I was asked to help a small startup improve and scale its 3D artists' platform.
At that time, they had about 30 artists on the platform and were delivering around 250-300 digital assets per month.
I began by assessing what they were currently doing and how the different procedures and processes were done.
This led me to conclude the 2 main issues that were impacting their growth:
1. Artists – Artists on the platform were failing to finish their jobs on time, and either doing very poor jobs or just leaving the jobs without finishing them.
2. QA process – The artists had over 80% fail rate which harmed delivery times and cost the company a lot of money.
I then devised a plan to fix these 2 issues.
--- Solving the Artists problem ---
I created a new ranking system, based on only 2 objective parameters:
1. Quantity of jobs done per artist
2. Number of fixes for those jobs
By analyzing the artists' past works, I then created another ranking system to separate them into market-specific expertise, such as experience in footwear, furniture, eyewear, modeling or texturing, etc.
This enabled the artists to deliver more successful jobs, make more money, and helped the company save money on unfinished jobs and shorten delivery time to clients.
--- SOLUTION ---
The company was able to grow the platform to over 400 specialized artists and deliver over 2000 unique products monthly!
--- Solving the QA problem ---
QA is crucial in lowering costs and shortening delivery times and mostly delivering products that the client can confirm immediately.
The company had the wrong incentive plan in place which accounted for over 83% fail rate.
At that time, they had a single QA person, and I changed his work goals not to just going over as many QA jobs daily, but to make sure the quality was also aligned.
Tying his incentives to artists' success, resulting in him earning more money, lowering the failure rate, helping the artists deliver more successful jobs, shortening delivery times, and also enabling the artists to earn more money – which in turn made them come back and work on more jobs.
--- SOLUTION ---
Once that plan was in place and working, we scaled the team from 1 to 12 full-time QA specialists, making more money and approving more jobs, and the company was able to lower the failure rate from 83% to just over 5%!
When beginning a project, it's crucial to start with a deep analysis and to define the current processes and problems, only then deciding on the goals, and finally devising and following through with the best work plan to achieve short- and long-term market success!
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