Kredinor is Norway’s largest debt collection company in terms of number of cases, and a leading player in the management and purchase of debt portfolios. The company has offices in Norway, Sweden and Finland, with 600 employees and a total annual turnover of nearly NOK 1.6 billion. Kredinor AS is owned by Sparebank 1 and the Kredinor Foundation. The debt collection industry is changing, and Kredinor aims to take a more socially responsible position in our follow-up of individuals, companies and public entities.

At Kredinor, our priority is to provide our customers with the best solutions and experiences. To achieve this, we need all departments to work together and understand each other. Good communication and a shared understanding of our goals are crucial. Technology, digitizing and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is part of helping us deliver on our customer promise.

To improve our way of working Kredinor started a process of finding a tool that could simplify the job of drawing flow sketches.

"We needed a solution that was easy to use, understand and learn, as well as transparent and flexible for documenting processes."
Jørgen Engeskog, Business Developer

After evaluating various options, Kredinor chose ShiftX as the solution that met their needs. ShiftX's visual approach makes it easy for anyone to understand and use, and it helps to improve communication and understanding between departments, in a more unified and efficient way.

Kredinor's development processes take place between people and systems from several departments. The work goes through phases such as exploring, identifying, defining, prioritizing, developing, programming, testing and documenting. People are often drawn into a task without having been part of what has happened so far or is to be done further. By using ShiftX we work faster, more efficiently and precisely through all phases of the process.

They are now effectively documenting all their RPA processes in ShiftX

“ShiftX is an unusual combination of simple and professional in one and the same solution. It's fun to use for presentations because it is easily understood”. 
Hege Karlsen, process analyst at Kredinor RPA-team

The use of ShiftX allows Kredinor to model the RPA process in ShiftX first, which results in smoother handover between process analyst, developers and test leader. It's not just the work with processes that gets better, the processes themselves get better too.

The visual approach helps Kredinor to quickly identify gaps, shortcomings, and consequences of a proposal, resulting in better decision-making. Often redundant steps are found and can be removed.

The further development and implementation also goes quicker because we save time and avoid unnecessary misunderstandings, errors and delays at all stages from the workshop, via development, testing and to the operation department.

It is easy to maneuver from step to step, and different information layers can be created within the solution, depending on who is to understand or do something in the step.

A useful side effect is that a well-documented process is well-suited for training.

It's not just the work with processes that gets better, the processes themselves get better too.

ShiftX also allows Kredinor to see previous versions, changes, and improvements easily. This provides the company to improve and develop RPA processes while keeping track of the changes made and when they were implemented.

Visual and intuitive understanding means moving faster as a unified organization

In conclusion, Kredinor's use of ShiftX helps the company to streamline their building process, improve communication and understanding between departments, and launch new processes faster.

Because ShiftX makes it so easy to understand each other and collaborate, there will also be less disruption, interruptions, fewer meetings and shorter discussions.

The more widely we use ShiftX, the greater the value of the use is. A growing part of the organization sees the same picture to an even greater extent of a better way of working. This means that we move even more in the same direction and work faster to develop new and better deliveries to our customers.

“We experience ShiftX as a very forward-leaning, listening company that is both curious and sympathetic to our wishes and needs. ShiftX is very intuitive and visual in use, which is extremely important to us. We are rooting for them to be a Norwegian startup.

 
Andreas Komnæs - Head of New Products and Services

Business Developer

Streamline the development and improvement of customer processes using ShiftX

For a B2B SaaS (Software as a Service) like ourselves, one of the main questions you often reflect on is: "

Do we want to focus on Product-Led or Sales-Led Growth?

If you're more like: "Product-Led what?" Let us explain:

: is a growth model where product usage drives customer acquisition, retention, and expansion. You focus on your users and the time it takes for them to experience value using your product. 

