📘 The Client: Evooq

Evooq is a Swiss-based WealthTech B2B company offering a platform for portfolio management, investment advisory, and risk analysis. With a technically mature product and an expanding client base across financial institutions, Evooq had grown organically through technical expertise and long-standing customer relationships.

However, as the company scaled, it became clear that the product decision-making process could benefit from more structured alignment and long-term focus. The organization leaned heavily on engineering and stakeholder asks, with little structure around discovery, prioritization, or roadmap ownership. PMs were seen as delivery coordinators rather than product leaders. Leadership acknowledged the need for transformation—from a reactive, feature-driven culture to a product-led organization.

That’s where Product People came in.

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🎯 The Mission: Helping Evooq Transform into a Product-Led Org

Unlike a typical interim PM mission, our engagement focused on accelerating product maturity through two parallel work-streams:

1. Leadership Enablement – align the executive and product leadership on a clear vision, strategy, and organizational priorities.
2. PM Capability Building – upskill Evooq’s 12+ product managers to own discovery, communication, and roadmap practices confidently.

This was a change enablement mission—a three-month endeavor to reframe how Evooq thinks about product at every level of the organization.

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Our Main Quest: Structuring Strategy, Discovery, and Delivery at Evooq

🚀 Launch: Fast Onboarding Through Interviews, Retros & Post-Mortems

When we joined Evooq, the product organization was at an inflection point. The company had ambitious goals—scaling client engagements, expanding product offerings, etc. We aimed to bring alignment across teams, strengthen strategic vision, and enhance delivery practices. Instead of jumping into execution, we began with one clear objective: understand before solving.

We kicked off a fast-paced onboarding sprint that combined discovery interviews, retrospectives, and post-mortem analysis. This gave us a layered view of the org’s dynamics, from high-level strategic direction to day-to-day operational needs within product teams.

In the first few weeks, we:

• Conducted 12 interviews across the org — including Executive Leadership (CPO, CFO, CCO), PMs/POs, UX, Sales, and Client Services
• Facilitated 3 retrospectives with key squads (e.g., Wealth Platform, Risk Engine, Product Platform)
• Ran 2 post-mortems with Delivery teams working with key financial services clients in Asia, such as UOB and DBS.

These sessions revealed opportunities to improve prioritization to become more proactive, strengthen ownership structures, and bring greater visibility to technical planning.

More than just a listening tour, this onboarding phase created alignment on the current state—and urgency to evolve. It resulted in:

• A consolidated list of 17 problem statements and growth areas, ranked by severity and cost of delay
• Groundwork for the leadership and PM workshop series that followed
• Early credibility with teams who felt heard, not just diagnosed

This foundational work set the tone for the rest of our engagement: bold questions, structured insights, and interventions tied to real organizational pain.

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🧭 Track 1: Aligning Leadership Around Vision and Strategic Bets

The Problem:

Evooq’s leadership team had big goals, but no shared articulation of product vision or strategic direction. Each department had different definitions of success, and prioritization was often reactive. Product leaders actively sought a unifying narrative connecting long-term strategic goals with short-term delivery needs.

What We Did:

Building on our discovery phase, we found a shared challenge: while belief in the mission was strong, there was no consistent framework to translate that into everyday product decisions.

We designed and ran a Vision & Mission workshop that united key leaders to craft a shared narrative. We followed it with a Strategic Bets session, introducing a simple but powerful framework to help leadership define—and commit to—3–4 company-wide priorities that could guide roadmaps across teams.

We also facilitated discussions around value alignment, product principles, and success metrics.

The Result:

Leadership emerged with:

• A unified Product Vision and Mission to communicate across the organization.
• Clarity around three strategic bets to guide planning.
• Alignment across CTO, VP Product, and CPO for upcoming product cycles.

These workshops unlocked focused roadmap conversations and allowed PMs to tie features to outcomes with greater confidence.

