Innovation Rocks! Turning a 60-Year Old Company into a Fast-Paced Start-Up
Three months ago I joined Simmons and promised to deliver innovation – innovations that improve our clients experience and that give them more value. I’m excited that we’re delivering on that promise, as of today, with the launch of our Simmons Insights platform.
Simmons Insights is evidence of what a team can do, when they come together in the face of a challenge. I know that, because I issued the challenge in my third week on the job, when I asked that we rapidly give our clients something new and hugely beneficial. In particular, we set the goal of “helping clients find new market opportunities in less time than it takes to grab a Starbucks coffee.”
Within three months, Simmons’ teams turned around the Simmons Insights platform, which make it easier for clients to find, explore and make meaning of consumer data. With a combination of our “Smart Search” feature and more modern design, we have cut he time required to find and build audience segments by over 50%!
Any of you involved in product development know how long it takes to overhaul a platform, from assessing user experience, to adjusting data structures to coding, testing and quality control. So, you can probably appreciate what our team accomplished in only three months.
But, there’s more. It turned out that our engineering team had also been working on a “skunk works” project to release a ChatBot app (Ask Simmons), providing the ability to ask a conversational question about market sizing and get an answer.
Yes, it’s cool to ask your phone how big the market is for “XYZ product” and hear it respond. Cooler than that, though, and much more geeky, is the back-end data efforts required for this to work. We’ve had to redefine data elements in a way that is conversational, so people who aren’t researchers can find a path through the data forest. Although we’re still in early stages, we think this conversational interface will lay the foundation for an approach to data that makes data mining accessible to the layperson.
I’m proud of the advancement that our team has made. They should be helpful for our users. And, I hope they will instill confidence that this 60-year old company can be as awesome as young start-ups, because we have a lot more to share this year!
Warmest Regards,
Andrew S. Feigenson
