Imagine sending a customized postcard or letter in the mail, as well as a fax, email, text, or voicemail, all with a simple click. ClickSend makes it possible with a one-stop shop for business communications as well as tools for developers. With the wide range of communication channels that ClickSend’s proprietary APIs cover, the company needed help staying organized.

Nadine Saadi, Product Manager, shared ClickSend’s story of the company’s journey with Productboard. As Saadi explained, the company had no official system for managing product and integration requests. As the single product manager in a quickly growing organization, Saadi knew they needed a product management system where they could consolidate all product ideas, requests, and feedback from colleagues and customers in one place. 

A Place for Ideas to Become Actions

Before Saadi implemented Productboard, ClickSend’s support team was overseeing product and integration requests. The process was chaotic and overwhelming, explains Jemaya Margetts, Global Head of Support. “It was a logistical nightmare to know if an integration was going to go ahead and setting expectations for users was impossible.” 

Productboard gave the organization a single source of truth: one location for all product requests, development timelines, and the company’s updated roadmap. “We chose Productboard because of all the different views we were able to set up and manipulate as well as the flexibility of being able to use different prioritization criteria” said Saadi. “Productboard gives us the ability to put our bold ideas down, organize our customers’ feature requests, divide our focus areas into components that we can easily update, and give the team a clear view about the future.”

A Streamlined Process for Prioritizing Requests

Once Productboard was in place, Margetts explained, “a lot of those one on one questions about when features were going to be built or when an integration was coming went away.” Whereas before, Margetts wasn’t able to accurately answer customer questions about the availability of new integrations, she can now look to Productboard for an accurate timeframe.

Today, ClickSend’s feature requests are directed to Productboard, where Saadi and her team assess the demand for each feature as well as the time and effort required to fulfill them. “When a feature is requested, it gets pulled into Productboard for review and that’s where it gets prioritized by the product team,” she explained. 

Productboard’s insights repository helps the team make objective decisions about what features to focus on and track the complexity involved in bringing them to life. “I like that Productboard gives us the ability to take out some of the bias and rally the team around objectively prioritized features that support our product and company objectives,” Saadi said.

Getting Better All the Time

Since ClickSend brought in Productboard, according to Margetts, “the system is so much better already.” Through Productboard’s integration with Jira, all new work from Productboard feeds into Jira for the development team. This allows the development team to continue working in the system they’re used to, while the product team has a separate space for prioritizing features.

The product team works on two-week sprints. “Every two weeks, they introduce a cool, new feature,” said Margetts. The company can now consolidate product ideas, requests, research, and feedback streaming in from a number of sources. From there, they spot trends and identify patterns that help them prioritize what to build next and build it in the right way.