How PayFit Trained Teams in Productboard: 5 Steps to Switch Tools
PayFit’s Product Ops team shares software onboarding best practices
Learn how Product Operations Managers Morane Shemtov & Raphael Dozolme helped cross-functional teams at PayFit use Productboard to create more collaborative and efficient product management processes.
Here’s how PayFit drove adoption internally:
1. Address the pain points upfront
Raphael says it’s important for the driver of any software change to emphasize from the beginning: “they had frustrations with the former processes and tools, and you are trying to help them.”
That way, the audience you’re training can feel a bit less attached to current platforms or processes — ones they conceded were faulty.
2. Nominate Sales and Customer Success champions from each product team
Raphael says it’s valuable to nominate internal champions from cross-functional teams, particularly Sales and Customer Success staff who have an investment in seeing Product thrive with the new platform. Their support (and feedback) along the training journey will help your organization build workflows that work for everybody.
3. Preserve naming conventions when possible
Next, Raphael says this is a great point in time to look back and simplify existing product processes, as “things can get messy when you continuously build floors on top of each other.” Here’s where he recommends exploring what might be worth preserving, too, including naming conventions.
“In Notion, we had a lot of naming fields for backlogs and roadmaps. We looked back at what was working, analyzed what was not, and tried to create something new — but on the basis of previous processes. That way, people would already know what to put in Productboard.”
4. Help teams accept that some workflows will be replaced — for everyone’s benefit
Once Raphael built trust among product managers by keeping approaches everyone agreed were productive, he made clear: new processes were still in store, designed to help everyone do their jobs more effectively. Raphael paints a colorful picture of the exchange that ensued.
“We had a truce with Product people: 2022 would be the year of destruction,” he says. “Lots of new processes were coming, and that meant we had to destroy some.”
So, Raphael got to work building out new processes in Productboard — especially how product managers should evaluate and act on feedback.
5. Build a new approach with experts on Product process (Pro Services)
Here’s where he says sessions with Productboard’s Professional Services team proved especially effective.
“We had workshops and reviews with the implementation team at Productboard to define the processes we wanted to have. We asked our Customer Success team to join these meetings from almost the beginning and they were the first to give us feedback like, ‘this tag is not understandable’ or ‘it’s too technical,’ so it was good to get them really involved.”
You can read more about PayFit’s experience with Productboard here.
And, if you’re curious to try a demo — you can sign up today!
