This is the second in a four-post series diving deeper into our announcement of the world’s first Extended Workforce Platform. Today we’re sharing Beeline executive Colleen Tiner’s responses to three questions related to what this means for users of the Beeline platform.
Over your 16-year tenure, you’ve obviously seen (and orchestrated) a lot of changes to Beeline’s technology. Can you share a bit behind what drives the product roadmap?
Ultimately, our product roadmap is driven by our purpose, which is to connect businesses to the remarkable talent within the global extended workforce. The details of the roadmap like products, features, and priorities are shaped through insights and feedback from end clients, users, partners, service providers, suppliers, and understanding how users engage with our platform day-to-day.
Years ago, we built a practice of customer empathy throughout Beeline, and today it permeates everything we do, including our product roadmap. The meaningful connections we’ve built with our client and MSP advisory councils and the touchpoints we’ve implemented to connect with users and stakeholders have enabled us to develop true customer empathy. We continuously seek to understand their goals, pressures, and drivers so that we can anticipate future needs and trends, and so that our plans address what matters most.
Our unique customer-centric data-driven product methodology scales to serve hundreds of Global 2000 clients without compromising what we believe is most important, meaningful customer insight and feedback. As a product leader, feedback is a gift, and we are continuously pursing ways to harness all forms of feedback (unstructured, product usage, user sentiment) to influence our roadmap.
2. There’s a very intentional move from a “system” to a “platform” with this change. Can you explain the difference?
Thank you for asking this question. It’s important to know that this evolution didn’t (and couldn’t) happen overnight. We’ve been on a multi-year digital transformation journey moving to cloud and a microservices architecture. We knew we had to evolve to accommodate the surge of technology innovation, more strategic use of extended workers, heightened focus on personal data ownership, and expansion of diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies into the extended workforce.
In our original form as a Vendor Management System (VMS), we successfully addressed our clients’ challenges related to managing large extended workforces and grew our scope from IT staffing to nearly every classification and type of non-employee labor. And while we supported integrations with third-party tools and partners, we recognized that the market was outgrowing the system model.
A platform’s value comes not only from native features, but its ability to orchestrate more efficient processes, optimal experiences, and create value for all constituents by connecting those native capabilities with external tools, stakeholders, and data.
3. What does this mean for the future of VMS? And what does this new category enable Beeline to do from a product perspective moving forward?
VMS functionality is core and remains extremely important to our clients and MSPs when managing contingent workforce programs. As a platform, in addition to providing our end clients and their MSPs with all the value from the best VMS functionality on the market, our decades’ worth of data and experience enable us to deliver talent-centered products and features, which are not characteristic of VMSs, for all constituents on the platform – clients, MSPs, suppliers, and the talent themselves.
The platform has already unlocked user experiences, data insights, and connectivity that translates into much greater value for the market. For instance, a beautiful, consumer-like experience designed specifically for the needs of hiring managers is coupled with a resume visualizer that not only accelerates the time it takes to review candidates but highlights the uniqueness and relevance of a person’s skills and experience that may otherwise be overlooked. Our platform includes a new analytics portfolio that expands beyond visualizations to actually interpret the analyses for instant insights. In partnership with Brightfield, we introduced SmartBuyer, the first AI-enabled, embedded third-party solution that tackles the challenge of overspending caused by ineffective job descriptions and uninformed buying behavior.
Later this year, suppliers and talent will be getting some attention, too, with more consumer-like experiences designed to help them better fulfill customer needs, give them more control over personal data management, and meet their respective objectives.
Overall, this move to the platform has allowed us to accelerate our innovation beyond what’s typically possible in a VMS environment. And that means the future is bright for Beeline customers.
For more, check out the first post in this blog series, an interview with CEO Doug Leeby.
