Customer Intelligence
Evaluating Beta Product (Customer Board) for New Persona Expansion
Company Overview
Productboard is the leading customer-centric product management platform, helping product teams to deliver the right products to market faster. We have 6,000+ customers, including Salesforce, Zoom, Autodesk, and UiPath. Series D startup backed by leading investors like Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, and Bessemer Venture Partners.
Our most common personas includes teams in Product Management, such as Product Operations, Technical Program Management, Product Design, and Engineering.
As the Product Manager on the Product Growth team, I led Product-Led-Growth initiatives for new user acquisition and oversaw the validation and expansion of a highly requested beta product called “Customer Board” to new personas.
Strategy
Following our Series C funding, the primary company strategy focused on driving revenue growth. To achieve this, we aimed to extend our product offerings beyond our main persona in Product Management roles, thereby expanding our Total Addressable Market (TAM) and enhancing organizational collaboration around customer-centricity.
To support this, a new team under the Product Growth organization was formed, called Customer Intelligence. This team is dedicated to enhancing customer-related areas within our product. Our solution addresses the growing need for collaboration between product and customer-facing teams, making customer insights more accessible and actionable, ultimately driving better product decisions and customer satisfaction.
Building the “Customer” Foundation
Improve relevance of the customer entities that serve as common language with customer-facing teams
Bring Collaboration with Customer and Product Personas
Develop solutions that cater to both Customer and Product personas, recognizing their distinct roles while ensuring they can collaborate effectively
Monetize Customer-Facing Teams
Create collaboration workflows tailored to each engaged persona type, fostering better integration and communication across different roles within the organization
Problem
In many organizations, the common language between product and customer-facing teams (CSMs, Sales, Marketing) is the customer. However, gaining and sharing customer context within Productboard is very challenging and requires many steps that are outside of our product.
“Customer” is the common language between CF teams and Product Teams
Building the Beta Product Based on User Research
As a team, we knew that step one in customer-centricity within Productboard was building the foundation. We also knew that we needed to move quickly. When speaking with Engineering team, the fastest way to build was to use as many existing UI components as possible.
Our belief was that if we can quickly provide users with an MVP, the more feedback we would be able to collect, and the more iterative our approach could be.
Sample Clustering on User Feedback
Major themes found in both Customer-Facing and Product Team collaboration cares about the following:
Look through companies and identify users to run research or beta
Look up Customer outstanding requests and product status
See an overview of product wins given from Customers suggestions
However, this workflow is very challenging in Productboard. Users struggle to easily look up feedback and its release status for a given customer. They have to scroll through emails or Productboard Feedback to keep track of specific feedback, look through lists of feedback to check their book of business or specific customers, and filter through the roadmap to see status updates on customer requests. Additionally, they have to navigate through Productboard, Salesforce, and their own notes, making the process cumbersome.
Before State - users have to navigate through many steps and still hard to accomplish their JTBD
With the “Customer Board” Beta , users can easily
Browse through companies and identify rightusers for discovery or beta testing
Getting up to speed before customer calls to celebrate product wins and what requests are still remaining and its status
Most importantly, users can close the feedback loop by viewing all features by status, seeing what is coming up and what has been shipped
This is all presented in one easily accessible view that centralizes Customer Intelligence. Additionally, the integration with Salesforce allows users to bring in additional information such as assigned owner (AM, AE, CSM) and revenue data per customer.
After State- users in MVP can navigate to dedicated “Customer Board” to solve their workflow easily
Beta Progress:
Beta User Recruitment Process:
Set beta user candidate criterial and designed a beta request process for Product team to enable the right candidates for the beta to test
Collaborated with CSMs in Scale and Enterprise to gradually open up Beta to 126+ companies (and 300+ users) that are friendly and requested this in the past to enable the Beta
Provided CSMs and users with onboarding materials and ways to submit feedback on improvements
Gathering Beta Feedback
Feedback Collection Methods
Initial Use Case Intent: Grouped and segmented reasons from beta sign-up users.
Usage Analysis: Compared intended use with actual product usage.
Retention Tracking: Monitored beta cohort retention rates.
Qualitative Feedback: Collected detailed feedback on improvements.
Collaboration Insights: Checked the ratio of product personas to active collaborator users.
Presenting to Leadership Team
Communicated findings to Senior EPD leadership, including product office hour presentations, async reports, and weekly meetings
Leveraged the positive learning data supporting the decision to pursue this new initiative
Impact and Validation
Beta Success Metrics and Results
Healthy adoption and 80% of workspace accounts were returning to Customer Board to stayed informed week over week
Strong PMF score with the Customer-Facing users for collaboration use case and monetization
Cohort User Retention users returning WoW after taking core workflow actions
PMF Score for Product and Customer-Facing
User Testimonials and Success Stories
Across both personas, the feedback on solving their problem were very positive. Below are two notable quotes from customers:
“I can’t wait to show this to our Sales and CSM group, so they can see that we ARE aware of and actioning their teams insights. This new product will help hammer that home!”
“Being able to give each of our customer facing team member visibility into their accounts roadmap is a game changer. ”
Next Steps and Roadmap
Leveraging user feedback to improve roadmap plan for the product’s next phases, including feature enhancements, scaling strategies, and market expansion
