How did global consulting giant LTI launch its Canvas online collaboration platform in fewer than four months? According to Chief Marketing Officer Peeyush Dubey, it took shoshin, “a Zen Buddhism word that means ‘beginner's mind.’ We believe that anyone with a beginner's mind will be able to solve many more challenges than someone who is thinking like an expert.”

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While not what you’d expect to hear from a tech consulting firm with more than 42,000 employees serving 460 clients in 33 countries, it’s how Canvas was launched in record time during the pandemic. And it was Canvas that helped LTI change customer perceptions and accelerate growth.

How did LTI pivot in response to the pandemic?

It was phenomenally clear to us that every single thing had to be questioned again. Every process, every way of working, the way we connect with our customers. We set out to redefine the whole idea of the future of software engineering and how it will be done in a world when the pandemic is over. We realized it was time to have a new way of working, a new platform focused on the developer experience that brings the entire team together under a virtual roof.

LTI Canvas is a platform that allows the software engineering teams who have traditionally been working in an office to collaborate and partner with the same effectiveness in remote and hybrid environments.

What went into the planning process?

We launched LTI Canvas in July 2020 and thought of the entire thing in three to four months. We worked with our operations team to think of a name, to define the positioning of this platform, the targeting, the segmenting and to find the partners to work with. The design and development team was working on the entire platform and how it would be promoted to the marketplace as well.

We talk of a blank canvas. That's how our new product started, with a completely blank slate, and it allowed us to think of how Canvas should be designed. From the paintbrush, the color and the palette to the way that the website and videos would look gave us—from a marketer's perspective—a blank canvas for the entire platform.

What was the team’s biggest challenge?

I came from the fact that the entire development of this platform had to be done remotely. At that point time, teams were not meeting with each other, partners were not with us. We felt that if we can develop this, if we can launch it like this, that means there are tremendous benefits that will accrue to the customers as well.

The marketing team was also remote, and we were supposed to launch something which would change the course of this large enterprise entirely within three months. We quickly got together and came up with the entire plan within two weeks.

How did you bring LTI Canvas to market?

A marketer's job, I believe, is to make sure that the message reaches every stakeholder that we have. We thought of every single stakeholder and made sure that each of them got the message in the right way.

Customers are important. Prospects are important. So are our employees. It's a new way of working for them. Our partners work with us. Our investors need to understand. In many cases, the governments and the regulatory bodies need to understand how the data is being used and if it’s secure.

How did you introduce it to employees?

We launched an internal training module, which is completely digital, for all employees to go through. Equally important is sales enablement and sales communication because these are the executives who will be talking to our customers and prospects about LTI Canvas. We created a separate series of communications and entire sales script just for our sales team and for our development teams through our internal learning platform as well.

When employees saw a couple of examples of how customers have adopted it and the benefits that they were seeing, it was a lot easier for us to then promote this and take it to many more projects. Right out of the gate, we had two or three clients who adopted LTI Canvas. Their examples and those case studies worked wonders within the company to get everybody else to adopt it.

What is your strategy for bringing the platform to prospects?

We thought of a persona-driven approach. Each persona would essentially be seeing the same brand, except that a copywriter would probably need different set of tools than an editor. That is the difference between the tools and frameworks, the profiles, or the personas that we created for Canvas.

If you are a project manager, the level of detail that you need is different than if you are a QA person. No one should be overwhelmed or inundated with the entire product at the same point in time. Even though we had a very short time to develop it, we made sure that those personas and the exact roles that each person would be using the platform for were well defined.

What metrics matter?

The metric that really matters for a product launch is how the customers are reacting to it. Are they adopting it? Are they finding it useful? In this case, not only did the customers start liking Canvas for the projects that LTI was working on for them, but in many cases, they said, Hey, can we actually use Canvas for the projects that LTI is not doing for us? We would like this to be the way that we work as we go forward."

It's a product that will remain there. That, I think, is the biggest clue for us. That so many customers have adopted it, so many customers like it, so many customers want us to use it for their projects. We are completely tracking as per our target: Around 35 to 40% of the projects within LTI are now using LTI Canvas.

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