The origin story of Skedulo
Matt launched Skedulo, which has been global from day one, based on two main drivers:
- They had a global team that needed a global solution.
- The entire globe needed the same global solution.
Taking a global mindset from the start shaped the way that Matt built the team, as well as what problems the product and opportunity was focused on solving.
Deskless workers exist everywhere.
To be honest, Skedulo started with a Photoshop mockup of what a product could look like… but no actual product. Yet so strongly did the design and vision resonate with future customers that the product build and evolution came naturally.
Skedulo & NDIS
There’s a special vertical in Australia called NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme) that actually became a great use case for the product early on.
The NDIS was a piece of legislation that shaped the way that providers that were helping individuals with disabilities interact with technology in the home and in the community to make sure they could be correctly reimbursed. (This is similar to EVV, or Electronic Visit Verification, in America.)
Skedulo, with its shared values of community-strengthening technology, seized the opportunity to serve a very important industry that provides amazing services to people.
Skedulo & COVID-19
The pandemic provided Skedulo another way to serve the global community. Skedulo basically had a COVID hackathon to offer a free technological solution to organize and schedule people using BioReference Labs in New York, a massive phlebotomy laboratory.
“What are the problems?” Matt said to BioReference. “Could we come back to you in a week with a possible solution?”
The design worked, so Skedulo built it. “To date, we’ve helped to schedule and facilitate more than 37 million vaccine appointments all over the world,” he added.
Building company values into worker-first products
Silicon Valley banter about company values aside, Skedulo takes its company values very seriously by baking them into building human-centered technology.
How did Matt come up with the company values for his brand-new organization? He turned to his own personality and personal values.
From there, he took his company through an exercise to explore the stories, anecdotes, and feelings that people had working for the company in order to codify and refine the values.
Skedulo’s 5 guiding principles
- No Shenanagins
- Customer first.
- Design and build great product.
- Care for one another.
- Be unapologetically better at doing better—but do it while laughing!
Let’s take a closer look at caring.
“The level of connection and empathy you need to have with your customers in a very caring way is not only important to lean into this concept of stakeholder value, but also to deeply understand the challenges that they have and build product to address them,” Matt said.
You can’t be dialed in to the needs of your customers or users unless you start from a customer-first view rooted in caring.