From AI experiment to product direction: how a Shaping Sprint helped Vestmark avoid investing in the wrong thing
- Client
Vestmark
- Services
AI, Shaping Sprint, Development
- Description
Helping Vestmark focus, align, and execute on expanding an AI agent workflow experiment.
Bringing cutting edge AI workflows to financial services
Vestmark is a wealth management technology company balancing the constraints of a highly regulated industry with an ambitious vision for how AI can transform its work.
Before engaging thoughtbot, CTO Freedom Dumlao and his team had prototyped EVE - an AI-driven automation platform. EVE could take on operational work that traditionally required people to move between screens, interpret emails, organize information, and navigate legacy systems.
They wanted to see if they should move it to production.
If you’re building something new, and it's a future that you’re curious about, with multiple directions it could go, you’re going to save yourself so much time by spending a little bit of time upfront tackling hard problems and creating tangible artifacts that can help you feel your way through the problem. A shaping sprint is the ideal way to do that, in my opinion.
Surfacing the expensive questions early
Over two weeks, thoughtbot and Vestmark quickly:
- Mapped and prioritized assumptions to identify the biggest risks and unknowns.
- Explored EVE’s critical path and technical feasibility to understand what would be required to move beyond the early experiment.
- Prototyped a centralized experience for managing EVE instances, making questions around users, scale, and autonomy tangible enough to test and discuss.
- Began the transition from shaping into implementation.
Shaping first, helped Vestmark move faster
The Shaping Sprint revealed Vestmark's executive sponsors weren't imagining EVE at the same scale. While Freedom imagined hundreds of EVE instances performing tasks simultaneously, other stakeholders were picturing something closer to a personal productivity tool.
"That helped us with executive alignment. We didn't even realize that we were missing that, because we couldn't see it."
That discovery led to bigger questions about ROI: Who would use EVE? Who would buy it? What would those buyers expect? And what scale would the product need to support?
We were able to see it saved us from wasting six weeks going down the wrong. Being thoughtful up front really saves a ton later down the road.