How we build product at Alan

• Key takeaways
• Organization
• Strategy and product vision

• A distributed organization with Areas and Crews.

• A product strategy that combines top-down and bottom-up approaches, with an annual vision updated each quarter.

  • Top-down through a central strategy document, the Strategy Pack.

  • Bottom-up through Product Strategy Reviews.

• 6-week cycles followed by a Cooldown week at the beginning of each quarter.

• The development process and organization are constantly evolving to maximize the time spent building our product.

A two-level product structure.

The two main concepts of our product organization are Areas and Crews.

Areas

Areas are responsible for a specific part of the product. For example:

• The Claims Management Area, whose mission is managing reimbursements (claims).

• The Health Offering Area, whose mission is creating and managing our health services for members and admins.

• The Growth & Brand Area, whose mission is to grow Alan by generating leads, converting prospects, and enhancing our brand image.

All Areas are equipped with a Core team of 4 Alaners. These are senior Alaners from the most relevant product communities for the Area. They are responsible for the strategy and success of the Area.

Currently, Alan has 9 Areas, each consisting of several Crews.

💡 Historically, we had an additional abstraction with Units, that grouped Areas. We removed this layer to simplify our organization and directly distribute responsibility to Areas and their Core Teams.

💡 Our organization serves our strategy, and we change it approximately every two years. Our next iteration will allow us to efficiently build global products for all our geographies.

Crews

Crews are cross-functional teams within an Area, similar to 'squads' in other companies. Each Area consists of 2 to 6 Crews. They focus on a narrative and clear commitments for our members, clients, or internal users. They have a fixed (but renewable) lifespan.

To use the examples above:

• The Claims Management Area is composed of a Crew focused on fraud prevention, one on document analysis, etc.

• The Health Offering Area includes a Crew for our online clinic, one for our health at work programs, etc.

• The Growth & Brand Area consists of a Crew for lead optimization, one for our public site and traffic, etc.

We use several documents and processes throughout the year. They are associated with the different levels of the organization, which you now know (Areas and Crews).

At Alan level

i. Strategy Pack

The Strategy Pack is a unique document that outlines our vision and strategic priorities for the year.

Each Area and Crew considers the latest version of the Strategy Pack to define their own objectives and prioritize their projects. It serves as the strategic reference for the entire company.

At the end of each year, the Strategy Pack is updated to present our goals for the coming year. In the meantime, any significant decision can shift its direction, through Product Strategy Reviews.

ii. Product Strategy Reviews

Product Strategy Reviews are used to review the long-term contract (more than 6 months) between Alan and an Area. This may relate to:

• A significant update to an Area's strategy or its success measures (KPIs).

• Defining a new opportunity within the Area, which would require increasing the team size.

• Identifying an at-risk objective and how to correct the course.

Product Strategy Reviews are long-term and thus directly impact the content of the Strategy Pack, which will be updated accordingly. Contributors include Jean-Charles Samuelian (our CEO) for the most critical decisions, Thomas Rolf, our product lead, business leaders (e.g., General Managers), and product leaders (e.g., Engineering lead).

Product Strategy Reviews are optional, and we try to limit them due to their high time cost for Alan.

At Area level

iii. Product Quarterly Reviews

At the end of each quarter, we conduct Product Quarterly Reviews in each Area, to reflect on the past quarter and prepare for the next one accordingly. These reviews help finalize the teams for each Area.

The Core team of each Area is responsible for the Product Quarterly Review for their Area.

The exact template we use is accessible 👉 here

KPIs

Areas have between 2 and 5 long-term KPIs to measure the health of the Area and its progress toward its mission.

• They can be technical or business-related and cover all aspects of the Area's impact on Alan's mission.

• They are often quantitatively measurable and tracked on dashboards.

• They are stable and do not change from quarter to quarter unless the main mission of the Area changes.

Examples include customer satisfaction with our HR experience, support contact rate for the Area's products, and the cost of processing a reimbursement. These KPIs are useful for assessing the performance of the past quarter and better defining the direction for the next one.

Roadmap

• Areas outline the direction they will take for the next 6 months through a roadmap.

• The level of detail depends on the maturity of the Area: new product efforts have little or no roadmap, unlike established products which may have long-term roadmaps.

• The roadmap shows the themes the Area plans to address and does not go into detail about the "how."

• Roadmap timelines are not firm commitments unless there is an external partner commitment, particularly for the needs of our largest clients.

Product Quarterly Reviews are reviewed by the product and business leaders of the company. For one week, Areas edit the document accordingly before reaching a final version.

💡 We recently introduced the concept of maturity for our product initiatives. Each topic is either a new bet (Explore), a scaling product (Expand), or a running product (Run). Depending on these phases, we adapt our product approach.

At Crew level

iv. Quarter Plans

Crews create Quarter Plans to support the Product Quarterly Review of their Area and to outline their objectives for the upcoming quarter. These plans provide a more concrete definition of what the team intends to accomplish in the quarter.

The Quarter Plans include the following elements:

• Narrative: A qualitative description of what the Crew aims to achieve in the quarter.

• Commitments & Tasks: What the Crew commits to accomplish, aiming for a 90% completion rate. The Crew allocates these commitments in 6-week cycles (which we will discuss later), providing more detail to the Quarter Plans.

• Dependencies: Any dependencies with other teams to prevent blockers.

• Risks: Security, legal, or privacy risks.

The exact template we use is accessible 👉 here

💡 We historically used OKRs. We decided to adjust our approach to use more comprehensive narratives and Commitments that better align with new projects. We were influenced by this article from Reforge at the time.

Product development timeline

You now know the organization and documents we use at Alan. This section will help you understand when and how everything works together.

The calendar year is divided into 4 quarters, each consisting of 2 Cycles. Each quarter begins with a Cooldown week ❄️. Experts will recognize the influence of the ShapeUp methodology.

Each quarter, we confirm and adjust the direction for the upcoming quarter.

This process spans several weeks and takes into account a mix of top-down direction and bottom-up suggestions to align the priorities and staffing of each team ⬇️

Step 0:

• Crews review their Commitments and Tasks from the first Cycle and adjust those for the second if needed. This is the Mid-quarter check-in.

• This step is independently managed by each Area.

➡️ The Area achieves as many Commitments as possible for the current quarter.

Step 1:

• Areas use Product Strategy Reviews to change direction if necessary.

• We edit the Strategy Pack to reflect 1) potential direction changes at the company level 2) updates by the Areas.

➡️ Product priorities and the budget for each team are decided.

Step 2:

• Areas finalize their Product Quarterly Reviews.

• Crews finalize their Quarter Plans.

• Product Quarterly Reviews are reviewed before being finally approved.

➡️ The direction of the Areas and the specific objectives of their Crews are finalized.

💡 One motto we adhere to is "We’re here to build products, not overhead."

We regularly iterate on our process to minimize the total time spent on planning.