: is a growth model that uses a sales rep or your sales team and their processes to drive conversions and business growth. You focus on the value you create for the users of your product and the buyer and their needs.

this in-depth explanation by the Product-Led Growth Collective

) also mention Marketing-Led Growth as an own strategy, but we're not going to go deep into that one in this text, as it's not one we've ever considered.

But do we have to choose one or the other? Yes, and no. As we'll see, both growth strategies carry elements of the other. But it's helpful to reflect on which of the two directions suits you the best, as they both entail different organizational, sales, marketing, and product actions once you've decided. 

We'll dive deeper into each strategy and how we've worked with each of them over the last couple of years. 

What is a Sales-Led Growth (SLG) strategy?

If your SaaS follows an SLG strategy, a significant part of your organization will typically consist of people working with sales. You might call them Sales Development Representatives (SDRs), Account Managers, and Business Developers. 

They'll typically work with lead generation, outreach, filling up your sales funnel, and work closely with your marketing or demand generation department (if you have one). 

it does not automatically mean you're following an SLG strategy

. As we'll get back to later, most of the companies following a PLG strategy 

 have sales teams, as most conversions, whether you're doing SLG or PLG, are sales-assisted and require human beings to do outreach and make sure your potential customers get what they want and need. 

Another thing that often separates SLG from PLG is that the Average Deal Size (also known as Average Contract Value, ACV) is larger with SLG, as you're talking directly to the person(s) with a budget, the buyer. 

When we were more on the SLG side of things, mid-2021, 

one of our sales processes could look something like this

SDRs would get lists from marketing, qualifying leads, and inviting them to meetings with our Account Executives and Managers. If you were lucky (and qualified), you'd sometimes get a demo account to test our product for a couple of days if you'd had a meeting or two with us.

But most of the time, our SLG conversions came after 1-3 sales meetings and product demos with our hottest leads. After signing a contract with us, they'd start using our product. 

With a PLG strategy, it's often the other way around. 

What is a Product-Led Growth (PLG) strategy?

Let's get a popular myth out of the way immediately: PLG strategies 

 rely heavily on having a working sales department of human beings making sales. As Sam Richard, VP of the Growth Team at Openview, an expansion stage venture capital firm, says in the webinar below, 

over 60% of the conversions of so-called self-service businesses are sales-assisted

, meaning one or more human being(s) have been involved in the sales process:

Then what separates an SLG from a PLG strategy? 

It's how early you get to use and interact with the product you want to buy. 

 PLG strategy often entails offering your product through some sort of freemium or free trial license. 

You let your leads sign up for your product as one of their first actions on your website. Then you trust your product to do the convincing. If it gives your leads value, they're seeing the business case for spending some money buying full access, either buying more features (if you offer limited functionality in your freemium/free trial licenses) or buying more time (if your freemium/free trial licenses only last for 7-14 days for example). 

If you also make larger enterprise sales (like we do), a PLG strategy can also help you 

which leads to get in touch with. Then you'll typically have some product metrics ("invited three colleagues to their workspace" or "returned to the product >4 times within a week") you've decided are good thresholds for which users to approach to ask for a more expanded agreement. 

Openview has a great blog post on Product Qualified Leads (PQLs)

Some weeks ago, we started mapping out what our PQL process could look like in ShiftX. 

There is no right or wrong answer to which of these strategies 

 company should follow. Some factors to consider that have played their part when we've decided and discussed are:

: Do you have a group of employees with sales and outreach experience that are used to owning the full sales funnel, from lead to closed contract? Fitting them into a PLG way of doing things is always an option, but the downside of the change management needed might overshadow the upside of potentially succeeding with PLG versus just sticking with the SLG way of doing things.

: How quickly do you think a new user (that doesn't know your product) could experience value using your product without talking to anyone at your company? If your product is intuitive and not too complex, letting users "self-serve" should be doable. This again will take you closer to a PLG approach by letting your leads experience your product on their own, right when they want to. Need help building self-served onboarding? Check out tools like 

 if you don't want to build something custom yourselves, as we've done.

