I worked for them as a product manager on several projects, including "Glass Vision", a microsite designed to better help building professionals in their choice of glass.
The Saint-Gobain building glass division doesn't sell its products to the final customers. They work with installers and architects that design and build spaces and include glass in their projects. However, it's hard for them to sell glass products because they have complex textures and colors that you can only visualise in real life.
To solve this problem, they developed an app in 2015 (before I joined the project), that allowed the user to take pictures and add glass effects to it. But it slowly stopped being maintained and very few users downloaded it.
We ran a few workshops with the team and a few customers; We quickly decided to kill the app and develop a web version with only the core features instead.
This would:
It's live → https://www.saint-gobain-glass.com/visualizer
Our business had a strong focus on design and most of the technical work was outsourced to cheap offshore development teams. This would reduce our expenses, but most importantly, allow us to fit into the budget constraint of our customers while still delivering high value to win the project.
The first (French) version we delivered worked perfectly. So well that other countries asked to have their own. The customer called us to translate the website.
At the same time, we had gotten in a financial argument with the development team of this project and couldn't work with them anymore. They left us with the beginning of a technical debt and no technical specifications.
The rest of the story is confidential. In short, I learned the hard way how to deal with stakeholders and still deliver the best product for my customer.
After more than 6 months (that could have been 2 weeks without development hurdles) working on translating the product, I developed a stronger relationship with my customer. We ended up adding a landing page to the product for her to better rollout to the country managers. She then referred me to a new business unit and I later developed this product.
Ipad Mini prototype