heatfolio
portfolio reporting in small & medium enterprises
Collecting timely status updates from project managers and displaying them through a birds-eye view for executives. An overview & a full details report. Digital or printed. Showcasing the evolution of a portfolio for the past months and the forecast for the next.
Industry
Timeline
Every project has a purpose...
The seed for heatfolio was placed through a consulting project we had been commissioned to implement for a large energy player in Austria.
The company’s board of directors had been facing challenges in grasping the status of their portfolio of projects at given moments in time, in an accurate way and across all their departments.
Our assignment was to filter the noise and provide meaningful business & financial insights to stakeholders. We did just that, and soon after had realised that we were doing repetitive work each month. That’s when the idea to automate the service popped up.
The idea was never meant to lead to a project management solution, nor to replace any related processes. It was destined to become exclusively a portfolio reporting tool, providing core value to CxOs in no-time.
...which requires a unique approach.
After discovering a business problem, we’ve prototyped a solution for it and, soon after validation, we had turned the concept into a SaaS product. Open to any other customers facing the same challenges.
Throughout the product discovery phase and initial iterations in 2018, we’ve worked with a simple web form for data collection, on top of which we were processing the information for the executive reports manually. With feedback collected on a monthly basis, it was not long until we were certain on the core features the independent cloud solution should have:
allow project managers to seamlessly report the status of projects in a unified way and to track their reporting progress (projects already reported vs. still pending)
allow the organisation to tailor their structure of departments, projects and information being tracked
provide executives with an automatic, searchable & filterable heatmap report containing a comprehensive overview of their organisation in minutes: in their pockets or at their desks; a full, in-depth report was also available on a need basis
The solution we’ve built was robust enough to fit to a small team, but also to a large organisation. To achieve this, the architecture was designed so that it includes as little fixed or static fields and as many dynamic options as possible.
We deployed the tool live with the first customer, in it’s first production version, in January 2019. heatfolio was then marketed in a sales-led growth approach.
The ideal customer profile (ICP) for heatfolio is represented by small & medium enterprises (10 - 250 employees) active in the energy, insurance, banking & consulting industries troughout the european market.
Key metrics
- to product market fit
- 6 months
- active projects per tenant
- 50 - 60
- status reports per year
- 600
- users per tenant
- 20 - 25
Achievements
-
The application started from Laravel v5.6 and was maintained in time all the way to Laravel v10.
code -
Developed a multi-tenancy based system, with encapsulated databases for each tenant
tech -
Drove discovery & roadmap through multiple product stages.
strategic -
Facilitated multiple product showcases for new features, in public or remove
product -
Requested custom modules & integrations on top of the base solution.
growth -
The product was fully bootstrapped and achieved 6 digits in revenue.
product -
Became the active point of contact with key stakeholders.
growth -
Was responsible for product, development, design, marketing, sales and customer support between 2018 - 2022.
product
An overview of projects through the heatmap report
Browsing an individual project
Reporting the status for a project
The next functions got packed into one tool
Easy status reporting in a focused 3-phase methodology
heatmap outline & full details periodical reports
comprehensive & fast overview of portfolio status
hierarchical access rights & organizational structure
flexible reporting period & customizable project fields
responsive functionalities and secure operations
multi-lingual, supporting English & German
digital knowledge base available for end users
...and the technologies that enabled it
Laravel
Vue
Bootstrap
jQuery
AWS
Github
Sentry
Adobe Creative Cloud
Google Tag Manager
Google Analytics
Do you want to see the application?
Visit projectTalking legal
In order to comply with the European compliance regulations and a high data protection component required for enterprises, we have conducted or engaged the tool, together with our legal partners, in several data privacy & protection activities.
Cookies
Coordinated and implemented the cookie consent management, kept under active maintenance together with the cookie policy.
Policies
Created and performed ongoing adjustments of relevant documentation, such as the terms & conditions and privacy policy.
DPIA
Coordinated, with support from IT & privacy law specialists, a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) for the project, as part of ongoing GDPR compliance steps at the organisational level.
Audit
Engaged in legal assessments, with support from law specialists, for every solution or service vendors before taking the decision of collaboration or integration.
Notes
The mockups and information showcased on this page have been anonymised in order to serve a purely presentational purpose, safeguarding relevant customer data, personal information or business insights.
This SaaS tool and all related customer projects have been implemented during my employment with Sourcing International.