How Product People Influenced Strategic Decision Making

The Client

Our client, a growing speech therapy practice serving an expanding patient base and catering to children, brought us on as they prepared to scale. The team recognized an opportunity to improve its practice-management setup, especially around integrations, duplicate data entry, therapy-series setup, cancellations, and rescheduling workflows.

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The Mission: Product Ops and Software Strategy

Product People helped the client turn software uncertainty into a decision-ready roadmap in four weeks. The pro bono mission gave the team clear evidence on what to keep, buy, integrate, or build across appointment management, patient booking, documentation, billing, waitlists, automation, and third-party booking marketplaces.

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Our Main Quest: Turn software uncertainty into a decision-ready roadmap

Launch: Onboarded Very Fast

We created a shared view of the highest-impact workflow opportunities by translating and reviewing existing German process documentation, mapping the patient and therapist journey, and aligning the research around concrete operational needs. Interviews and a therapist workflow survey clarified where a future setup could reduce repeated administrative effort and improve day-to-day work.

Explore and Conquer: Find the strongest path to scale

The mission produced a practical software direction and a testable booking-channel strategy by addressing two connected opportunities: selecting the right near-term practice-management path and evaluating the long-term role of a third-party booking marketplace.

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Initiatives

Initiative 1: Choose Buy Before Build

Problem: the client recognized an opportunity to make a confident build-vs-buy decision before committing to a custom practice-management platform with meaningful cost, risk, and delivery implications.

What we did (tied to results):

• Reduced decision risk by translating operational needs into a structured requirements matrix and comparing shortlisted systems against it.
• Established a clear leading option: it performed well in 12 of 14 requirement categories and was the only shortlisted system with native integration to the client’s existing booking marketplace.
• Preserved a cost-focused alternative: a cloud-based, therapy-specific platform offered an estimated 30% reduction in annual software costs compared with the current system.
• Created a lower-risk investment path: estimates showed that postponing a custom build would avoid a significant five-figure upfront investment, months of development, and substantial ongoing product, engineering, legal, security, and maintenance costs.

Initiative 2: Validate the Booking-Channel Strategy

Problem: the client saw an opportunity to better understand which bookings came from a third-party marketplace versus its own marketing, while also reducing the manual re-entry work connected to marketplace bookings.

What we did (tied to results):

• Protected patient acquisition while creating a testable path to savings by recommending that the client retain its established booking marketplace while comparing its performance against direct website booking.
• Defined a two-scenario test measuring bookings per day and administrative workload over two-to-four-week periods.
• Recommended formalizing phone booking and exploring IVR or AI-assisted support, reflecting Germany’s continued reliance on traditional booking channels.

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Mini-Missions: Our Side Quests

• Made operational improvement opportunities visible by documenting duplicate entry, manual recurring-session setup, cancellation handling, note copying, and rescheduling friction.
• Shortlisted three viable practice management platforms with explicit strengths, costs, and contingencies.
• Identified a connected workspace as a lightweight option for the client’s future HR, onboarding, knowledge-base, and operations workflows.

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Mission Achievements: Delivered Outcomes

💡 12 of 14 requirement categories covered by the recommended primary option. The remaining options were substituted with in-house automations.

💡A significant five-figure premature build investment avoided through a grounded buy-before-build recommendation.

💡 Up to 30% lower annual software cost identified through a cloud-based, cost-focused fallback.

💡 A four-week engagement converted fragmented workflows and vendor uncertainty into a prioritized roadmap, test plan, and low-risk next step: demo and trial the leading platform before committing.