2010
North America
Customer Insights
Sasa Batovanja
SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER
Pipedrive is the leading sales and marketing CRM and that helps small and medium-sized companies find, qualify and manage leads, automate workflows, prioritize deals, track performance, and hit their revenue targets. Today it’s used by nearly 100,000 companies across 150 countries. As a more established organization, one of its selling points for new recruits is its highly refined, data-driven product processes. That was the draw for Sasa Batovanja, who joined the company as a Senior Product Manager in 2019, looking to learn from the very best.
While Pipedrive’s analytical approach to product management is in part powered by its teams of data analysts, it also employs rigorous user research and product discovery processes. But in the past, a lot of user insights were waiting to be discovered, scattered across a number of systems. As a result, product teams didn’t always have immediate access to all the insights that might have been valuable when making key product decisions.
“We had so many sources of incoming user feedback that being able to manage it all in a meaningful way was challenging. This is one of the reasons why we started using Productboard. It really helped us funnel all these inputs into one place, see trends, and make better product decisions.”
Sasa Batovanja
SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER
At Pipedrive, these sources of product feedback included customer support conversations in Intercom and their customer community forums. Additional feedback arrived from colleagues from customer success and other internal teams that interfaced with customers, often by way of a Slack feedback channel. It also included formal user research — interviews, surveys, and other structured forms of user feedback. These activities are managed by product researchers like Katerina Merklova, who have adopted Productboard as well.
“All the feedback captured in Productboard serves as a valuable foundation for our research activities. It often serves as a starting point for further exploration”
Katerina Merklova
PRODUCT RESEARCHER
According to Katerina, the typical insight in Productboard sparks further inquiry. It might inspire them to explore further by conducting a survey, or carrying out interviews to get more context or validate hypotheses. From there they can decide whether to proceed with designing a solution, do more research, or solve the problem in some other way.
Product managers like Sasa frame the value of Productboard in a similar way. Productboard allows them to dig deeper into the user needs they’re solving for.
“We funnel lots of feedback into Productboard from Intercom and Slack, but so often these are just requests for solutions customers want. So it’s really important to come to a deeper understanding of why the customer needs that. Productboard helps us see the original context behind the request. Once we understand that underlying problem we can determine what would be the optimal solution.”
Sasa Batovanja
SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER
With Productboard, you can see everyone who requested a feature and exactly what they said about it. The original context of their request is always just a click away.
At Pipedrive, product teams have autonomy over their tools and adoption of Productboard has been organic to-date. As more product teams adopt the solution there will be new opportunities to define product objectives in Productboard, adopt its prioritization and roadmapping capabilities, and potentially integrate its Portal into the Pipedrive customer community. One of the advantages of Productboard is having this flexibility to start where your need is greatest and scale usage at your organization’s own pace.
“Our adoption of Productboard has been gradual, with a number of product teams now using it but many more to go. It’s better to take this organic approach to adopting software than force people to use some new solution. In the long run, it will be worth it because more people will keep using the solution so it will be a far better investment.”
Sasa Batovanja
SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER
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