Wrangling SaaS
Trent Walton • Dec 12, 2022
Luro provides a central, cross-discipline platform for product development teams to share their most valuable insights and resources.
Teams spend a lot on SaaS tools, but they spend even more on the time and effort it takes to collaborate with them. The cost of not having what we need to do our work is high—time, money, morale, momentum, etc.
Does this sound familiar?
How much time do people spend in meetings, on the phone, and responding to e-mails? At many companies the proportion hovers around 80%, leaving employees little time for all the critical work they must complete on their own. Performance suffers as they are buried under an avalanche of requests for input or advice, access to resources, or attendance at a meeting. They take assignments home, and soon, according to a large body of evidence on stress, burnout and turnover become real risks.
Problem 1: Access
“Hey! I got the user test results link, but I don’t have access. Could you add me?”
We’ve all wasted days waiting for access to the necessary information to do our work. Whether it’s a design asset or a research summary, tracking down the right person to give us the proper viewer role in the right SaaS tool is a real momentum buster.
Problem 2: Interruptions
“Sorry to bother you, but I need some analytics info for today’s meeting. Could you let me know how page views and conversion is looking this month ASAP?”
Just as often, we’re on the receiving end of requests—context switching chisels away at our days as we stop to answer questions and field requests. Instead, minds that could focus on innovation are entrenched in the ceremony of clicking, pasting, sending, and sharing.
Problem 3: Findability
“Ugh. I couldn’t find the ticket or the design specs anywhere. Could you send them ASAP so the team can stay on schedule?”
Whether it’s the firehose of chat messages, task-management tickets, or a sea of thumbnails, it’s hard to focus on innovation when everything is equally weighted. With many productivity and communication apps, a prototype that took six months to build and test has the same hierarchical weight as a request to increase spacing by 1 pixel. Furthermore, knowing what to search for becomes a miracle unto itself—recalling file names or who shared what becomes cumbersome detective work when all these things should be self-service.
We’re building Luro to be the central, cross-discipline platform for product development teams to share their most valuable insights and resources.
The most intuitive way to share across teams is by mapping SaaS insights and resources to the site map and design system.
For example, I might remember that a 6-month-old user test report for the sign-up flow lives in the company’s cloud storage, and the name was “Q3-UX-Sign-up-flow-dot-ppt,” which is possibly enough for me to go hunting for it. With Luro, all I’d have to know is that the test was done on the sign-up flow.
I visit the sign-up page in Luro, and I can see the complete user testing history in addition to performance scores, accessibility audit information, analytics, component usage, etc. It’s all there, and it’s all self-service.
Furthermore, while I’m doing my work, I have Luro open alongside as a reference. Suppose I’m heads down fine-tuning typography and animations in Figma. In that case, I’ll have a cross-silo view into every other aspect of the product I’m working on, informing my decisions along the way.
I can see the work of my teammates alongside my own, and suddenly what I am working on starts to feel more like what we’re building together. Alignment, buy-in, and shipping all seem more manageable because I can utilize so much more while doing less to maintain it. Let’s build together.