Value Optimisation · EST. 2011 · APAC

Months of upfront analysis, compressed into a single day. SuperChoice started delivering weeks sooner.

The Situation

SuperChoice engaged ZXM to diagnose why its projects were slow to start and to design a faster path from concept to working backlog. The organisation was operating in a competitive fintech environment where time to market was a direct commercial constraint, and its existing approach — lengthy upfront requirements analysis before any development commenced — was creating significant delay before teams could deliver.

The engagement ran over a concentrated period in the early stages of a new product initiative, working directly with the cross-functional team and key business stakeholders.

What the diagnostic found

Before any intervention was designed, ZXM mapped the team’s existing discovery process to locate where time was actually being lost. The primary finding was structural: the team had no shared model of the product it was building. Without that shared model, every planning conversation required stakeholders to reconstruct context from scratch, which produced extended requirements sessions, misaligned assumptions, and a backlog that could not be sized or sequenced until analysis was complete.

ZXM identified two reinforcing conditions. First, the team’s approach to requirements was document-centric rather than model-centric, which meant the artefacts it produced were difficult to navigate collaboratively. Second, there was no common language between the business stakeholders and the development team for describing product scope at different levels of granularity, which created friction at every handoff.

Both conditions were system properties, not individual shortcomings. The team was operating the process it had been given.

What changed

ZXM replaced the document-centric requirements process with a structured set of collaborative workshops that built a shared product model directly with the team. In the first session, ZXM facilitated the development of pragmatic personas — grounded in actual user behaviour rather than demographic profiles — to give the team a concrete reference point for every subsequent decision.

ZXM then introduced story mapping as the primary structuring mechanism. Story mapping organises product scope visually, with the main workflow across the top and progressively detailed user stories arranged beneath each activity. This gave the team an end-to-end view of the product in a single working session, which made it possible to identify the minimum viable product boundary without an extended analysis phase. The resulting backlog had direct traceability to both the personas and the workflow map, so development priorities could be sequenced against real user needs rather than stakeholder opinion.

The entire process — from no shared model to a structured, sequenced backlog — was completed in a single day.

What held

The requirements and analysis phase that had previously taken months was compressed to one day. The team entered its first development sprint with a structured backlog, clear user personas, and an agreed product scope. Stakeholder alignment, which had been a source of extended delay, was achieved within the workshop sequence rather than through a separate approval process.

The result was not just faster delivery of this particular initiative. SuperChoice gained a repeatable discovery model it could apply to future projects, which meant the structural conditions that had caused the delay in the first place were no longer embedded in how the organisation started its product work.