Paula Viinamäki
Duuers
Paula has close to 20 years of experience in telecoms industry. She is CEO of Duuers, and has been Product Lead/Program Manager at Microsoft, and most of her career as Director of Forward Labs and Product Management at Microsoft and Nokia.
Paula has led international teams and organizations in areas including innovation laboratory, product management, user experience, usability and design strategy. Paula has a strong track record in making multiple successful world class products, developing innovative customer driven solutions and creating high performing teams. She holds EMBA, and BBA in SME's Business Administration.
How many hours on average companies spend in creating and managing proposals? How do they receive and handle proposal requests? How many proposals get accepted? What tools are typically used for creating and managing proposals? How do recipients perceive the proposals?
As a background: Small businesses are great in what they do as their daily work but preparing business proposals is not their typical core competence. At the same time, that is something they need to do in order to get new work.
Currently, the whole process of creating the proposal takes a lot of time and includes unnecessary repetitive work. In addition to it taking too much time, the quality of the business proposals is so poor among other reasons that on average only 1 out of 10 proposals get accepted. The communication with customers is scattered across different tools and different versions of the proposals are buried in emails, which makes it hard to follow what has been agreed often leading to disputes and inefficiency. Small companies are also loaded with multiple parallel procurement platforms which all require their own tailored responses that are separated from the daily proposal work. All in all, small companies are spending now too much time on getting the work. They should spend the time doing the work that adds real value and growing as a company.
Duuers web-based tool will replace Word and Outlook in creating and managing proposals. The solution saves users a lot of time and makes them look more professional. To put it simply: they create the proposal with enhanced toolset provided by Duuers and send it to the customer. Customer receives the proposal online in the software, so the company is kept on track with what's happening with the proposal in the customers' end. All communication and editing will happen online, and not in the email inbox. It takes one minute to sign up and start using the product.
The solution has been developed in a lean way in one week sprints and together with the customers in order to recognize the areas that cause friction to reduce the waste work and to ensure a proper product-market-fit. More than 60 pilot customers have contributed to the product development by providing their extensive knowledge of the real life practices and feedback both on prototypes and on the product based on real use. The larger problem areas have been tackled with 5-day Google Sprints, which is a modern interpretation of the well-known “double diamond” design approach.
Companies claim that they save up to 50% in the time spend in proposals when comparing to the old way of doing things and traditional tools where the messages and proposals got buried in emails and folders. Overall the solution will increase productivity of the companies significantly and release time for the actual work they are paid for.
The solution will be developed further based on continuous dialog with the customers. Machine learning based solutions and smart integrations offer promising future development areas.
