SenseHQ
Background
Sense was set up in 2015 to make the relationship between agencies, consultants and their clients more personalized. The company contains of 10 engineers, 1 product manager and 1 product designer. They follow the version of Agile and doesn’t force their employees to use a method. It has developed customer centric application. With the research, they found out that 20-30% of the employee leave on the 1st day of the job. It spoils the reputation of staffing company and makes loss. Sense help such companies to analyze the quality of employees based on his/her engagement. They use different platforms to engage with contractors and employees. With the help of machine learning they gather data. Analysis it after cleaning the data and send it to staffing companies to choose right candidate for the job. Currently they have 50 customers and all of them are from staffing industry. They believe their idea is novel and there is no competitor in current market. “We solve real problem”, said by CEO Anil Dharni. The business model of the company is B-to-B and earns their revenue by consulting business to hire talent. With the introduction of new electronic media in market, they are continuously innovating themselves to engage with candidates. They commercialize the innovation.
Innovation
Input
SenseHQ believes that innovation happens from anyone working with, or using, the platform. Indeed, that the employees and the users are most likely the people realizing a need for updates, changes, problems etc. Currently, the company is relatively small with a team of 15 employees. Therefore, if someone has an idea in terms of innovation, the entire company can have a meeting where they have a discussion about the idea. During the meeting, the team primary focuses on 5 factors in order to decide if the idea, i.e. project, should go into process. The factors, or questions, are (1) is the idea unique and how? (2) Timing i.e. why now? (3) What is the real problem and do we have a solution? (4) will the idea generate a (high) revenue? (5) Can the idea be further developed later on i.e. is it any potential for growth?
What sense also highlighted was the importance of sustainability i.e. focus on long term. Furthermore, Sense believes many companies fail because they focus too much on speed i.e. are acting like everything was a sprint while it should be a marathon.
Process
As a small company Sense is very flexible in its process to innovation. Building enterprise software in a non competitive market allows them to deliver the product features their customers ask for.
A team is comprised of 10 devs, 1 salesperson, 1 designer, and 1 PM.
-50% of the team is focused on innovation and 50% is focused on maintenance.
Every tool the companies uses is collaborative in nature, which mirrors the company culture of communication. People are allowed to freely share ideas and build up to a MSP. (minimum sellable product)
Output
SenseHQ mentioned they have certain areas they focus on when measuring success. They measure success based on two metrics:
- Engagement – daily active users
- Revenue
The two measures decides whether a project or implementation is successful vs failed. They also work with a lot of text feedback in order to measure the engagement as well as user satisfaction. More, the engagement is measured through acceptance among customers. Meaning, if the customers like it and use, they will pay for the product or service. Therefore, creating revenue for the company. In other words, the two metrics will connect since more engagement will automatically lead to more paying users which results in higher revenue. In order to to create more engagement, SenseHQ focuses a lot on its users by sending out surveys. The feedback from surveys are then analyzed to create a better experience and therefore more engagement with a better product.