Why and how we're changing to more of a PLG strategy

Getting to a point where your PLG strategy is in full blossom, where your (mainly) self-served customers are driving your main income, can be a long road. Knowing when and if to go PLG is a very important business decision. Like global venture capital investor Gil Dibner writes, 

for some, it makes sense to go PLG immediately

As we are both rigged, organizationally, for doing PLG and have a pretty intuitive, user-friendly, non-complex tool to get you started as a user on your own (at least we like to believe we do), we feel ready to make a shift towards a PLG strategy. 

I'll continue telling you some more about what inspired us and what we've done in the last couple of months.

As PLG has started taking off in recent years and months, more and more resources are out there, sharing experiences and knowledge. Here are some that we've used:

"Product-Led Growth: What It Is And Why It’s The Future of SaaS", by Breyta

The Product-Led Growth Collective Community

What most of these resources often barely mention, though, that might turn out to be one of your main challenges (as it has for us), is 

With PLG, you'll not be making outreach sales at the same scale (or maybe 

). So, how will you get the new users (and paying customers) to come pouring in with your new PLG strategy? 

Some of us product heads live(d) in the illusion that if you just make an 

 product, people will find their way in themselves. Word-of-mouth, Viral Campaigns. These nice things will happen. By themselves. 

Well, I hate to be the one telling you that this belief is a beautiful but also dangerous illusion. Distribution, spread, and awareness all demand hard, strategic, long-lasting work.  But there are a couple of things that could help you get things going quite quickly, though.

The one thing which has been the thing (so far) helping our distribution the most (by far) with the least amount of effort is 

. There are tons of blog posts about how to launch successfully (

I found this one, by Danish designer Michael Flarup, pretty helpful

). What (we think) turned out to be one of our most important preparations was letting one of Producthunts top "hunters",

, post our product, or "hunt us", as it's called. 

Overall, Producthunt gave us around 300 new signups, a lot of kind words, constructive feedback from SaaS-heads around the world, 

, and spread to other platforms and forums. 

We've also learned about the LTD (Lifetime Deal) forums like 

, where you'd offer lifetime discounts on your software and get hundreds of signups. As an experiment, we posted an offer for 

, and got some helpful feedback and about 100 signups (which was quite a lot for us) in about one day. A little experiment that gave us some valuable insights on our own customer journey and our product, but also realized these are not users matching our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

Going forward, we're experimenting more with integration and partner strategies, connecting ShiftX up with other tools in our sphere, creating a powerful stack for streamlining your business administration and documentation.

With an SLG strategy, you'll most likely have a very operational sales team, following their prospects hands-on, full cycle, from cold lead to closed deal. With a PLG strategy, you'll have to rely more on tools and analytics to do the same jobs. A lot of these kinds of tools have arisen lately. 

To do PLG effectively, knowing your customers, what they like and don't like about your product, what they need in the future, and what will get them to love your product is essential. And, as mentioned above, knowing which customers to get in touch with, as a lot of PLG sales also are sales-assisted, is also key. That way, you won't waste time in meetings with leads that don't have real buyers' intent but still catch the big fish that do. 

There are a lot of new tools lately that want to help you 

get control of your full "lead to happy customer" lifecycle

. These are some we've considered starting using:

"CRM as it should be". Early-stage Norwegian-based startup that wants to help you get control of your entire customer lifecycle.

 – "Turn product data into revenue". A Product-Led Sales platform that helps you improve customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion.

 – "Turn signups into revenue". They want to give your sales team the product insights and workflows they need to prioritize, close, and grow accounts.

For analytics, we've considered and started using some of these tools:

 – "Build better products". They want to help you get control of your self-serve product analytics to help you convert, engage, and retain more users.

 – "B2B Revenue attribution". Help you gather, join and clean all revenue-related data to present a transparent actionable analysis of what drives B2B revenue.

 – "The Leading Subscription Analytics Platform". A typical SaaS tool to measure, understand, and grow recurring revenue.

