Idea Group
A Comprehensive Product Management Lifecycle Solution

Many businesses strive to build and nurture their brand by devising a multitude of vibrant sales pitches and marketing plans to achieve their objective: selling products. Debunking popular belief, Bill Gourlay identifies the flaws in the current scenario, where business focus is distracted from producing better products, and instead over-invests in commercial activities to facilitate sales of lower quality goods. Part of this can be attributed to the fact that a product manager is seldom able to call on the support of an able product management tool, and therefore struggles to effectively follow their product management process. With an industry experience of more than 20 years, ‘Idea Group’ is changing the game in the product management space with its natively developed, well-thought-out product management tool, dubbed Prodigy. “Breaking the mould, Idea Group’s Prodigy is a comprehensive software platform for product managers built by product managers,” evinces Bill Gourlay, CEO, Idea Group.

Prodigy is filling the gap in the product management arena, where there was a mounting need for a tool that efficiently captured a product’s details and lifecycle process, yet took minimal deployment time and yielded unrivaled performance. “The first thing we wanted to do was to provide a cloud based Software as a Service (SaaS) model, promoting easier and quicker implementation,” states Gourlay. Idea Group’s teams identified the natural integration that flows between customer relationship management (CRM) and product management as a critical factor, leading to the decision to build Prodigy on the Salesforce platform.

Prodigy was designed from hands-on industry experience, as Gourlay had previously been responsible for creating the global product management process for a large North American bank. “We constructed setup templates, procedures, and documentation, but our foremost target was to replace the paper-based trails,” explains Gourlay. Today, Prodigy’s key features reflect this with aa document repository, clear audit trails, easy collaboration, flexible reporting and global access, to name a few.

Prodigy leads with its simple, comprehensive dashboard that gives a clear insight into each product’s status. Prioritized task lists, along with impending deadlines are displayed on the dashboard and updated on a real-time basis.

Idea Group’s Prodigy is a comprehensive software platform for product managers built by product managers

“An employee or manager can turn on their PC in the morning, or they can pick up their iPad or smartphone and they can see everything that they are responsible for on a single screen highlighted in terms of urgency,” Gourlay says. For organizations to instigate employee motivation and produce meaningful performance appraisals, Prodigy offers complete visibility across a range of flexible parameters, tracking how well each staff member is meeting their corporate expectations, and uses a bespoke scoring system to rank their delivery.

On the workflow refinement front, Prodigy is flexible enough to map out the current operational workflows, or introduce best practice improvements, for its customers. “We understand organizations can have perhaps five or six different workflows, potentially because they might have different regulatory requirements to follow, are developing products for different countries, or need to pass through different approval committees,” affirms Gourlay. “Prodigy helps manage all of this complexity,” he adds.

Prodigy caters to a broad spectrum of clientele—having been born out of the financial services, banking and investment management industries, but now also seeing significant interest from manufacturing, pharmaceutical, healthcare and the food products sector. From funds to breakfast cereals, Prodigy’s sublimity has proven to boost productivity, with its robust and comprehensive model.

Since its inception, Idea Group has been a transformational force, helping businesses bring out more efficient and effective strategies to deliver their products and services from office, or factory, to market. In the years to come, Prodigy will continue to add value to the product management space substituting inefficient legacy techniques with practical innovation based on business understanding.