Defining the product and market opportunity for IRIS Bridge
From a filing-conversion product to a focused validation plan.
- Market
- United States
- My work in this market
- Account opening, mortgage lending and tax files
Project brief
US businesses report payments to the IRS in bulk files. The IRS’s newer system, IRIS, takes a different format from the legacy files many filers and their software still produce. IRIS Bridge converts one into the other. With the first version built, I assessed what it could do against competitors, defined who to sell to first, and planned how to test demand before more was built.
My role
I led the product evaluation, market and competitor research, customer segmentation and the validation plan, and improved the first version. The conversion engine itself was written by a colleague.
- 32
- legacy form types read
- 6
- competitors benchmarked across 12 dimensions
Key decisions
- 01
Benchmark what the product can actually do
I compared the product as built, not as planned, against six competitors across 12 dimensions, and turned the gaps into a proposed build sequence.
- 02
Choose an initial audience
I prioritised tax software vendors before banks, since vendors can open a path to many filers, and wrote a separate outreach approach for each buyer need.
- 03
Set the investment gate before seeing responses
I proposed demand thresholds before any campaign results came in and made further product work conditional on them. With a small recipient list, I treated message variants as qualitative input instead of running an A/B test that could not be statistically meaningful.
Outcome
Delivered the competitor benchmark, the target-customer definition and the validation plan, ran the outreach, and presented the product to a prospective partner. IRIS Bridge reads 32 legacy form types.
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