How it started: the challenges before Productboard

“But as our teams skyrocketed, our culture waned.” When GSoft grew quickly and saw its office vibe suffer, the company created an employee experience platform to solve this problem for everybody: Officevibe. Built by GSoft in Montreal, Officevibe now helps teams around the world form better relationships by sharing honest feedback.

From Officevibe’s earliest days, GSoft teams strived to make every product decision with this core value in mind: “listen to understand.” Product managers reached out directly to users for feedback when GSoft was small. But as the customer-facing teams attached to Officevibe grew bigger and bigger, the platform’s product team ironically learned less and less about what customers needed. 

Missing a central place where customer feedback could directly shape product decision-making, GSoft saw Officevibe’s:

• Product managers waste time searching multiple channels for feedback
• Account managers lack clarity on roadmaps, missing chances to reassure customers
• Team faced a dip in morale as its meaningful, customer-centric strategy unraveled

Determined to help teams across the Officevibe platform share and solve customers’ problems collaboratively, GSoft turned to Productboard.

How it’s going: the results from a single platform

Once teams started using a comprehensive product management platform, the results were clear:

• 2x increase in customer feedback contributed – GSoft has seen the volume of its Productboard notes nearly double since it adopted the platform one year ago
• 8.4/10 overall employee engagement — GSoft saw a .8-point increase among Officevibe product team members over the last six months, ever since they started working actively on product management objectives in Productboard

• 8.6/10 personal growth score — GSoft’s Officevibe product team members report huge increases in their senses of mastery and purpose over the last six months of using Productboard, resulting in a 1.4-point increase in overall personal growth

• 2hrs/week saved per maker – GSoft product managers working on Officevibe now save roughly two hours per week each with Productboard as their product management platform

GSoft’s Officevibe product managers save time:

• Conducting user research by processing feedback directly as notes in ProductBoard
• Collaborating on customer feedback directly in ProductBoard instead of various Slack channels
• Linking the customer feedback directly with the feature instead of navigating in various Confluence pages or searching feedback in Slack to get back to customers once they release the feature weeks after the feedback

With a single system of record driving their decisions, GSoft’s Officevibe team has seen valuable results across the board. But, we certainly can’t take all the credit! Productboard makes the biggest impact when teams across an organization embrace the platform’s potential for customer-centric collaboration. GSoft Co-Founder and Director of Product Guillaume Roy shared that message thoughtfully — and repeatedly — among Officevibe’s teams until everybody rallied around the cause.

How it changed: the process of driving outcomes

Guillaume was determined to:

• Improve cross-functional collaboration and efficiency by bridging information gaps 
• Rebuild workflows to suit a scaling org that still cared deeply to be customer-centric

Believing there had to be a better product management workflow than disparate spreadsheets and overflowing inboxes, Guillaume was thrilled to discover Productboard’s seamless connections between customer insights, feature prioritization, and roadmapping.

To ensure successful adoption of the platform, Guillaume led a collaborative, org-wide change management campaign to highlight the collective benefit of contributing and leveraging customer feedback in Productboard.

“Closing the Loop”: How GSoft Changed Course Based on Customer Insights 

The Officevibe team had a 12-month plan to launch a new module that would let a user sync their HR system to Officevibe. 

• Three months in, the Product team had its first MVP (minimum viable product)
• With its Productboard workflows in place, product managers sent Intercom drips to a small group of customers, requesting that they try the module
• Very quickly, about 50 customer responses surfaced in Productboard. Users reported the same issue: they could not filter out contractual employees with the new Officevibe integration
• Leveraging these customer Insights, Officevibe product managers quickly changed priorities to fix the filtering concern
• Within a month, product managers shared their solution with the same group of users, who were amazed. As one customer put it: “You listened and fixed this in just a few weeks?”

The play-by-play: GSoft’s 3 Steps Towards Change Management

Hoping to see the same customer-centric culture shift at your company? Guillaume was kind enough to share his play-by-play change management strategy with us: 

1. Lasting change starts with one team

To perfect his approach, Guillaume chose to start facilitating change one team at a time.

He decided to reach out to Customer Support, and took the following steps:

• Scheduled time with two CS team members known to go above and beyond championing Officevibe users (i.e. writing promptly to product managers when customers expressed concerns)
• Shared the benefits to their CS team and the greater Officevibe org if they started contributing their findings to the place where Product could take next steps (Productboard!), i.e. having a clear understanding of how feature requests would shape roadmaps, plus the ability to reassure customers that their concerns were being heard
• Showed them how to start pushing their customer feedback (with relevant tags) from Zendesk directly into the Insights section of Productboard
• Praised their efforts directly to their manager, setting the tone that a shift to the new workflow would be recognized and rewarded professionally

2. From the beginning, match effort with effort

To ensure support team members saw positive results from their early efforts, Guillaume coached the product team to respond to the Customer Success contributors for every piece of feedback they entered in Productboard.

• If the feature was unlikely to bear fruit, the product team should say so
• If the request might be viable but only help 15% of users, product should say so

Over time, these small responses made a major impact on the culture among Officevibe product teams; customer-facing team members and product managers started working more collaboratively, in Productboard and beyond.

Yet, Guillaume had one more tactic up his sleeve: org-wide shoutouts.

3. Recognize top contributors in group settings

During GSoft’s monthly, company-wide Product News meeting, Guillaume ensured Officevibe product managers recognized this new behavior by their Customer Success colleagues, sharing the results of their feedback-gathering.

Whenever his product managers presented a new feature, they always mentioned where it came from — the Productboard feedback that led to its development. In the same call, Guillaume made sure his team highlighted the top three contributors of feedback per month.

In the end, Guillaume helped Officevibe product teams rediscover the customer-centric methodology that made their office vibe so fulfilling in the first place.

A recent brainstorm session brought together GSoft’s entire product management function — designers, researchers and product managers — to discuss better ways of crafting product at the company. When Guillaume spoke up to share a few ideas, he referred multiple times to a product excellence slide he liked from Productboard’s very own CEO, Hubert Palan.

Proud of Guillaume’s work helping Officevibe teams collaborate in Productboard, a colleague decided to do a little bit of photoshopping after the call.

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