Crema

As the Solarhood team was forming inside the larger organization, there was a desire to create a distinct solar brand and validate that the concept would be welcomed by consumers. With growing competition from tech powerhouses, the Solarhood team wanted to move quickly and efficiently and decided to hire an outside team. That’s where Crema came in.

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Over the course of several years, our two teams collaborated on multiple phases of the Solarhood product. Each of these phases have presented market opportunities that are continuing to evolve today. The phases Crema was involved in broke down as follows:

• Product Branding, Prototyping and Validation
• Mobile Development Revitilization, B2B exploration  
• Mobile and Web Development, Continued Validation

When our two teams began working together in late 2016, the original focus was to further refine the Solarhood product concept and design unique product branding that is still being used to this day. By creating a high-fidelity mobile prototype and testing it with real users to glean feedback on the application, we were able to measure a response on the product in two solar markets – Kansas City and Portland.

Mobile Development Revitilization

This phase of work, beginning in late 2018, opened up a new type of partnership between Solarhood and Crema. Crema was asked to continue to support the Solarhood product with a lean, full-stack team, made up of product strategy, design, development, test engineering, and product management, to reach core metrics for their mobile app.  

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Today, Solarhood is available on the web and for download on all iOS and Android devices. With their robust tech stack and flexible design language, they’re positioned well to scale quickly consistently exploring new geographic regions, customer segments, and additional revenue models. The Solarhood team also continues producing engaging, informative solar information across many different channels, educating consumers on the benefits of going solar.

SBI is a revenue growth consultancy that brings extensive data and practical knowledge to deliver strategies that help clients scale fast.

Their team approached Crema after they identified an opportunity to create greater client impact & boost operational efficiency: a custom platform with self-serve, digital diagnostics.

Some of the core objectives of the product were to: 

• Reduce the manual hours spent finding and determining benchmarks
• Boost client engagement throughout the partnership lifetime
• Create a centralized hub for clients providing weekly and daily workflows
• Nudge clients if they aren’t effectively tracking towards their set goals

See the final result of the SBI Pro digital product in this case study.

We worked with a Chronic Condition Management (CCM) company helping high-risk patients better manage their medication and overall wellness.

Their unique approach connects patients directly with licensed pharmacists to make sure medications are safe, affordable, and effective. These services help self-insured employers reduce costs while supporting their employees facing the overwhelming health and financial obstacles associated with chronic illness.

Since its inception, the client's model has been to build personal care plans with a "white glove" touch. Keeping to this core principle, they needed to extend their capabilities with modern technology.  By increasing engagement and enabling patients to adhere more closely to recommendations, they could achieve better patient outcomes.

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Core challenges:

• Face-to-face pharmacist follow-up calls don't scale well and they can't happen daily, or even weekly
• Create alternate venues for patients to connect with pharmacists & doctors
• Enable patients to access & follow recommendations more easily
• Add another tool to the client's marketability, helping them stay competitive
• Make crucial healthcare information more accessible
• Allow patients better visibility into existing benefits
• Develop a full range of connected offerings for a more holistic picture of health

The final result wasn’t just a healthcare app,  but a robust wellness platform that tracks activity, sets health goals, sends medication reminders, and delivers custom care plans written by pharmacists.

Beyond supporting patients, the app helps self-insured companies save by preventing unnecessary doctors visits and recommending generic medications over name brand, leading to an average company savings in the six-figure range.

The leading platform transforming how physicians find jobs gets a needed transformation.

PhysEmp (short for Physicians Employment) has been connecting physicians with employers since 1991. Originally starting out as a print magazine, founder Bob Truog evolved his offering to the early days of the Internet with great success. Since then, PhysEmp has been the industry-leading platform connecting talented physicians with employers and recruiters across the nation.

Today, the platform allows physicians to search over 24,000 jobs in more than 200 specialties and subspecialties in all 50 states.

What sets PhysEmp apart

• Other job aggregators aren’t built to support the needs of physicians or the recruiters looking to place them in jobs. PhysEmp was created to uniquely support this population.
• PhysEmp has been around for decades, and has built meaningful connections & trust with physicians, hospitals, practices, and recruiters every step of the way.
• They meet physicians and recruiters where they are – offering an efficient and relevant job board available across devices.
• There are no placement fees that other competitors require.

The Challenge of MSSIn a time of increasing threats and a proliferation of technologies promising answers, Kudelski’s Managed Security Services (MSS) Portal needed to demonstrate key offerings:Beautiful: Is it finely crafted and presented?

• Functional: does it seamlessly connect different offerings?
• Robust: is it able to handle heavy customer usage?
• Flexible: can it meet different consumer needs?
• Quick: can it respond to customer inputs rapidly?