We've now also made it possible to pay your ShiftX license with 

And of course, we've used our own tool in making out our core processes, like the ones we've shared with you above in this text. Want to do the same? As we've now transitioned into more of a PLG SaaS, 

PLG is more of a long game than SLG. Building good self-service customer journeys into and around your product takes time. And, as we hope we've made clear in the text above, we're going to be in some sort of hybrid state where manual sales still play a vital role in growing the company's accounts, especially, as mentioned, the larger ones. But our PLG focus is here to stay.

How we're changing from Sales-Led Growth (SLG) to Product-Led Growth (PLG)

Here's a little mid-year update from me, Nikolai, CEO of ShiftX.

It's been a very active first half of the year, with some major 

 – a new way to add documentation to your steps in ShiftX, with Notes, Links and Images.

 – a new way to visualize time spent on each step in your process.

 – decide who has what access to which of the flows in your workspace.

webinars you're free to watch as recordings

Why involving 10x more people is key for continuous improvement and change

, with CTO Eigil Sagafos and me from ShiftX.

How Custimy.io prepare operations for rapid growth and change

, with SVP of Operations, Linda Hassellund.

Continuous improvement through employee inclusion

, with VP Global Head of Business Processes at Skuld, Andreas Sylthe.

A process' role in implementing a business strategy

, with Petrine Djupvik-Flaa, Ph.D. Candidate at BI Business School, and Process leader at Asplan Viak.

process work has gone from boring to fun at OBOS

How ShiftX helps Inselo close sales faster

OsloBuss handled spikes in Employee Onboarding using ShiftX

, giving us a lot of really great feedback from product lovers all around the world, and some interesting new connections. Don't hesitate to get in touch if you're considering launching something yourself, and want advice. 

As always, if there's something you're missing or want to ask us, 

don't hesitate to get in touch or join our Slack community

And if you need help planning your summer holiday, 

check out our Summer Holiday Planning process

Mid-year update from CEO Nikolai

In this Webinar, we discuss topics such as:

Petrine's academic research on technology

how well-documented processes can help in implementing strategy, together with or instead of Goals and KPIs.

This webinar is part of our webinar series where we invite users and customers of ShiftX to talk about different topics related to continuous improvement, business processes, and innovation. 

Webinar: A process' role in implementing a business strategy

OsloBuss is a family-owned company, established in 2002, specializing in charter and touring buses. It was the first company to begin using a fully electric touring bus in Northern Europe, and it has set an ambitious goal to be fossil-free by 2023 and not to have any more diesel trucks by that time.

Their customers are (among others) Flytoget, the Norwegian Army, the IKEA-bus, Coop Obs, and the Municipal educational Officer. 

They also have a lot of school buses in Oslo, and transport about 1000 students each and every day. It's all very complex, and a lot of processes to keep track of, says Fredrik Eijerstam, CEO of OsloBuss. 

Onboarding new drivers during a pandemic 

Like many others, OsloBuss faced challenges due to the pandemic. Pre-summer 2021, their driver pool was reduced and OsloBuss was to replace Flytoget, the airport express train in Norway, as part of the summer deviation plan for Flytoget. Flytoget is very quality-focused, and is expected to and known for being right on time and delivering excellent customer service. OsloBuss was going from small to enormous production in a short period of time. 

Elevate all employees, both existing and new, to this high-quality level 

And last but not least, how to make every role clear to everyone? 


For OsloBuss, it became important to find a tool to reach out to as many drivers as possible, and map out what it means to be a Flytoget-driver, what it meant to work for OsloBuss, as well as the customer journey flow. E-learning and ShiftX turned out to be great tools to achieve this. 


- For a guy that's over average interested in processes and structure, it's a fantastic tool to draw up processes, Fredrik says

OsloBuss has been working with ShiftX for about 2 years now. When they first started using the tool pre-summer 2021 to face the challenges they experienced, Fredrik started by mapping everything, the whole organization, and all its processes, out himself at first.

