SAP Advanced Track and Trace for Pharmaceuticals

Summary 

The solution helps pharmaceutical production and wholesale companies to comply with regulatory reporting requirements.

As Product Owner, I was leading a team of 15-20 developers. The team was distributed between two locations. The solution was defined and developed from scratch with 13 co-innovation customers in just one year as an agile project in scrum mode.

Highlights: the solution has more than 150 customers, and it generates a double digit M€ revenue per year.

Major activities

• Customer co-innovation
• Product vision, roadmap, backlog, specification
• sprint planning, review & retrospectives
• solution testing
• release activities
• go-to-market activities
• product documentation
• presales support
• customer support
• partner enablement

Key to success: customer co-innovation

When we presented our business case, we got the guidance to find 3 customers for co-innovation. We announced our initiative and 13 customers signed up for co-innovation. We closely collaborated with this group and ensured that whatever we implemented was validated with them. Before implementation, we reviewed concepts and specs with the co-innovation group. After implementation, we demoed the software, gathered feedback and improved the implementation. This approach helped us to get the solution to a market ready state at our product launch in September 2015.

Key to success: strong lead architect

People matter. I am thankful that I had a strong team for this project and even more thankful for the extraordinary lead architect. Without this person we would have failed. He implemented an MVP as a side project within a few weeks which later was the basis for the whole solution. He was controlling and managing every aspect of the implementation and guiding the team of >15 developers during implementation, looking at the code, leaving comments, ensuring quality and good architecture. He was my main discussion person when adding a new feature. We spent hours in a small workshop room in the cellar of our building to discuss new concepts and shape our solution.

Key to success: the right product architecture

We started the project off with an evaluation phase and the objective to build just the reporting piece on top of an already existing track and trace product. During this phase we found out, that the basis was not the right one for the pharma industry with its insane volumes of serialized items. So we convinced our management to build a completely new solution from scratch. As already mentioned above, our lead architect built an MVP as a side project and proved, that our target architecture will work and especially will meet the volume and performance objectives of the industry. It was extremely important to challenge the status quo early and convince management about changing the direction as we would have failed with our initial approach.

Key to success: good product definition

Keeping a team of >15 developers busy with meningful work is not an easy task as a sole PO. Good product definition is the key.

What makes good product definition?

• a good product vision and roadmap
• high level concepts of topics to come
• good discussion partners to discuss high level concepts and detail them out (see lead architect above)
• constant customer feedback on concepts and implementation (see co-innovation)
• constant collaboration with the team
• good quality of backlog and specification
  • sufficient detail to avoid ambiguity
  • one single source of truth: backlog/spec in one place
  • always kept up-to date both by PO but also by developers

Key to success: focus

In today’s world it is often not easy to focus on one thing at the time and to not juggle with multiple topics. Often, a team has to take care of older products and releases while they also need to develop new versions. In this project, we had the luck that the team could fully focus on the development of our new solution without too many distractions coming from old projects. And from my point of view this focus really made a difference, especially if you are building a first version of a product. We had a tough timeline to achieve and we could only do this with a fully focused team that had minimal distractions.