A new level of clarity and flow

The Company

Founded: 2005, Stockholm, Sweden
Size: 850 FTEs
Industry: Audiobook and ebook streaming services

Storytel is one of the world's leading audiobook and ebook streaming services with over 1.6 million paying customers in 20+ markets.

The Challenge

"Finding a scalable and efficient way for our product teams to deliver product value"

As Storytel have grown over the years, so has the number of people working with product and tech. Today, more than 150 people work on developing Storytel's product offering, which have given rise to a few challenges.

Mikael Holmquist, one of the longest serving Product Manager's at Storytel, lists a few challenges they where facing before they found Delibr:

• Low transparency into what the tech organization was working on
• Collaboration issues
• Hard to find the latest, and correct, information for any given project
• ‍Product Managers spent a lot of time doing redundant work, like copy-pasting from PRD to Jira and updating several documents with the same information when something changed.

We had been growing a lot and reached a point where we felt we needed a more uniform process for how to work with product development

Mikael Holmquist

Product Manager
@ Storytel

The Solution

"One tool for managing work, with all the details about each project at our fingertips"

The teams at Storytel started using Delibr for managing their work, and where able to successfully tackle their top challenges. They did so by:

• Creating a roadmap for high level overview of what each tech team are working on, and what is coming. ‍
• Utilizing an epic board in Delibr, to help track and mange ongoing work on the epic level.
  
• Creating a Delibr document for each epic, which contains all the relevant information about the epic, and allows people to collaborate more easily.

We no longer have ten documents we need to keep in check when something changes during a meeting. Delibr lets us keep everything in one place.

Mikael Holmquist

Product Manager
@ Storytel

The Result

Roadmap
The roadmap shows what each tech team is working on, and what comes up next. It includes high level information such as objective & key results, and links to the Delibr document which contain all the relevant details and decisions.

Epic board
The epic board helps the team manage their epics from inception to development, and lets them see relevant information like how many undecided questions there are, how many outstanding ToDos etc., at a glance.

Delibr document
They use their own templates for epics:

• Creates consistency across different teams
  
• Helps new team members get up to speed quickly
  
• Sets a higher standard for each epic, which has improved the quality of work

All the relevant information in the same document:

• The expandable tree structure makes it possible to nest information without the doc growing unruly
  
• Instead of having several documents and design files for each epic, the PRD in Delibr acts as a single source of truth
  

For me, what really makes Delibr stand out, is how easy it is to structure the documents.

David Božjak

Tech Manager
@ Storytel

PRDs are tightly integrated to Jira:

• Saves the team time not having to port over user stories and information manually from PRD to Jira
  
• Gives a higher quality information for tickets in Jira
  
• Removes the need for updating across Jira tickets and PRDs when something changes

Collaboration & decision making

• Decision making functionality which help the teams collaborate and reach better decisions together
  
• Better communication and collaboration thanks to User Story Maps that live directly in the PRDs
  

Increased transparency
People now know what is being worked on and what is going to be worked on.

After the introduction of Delibr, a survey was sent out asking if people thought the communication had improved, and roughly 90% said they though so.

David Božjak, Tech Manager, adds "The process we have now, where we are using Delibr documents to prepare our features and epics, could have been done in Confluence or Google docs. For me, what really makes Delibr stand out, is how easy it is to structure the documents. This is much thanks to the nested bullet structure and the ability to collapse parts of a document. This lets us use the same document from early discovery to the creation of backlog items. Before, we typically split all of this up into numerous documents, presentations, design files and Jira issues."