At the beginning of this year, I rejoined Kurtosys as the Associate Head of Product. I returned to take on this new role because it presents an exciting opportunity to capitalize on the foundations of a fantastic product. To build it out to provide our clients with even more innovative solutions as we enhance our product to serve the digital and reporting needs of the investment management industry.
I was also able to capitalize on this year’s preparations and kick off this new direction recently at our client day. Myself, Hanri Calitz and Natalie Kennedy from the product teams took our clients through the product vision and how we plan to get there. Moving forward, it is of core importance to us at Kurtosys that our clients become an integral part of our product development as we share our strategy, planned features, and the steps that we are taking to realize our vision.
Industry-leading, consumer grade data and insight delivery for investment management firms
A vision describes the future you are trying to create. Our vision at Kurtosys is to become a product-led company with an industry-leading consumer grade product for investment management reporting and digital solutions.
The Kurtosys application should be one of the first considerations for investment managers when reviewing their digital and reporting options. It is an established product with a proven track record, earned over many years of developing great solutions for our clients. Our next step is to grow from an organization that serves the needs of 50 clients to one that serves 500 or 1000 clients. We will achieve this if we focus on becoming a truly product-led organization.
Getting onboard our product journey
To achieve our vision, we need to deliver on two strategic milestones:
- Engage our clients and collaborate on our product journey
- Balance product capability vs usability
Underpinning these milestones and ultimately getting us closer to our clients, we are focusing on four main principles:
One of the key areas of focus for us is client education, our goal is to truly empower our clients to take control of their solutions built with the Kurtosys App. Once our clients understand the product, together we can streamline best-practice implementations to allow efficiency, agile team structures and scalability.
To take us further still, we are actively working towards approaches that allow for a two-way product communication channel between us and our clients. The benefits of working together in this way will enable us to have constructive and transparent collaboration around the evolution of our product prior to features being launched.
It will also pave the way for clear alignment so that we solve the right problems, addressing the most important needs for the industry and closing the most pressing gaps. Client engagement and input will be critical to the successful growth of our product.
Staying true to this process will allow us to deliver on our strategic product milestones.
Enabling our clients
More often than not, a suite of products, its roadmap, and development schedule can be unclear and confusing to the consumer, this is why we have started to create our Product Catalog. The catalog is a simple framework to better understand the Kurtosys application and the solutions that can be built off it.
The Kurtosys product catalog gives a central overview of all the modules and capabilities in the application that are available to our clients. It aids in educating users how to configure digital and reporting solutions using our platform.
On the snapshot of the product catalog above, you can see clearly which modules within the application are available and ready to use across the four main use cases for our technology (Investor Reports, Investment Websites, Portals and Invesment tools).
A wide range of product training materials alongside our comprehensive help site and client portals are available to help users understand how to optimize for their specific use cases. The real benefit for our industry will come from the continued collaboration between our clients and our internal teams over time. Our commitment and ongoing investment is to update these resources, improving our solutions to always focus on the future and solving broad industry issues rather than bespoke problems.
Our commitment and ongoing investment is to update these resources, improving our solutions to always focus on the future and solving broad industry issues rather than bespoke problems.
Our clients have made it clear that they want to be involved in planning initiatives of the roadmap and we are listening. To complement the product catalog we are working on providing a more transparent view of our product roadmap as we track progress against it in real-time. Soon clients will start to receive quarterly reviews and workshops covering product roadmap progression and development, with another option of real-time access via a log-in following shortly after. These regular product workshops (online and in-person) will also be critical to showcase our features, ensuring our clients have a view of what is available currently, what is coming up next and where we are in the product lifecycle.
Capability vs Usability
The second strategic milestone focuses on the product initiatives in our roadmap. Ongoing client feedback, coupled with our continuous research has shown us that (now more than ever) striking a balance between building additional capability versus deepening and enhancing usability as we evolve our product set is a major priority.
To enable our clients and implementation partners to use our product, take control, and manage their solutions, our product needs to be increasingly intuitive and user-friendly – hence our target is to make the entire Kurtosys app “consumer grade”. It is our mission to enable anyone of our clients to navigate through our platform, manage their data and content and configure their solutions with ease, minimal ongoing training, and very low support requirements (if any).
Exciting times ahead
Having set ourselves some ambitious targets at Kurtosys, we remain very committed to not only keeping our clients in the loop but involving them more in what we are doing so they become an intrinsic part of the product development process. Keep your eyes peeled for updates on product planning, workshops and events, as we evolve our product journey.
We recently hosted our second virtual product insights workshop for Q2 on 27 June. The content centered around our recent product updates and upcoming product developments in the second half of 2023. If you were unable to make it and would like more information, please contact your relationship manager.
