Opportunity - Pivot from general analytics platform to healthcare innovator adapting to industry and AI technology disruption.
Glassbeam, celebrating its tenth anniversary, has a storied history of innovation and agile transformation. Founded in 2004, the company initially focused on consulting ("Act 1"). Then to accelerate growth, Glassbeam transitioned to product development in the device and log analytics space("Act 2"). This period was characterized by the development of a unique platform with differentiated intellectual property (IP), which enabled the company to successfully achieve its first Product/Market Fit.
However, the company's most strategic pivot came when Glassbeam decided to focus its GTM entirely on the healthcare medical devices market ("Act 3"). This pivot was driven by the realization that the healthcare industry had significant unmet needs that Glassbeam's platform could uniquely address. By narrowing their focus, they landed key customers such as Canon and MultiCare Health, enabling them to uplevel their positioning from a general-purpose, horizontal technology provider to a specialized, industry-specific healthcare solutions provider. It also allowed them to capitalize on their application of powerful Machine Learning (ML) technologies on top of vast amounts of real-time medical device data to inform identification and prioritization of critical preventative maintenance activities and effective device utilization improvements.
However, while they were early to market when they made this pivot and initially faced limited direct competition, Glassbeam are now in the midst of a broader technological shift as dramatic advances in AI, ML and Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly democratized and available for use by new software startups to enter the market to offer more intelligent AI-powered applications. This intensifies the pressure on Glassbeam to scale its business before new competitors reached the market.
As discussed in our prior blogs, Product/Market Fit is not a one-time milestone you can simply achieve and move past. Instead, we often need to repeatedly optimize P/MF to keep pace with changes in the market and/or our business. Glassbeam has experienced this first-hand over their company history and has learned to pivot to maintain market-leadership even in light of the blinding speed of continued AI technological advances. This blog post tells that story…
INITIAL P/MF: Pivoting into Healthcare to Accelerate Growth
The original decision by Glassbeam to pivot into healthcare was not just a strategic move but a necessary one. The healthcare sector was undergoing significant changes, and Glassbeam's early success in this space indicated a substantial opportunity for growth. By focusing on medical imaging devices, Glassbeam leveraged its AI-driven analytics to provide unique insights, including preventative maintenance, better utilization of devices, and cost control. Glassbeam initially partnered with a select set of healthcare imaging OEM providers and Independent Service Operators (ISOs), to allow them to offer expanded capabilities for multi-vendor analytics.
This pivot was crucial for several reasons. First, it allowed Glassbeam to address the pressing need for reliable and efficient maintenance of medical imaging hardware. By providing predictive analytics, Glassbeam enabled OEM providers to prevent outages, thus ensuring uninterrupted service and better patient care. Second, the focus on device utilization helped OEMs and ISOs enable healthcare providers to maximize the return on their investment in expensive medical equipment, optimizing their operations and financial performance.
CHALLENGE: Shifting from "Startup" to "Scale up"
Glassbeam successfully found Product/Market Fit around these Healthcare specific use cases; and experienced not only sales and customer growth, but also achieved accolades as a leader in the market. However, continued growth over time became harder and harder. As Glassbeam transitioned from a "startup" to a "scale-up" software business, it faced the critical challenge of maintaining its competitive edge by developing new innovations while optimizing its existing Product/Market Fit for larger scale operations. The initial success in the healthcare sector demonstrated Glassbeam's ability to meet the unmet needs of medical device analytics, but scaling this success required more than just a robust product. It demanded a refined Go-To-Market strategy, enhanced operational efficiencies, and the ability to adapt quickly to market changes.
This next phase of growth also necessitates a careful balance between sustaining the agility of a startup and implementing the structured processes and tools that enable scalability. The company must continuously refine its product offerings to ensure they remain aligned with the evolving demands of its initial target segments—OEMs, ISOs - while also expanding its reach in the healthcare market by adding support for new segments (such as selling directly to the independent hospital networks).
The journey to scale-up also brings with it organizational challenges that require a shift in leadership and processes. Glassbeam needed to invest in building a more mature organizational structure, and review the processes used across the software development lifecycle and ensure they delivered results that optimally aligned with their strategic vision and priorities.
