Bilyan Belchev, Director of Product, AI Analytics at Reveal, joins George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal, for ACEDS #eDiscoveryLeadersLive.
Billy has been the Director of Product, AI Analytics at Reveal since June 2021. For nearly 15 years before that, Billy was with his own firm, Webitects, where they helped clients determine the best-fitting strategy for serving their audiences and achieving measurable business goals online, and where Billy lead teams on usability, design, information architecture, and conversion strategy. Billy has a BS in Computer Science and an MS in Technical Communications & Information Design from the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Billy discussed his background and the path he took to his current role. He talked about what makes eDiscovery especially challenging and well as such an opportunity, and the problems he is trying to solve. After sharing his thoughts on the why of what we are doing, he went into various aspects of what it takes to do his job and do it well, and then discussed some of the processes he and his team use to get from initial idea to final product. Billy closes with two examples of features he and his team have worked on.
Key Highlights
- [1:47] Billy’s background and his role today.
- [3:54] How Billy found his way to software, web, and workflow development.
- [7:38] What makes eDiscovery especially challenging – and such an opportunity.
- [9:13] The challenges and problems he is trying to solve at Reveal: Filling the “empty chair”.
- [10:48] Working on the interface: Saving a few seconds to save many dollars.
- [12:23] Figuring out how to better present data to users.
- [14:13] How to ask clients about what they really
- [16:56] The artistic side of development.
- [18:35] Using Agile.
- [21:03] The poetic side.
- [21:38] His team.
- [23:17] Working directly with clients.
- [26:30] An iterative process.
- [27:53] Two examples of features he and his team have worked on: Brain Explorer and High Precision Classification.
Key Quotes by Bilyan Belchev
- [“eDiscovery is] one of the most interesting and challenging industries, a space where there is a lot of opportunity and exciting innovation happening.”
- “My drive has always been, find a painful difficult workflow and make it a little better, a lot better, and lead the team, the designers, the developers, that I have the pleasure of working with, to make it better.”
- “The scale of the problems I have seen [with eDiscovery] is unlike any other industries, When I say scale, that could refer to the volume of data. It could also mean the time pressure, the immense time pressure. I could be factors like, what does a minute of effort cost in the industry, and we know that a minute in this industry is expensive…. At the same time, I think all those challenges are opportunities.”
- “I bring the concerns, requests, desires, challenges of our customers to my colleagues, to the engineering team, and I do that by prioritizing the feature requests, the functions that will go into the next release of one of our products, especially those powered by artificial intelligence.”
- “I work with an incredibly talented team of interface designers, people who are very experienced and passionate about visualizing information, about finding simple ways to represent complex relationships, on the one hand. And on the other hand, I work within an organization that’s passionate about bringing ideas to customers and getting direct feedback from them – treating the customer as a partner, almost a co-designer in a sense, for an exciting new feature.”
- “Every feature request, before it makes it into the product, way before it makes it into a product, it starts as a simple story in a software tool. A user story has to talk about the value… It has to be a sentence or two, nothing more. Every feature has to have the why; it’s not about the what, but the why.”
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