UPDATED 14:56 EDT / APRIL 22 2021

CLOUD

Productboard raises $72M to help developers turn user feedback into new features

Product management startup Productboard Inc. today revealed that it has landed a $72 million funding round led by Tiger Global.

The investment firm was joined in the Series C round by several of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capital firms: Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners. All four are returning Productboard investors.

The investment is the latest in a series raised over recent months by software-as-a-service startups targeting project management use cases.

Productboard, founded in 2014, provides a cloud-based platform that enables companies to plan what new product features to develop based on requests from their customers. UiPath Inc. uses the platform to inform the development of new robotic process automation capabilities. Productboard’s more than 4,000 additional clients rely on its technology to build products ranging from delivery apps to financial services. 

Much of the work that goes into operationalizing customer feedback involves organizing large volumes of disparate feature requests into a more usable form. To streamline the task, Productboard provides a set of features specifically for speeding up data collation. The service also provides project managers with tools for turning the data into development roadmaps. 

Productboard enables users to aggregate customer feedback from sources such as support tickets and Slack into a single repository. From there, they can group related items to identify the capabilities that customers are requesting the most. Those items can be forwarded to relevant members of the project management group to inform engineering plans.

Productboard makes it possible to organize features that have been added to the engineering roadmap in virtual boards. When extra context is needed, the boards enable users to quickly bring up the customer requests that inspired a given feature. 

Project management teams looking to fine-tune the creation of development roadmaps can customize their Productboard workflows in various ways. In the feedback collection phase, the platform enables users to not only identify the most common feature requests but also add contextual details, such as the estimated amount of effort that building a given capability would require. The virtual boards in which Productboard displays development roadmaps, in turn, can be tailored with custom fields. 

The startup is arguing that its platform can replace the spreadsheets and other general-purpose productivity tools that project management teams have historically used. “Just as sales organizations ditched spreadsheets and databases for CRMs several decades ago, modern product organizations are adopting dedicated product management platforms,” Productboard Chief Executive Officer Hubert Palan wrote in a blog post today.

The startup’s plans going forward include opening a new office in Dublin and expanding its existing Vancouver hub. Productboard, which is headquartered in San Francisco, plans to hire more than 100 new employees this year as part of the growth effort. It’s also hoping to add more companies to its partner ecosystem along the way.

Productboard’s latest capital raise comes a month after a group of investors led a $270 million funding round for Airtable Inc., whose cloud-based spreadsheet platform is popular among project management teams. Productivity startup ClickUp, formally Mango Technologies Inc., earlier landed $100 million in funding at a reported unicorn valuation. 

Image: Productboard

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