Crema was asked to design, prototype, test, build and deploy a new service called MSS Portal, which took all the different tools their clients had to use and pulled them into one, easy to use centralized tool - with the end goal to make security more effective and remove complexity for the end user. We created a design system that was consistent and clear across every view in the solution, providing valuable insight and depth into their MSS services and security posture across a global client base.

In Q3 of 2018, Forester Reports reviewed 10 emerging MSSP's in the market ranking Kudelski among the top two

A platform that's positive, not fear based.

Kudelski Security received its highest scores in the following criteria:

• business and technical value
• reporting capabilities (including dashboard and user interface)
• artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, automation
• user experience road map and talent management.

Crema continues to support the product with a maintenance and design retainer.

tilr fully automates the recruitment process by matching worker skills to company requirements. They differentiate themselves by vetting and providing on-demand workers based on skills, not job titles.

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A founding team with a vision to change hiring forever.

By working closely with the founding tilr team, Crema partnered to refine the brand and create a product experience for both workers and companies. We built an API that drives matching skills to opportunities, work shifts, and payments. Eventually, Crema built the web, iOS, and Android builds for the platform we iterated through releases toward market validation. Crema served as the product team for tilr for the first two years the platform existed, and worked hand-in-hand with the founding team as an extension of their team.

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Algorithmic-based hiring on skills, not resumes.

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tilr entered into a market dominated by traditional hiring processes involving resumé bias, long wait times between job postings and fulfillment, along with other challenges that prohibited connecting job seekers and employers. Up front, tilr knew the solution had to involve algorithmic-based hiring on skills, not resumes, for effective and efficient job placement. Creating an accessible platform that efficiently onboarded and connected job seekers with employers was the core challenge that needed to be solved.

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"Crema is great at pushing me to do the right thing for my company, as opposed to doing the right thing for them."— Luke Vigeant, Former CTO, tilrtech is a tool, we're building ventures.

Ultimately, our teams created a custom presentation template solution for Lockton that converts CXML to InDesign files for a subset of document types. Crema created a frontend interface that draws on Typefi’s platform and allows Lockton users to go through and choose a base template to then customize with their own data. The user can then go back in and rerun all the presentation on their own without having to engage with the design team for edits. Once the data is pulled in, the user can download their final document as a PDF created in InDesign. The download comes with all of the style and branding details that’s consistent with Lockton’s brand guidelines.

Perhaps most compelling of all is the time and cost savings as a result of this workflow solution. It’s projected that a process that once took 12 hours will be reduced down to 15 minutes. The cost savings from this initial product will open up Lockton’s design and account management teams to be more creative and drive more impact for the business.

Currently in beta, the product is being introduced to more users within the organization, and iterations are being made to support additional needs.

When our teams set out to work together in January 2019, we had determined there were immense opportunities to learn from each other and design a beautiful and useful UI to validate the platform. We began with a full-day Strategy & Alignment session to unpack Diode’s business model, desires, and initial vision for the product. Once those assets were organized, our teams worked together to:

• Design and prototype a clickable product experience that demonstrates an improved workflow for the Diode team
• Outline a product roadmap for the initial release of the product
• Create a high-level technical plan to develop the platform

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Our teams focused on the early stage project workflow & client experience of the platform during this time. In a later phase, we collaborated on an updated marketing site that would help to improve their positioning and client onboarding to the platform and marketing to their target audiences.

It became clear in the initial weeks of this engagement that the platform was far more complex than originally expected. To simplify a robust workflow is no easy task, and it took the minds of all team members to identify the most important elements to focus on and refine. There were opportunities to go deep on some features, and shallow on others in order to validate the product experience as a whole.

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Our teams were also able to pioneer a new concept for planning financials in asset development that could be tested with stakeholders. This is still being considered and socialized around the organization, but it was a result of tight-knit collaboration between product strategy, design, and industry knowledge.

At the end of the engagement, Crema presented the prototype to the entire team to cast a vision for the future. It was valuable for stakeholders to see what the product could actually look like, and compare this to their current day-to-day operations. This created buy-in from the whole team and team alignment to move forward.

Founded in 2006, symplr is an industry leader in compliance and credentialing software solutions that help healthcare organizations mitigate risk and ensure compliance. Over the last year, they acquired additional products and needed to unify their product experiences with the creation of a UI component library.

symplr and Crema collaborated to design & develop a UI component library for their Form Builder product. This included designing and developing essential UI components while considering any necessary UX changes within the Form Builder tool to allow for sustainable and unified development moving forward.

As symplr has grown to lead the healthcare compliance & credentialing industry, they have acquired key players in the space to increase their market share and value. As with any type of merger, there are complications when bringing disparate products together.

In the instance of the Form Builder tool, the product team at symplr was running up against project impediments during the development process due to a lack of reusable components. There was also a desire for more unification in the product suite to increase velocity down the road, as well as a need to leverage user feedback within the overall roadmap.

