Immuta, a data security platform provider, wanted to prepare for rapid growth by scaling their product management processes and aligning stakeholders. The company adopted Productboard to centralize customer feedback and streamline product planning. With Productboard, Immuta’s product managers are able to align features with core company objectives and build a more customer-centric approach. They also drive more successful collaboration between product and engineering teams, and provide Immuta’s leadership team with data-driven insights for better prioritization and business decisions. With Productboard, Immuta achieved scalability, clearer communication, and better customer insights, contributing to faster growth and higher revenue.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to data security. Every organization, of every size, faces unique risks and regulatory requirements, and their customers’ trust hangs on their ability to protect data. In order to grow the company, Immuta needed to identify the unmet needs of their target market and avoid the trap of building bespoke solutions for individual customers.  

It’s easier said than done when the business itself is quickly and constantly expanding. Immuta is a data security platform that specializes in providing data access control, privacy, and compliance solutions. Fast-paced, high-volume growth was fueling higher revenue, but internally, foundational product processes were strained as more companies adopted the platform and market demand evolved. 

“Everything was working pretty effectively in a small org, but we needed to make changes as we got bigger and started planning to launch multiple products,” said Catherine Carney, Senior Product Operations Manager at Immuta. “Instead of having two or three product managers, we planned to have 10 or 20, and our processes needed to scale.”

The Immuta team needed a centralized, transparent way to gather feature requests and product ideas, prioritize them, and integrate them into a dynamic product roadmap. They found the tool and tactics they needed with Productboard, revolutionizing the way they capture, coordinate, and communicate iterative feedback at every stage of the product lifecycle.   

Challenge: Planning for Business Growth

Immuta relied heavily on in-person discussions and Slack channels to communicate customer needs. This became impractical for scaling, especially with the prospect of adding more product managers and multiple products to the portfolio. 

Without consistent processes and a shared hub for information, Immuta’s product function risked:

• Slower time-to-market and delayed product development cycles.
• Incomplete, inaccurate insights that broke the thread between market demand and product deliverables.
• Unclear product roadmaps that were difficult to socialize, interpret, and update.

Immuta’s engineering team was also growing, and product leadership was no longer directly involved with all the engineering planning and decisions. For feature prioritization and planning, teams used spreadsheets that quickly became out-of-date. Product and engineering managers needed a better way to answer the questions:

• “What is the team working on?”
• “When will it be done?”
• “Are we on track?”

Solution: Synching Product with Go-To-Market for Actionable Feedback

Productboard streamlined Immuta customers’ feedback by centralizing, organizing, prioritizing, and fostering collaboration around user insights. It allowed Immuta to invest in a more customer-centric approach, in order to create products and features that better meet user needs and preferences.

Productboard enabled:

• Centralized feedback collection. Immuta now easily gathers feedback from various sources, including customer support, sales and marketing. This centralized approach ensures that all feedback is captured in one place, reducing the chances of valuable insights being lost or overlooked. This has also made it easier to on-board new product managers.
• Collaboration and visibility. Cross-functional collaboration allows product managers, designers, engineers, and other stakeholders to access and contribute feedback, adding transparency and ensuring that everyone is on the same page when it comes to user needs and pain points. Stakeholders who log insights receive notifications when their insights are linked to features, so they know their ideas aren’t disappearing into a black hole. Productboard also sends notifications when feature status changes.
• Data-driven decision making. Product managers can prioritize user feedback based on factors such as the number of requests, alignment with business goals, and strategic importance. By aggregating and visualizing user feedback, Productboard helps product teams make data-driven decisions. It provides insights into the most requested features, identifies pain points, and uncovers trends.

Increasing engagement: customer insights logged by quarter

“We’ve experienced increased internal engagement with Productboard, with a growing level of involvement throughout the year,” said Catherine.

Solution: Data-backed Planning and Roadmaps

Productboard also provides visibility into the feature planning process and engineering status. Immuta’s Product Operations feature board shows what each squad is working on and where they are Immuta’s software development process.

Unlike when Immuta used spreadsheets for planning, integration between Productboard and Jira syncs feature information, including:

• Feature title and description
• Delivery timeframe and confidence
• Engineering status
• Links to feature artifacts

The engineering teams make status updates in Jira that automatically flow into Productboard’s feature boards and roadmaps. 

Using the up-to-date delivery timeframe information, Immuta publishes a quarterly timeline roadmap for internal stakeholders, where they can drill into roadmap items and see the underlying customer insights. Product team members can drill into monthly and weekly views. 

Product Operations Feature Board

Results: Scaling with Customer Insights

Immuta’s product leadership team now relies on Productboard to manage feature requests and product ideas. They also have greater visibility into operations, and can drill down into Jira to track the progress and status of ongoing work.

More transparency within the organization has led the GTM teams to become more involved in product development. They can now offer more actionable feedback, and so far, doing so has led to features being tied to a higher number of customer insights. This has also enabled more robust analysis—one of tangible outcomes resulting from broader input on Immuta’s product development process.

More Customer-Centric Releases

“During the most recent fiscal quarter, we observed that the number of customer insights linked to our released features increased 40% compared to the same quarter last year.”

“This substantial increase in customer insights linked to features is clear evidence that we are receiving more useful and actionable feedback,” Catherine said. “It also reflects our focus on prioritizing features based on the valuable voice of the customer input we are receiving.”

“What’s better now is that, as we roll out new features, we can highlight who provided input on those features,” said Catherine. “Customer Success can reach out and say, ‘we noticed you were looking for this!’, and when discussing features, we can bring up the insights and see direct feedback from the customers themselves.”

 Productboard allowed Immuta to:

• Scale efficiently as they grew, onboarding six new product managers and launching two additional product lines.
• Centralize product insights and prevent valuable information from being lost or overlooked in Slack threads, and making it easier to track and incorporate customer feedback.
• Improve cross-functional collaboration between product and engineering, fostering better coordination and a shared understanding of priorities.
• Deliver data-backed roadmaps that provide leadership with greater visibility into the prioritization process, and enable them to make informed decisions based on customer insights.
• Increased engagement from GTM teams, leading to deeper alignment on goals and processes, as well as faster time-to-market. 

Matt DiAntonio, Vice President of Product Management, says that in a B2B business, the field scales more quickly than the product team, and “by using technology like Productboard we are able to harness the ongoing conversations that our Sales and Customer Success teams are having with customers, without having having to be in every meeting.”

“With Productboard’s insights, we all gain a deeper understanding of ongoing initiatives,” added Catherine, “and can more clearly understand business expectations and decisions. Organizations throughout the business are benefitting from Productboard, and when cross-functional teams get value from a platform, they’ll put value back into it.”