Launching the POC: IpponGPT comes to life on Slack

As a product leader, are you wondering how GenAI applies to your organization and your teams?  If you feel inundated by all the media, this is a quick and fun read to help you jumpstart!

In this blog, Part 2 of a 3-part series, I will share more about how we achieved a conservative $7k in ROI in less than a month (Click here to read Part 1). Translating that hour into billable time in a service business potentially multiplies it. Do you want to get started today? Contact us to find out how a whiteboard session could help.

In just 3 weeks and less than 12 hours of meetings, this is how we produced rapid value leveraging GenAI technology. It comes down to creative product leadership teaming with product-minded engineers. Here’s the overall timeline:

In part 1, I shared how our whiteboarding discovery sessions resulted in 57 ideas which we narrowed down to eight product concepts. We chose a winner to start a Proof-of-Concept based on a combination of high value, reasonable effort, and no blockers to getting started. 

Quick wins are important; you want to focus on something people care about and show them something as quickly as possible, ideally in days. Many teams make the mistake of wasting months perfecting a proof-of-concept (POC) that ends up being a throwaway. So taking the time to think about the main feature or functionality that needs to be demonstrated is vital. Users can focus on the value added from the POC, and seeing the concept gets everyone excited and thinking about new ideas and next steps. That excitement builds momentum and enables quick learning. In this blog, I’ll share HOW we made those quick wins happen. 

With the core idea selected, I met and led the team through “Story Time.” Story Time is our whiteboard-based approach, streamlining the Sprint Planning and Refinement ceremonies. It’s a lean approach that works well during Discovery to do what I call GSDF—Get $h!t Done Fast! Discovery is all about making rapid progress in conceiving and testing a product with actual users. Discovery should confirm that it is technically feasible and solves worthwhile stakeholder problems leading to financial gains. Once the market fit is proven, committing the investment to build the real solution has merit.

The faster you can prove market fit and technical feasibility, the better.

Story Time begins with setting clear goals for the sprint. The top of the backlog items are discussed, and new cards are created based on the sprint goals. The team works together to identify the highest priority cards in the upcoming iteration, which in our case was a 1-week sprint.

Based on the sprint goals for my GenAI team, we needed to answer questions such as whether we could import a presentation for consumption by the LLM (Claude). If so, would the LLM be able to answer the types of questions we wanted to be able to ask? And finally, what type of user interface would be best for our users?

Story Time event to brainstorm backlog ideas, prioritize next steps, and add the right cards to our Kanban board

In less than a week, the team imported our case studies. Ippon’s data practice is expert in using ETL and automating the collection of data. The team demonstrated this at our next weekly Demo Time session, and the vision of this custom GPT began to take shape.

Vision becomes reality - The POC of our top idea was achieved in less than 4 weeks.

The final challenge for our team was that we had proven we could leverage the data and make it available in such a cool new way. How would the stakeholders interact with it? We didn’t want to add a new tool for stakeholders to learn, so enabling it through an application we already use daily was desirable.

That is when we launched “IpponGPT,” a new chatbot with access to key corporate data that is scattered from various sources. It is accessible right in Slack, which is the primary messaging tool used daily across the organization.

IpponGPT comes to life on Slack

Stay tuned for Part 3 of our blog series, where I’ll share how our stakeholders reacted to IpponGPT and how we measured ROI. I’ll also share the key metrics that you should know about if you are interested in exploring GenAI.

Interested in learning more about Generative AI? Connect with Ippon for a whiteboarding session! We’ll use inside-out thinking to pinpoint opportunities within your business for cost reduction or revenue enhancement. Leveraging Ippon's FinTech experience, product leadership, and extensive engineering capabilities, we look forward to uncovering new possibilities and innovative ideas together.