Customer Story

Belron plans and executes strategy for its global IT team with product roadmaps. Learn how ProductPlan helped improve their communication.

OrganizationBelronWebsitewww.belron.comIndustryAutomotiveUse CaseIT Roadmaps
OrganizationBelronWebsitewww.belron.comIndustryAutomotiveUse CaseIT Roadmaps

Overview

Belron is a vehicle glass repair and replacement group operating worldwide across 34 countries and employing over 25,000 people. The IT team at Belron is headquartered in the United Kingdom, with additional IT teams spread out across the globe. The chief aim of the IT team at Belron is to deliver new technology solutions, tools, and processes to the entire company, particularly in the areas of project management, business analysis, and platforms.

Key results

  • Standardized planning process for multiple IT teams
  • Synced high-level strategy with project management using the ProductPlan-JIRA integration
  • Improved communication between remote teams

As a global enterprise company, Belron faces many of the typical challenges of a large organization: dispersed business units, communication challenges, and many interlaced initiatives. Before using ProductPlan, the IT team at Belron struggled with building and maintaining accurate IT roadmaps to keep remote teams in sync and communicate the high-level plan to executive leadership.

Ross Nelson, IT Manager at Belron, came across ProductPlan when searching for a convenient, easy-to-use solution for building high-level roadmaps. His team had previously been using a number of different tools for building roadmaps, including Visio, PowerPoint, and Excel, but weren’t happy with any of them. Visio and PowerPoint took too much time to keep updated, while Excel didn’t provide the sharing options his team needed. With ProductPlan, however, Ross was able to sign up and build his first roadmap in minutes.

Challenge

Belron’s IT team supports over 25,000 employees with operations across 34 countries. Managing strategic IT initiatives and communicating the plan to executives is inherently challenging.

Solution

With ProductPlan, individual IT teams at Belron can easily build beautiful, visual roadmaps and share them with executives and other IT teams.

Results

ProductPlan allowed the IT team at Belron to standardize their product planning process and save time building and maintaining IT roadmaps.

The easiest roadmap software

The key differentiator between ProductPlan and similar tools, according to Ross, is its simplicity. “ProductPlan required no lengthy onboarding process or team training sessions. Adding a new editor is as easy as inviting them to be an editor on a roadmap, and ProductPlan’s intuitive interface ensures they can take it from there.”

“We’ve had great success at Belron sharing roadmaps across teams. The easy-to-use sharing mechanism frees up team members to spend more time executing on initiatives instead of maintaining roadmaps.”

The team at Belron uses ProductPlan specifically for IT roadmaps. The main audiences for their roadmaps are internal IT teams and executive-level business stakeholders. ProductPlan’s JIRA integration makes it easy for the IT team to tie high-level strategy to project details, while the Versions feature allows Ross to share different versions of roadmaps with different external stakeholders.

Seeing the big picture

During his time at Belron, Ross’s role evolved from managing individual IT roadmaps to managing a small team, with members contributing their own roadmaps. Ross uses ProductPlan’s Portfolio View feature to aggregate his team’s individual roadmaps into one concise view.

With Portfolio View, said Ross, “each of the team members can create their own roadmap and share it with with me.” Ross can then create specific filtered views within that Portfolio View and share them with various stakeholders.

“When we’re in a meeting, I can just pull up the Portfolio View and we can talk through where things are at, who’s working on what, and what’s in the backlog.”

Communicating the big picture was one of Belron’s main reasons for using ProductPlan. Instead of sharing a list of projects with stakeholders, ProductPlan’s visual roadmaps make understanding the overall IT strategy easy and fast for everyone involved. Using ProductPlan has also helped Ross and the IT teams at Belron be more efficient with their communication, drawing a clear line between their roadmaps and their backlog. “It’s very simple,” says Ross. “Strategy goes in the roadmap; backlog stays in JIRA.”

Talk to an Expert

Schedule a few minutes with us to share more about your product roadmapping goals and we’ll tailor a demo to show you how easy it is to build strategic roadmaps, align behind customer needs, prioritize, and measure success.

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