Building the high-adoption merger integration tool Signal
Building the high-adoption merger integration tool Signal
Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) can help companies create immense value, but they can just as easily destroy value if not executed carefully. Bain is a worldwide leader in advising its clients through strategic M&A decisions like these. But as M&A transactions grew ever more complex, Bain knew it needed to build its own software tool to ensure the best outcomes.
These teams helped build a new internal software tool
Bain’s Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) practice teamed up with the NextGen Software Solutions and Consulting teams to build a celebrated proprietary tool. They had support from a third-party software development vendor, Echelon, as well as an external design team.
These teams helped build a new internal software tool
Bain’s Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) practice teamed up with the NextGen Software Solutions and Consulting teams to build a celebrated proprietary tool. They had support from a third-party software development vendor, Echelon, as well as an external design team.
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Bain Marketing
The marketing team helped brand Signal, produce product videos, and announce its launch.
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General Consulting
Consultants participated in the initial build phase. They helped write and test business cases, developed the commercial plan, ensured product-market fit, and ran the pilot program. The Signal design process would eventually involve more than 25 consulting team members across tenures, to review features and assess the value.
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Legal/Risk
The Legal & Risk team helped define the terms and conditions for the software’s use and streamlined the signup process.
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NextGen Software Solutions
The NGSS team turns Bain’s ideas and tools into software, and led this project. An NGSS product manager implemented an Agile design and build process, scoped the minimum viable product (MVP), prioritized user feedback, and, upon launch, rapidly scaled the solution. During the pilot launch, the NGSS Customer Success team joined to configure Signal to meet clients’ needs and onboard users.
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Product, Practice, and Knowledge (PPK)
One General Consulting team member, Brooke Houston, shifted over to join the PPK team to become the tool’s product owner. She helped guide the development and ensure Signal’s features followed best-practice integrations and divestiture work. In addition, several PPK leaders contributed significant ideas, gave feedback on features, and supported the initial deployments.
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Technology Solutions Group (TSG)
TSG supported the Signal team by provisioning the cloud infrastructure needed to host the software and ensure clients would have uninterrupted access.
Background
Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are a core component of corporate strategy, and one that Bain excels at helping with. These corporate transitions tend to be complex, but if done right, they have the power to transform that company and sometimes, the industry.
The greatest challenge is often the corporate integration. Two organizations with different cultures, systems, and habits don’t always gel, and speed is essential—if the integration drags past the first year, inertia can set in, and it grows even more difficult. At the same time, expectations for what a company can achieve through M&A are rising across industries. This means Bain needs the best tools to support better and better integrations.
The M&A practice began looking into building its own software to support this work. Suzanne Kumar, Practice VP of M&A, arranged a two-day design workshop where she announced, “This is mission critical.” That workshop gave the team ideas for features and the foundation to begin planning.
The plan
The NGSS team knew this tool would have to be enterprise-grade right from launch. M&A work is high stakes, and the minimum viable product (MVP) would need to provide Bain’s team a significant advantage over alternative program management tools.
Bain’s M&A practice leader, Alex Ramanathan, asked Brooke Houston, a consultant who’d run successful M&A projects, if she wanted to lead. She said yes—she was ready for a change. She moved to the Product, Practice & Knowledge (PPK) team and was paired with a product manager from Bain’s NextGen Software Solutions (NGSS) team. They began prioritizing features they’d need in their MVP.
Because Bain already has so much expertise in M&A, the company had a strong sense of what was needed. Brooke and team ran a user discovery process on Bain’s own consultants and mapped out the plan: to build, test, secure, provision, launch, and continue to iterate. They engaged a specialist third-party developer and began work on the tool that would become known as “Signal.”
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What pain points were teams currently experiencing?
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What functionality would the tool need at MVP?
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What functionality would the tool eventually need?
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What level of expert software support would be needed?
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How could this become an opportunity to infuse software within Bain’s consulting approach?
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How could the software support integration best practices?
The approach
Bain teams built the first module, known as the work plan, within three months. That allowed them to beta test with a first client—one of Bain’s own practice teams which was busy helping Bain itself acquire a company. That M&A practice team’s initial feedback influenced and guided the next five modules.
Six months in, Signal was ready for the first client pilots. At 12 months, the six core modules were fully tested and available and Bain and client teams were actively using them. The software allowed those consultants and their clients to jointly monitor progress against goals, resolve integration issues faster, manage moving talent, and spotlight critical decisions. The early results were all Brooke and the NGSS team had hoped for. Signal users spent less time establishing templates to track things and more time on key actions, which meant quicker launches and faster results.
Once the complete Signal MVP launched and new customers began signing up, the team focused on rapidly improving the core product. With those added feedback cycles, the product reached a point where four times more Bain teams were using it than were using the prior method. It scaled so effectively, within one year of MVP launch, they transitioned to a new version, Signal 1.0.
The results
Signal is now used in 80% of Bain’s merger integration and divestiture projects. It has been wildly successful and set a standard for new tools. Signal is considered the benchmark against which other Bain product teams measure success, and a model for how well things can go when you start with user research and build with Agile. Signal has also allowed Bain to maintain its leadership in the M&A space and, as a result, helps countless clients continue to grow.
adoption on relevant cases
active users globally
higher user satisfaction (NPS) than the benchmark