And after he was done, he invited everyone else in. But they didn't understand anything. As he drew everything from his own mind, the interaction was lost. To get an accurate picture, they quickly understood they had to make the process of mapping out everything more inclusive.


- Instead, we sat down in a meeting room together and mapped every challenging case we knew of, 

By mapping it out together, all parties were able to agree and clarify their roles and responsibilities. How long each one is responsible, when its transferred, etc.

Just the simple move of sitting together, the whole group, to clarify responsibility, gave us a better flow,

The result: Out of 27 000 trips in one month with 100 bus drivers on duty and 20 customer advisors, 

99,3 percent of scheduled trips were on time. 

According to Fredrik, the implementation and delivery turned out very well, which also makes them able to harvest useful experiences for next year's delivery. Having the right tool has helped the company to get a better flow of things, better understanding, and reduce stress. 

- You're able to map out the full onboarding flow, from A-Z, in a structured, nice way. Everyone knows what's supposed to happen in which step, and what's supposed to happen afterward. 

By mapping out steps and responsibilities in the process and their internal routines, the whole atmosphere in the group has changed and improved. 

- Through ShiftX, e-learning, and routines, we improve the level of understanding throughout the company, Fredrik concludes. 


In closing, Fredrik comments that the more they use ShiftX, the more they use the finesse and different features it offers. 

If you are interested to hear and see how OsloBuss use ShiftX, watch the recording of our live seminar here: 

CEO of OsloBuss

Onboarding process with high quality expectations using ShiftX 

In this webinar, you will hear about how Skuld is:

building a continuous improvement culture 

utilizing digital tools in combination with knowledge and experience

managing and getting people involved in the process work 

and why did they chose ShiftX as their new process tool to work with continuous improvement 


This webinar is part of our webinar series where we invite users and customers of ShiftX to talk about different topics related to continuous improvement, business processes, and innovation. 

Webinar: Continuous improvement through employee inclusion

As SVP of Operations at Custimy.io, Linda knew they had to document their business processes to create ownership and scale. With ambitious growth plans, their goal is to streamline and have as many processes in place as they can.

Quicker onboarding for new colleagues when knowing how things are done

They have been using ShiftX to structure different processes, such as customer onboarding and lifecycle, and data flow.

Webinar: How Custimy.io prepares operations for rapid growth and change

Digitalization, innovation, streamlining, and change management. It's all about processes and making people and systems interact in new ways. But before you can change and get to a level of continuous improvement, you got to involve the people doing the work.


While ShiftX Co-Founders Nikolai Strandskogen, Eigil Sagafos, and Kjetil Jortveit worked as consultants in design and tech agencies in Norway, they noticed that the client story often repeated itself. 

As the onboarding process begins, the consultants would want to understand today's as-is situation. The answer often lies in fragments within different departments of the client. And so the over-enthusiastic and chaotic workshops begin.

There has to be a better way of getting an accurate picture of the company's current state?

Watch the webinar to learn more about the birth of ShiftX, and how the involvement of employees is key to continuous improvement and change. 

Webinar: Why involving 10x more people is key to continuous improvement and change

ShiftX is the place to document and iterate on your business processes, making it the perfect place for working with continuous improvement throughout your organization. 

To make it even easier to put in (and have your colleagues comment and iterate on) your thoughts and existing documentation, we're now introducing 

, where you could put notes on each of your steps in your process, with structured content blocks, making it easier and more accessible both to read and create documentation 

We are now introducing three different kinds of c

 Each block is given a title and has some additional fields depending on the block type. 

You can add as many blocks as you want, and move the blocks up and down in order after creation. These are the three types of content blocks we've enabled:

This block is similar to today's additional information. In this block, you can write and format text, and add links. What's also new, though, is that you can create 

, separate blocks, and move them up and down in the side panel. 

Ever just wanted to create an easily accessible link to something 

 of ShiftX? With content blocks, you can now create a simple 

 that will be directly accessible in the block panel to your right.