P/MF OPTIMIZATION: Glassbeam scales through end-to-end Product Excellence
Glassbeam first engaged Tachyon Solutions to provide an external assessment of their Product and Engineering teams. This leveraged our unique Product/Market Fit framework and supporting advisory services. Using Tachyon Solutions' proven methodology and practices for rapidly evaluating a client's current state to identify opportunities and gaps, we developed an action plan that optimized organizational design, product development processes & tools, and GTM alignment to drive accelerated growth.
Some of the most critical actions taken addressed the following:
Clarifying Vision and Product/Market Fit: One of the critical challenges Glassbeam faced was aligning the full company on a clear and consistent view of its vision and product/market fit. Their geographically distributed teams often struggled with fully aligned prioritization and accountability due to lack of consistent clarity on their market, customer, and product offerings. To address this, we helped Glassbeam implement a standard internal vision memo process. This initiative helped define and communicate the company’s strategy and priorities, ensuring that everyone from leadership to sales, marketing and engineering had a shared understanding of the goals and objectives. This clarity was instrumental in aligning vision to execution and driving focused growth.
Unifying Product Management (PM) and Engineering Leadership: As Glassbeam rapidly grew, like many startups they experienced some organizational "growing pains", particularly in their Product Management (PM) and Engineering organizations. Initially, PM and Engineering were handled by different teams under separate leaders, with operations spread through organic hires across the U.S. and India. This fragmentation often led to misalignment of priorities and hindered the cohesive execution of projects. To address this, we assisted Glassbeam with restructuring its leadership organization, defining global leaders for Product and Engineering with structured roles and responsibilities. This move unified the distributed teams, aligned their goals, and improved overall effectiveness and speed to market.
Scaling Product Management Org and Processes: Moving into scale-up mode also required Glassbeam to adopt a more structured approach to Product Management. The company recognized the need for a new PM organizational structure, integrating Product Owners in India with PM leadership based in the U.S. This hybrid org structure aimed to leverage the strengths of both regions, ensuring that the product development process was both efficient and aligned with the company's strategic goals. Enhancements to the planning process also emphasized clearer definition of product plans, linking vision themes all the way down to sprint level, detailed planning artefacts. This enabled standardization through use of tools and templates at each layer, which helped ensure alignment of the engineering development activity back to top-level vision. This new process also introduced consistent prioritization, enabling teams to focus investments on high-impact projects and business priorities.
Elevating Technology Leadership and Delivery Methodology: Glassbeam's software development methods had evolved over many years and was not keeping up with many modern automation and development processes. To counterbalance the U.S.-led PM function, we helped Glassbeam recruit an Engineering leader in India, providing local leadership and fostering an Agile culture. This was essential for building mature development practices and improving delivery methodologies. The emphasis on Agile practices helped streamline the development process, reduce inefficiencies, and enhance the quality of software delivery.
Enhanced Product Governance: Prioritization decisions within Glassbeam were not always consistently understood and transparent, leading to inefficiencies and misaligned resource allocation. To enhance decision-making and communications processes, we introduced a new quarterly business review (QBR) approach. This structured and repeatable governance model for R oadmap planning, scope definition, and resource allocation enforced a consistent cadence of governance. By establishing clear guidelines for prioritization and investment, Glassbeam ensured that its product development efforts were aligned with its strategic goals, driving more consistent and impactful results.
OUTCOME: Strategic P/MF Optimizations Prepare Glassbeam for Growth
Taken together, the optimization of Product / Market Fit aligned with aligned changes to vision, leadership, team organization, and the integration of more advanced Product Management and Engineering practices have enabled Glassbeam to increase its velocity of delivery while simultaneously maintaining a high standard of software reliability and performance. Ultimately this is about helping Glassbeam scale, ensuring it meets the increasing demands of a growing customer base while staying ahead of the competition.
"Staying agile and maintaining a high velocity of innovation is crucial in today’s rapidly evolving market, especially with the disruptive advancements in AI technology” said Dave Ysseldyke, VP of Marketing and Product Management at Glassbeam. “We understand that to meet and exceed customer demands, it’s not just about having a great product; it’s about ensuring a perfect product-market fit and having the right processes and tools to support this vision. Our focus on unifying our teams, refining our product management practices, and leveraging agile methodologies allows us to stay ahead of the curve and deliver unparalleled value to our customers. This commitment to agility and innovation is what drives our success and enables us to continuously transform the healthcare analytics landscape."
The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu famously was quoted as saying “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” In a similar fashion, the work done by Glassbeam represents the first step on a much longer journey to maintain its innovative leadership and capitalize in a more strategic fashion on future innovations in the market.
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