it’s called Fennec and…. we already have several active customers!
We are proud to announce this product, which has kept us busy over the last year and has allowed us to involve external professionals, shatter our beliefs, understand our customers’ needs and provide software that from now on will be even more complete!
The greatest satisfaction? Already having active customers the week of the official launch!
But what is Fennec? What does the name mean? What does it do? Who can use it? How did we develop it? Slowly, slowly… We’ll tell you now!
Step 1: Forget my name
About a year ago, with the pandemic crisis, we also experienced an existential crisis. Like any self-respecting startup, we realised that we had to create a product that met the real needs of the market, without forgetting our approach of direct involvement and innovation. The Foxwin webapp is useful for generating new ideas and innovative projects, but we felt that something was missing. We decided to create a Hackathon to understand market needs and align them with new products.
We wanted to continue creating tools for active participation and we found the thread to do it: collecting inefficiencies (before asking for new ideas) is more engaging for employees and more useful for companies!
But how can this be done using software? We tried to think about it starting from theory: design thinking.
Phase 2: Design Thinking
Finally, the hackathon enabled us to find a need: to enable organisations to understand what waste is reducing their profit margins.We realised that we also had:
- a target market
- personas to whom the product could be proposed
We realised that we also had: a target market of people (personas) to whom we could offer the product; fixed values from which we didn’t want to detach ourselves: generating, in addition to new turnover for the organisations, active participation in people and attention to sustainable processes.
But how to put all these factors together?
We used the DesignThinking approach, which allows us to empathise, define, design, prototype and test any process. Another discovery, which we made our own over time, was Double Diamond: the process of opening up to many people to harness collective intelligence and closing in on a few points to focus on what really matters. This approach is easy to use live (we already do it with daily consultations to facilitate team meetings), but we were left with a question: how can it be digitised?
Phase 3: The co-design approach, interviews
Thursday 10 November 2020, new office and online strategy meeting, everyone from home. Massimo Curatella, who helped us define the product, asked us: “Now that we know what we want, do we know what the market REALLY wants?”
The only way to answer him was to interview the people involved! We didn’t want to presume to know what was right or useful, and through this approach we discovered a myriad of opportunities, many of which have turned into features of the current software.
Unfortunately (or fortunately 🤔) we were also challenged by several certainties! For example, we were convinced that management was aware of the waste present, but over time we realised that the iceberg of ignorance is a very common snapshot of companies.
How do you conduct an exploratory interview?
Most of the time we used a prototype of the software as an outline, asking the “users” for their opinions on each function.
Phase 4: The Fennec prototype
In order to have a prototype to test, you first need to have an idea, albeit a rough one, of the product. We started by presenting the software verbally. “Fennec allows you to collect feedback, analyse it, prioritise it, present it. What questions would you ask? To how many people? Against which criteria would you give more importance to the collected data?”
After realising that the three main areas to work on were collecting, analysing and presenting information, we started to create a paper prototype: “On this page you can do these 3 actions, which button do you click? Why?”
Not content with that, we needed to test it with real customers: the first working prototype was an excel file (we’ll just let you imagine the tangle of formulas) that allowed us to filter the most frequent answers. It may seem strange, but with considerable effort and hours spent creating table after table, the results were nevertheless seen: we helped a large retail organisation realise that it could save €7,500 per month by improving just one small procedure.
This field test allowed us to see where we could improve the product, creating software that shortened the time it took to analyse feedback.
And that’s not all we did! In addition, we also developed the possibility of generating presentations containing both the critical points highlighted and possible solutions.
Phase 5: it’s show time!
So what is Fennec? At the end of this journey we gave ourselves an answer: it is a software to collect, analyse and present the inefficiencies of organisations. We chose this name because the Fennec is a small fox that lives in the North African desert. It has long ears and is an extremely curious and intelligent animal. That’s why it immediately seemed to us to be the right name to represent this software, which allows us to listen to the needs of an organisation with curiosity and apply improvements in an intelligent, but above all participatory, way.
We have used it with some of our clients and it has given us much satisfaction: we have collected and summarised hundreds of feedbacks, criticalities and needs in a short time. From now on, this data will populate a database that will allow all users to understand which are the best solutions to the most common problems of each organisation.
Want to try it out?
Access is free if you register here