Creating my first product

The idea

1. The payer practice at my employer under the Healthcare & Life Sciences umbrella — which I helped set up and formalize — had multiple accounts from which revenue flows.
2. Two types of revenue flow from a SOW (Statement of Work): Fixed Price or Managed Service revenue — fixed amounts based on monthly or quarterly milestones — and Time & Material or Professional Services — hourly billed consultant and developer teams.
3. The goal was to streamline it so we could forecast monthly, quarterly, and yearly revenue.
4. Tie it in with the pipeline — the CRM — and you also have potential revenue, which adds to the forecast.
5. I defined Most Likely (ML) pipeline and Upside to differentiate quality of revenue.
6. I developed this for my unit only, but it clearly impressed leadership such that it was adapted across 3 units, forming the whole of our HLS practice.
7. My method of organising it based on SOWs and later Service Lines also found wide acceptance and became the norm.
8. I went through 8 to 9 different Excel sheets in that first year of development — all of which I call version 1.
9. Then came version 2 (our beta, used for almost a year through 2024), and we finally arrived at version 3 — the prod version — for which I teamed up with a brilliant engineer working for one of our healthcare clients.

The process

Testing in prod

1. Version 1 was one Excel sheet per account — a listing of rate × hours in a month for each T&M associate, giving monthly revenue for T&M. FP calculation was simpler: milestone values per month, tallied up.
2. I tried a bit of macro development and added visualisations — some unnecessary, some useful — but it worked and got our numbers in a row.
3. As it got adapted, I shared it over OneDrive so people could do their own update exercises and ultimately contribute to the forecast that eventually became centrally mandated. Ours, by virtue of being rigorous, made the closest call.
4. For v2, I tied up with an engineer — our in-house Excel wizard — and we developed a version that would give Smartsheet a run for its money. Formulas did most of the magic; manual labour was greatly decreased.
5. All this while, I had almost a year's worth of user feedback going into a ledger. We could not push v3 immediately: Excel had its own limitations, a complete overhaul mid-financial year was a problem, and manual updates were working fine for data called only 1–2 times a quarter. My ledger kept a note of every feature to include or delete in v3.
6. v3 — the prod version — went live this year. It is more automated, updating happens in a jiffy, has room for clearly called-out forecast adjustments with source attribution, and makes life easier for whoever does my job next. What took hours now takes minutes.

I am proud of my first ever product. The joy of developing it was what I tweeted about.

The design

You have to see it for yourself. Give me a ring or drop me a line and I will find a way to show it to you — easiest is to book 15 minutes on my calendar.