The same goes for images. If you have relevant images for a step in your flow, create an 

, and upload it there. Maybe you have a relevant screenshot, poster, or some instructions?

We know, sometimes new features mess up what you've already created. But don't worry, this release won't. At least not the documentation you've already put in what we used to call 

If you experience any bugs or other unwanted issues, please 

Add content blocks to your steps in ShiftX

How should you organize your work when you want to build a digital product as fast, painless, and right for the customer as possible? 

The question is old and has many answers. 

Several of us in the product team here at ShiftX has been working in consultancies for many years and have met both the positive and negative sides of frameworks like Scrum and Kanban.

And while these classic frameworks might work in bigger companies, we wanted a framework that made the product team feel more ownership. We want to hire people who love solving problems and are passionate about building quality products, and not just turning tickets.

not spending enough time digging into the real problems

While developing, we also started questioning our own decisions: 

Were there other more important features than the ones we decided to make? Did we find the wrong solution for this feature?

We also saw that it was hard for the rest of the company, the ones working in admin and commercialization, to understand why we did what we did. 

When we got feature requests and bug reports from customers, it was hard for people outside the product team to understand why we didn't make or fix them immediately. 

The answer was clear for us. In a startup like our own, where there's an endless list of features we want to create, with a relatively small team (we're about 3-4 people working full time with product development), we need to prioritize hard.

Our solution has been to mold our version of 

the Basecamp-created framework called Shape Up

So, at the core of Shape Up lies a premise of "betting": 

Given what you know at this exact time, what feature (that can be made in a realistic amount of time, with a realistic amount of people) do you bet on to improve your product the most for existing and potential users?

You align the product team and the whole company, with bets taken on which improvements matter the most for you, right now. And when the decisions are made, everyone knows this is what the product team is focusing on solving. 

Each "Shape Up cycle" is run in six weeks. And the setup of every cycle looks the same:

Everyone in ShiftX can suggest ideas for implementation. This is nice, both for making the whole company feel ownership and making it evident that when we get 20-30 ideas, everyone understands we can't make them all at once. It's about prioritization. 

Often the ideas are based on customer feedback (

Streamline the development and improvement of customer processes using ShiftX

How we're changing from Sales-Led Growth (SLG) to Product-Led Growth (PLG)

Mid-year update from CEO Nikolai

Webinar: A process' role in implementing a business strategy

Onboarding process with high quality expectations using ShiftX

Webinar: Continuous improvement through employee inclusion

Webinar: How Custimy.io prepares operations for rapid growth and change

Webinar: Why involving 10x more people is key to continuous improvement and change

Add content blocks to your steps in ShiftX

How we build ShiftX using the Shape Up framework

Adding duration to your process mapping

How to use ShiftX in Sharepoint

How ShiftX helps Inselo close sales faster with quicker client understanding

OBOS's approach to improving processes using ShiftX

Access control on every flow

– It's been a special and active year

Process mapping tool – which one do you choose?

ShiftX as a Microsoft Visio alternative

How to: See different versions of your process

How to: Use Issues in ShiftX

How to: Get started with process modeling in ShiftX

Loop back to earlier stages in your flows

Communicate with your colleagues – inside ShiftX

Use ShiftX in Microsoft Teams

Agile organizations - The new normal: Soft skills vs. hard skills

Agile organizations - The new normal: Communication in «the new normal»

Agile organizations - The new normal: Small, autonomous, agile teams

Agile organizations - The new normal: Agility

A new way to do business process modeling

We are expanding to Benelux – welcome Mark and Malin

Why ShiftX is not using Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN)

Three reasons why BPM implementations fail

How we are building our sales team

You can now end paths in ShiftX

– I want to help ShiftX grow

Mastercard builds closer connections with their clients using ShiftX

Servebolt made ShiftX their shared common language for visualisation of business processes

How Virke is saving time using ShiftX

ShiftX has been key when building the culture at Ohmia