Miso3

Once upon a time, there was a company struggling to manage its relationships with 25 medium-sized vendors. Time and money were slipping through the cracks, with 65% of its service subscriptions not properly aligned with internal ownership or reviewed for actual necessity. Audits, meant to help benchmark and negotiate better deals, turned into a headache. A staggering 70% of audit hours were wasted on gathering and organizing data. This inefficiency was costing them dearly.

Enter MISO, the company’s partner in solving this challenge. MISO's first task was to tackle the data problem—how to compile all the scattered information from various subscriptions, audits, and user data into one place. And they did it exceptionally well. After launching their solution, one client remarked, "Working with MISO, we can now see our spend by user. We had no idea we could save so much time and money. Now, anyone we track using a service is actually using it. MISO has enabled us to generate reports that are truly actionable for the business."

However, despite this early success, we soon realized they had missed the real problem. After releasing the MVP, it became clear that the biggest challenge wasn’t organizing the data—it was who would input the data into the system. Most users were accustomed to using spreadsheets, and the new process felt unfamiliar and burdensome.

So, we adapted. We redesigned the flow to mimic the simplicity of spreadsheets, something the users were already comfortable with. By doing so, they made the tool much easier to adopt.

The key lesson learned? If we had tested our assumptions early, using simple prototypes to identify the true problem, they could have avoided costly redesigns. It became clear that understanding user behavior and addressing the right issues from the start could have saved tens of thousands of dollars in fixing a secondary problem.