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🧱 Track 2: Enabling PMs to Own Discovery, Influence, and Outcomes

Setting the Stage:

Many Evooq PMs brought strong experience from delivery or project-oriented backgrounds. They were effective at coordinating execution and driving initiatives forward. As Evooq’s ambitions grew, there was an opportunity to expand those strengths—building deeper ownership of product strategy, sharpening discovery practices, and developing a shared toolkit for consistent product thinking across teams.

To address this, we created a structured 4-part workshop series—each session designed to build one foundational capability at a time.

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🧩 Workshop 1: Discovery & Opportunity Framing

This session introduced the concept of continuous discovery and showed how to break down high-level goals into problem spaces and hypotheses using Opportunity Solution Trees (OSTs). Participants worked through real product examples to practice mapping their current requests into opportunity-driven framing.

💡 Why it mattered: Most PMs had been trained to execute what was asked. This workshop helped them see themselves as problem-solvers and insight collectors, not order-takers.

🧠 Impact: Teams began experimenting with OSTs to reframe upcoming features. Multiple PMs expressed excitement about finally having a structure to say “no” or “not yet” to misaligned asks.

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📣 Workshop 2: Customer Interviews & Feedback Loops

Here, we tackled qualitative discovery. We taught best practices for recruiting participants, asking open-ended questions, and synthesizing findings into insights. PMs practiced writing interview scripts and mapping responses to product decisions.

💡 Why it mattered: Evooq PMs rarely had direct customer exposure. Many relied on secondhand feedback. This session gave them tools and permission to initiate discovery on their own.

🧠 Impact: One week later, several teams had scheduled interviews with partners. Others began using Notion templates to capture structured feedback.

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🎯 Workshop 3: Effective Meetings & Communication

This session was designed to enhance how PMs share information and drive alignment, both in written and verbal formats. We focused on helping them structure meetings to achieve clear outcomes and communicate decisions in a way that supports follow-through across teams.

💡 Why it mattered: With fast‑growing teams and multiple stakeholders, even small communication gaps could lead to misunderstandings or duplicated effort. Strengthening meeting practices and written updates created a smoother, more predictable workflow.

🧠 Impact:

• PMs began adding clear agendas to meeting invites and documenting key decisions.
• Teams reported better clarity on next steps after meetings, improving efficiency and accountability.
• Communication artifacts (like summaries and follow‑up notes) started to be shared more consistently across functions.

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📊 Workshop 4: Metrics, Outcomes & Progress Communication

The final session focused on north star metrics, input/output indicators, and how to show progress when feature work is complex or slow-moving. We walked through examples of metric-driven narratives and taught ways to visualize product health.

💡 Why it mattered: Evooq’s B2B nature made progress hard to measure. This session helped PMs talk about value, not just velocity.

🧠 Impact: PMs began revisiting OKRs, asking questions about usage tracking, and advocating for better telemetry support from engineering.

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🔧 Side Quests: Supporting Tools & Deliverables

While the workshops were our core mission, we also contributed to several complementary efforts:

• 🧰 Ideas Backlog Review: We reviewed Evooq’s extensive backlog and grouped themes to identify dead weight, repeated asks, and strategic quick wins.
• 📊 Product Maturity Framework: We benchmarked Evooq against common product maturity models, helping leadership identify blind spots and progression paths.
• 📝 Reusable Assets: We delivered customizable templates, workshop decks, feedback loops, and interview guides to help the org scale these practices independently.

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Mission Achievements: Delivered Outcomes

💡 🧭  Delivered 4 PM + 1 Leadership workshop to align vision, mission, and strategic intent

💡 👥 12+ product professionals trained in discovery frameworks, KPI-setting, and roadmap structuring

💡 🕵🏻 Identified and prioritized 17 key improvement areas across the product organization, ranked by severity and cost of delay, creating a clear focus space for leadership and teams

💡 📄 Prepared over 15 reusable templates and documentation covering product discovery, delivery, go‑to‑market strategy, collaboration practices, and team structure — including frameworks, playbooks, and ready‑to‑use tools to support ongoing product‑led maturity.

💡 📈 Defined roles and cadences for strategy reviews and delivery rituals

💡 🔁 Follow-up requests from PMs and leadership teams for more targeted training (e.g. 1:1 coaching and squad-specific sessions)