2009
North America
Marielle Velander
RESEARCH OPERATIONS LEAD
Dashlane has risen to prominence on the promise of a password manager to simplify your life online. They help safely manage passwords, payment information, and other personal details — and retrieve them quickly. With a product that users employ throughout the day when they’re in the midst of another task, Dashlane’s aim is to remove any friction from the process. It’s no surprise they take their user research seriously.
We recently spoke with Marielle Velander, Research Operations lead on Dashlane’s Product Strategy and Insights team. Her primary responsibility is to bring together consumer research and usage data to form a holistic picture of users’ needs and market opportunities. They also enable product teams with more concrete product insights that they can use to prioritize the right features to build next. This is where Productboard has been especially valuable for their research processes.
With Productboard’s integrations for automatically centralizing product insights, Dashlane’s Research Ops function can cultivate a steady stream of product ideas, requests, and feedback for their own analysis, and for the product team to access self-serve. These are submitted through support (via the Zendesk integration) and other colleagues. Product feedback is also submitted directly by users on Dashlane’s public Portal, which is directly accessible to customers from within Dashlane’s app. In this way, Dashlane Research Ops is able to scale their enablement of the product team with minimal overhead.
The Portal is a customer-facing interface you can use to efficiently collect feedback on ideas and source new ones.
With all these insights on hand, Dashlane product managers are well-equipped to identify new opportunities, validate their decisions, and fill in the picture around why it is that customers want something. And because Productboard provides a historic record of who has asked for what, product managers can easily follow up with everyone who requested a certain feature, such as a family plan, to invite them into a beta program.
“Productboard creates a space for analysis in the way you can cluster the insights and ideas that come in from users. That’s been really valuable. From a research perspective, it allows us to easily home in on the answer to a certain question.”
Marielle Velander
RESEARCH OPERATIONS LEAD
Dashlane’s Research Ops function is sophisticated, and the team collects insights from quantitative analytics among other types of inputs. But the information they glean from Productboard is an important input in guiding the product team’s strategy. It has also provided new entry points for colleagues across the organization to stay close to the voice of the customer and appreciate what the product team is working on.
“I think one of the strengths of how we use Productboard is how cross-functional it is. It’s created connection points between product management and engineering, but also the support team which now plays a role in categorizing the insights they’re hearing from a product perspective.”
Marielle Velander
RESEARCH OPERATIONS LEAD
By sourcing product insights that guide strategy, seed new mission teams, and help communicate the voice of the customer to colleagues across the organization, Productboard has helped power Dashlane’s Research Operations. And by facilitating their enablement of the product team, Productboard has allowed Marielle and her colleagues to focus on diving into the thornier, more abstract research that might just spark Dashlane’s next big idea.
Ready to make products people want?
Build excellent products with Productboard
