Craft.io Helps Fannie Mae Prioritize Product Decisions with Greater Efficiency and Confidence

Fannie Mae, a leading source of mortgage financing in the United States, leverages Craft.io to centralize product content and help product teams plan and prioritize more effectively.

The Company

Creating affordable housing opportunities across the US since 1938.

Fannie Mae provides a stable source of liquidity to promote equitable and sustainable access to homeownership and quality, affordable rental housing for millions of people across America. Fannie Mae helps enable the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage and drive responsible innovation to make homebuying and renting easier, fairer, and more accessible.

The Goal

A Software Tool Designed Specifically for Product Management

Vidyasagar (“Sagar”) Medandarao, a leading member of Product Management for Fannie Mae, explains that the company is often looking for opportunities to adopt new processes and technologies. However, like most organizations, Fannie Mae did not have a software solution designed specifically for the strategic needs of its product management teams, Sagar explains.

“We wanted a centralized solution purpose-built for roadmapping, and prioritization, as well as stepping back and viewing our work at the strategic level. We needed a platform designed for the work our Product Managers and Product Owners do every day.”

The Solution

Migrating to Craft.io to streamline workflows and create a centralized space for product management teams to capture and share their strategies.

As Fannie Mae’s Product Management Center of Excellence group began rolling out Craft.io to the first few Scrum teams, those teams immediately saw the advantages of having a purpose-built product management tool, Sagar explains.

“One of the first things we helped these teams do was to connect them to a Craft.io workspace,” Sagar says.

“That meant they could now quickly populate their backlog in the Craft.io platform, sync their progress in our task-tracking application with a higher-level roadmap view in Craft.io, and use Craft.io’s prioritization models to prioritize which backlog items to work on next.”

As other product teams across Fannie Mae learned about the successes these early-adopter teams were experiencing with Craft.io — including more efficient roadmapping, improved capacity planning, and one-click prioritization — many asked for access to the platform. In the year since the company activated its first licenses, Craft.io usage has increased across Fannie Mae by 150%, Sagar points out. The intuitive nature of the Craft.io platform, as well as Craft.io’s support team, made it easy for his Center of Excellence team to onboard Fannie Mae’s product teams, Sagar also points out.

“There’s basically no learning curve with Craft.io,” he says. “Everything is right in front of you and easy to figure out. And when we need help customizing some aspect of the platform, Craft.io’s support team is there to help us. In fact, I’d say the responsiveness and hands-on support are among the best things about working with Craft.io.”

The Results

Saving Time, Prioritizing More Effectively, and Gaining New Business Intelligence

Sagar explains that his Center of Excellence team has helped dozens of agile teams across Fannie Mae implement Craft.io and that those teams have experienced significant positive results.

Saving Product Teams Time

A common theme Sagar hears from his product colleagues using Craft.io is the many ways it saves them time. “Syncing the Craft.io workspace with your other workflow tools means you don’t need to keep cutting and pasting new information every time you deliver a status update or adjust your roadmap. Your Craft.io content updates automatically to reflect your team’s progress in those other tools.”

“Another thing I hear from our teams is how much they appreciate the Guru functionality in Craft.io, because it gives them one-click templates and prioritization models. No one has to build anything from scratch when they’re using Craft.io. And if they have a question about how to use something, the help portal saves them time because a lot of the tutorials are simple, short GIF walkthroughs of the functionality, rather than lengthy explanations.”

Prioritizing More Efficiently and with Greater Confidence

Another benefit, Sagar adds, is the catalog of best-practice prioritization frameworks built into Craft.io. In addition to saving time, having single-click access to multiple models for prioritizing backlog items also means that Fannie Mae’s product teams have flexibility in choosing their frameworks and they can even weigh competing items using more than one framework.

“Because it’s so easy to apply the different prioritization models to our backlog items in Craft.io, our teams often use more than one model to make their decisions. They can just click and score competing items using the RICE framework, then try it using the Now-Next-Later model, and then try it with WSJF or another model. We don’t need to build any formulas or do any manual work. The frameworks are right there for us in Craft.io.”

Giving Senior Management Insights into Progress on Work Across the Company

Finally, Craft.io’s Portfolio Management gives Fannie Mae’s senior executives visibility into progress across the organization — insights the department wasn’t previously able to show as easily, Sagar adds.

“Right now, we have many agile teams planning, prioritizing, and tracking their progress in Craft.io workspaces,” Sagar explains. “Because we’ve made that data available in a unified platform — and because Craft.io provides a detailed portfolio view — we can give our senior leadership team access to a big-picture view of how things are progressing across all those teams’ work. In fact, we can just send them a link to Craft.io.”

Fannie Mae’s Favorite Craft.io Features