How Ricoh scaled product team delivery 20x with airfocus
Problem
With operations in over 150 countries, teams worked in silos, leading to duplicated efforts, disconnected workflows, and a lack of visibility in product development.
Solution
By adopting airfocus, Ricoh streamlined its product management processes, enhancing collaboration, visibility, and efficiency. As a result, Ricoh successfully scaled its product team delivery 20x, transforming its approach to digital product management and fostering seamless teamwork across its global operations.
Ricoh, a global leader in workplace technology with 84,000 employees worldwide, faced significant challenges in coordinating product management efforts across its international operations. As the company shifted focus towards digital services and workplace applications, the need for a unified, flexible product management system became business critical.
Nathan Thomas, Head of Product for Ricoh Digital Experience (RDx) at Ricoh Europe, shared insights into their challenges, the decision-making journey, and the results they've achieved since adopting airfocus.
airfocus has given us the confidence to take bold steps forward. It's not just about improving processes – it's about transforming how we work together as a global organization.
About Ricoh
Ricoh is a multinational organization headquartered in Japan, specializing in workplace technology and digital services. With a focus on building workplace applications distributed globally, Ricoh is at the forefront of digital transformation in the corporate world.
The global challenge
When Ricoh began the journey to align its global teams, the product management function faced significant hurdles. "Our challenge has really been to coordinate our efforts and prioritization across the globe," Nathan explained. They have offices in over 150 countries, and were working in siloes, and in some cases duplicating work. "Being able to have a look at all these in one big place and really understand what we want to move forward with was really hard for us."
We had competing software platforms developed in different regions. There was a disconnect between design, product work and development in Jira, with no real history.
Ricoh are a customer-insight driven business, but this disconnect led to significant issues in product delivery: "There was a time before we took airfocus on, where we delivered a bunch of stuff in a month, and none of it was what I was expecting." The disconnect between teams meant the communication had broken down, and there was no visibility of a project’s beginning to end.
Ricoh needed a flexible and comprehensive end-to-end product management system, with:
The ability to customize workflows and terminology for different development models (hardware and software)
Intuitive user interface
A pricing model allowing unlimited stakeholders to comment without extra cost
Why airfocus?
airfocus's adaptability was a key factor in Ricoh's decision to adopt the platform. Nathan explained: "Productboard had very little flexibility. I could never have done what I've done in airfocus, in terms of bringing the dev [team] on board and having visibility across the product org with custom fields and multiple views."
The ease of setup was also an advantage – the team started with a free trial, and a subset of people: "We were surprisingly able to do quite a lot quite quickly. I didn't really need any onboarding or any help – we just went live and started using it."
How has airfocus changed the way Ricoh works?
"Before airfocus, feedback was scattered – if you were lucky, you'd hear it at the right time," says Nathan. "With centralized feedback boards, we capture and prioritize insights from customers, sales teams, and strategy groups in one place." The transition to airfocus has brought several advantages:
Improved collaboration:
"Everyone's there together now. So it's easy. When we're talking about a ticket, you put the link in, now we've got the ID links. It's always an airfocus ticket."
Enhanced visibility:
"If we've been speaking about something for three months and you get to see the designers comment three months ago, you can just scroll back. All the history's there. Everything's there."
Streamlined processes:
"Our development team and our design teams are fully into airfocus."
Flexibility:
"With airfocus, we have an end-to-end process from design feedback issue management down to the engineering piece as well."
The business now only uses airfocus. "This was a huge leap. It shows our confidence in the product and our ability to deliver an end-to-end service utilizing just one platform," Nathan said.
As Ricoh continues its digital transformation journey, airfocus stands as a crucial partner in its success. "For me, airfocus is a massive growth opportunity. It helped me and my team’s growth," said Nathan.
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