Crema was approached to bridge the gap between where the Form Builder tool was & where they wanted to go.

Our goals were:

• Remove development blockers by delivering essential UI components
• Continue momentum towards the unification of reusable products and standards across the symplr tool suite
• Utilize existing user feedback to guide component-focused UI/UX decisions, while being mindful of symplr’s goal for longterm integration

Our teams were able to accomplish the original goals of the engagement – creating a UI library to unify the product suite. At the end of the 6 weeks, symplr walked away with:

• A UI component library delivered in GitHub
• HTML/CSS and SCSS files for the components
• All final designs delivered via Sketch & InVision

In Q4 2019, a Senior Product Manager at a Major Retail Chain (hereby known as the Client) was looking at his roadmap for a customer experience that they hoped to redesign by late Q3 2020. In order for the development team to hit this timeline, designs had to be done in Q2, which meant that the new product direction would need to be done in Q1, only a few months away. In other words, they needed solutions fast. For this reason, he began looking up companies that could help run a Design Sprint with their team.

Pre-Engagement

Our teams met regularly leading up to the kickoff date to make sure all parties were aligned on expectations, schedules, and deliverables.

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Days 1-3

Each day from 10 am - 4 pm, the team would be fully present for the collaborative workshops. Knowing that Design Sprints are a large time commitment, it was important that the Client’s team had 8-10 am to take care of other pressing items. Not only this, but both the 8-10 am and 4-5 pm times hosted essential stakeholder conversations that gave crucial context into the work that had been, and was yet to be, completed.

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Post-Workshops

After designs were finalized, the Client immediately hosted a large-scale stakeholder review to receive suggestions & buy-in from the team before moving forward. The designs were finalized and presented to users for feedback. With user feedback in place, the Client presented their work & findings to key stakeholders to hear any further suggestions and finalize next steps.

With this feedback, the team integrated the most successful parts of 2019’s experience with the new designs, resulting in a richer and more robust set of designs. These designs were approved by the Client stakeholder team, and are currently being implemented to be rolled out in late 2020.

WorkSmart.ai is prepared to disrupt the retail intelligence sector. Traditionally, retailer POS data is the primary source of data being monetized in the market, but WorkSmart.ai identified that most retailers are not capturing their fair share of the revenue. As a data and intelligence monetization company, WorkSmart.ai helps businesses build a better data and intelligence ecosystem with their marketplace-as-a-service platform.

In April 2019, Crema and WorkSmart.ai set out to design and test the initial vision of the product, as well as identify a technical plan to bring the solution to market.

In April of 2019, our teams set out on a 6 week engagement to:

• Identify a product strategy and design that could prove out the concept, allure potential customers, and create a path for development
• Test the product designs with real users to gather data & inform the product roadmap for the initial build of the product
• Create a technical plan to accompany the product roadmap for the WorkSmart.ai platform

  Today, WorksSmart.ai is equipped with a professional brand, a modern clickable prototype, and a comprehensive technical plan that will act as a catalyst to pitch to potential investors and begin the development of their MVP.

  WorkSmart.ai’s solution is powered by an innovative technical stack and end-to-end services that centralize creation, accelerate go-to-market, and generate new revenue at scale. You can learn more about WorkSmart.ai here.

When Crema connected with the founder of ProfessionalChats, Scott Hansen, they were a small business with explosive growth. The business had strong month-over-month sales, but the technology they used to start the business was not holding up to the rising demand put on the system and their team. In order to bolster support for growth and defend their position in the market, the ProfessionalChats team entrusted Crema to help solve many of their technology challenges over several years of working together.

Objectives and Goals

• To rebuild the bootstrapped platform of off-the-shelf technology into a proprietary chat system capable of meeting the demands of their growing business while improving chat performance, scalability, HIPAA compliance, employee efficiency and accuracy, and improved customer experience.

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• All of these improvements would not happen overnight. Our team worked to prioritize the product development process to solve the largest challenges first, while supporting the day-to-day technical operations of growth for ProfessionalChats.

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• Concurrently, the teams needed to ensure that current customers did not lose any sense of value from the system. We worked closely on a transition plan from the old platform to the new, monitoring for performance and creating contingency plans.‍

• Knowing that the ProfessionalChats platform needed to be HIPAA-compliant, our teams worked closely together and with trusted outside partners to review the data security and storage requirements for compliance. This even included switching to a new chat platform and iterating on the product to fit a new workflow.

Results

• 1000% revenue growth during the time we worked together.
• Scaled from 10 employees to 150 employees to support hundreds of new customers.
• Ability to enter into new markets with a HIPAA-compliant chat system.
• Company acquisition by Ruby Receptionists in Portland, Oregon.
• Integration of the ProfessionalChats system into the Ruby Receptionist system is actively underway.