Salaried employees worldwide accrue wages as they work but wait until payday to access them. To bridge that gap, DailyPay CEO and co-founder Jason Lee started DailyPay so companies can provide employees access to their hard-earned wages right as they earn them. The payment platform has taken off since its founding in 2015, expanding its payroll services and working with enterprise clients, including Kroger, Vera Bradley, G4S, Six Flags, and more. 

Jake Forsland, Director of Product Operations, joined DailyPay four years ago when the company had just over 20 employees. As the company scaled to more than 600 employees, Jake has seen how Productboard has transformed DailyPay’s approach to product management. 

Scaling up brought an end to simple, unflexible spreadsheets

In the company’s early years, the small product team would simply create makeshift roadmaps in Excel or Google spreadsheets. Since everyone worked incredibly closely together, employees across different functions were hyper-aware of what everyone else in the company was up to. 

However, once the company began to scale, informally keeping employees up-to-date and aligned about new product developments was less effective. DailyPay’s growth corresponded with increased remote workers due to the pandemic, making in-person office interactions less frequent. When Darlene Miranda, Vice President of Product Management, joined DailyPay, the need for a more formal product management tracking tool became even more evident.

Finding Productboard and focusing on the “why” 

DailyPay chose Productboard as the right tool to help them achieve more organized and strategic product management. They liked that Productboard’s capabilities helped guide their natural progression toward focusing on the “why” of new products, rather than just the “what” and churning out new features like a feature factory to satisfy specific stakeholder requests.  

Offloading the “babysitting” aspects of project management 

One of the best parts about Productboard, Forsland said, is it enables PMs to offload the “rote” aspects of product management, such as ensuring people document progress.  

“Productboard makes it easier for PMs, engineers, and everyone involved to keep track of the easy stuff. The stuff a project manager might have sunk a lot of time into,” he said.

That freed up Forsland’s team to focus more on the big picture of product operations. 

Namely, the Product Ops team focuses on three main areas: Planning and Prioritization, Delivery and Execution, and Optimization — including scalability, processes, tools, training, and ensuring the product team executes accordingly. 

Setting customized views to keep meetings productive and on task

Productboard’s Features board has made a significant impact on Forsland’s team. Using it keeps internal R&D meetings (for example, between PMs and engineers) highly focused and ensures big-picture questions are answered. 

“We’ll set up a customized view in the Features board to facilitate the discussion and keep the conversation in scope. We [would otherwise] revert to talking about the status of what we are building — a habit that leads to redundant conversations and wasted time,” he said. 

Productboard’s seamless integration with Jira means that those customized Features board views can also include what the team’s engineers are working on and their status.

“The Jira integration is really beneficial because we can basically bring the Jira status of certain tickets into the conversation and ensure what we’re talking about aligns with what the engineers are actually working on,” Forsland said. 

Briefing leadership and external stakeholders

Customized views throughout Productboard also make it easy for the Product Operations team to keep high-level leadership and external stakeholders in the loop, giving them a window into the team’s day-to-day operations without getting too bogged down in the details. 

Since sharing customized views with participants in advance of meetings, their meetings are more efficient as stakeholders know what to expect and are prepared with targeted questions. 

Adopting Productboard and reaping the rewards

With DailyPay’s recent massive growth, two-thirds of its product managers are new. Therefore, Forsland invested in helping new team members learn how to use and utilize Productboard and more senior team members default to using Productboard instead of reverting to “old habits.” 

Forsland cites progress just five months after beginning to use Productboard and expects to continue seeing productivity gains in the future. 

Future aspirations

DailyPay also values Productboard’s smooth integration with Slack. Using the Insights board, PMs jot down and track notes and comments from customers or stakeholders (and later link them back to specific features). They also like Productboard’s custom fields. 

Forsland notes that he eventually hopes to move the team toward using the Portal to easily solicit input on new products from customers and colleagues. He knows the team can find even more uses for Productboard in the future, and he’s pleased with how far they’ve come.