Case Study With Craft.io, A121 Labs is saving time and making better-informed product decisions The world leader in AI-based language solutions leverages Craft.io. to centralize product content, share the right details with each audience, and connect epics to objectives. WEBSITE FOUNDED HQ EMPLOYEES ai21.com 2017 Tel Aviv, Israel 150 “Decision-making is much easier with Craft.io — because we can see immediately if something does or doesn’t meet one of our objectives.” Jack Yulzari, Product Team Lead The Company Leading the natural language processing revolution to transform the way humans read and write. When it comes to company missions, you won’t find many that are bolder than “Turning machines into thought partners,” but AI21 Labs is already making good on that promise. AI21 is a pioneer in the natural language processing (NLP) revolution — teaching machines to understand and generate natural text — as the company behind the world’s most advanced NLP platform. In fact, AI21’s code contains billions more parameters and can understand many times more lexical items (such as expressions and phrases) than the world’s next-largest NLP app. The unmatched sophistication of AI21’s Wordtune application — the first AI-based writing companion that understands context and meaning — has attracted millions of users around the world. And the company is making a similar impact with its B2B solution, AI21 Studio. The Challenges Maintaining product content in multiple tools was both wasting time and making it difficult to connect epics with company objectives. Jack Yulzari, Product Team Lead for AI21 Studio, faced three challenges maintaining reliable, up-to-date information on his strategic plans and progress. “I was using several tools to keep the product strategy updated — spreadsheets and documents for epics, requirements, and user personas, and a presentation app to share our plans with stakeholders. It was extremely inefficient and wasted a lot of time.” Additionally, Jack says: “Because we couldn’t connect our work at the epic level to our developers’ tasks in Jira, it was difficult to know how much progress we had made toward any of those epics.” Finally, Jack explains, the most significant challenge from a strategic perspective was the fact that none of the tools he was using allowed him to quickly view a new epic against his business objectives — and make a yay or nay decision based on whether it supported one of those objectives. “Craft.io lets me set up strategic objectives as a parameter for adding new work. If we want to put something on the roadmap but can’t find an objective it supports, it goes on the backlog.” Jack Yulzari, Product Team Lead The Solution Centralizing all product content — including the engineering team’s Jira tasks — onto the Craft.io product management platform. Jack knew it would be counterproductive to ask everyone — the product management teams and the company’s software engineers, data scientists, algorithm developers, etc. — to manage their work on the same software platform. The needs and processes of a product team are different from those of an engineering department. “Craft.io is ideal because it lets my product team centralize our work in one environment, view and present just the level of detail we need, and sync our strategic work with our dev teams’ Jira data. The result has been more focused workflows leading to more valuable products.” The Results Improving product team efficiencies and developing more impactful products. Jack points out three operational improvements he has experienced as a direct result of rolling out Craft.io to manage the strategic direction of AI21 Studio. 1 Creating efficiencies Whether he’s adding new items to the AI21 Studio product backlog, reviewing the roadmap, writing a user story to support an existing epic, or presenting his quarterly plans to the executive team, Jack now has a single application to get nearly all of his strategic-level work done. Whatever he’s working on, and whoever he’s sharing it with, Jack says he can find everything he needs in Craft.io. “Being able to add and update things once, in one place, saves me hours every week. It also gives me the confidence that I’m always working with the most accurate data.” 2 Improving stakeholder communication and collaboration Craft.io’s flexible platform has also added value to the product team’s meetings with different stakeholders, Jack explains. Because Craft.io integrates with Jira, for example, his regular meetings with AI21 Studio’s technical teams are now much more productive and informative. “In my weekly engineering meetings, Craft.io makes it easy to show how those teams’ tasks are affecting overall progress, because we’ve synced their Jira data with Craft.io. The engineering teams appreciate seeing how their work is helping drive the product forward.” 3 Connecting the why to the what – and building only the stuff that actually matters From a company perspective, Jack notes that the biggest benefit of Craft.io is that it has helped improve his team’s process for prioritizing the strategic items that earn a place on the AI21 Studio product roadmap. And that, he explains, is helping his team focus on building only the stuff that actually matters. “With Craft.io, setting OKRs and connecting new items to a specific objective are built in. That makes it easier for me to make informed decisions about what to add to our roadmap and to show stakeholders why we’ve done so. Ultimately, it’s helping my team build products that matter.” “Craft.io is the first solution I’ve ever used that lets me do just about all of my product work in one environment. That saves me hours every week.” Jack Yulzari, Product Team Lead AI21’s favorite Craft.io features 1 2 3 Strategic roadmap Jira integration Guru templates To ensure each epic supports a business objective To sync dev tasks with strategic-level progress To quickly create new epics, stories, and other assets Build great products with confidence © 2022 Craft. All Rights Reserved