Adevinta is a leading online classifieds group, operating digital marketplaces across Europe. Their marketplaces span consumer goods, mobility, real estate, and jobs, with a portfolio consisting of more than 25 digital brands. But with so many unique companies and brands, the product organization was experiencing several pain points, including too much time spent in meetings, a lack of trust and communication as teams worked in silos, and difficulty accessing information because everyone used separate tools. Productboard supported them in streamlining roadmapping, customer insights collection, and communication, so everyone now feels empowered to work toward the same strategic goals.

Need to buy or sell something in Europe? If so, there’s a good chance you’ve turned to one of Adevinta’s 25+ brands. Their portfolio — including brands like Leboncoin in France, Marktplaats in the Netherlands, and Kleinanzeigen in Germany — attracts 120 million users and over 1 million businesses every month. 

Each brand has its own unique identity, provides a range of services, and plays an integral role in empowering buyers, sellers, renters, and job seekers to find exactly what they’re looking for. As you can imagine, serving such a broad community through dozens of platforms leads to complexity within the product org. Needless to say, it’s easy for tools and communication to get a little tangled. This is why Product Operations Manager Jo-Shan Lee is committed to streamlining their product processes and toolkit. 

Challenges: Multiple tools, inconsistent processes, and too much time lost 

“Back in the old days, our teams were using multiple tools to manage their roadmaps — Google Sheets, Google Slides, Confluence,” says Jo-Shan. It often took several rounds of back and forth meetings to communicate roadmaps. Some of their biggest challenges included:

• Inconsistent roadmap processes, which led to extra work and time to get everyone on the same page
• Lack of visibility into other teams’ work, which eroded trust and hampered productivity
• Decentralized organization prevented effective cross-team alignment

These problems meant there was a lack of cohesiveness within the product team. “People didn’t have visibility into what others were doing — teams worked in silos,” says Jo-Shan.

It was clear they couldn’t continue to operate this way. Adevinta’s Director of Product, Fabrice Chupin saw a way forward with Productboard. “The flexibility and adaptability of Productboard and their team allow us to cater for and adapt to all our market needs,” explains Fabrice.

Solution: A single source of truth promotes consistency, clarity, and collaboration 

Jo-Shan says Productboard was the clear choice to address their pain points. “We believe that Productboard has the features and functionality for us to optimize our product management processes from end to end, from discovery to delivery.” The Productboard features and benefits that appealed most to Fabrice and Jo-Shan (“And there’s many,” she adds) included:

• Standardized processes increase clarity and consistency toward the same strategic goals
• Content from varied customer-facing sources collected on a central Insights board
• Shareable standardized roadmaps eliminate data and information silos and allow stakeholders to self-serve essential information
• Jira integration promotes full end-to-end transparency and reporting on delivery of customer needs to all stakeholders

“This will naturally increase transparency within our product org and improve our product culture,” says Jo-Shan. 

Fabrice agrees, adding, “Linking the customer’s insights to the outcome allows us to close the loop and clearly communicate the rationale and the value of the product org to the stakeholder.”

Because Jo-Shan had worked with Productboard at a previous company, she led the initiative to launch Productboard at Adevinta. In order to design a process that would meet the diverse needs of her team, she began asking a few product managers to test the solution while she ran user interviews to understand the user problems and needs. Just like the PMs she supports, once she’d identified the user problems, she set a structure to meet their needs. She then led a few alignment sessions to introduce the new roadmap process and define the product hierarchy. Through this process she was able to outline the communications and integrations requirements to ensure end-to-end transparency within the product life cycle. Next she worked with each of the initial tribes within Adevinta to create a strong foundation. 

“Implementation is not the end of the journey,” says Jo-Shan. She continues to monitor progress and usage and iterate on the process whenever it’s needed. Jo-Shan also works closely with Adevinta’s research teams to facilitate continuous discovery and incorporate better customer insights flows in Productboard.

Because Jo-Shan is running a small but mighty product operations team of one, she’s especially grateful for the partnership with Productboard’s professional services team to facilitate rollout and adoption. She’s developed a strong relationship with the sales and support teams and relies on their thought partnership and creative approach to solutions. “Our account executives and tech support agents are always patient and helpful with my feedback and requests. I think they are probably working on answering some of my requests right now,” laughs Jo-Shan. 

Up until recently, Jo-Shan said her favorite feature of Productboard was the Jira integration because it helps keep roadmap statuses up-to-date and it makes it easy for PMs to manage things without going back and forth between different tools. But now Jo-Shan says everyone is excited about the possibilities of Productboard’s AI capabilities. “We really look forward to being able to better organize customer insights and for the AI to help us aggregate data into different clusters.” She can already imagine the time and effort this will save PMs and UX people when analyzing insights and writing feature descriptions. This will give everyone greater confidence and eliminate any “I don’t have time” excuses.  

Results: Roadmap creation and communication is simplified and everyone is empowered to participate in product 

With Productboard in place, roadmaps are no longer a source of frustration at Adevinta and instead act as a tool for communication and collaboration. A few of the biggest changes so far include: 

• Widespread adoption across the company: 94% adoption across 170 PMs to date and 1,100 total users. A team of internal ambassadors is also helping spread the word and inspire others with their success with Productboard.
• Engaged cross-functional collaborators: The top 10 most active members were contributors, signaling broad interest in the platform outside of product. “We see this as a sign that Productboard is not only helpful for the people who provide information, but also for those who consume information,” says Jo-Shan. One member of the UX team said, “There was no good place to properly store analyzed qualitative data that we connect with product backlog — it’s a lot easier now with Productboard.” 
• Upleveled product teams with more standardized processes: The product teams and business stakeholders are now united around a shared understanding of the product vision. “Productboard brings business alignment that empowers our product teams to learn from both successes and failures across all the teams, leading to improved prioritization and decision-making,” explains Fabrice. 
• Increased efficiency: Dozens of recurring meetings across tribes that took more than 40 hours (plus prep time) have been condensed into three meetings that take two hours each, giving product managers back dozens of hours they can now spend on more impactful work. “Productboard makes this so much easier because teams can use it as their default presentation format,” says Jo-Shan.
• Simplified communication and meeting preparation: “The ability to be high level or dig down in detail for any audience allows me to present confidently, even with two seconds’ notice, to anyone at any level,” says one Head of Product.

Everyone throughout the product org — from leaders and individual PMs to UX researchers — has shared positive feedback with Jo-Shan. One of her favorite comments? A product team in Spain collectively shared the following: “We use Productboard to show everything on the table — we don’t need Google Slides anymore!” 

Adevinta started their Productboard journey with 30 makers — mainly product managers and product owners — using the tool. There are now around 170 makers (and around 1,000 total users) from France, Germany, parts of Spain, and the Central Teams active on the platform today. They also plan to expand to cover all of Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy in 2024. “Product operations is on a mission to evangelize Productboard across all of Adevinta,” says Jo-Shan.

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