While the CCC Product Management team loves to interact with clients (direct engagement is the best way to identify problems and create valuable solutions!), we also spend a great deal of time working with our colleagues in Engineering, Project Management, Business Analysis, and more to execute processes that ensure we can deliver solutions the best way possible.
Here’s a look at how CCC approaches product development—how we manage requirements and delivery, test functionality, launch new features, and ensure a strong and scalable systems foundation.
Agile Framework
“Agile” is an approach to project management that emphasizes iterative delivery of value and continuous improvement. It, and its extensions and varieties, have been adopted by many software organizations, including CCC.
Agile gives CCC flexibility to follow market needs and customer requests. Our roadmap isn’t “set in stone.” This flexible roadmap enables us to course correct as needed. For example, if we begin to develop a particular workflow based on conversations with a few clients, but then realize that the broader client base has a different set of needs, we can shift direction without imperiling our overall goal.
This iterative approach also means we try to develop big features in smaller increments where possible, to get something delivered sooner to our users so that we get feedback faster. A “big bang” approach, where massive features are developed and delivered altogether at once, risks taking a long time to deliver software that may miss the mark once it’s released.
UAT (User Acceptance Testing)
User acceptance testing, or UAT, is testing from the perspective of a user. Other types of quality assurance testing validate that the developed functionality meets the requirements provided; UAT is intended to determine if the delivered software actually fulfills its purpose for the user.
In advance of a release to production, our team often identifies features that merit a round of internal UAT. Our colleagues—client engagement managers, customer service representatives, and more—often have the most detailed knowledge of specific client workflows. They can put the delivered feature “through its paces” to see how it works in the context of real-world scenarios.
By doing so, they help our product management team catch potential issues earlier, before a client encounters them. UAT is also a great way for our whole CCC team to learn about our new features, which in turn improves our training and communication with clients.
Beta Periods
Beta periods are a stage of development before the general availability of a piece of software, where a limited set of users try out the functionality and provide feedback.
For many of the innovative features we develop at CCC, we choose to launch them in a beta period where access is only granted to a few clients. Launching new features in this way enables a high degree of collaboration with clients who have demonstrated the greatest interest in the features, helping us to enhance their functionality and confirm the value they bring to our clients before we release them broadly.
As an example, we have recently conducted a valuable beta period for our generative AI (“genAI” for short) enabled Chat Mode for RightFind Navigate.
Technical Work
Technical work, sometimes referred to as “technical debt,” encompasses the variety of work completed by software developers that may not result in delivered features but relates to other aspects of software.
For instance, the dependability and availability of the system, its safety and security, and the efficiency of our teams in managing and enhancing the system. Another example of technical work is updating a code library to the latest version, or re-writing certain parts of the code base to be simpler or better annotated for future developers.
Although technical work is often the item in our roadmaps we discuss least with clients, it is invaluable to our ability to continue to deliver the feature-related enhancements that receive the most attention.
Because of this, CCC dedicates a significant portion of our development capacity to technical work—an investment in a healthy foundation on which we build the solutions and features our clients need.