Genesis and assumptions.
A multi-level platform for managing the company's products and services
Due to the fast and dynamic development of the company in the field of Digital Signage and Hotel TV applications, the company decided to organize its activities and build a specific tool to solve the multiplying problems and needs of its customers.
The BergOS system was intended to bring together all the company’s products in one place. Thanks to it, was possible for our clients to manage their applications and devices, and to build the entire working environment around their businesses using our tools and applications.
The company’s products focused on the platform consisted of:
• Facility management (advertising and tourism industry), i.e. building customers’ own working environment through the structure of facilities and assigning their employees to them who were to perform the tasks assigned to them.
• Marketing & travel applications for Digital Signage devices and large touch screens.
TV applications (including Hotel TV, Streaming, Information)
• Builders for the above applications, enabling the creation of applications without the specialist knowledge of our clients, which translated into the optimization of the costs of implementing new applications that were quite high and not every client could afford them.
• Integration and management of Smart Home & Hotel systems, i.e. the All in one place approach, which made it possible to solve a very important pain for customers, i.e. too many systems to manage various products within a given business.
• Marketing tools enabling campaigns and marketing activities in the above applications.
• Remote management of devices from DS screens, touch screens to auxiliary devices in the form of modems or hotel automation.

BergOS System
Product design process
Think — discover.
Discovery workshops with business and part of the team: Defining business and project goals, main problems and discussing what this project / product is and what it should not be. Attempts to organize the above issues with the help of Business Model Canvas.
Defining the initial user segments of the system (including the planned product development strategy), defining the initial protoperson and, with their help, creating the Value Proposition Canvas, and at this stage quite general User Stories, which translated into a solid basis of knowledge about users / customers, their needs and problems.

Discover — Research.
Expanding the knowledge about the main user segments by means of questionnaires and IDI interviews with various levels of depth of information collection. Their main goal was to verify whether the problems and needs posed in the given user / customer segments are correct.

Think — discover.
Verification of information and assumptions about the main user segments based on in-depth research, introducing changes and corrections to Value Proposition Canvas and User stories, which gave a real picture of the needs and problems of our users and showed a more detailed direction of development.
Research of market solutions in the field of management systems, not only in the form of direct competition, as well as indirect products or solutions completely unrelated to our industry, which gave a picture of what solutions to avoid and which would be worth applying to our system.

Think — ideation.
Preparation of lists of functionalities that were to meet the needs and problems of our users and customers, the Opportunity - Solution Tree, proved to be helpful in mapping functionalities.
Prioritization of functionality using Priority Matrix, but also taking into account the impact on business, product development and the clash of these plans with the needs of customer segments.

Make — implementation.
Preparation of user flow taking into account the main needs of users for various customer segments.
The next very difficult task was to draw a full system map with a breakdown for websites - marking the places where they connected seamlessly (flexibility was also one of the main needs of the platform, e.g. switching from device configuration to application settings and back), mapping all functionalities, including advanced application configuration forms.
Another related issue with the level of complexity on the platform was the mapping of the builder for developing DS and Hotel TV applications (Something like a WIX product).


Make — implementation.
User flows and system maps. Creating mock-ups was related to the implementation roadmap and spread over sprints, which resulted in the smooth implementation of new functionalities. Any corrections and errors encountered after implementation (whether on the design or development side) were broken down into subsequent sprints, ranging from critical errors to negligible ones.

Learn — delivery.
As the development of the system / platforms or even products can never be called finished, we had internal testing procedures after each sprint. We had to wait for usability tests, feedback from clients and users until the quarterly release of the feature group. Which, for the most part, resulted in the fact that tests and research were done sketchily and sometimes even omitted. The only thing that improved was the critical comments of customers and users.
Main problems.
Despite the fairly broad stage of Discovery, which highlighted the problems and needs of our clients. In the end, the business had a decisive say in what should be implemented and what not, only because "I am the owner and I know it better than customers" The effects of such an approach were usually deplorable, i.e. burned to anyone unnecessary functionalities (including large applications ) huge amounts of resources.
As the platforms and applications were quite advanced, the maintenance of specialists was very expensive and any major change in the business logic only generated additional unnecessary costs.
Another problem encountered was the omission of usability studies or even business insensitivity to customer feedback. On the other hand, there was again an exaggerated focus on less important problems and errors in favor of the critical ones that have been deepened and well described.
The problem with the technologies used, integrations with partners or soft data from manufacturers that did not want to cooperate (despite finding the causes of errors and developing methods to fix them - LG and Samsung did not want to fix them).
Very large implementation chaos caused by the lack of experience among people managing products / projects.
