company founded
1993
location
North America
"My biggest challenge used to be speed. Getting products out the door took too long, and sales didn’t always have the information or materials they needed when they needed them. Now, Spark is helping product move much faster."
Principal Product Manager
Productboard Spark
18th August 2026
Software
company founded
1993
location
North America
"My biggest challenge used to be speed. Getting products out the door took too long, and sales didn’t always have the information or materials they needed when they needed them. Now, Spark is helping product move much faster."
Principal Product Manager
Service Express delivers managed infrastructure services that help IT teams maintain and optimize critical environments. Its cloud business supports a broad portfolio spanning managed operating systems, infrastructure services, connectivity, and security. As the company navigated growth and integration with Park Place Technologies, its product organization needed a more scalable way to understand customer needs, evaluate opportunities, and explain why certain bets deserved investment.
For Darren Smith, Principal Product Manager at Service Express, Productboard had already become the home for product work. Spark expanded that role dramatically, giving a product team of one the ability to build evidence-backed workflows for prioritization, competitor intelligence, customer intelligence, and service definition.
Before Spark, Darren had built Productboard workflows that helped Service Express launch five products in a single year. But speed came with a tradeoff. With one person coordinating product launches across technical, sales, and marketing teams, the underlying product operations work often fell behind.
Documentation, sales enablement, and the evidence behind prioritization decisions were difficult to maintain. Darren could see the customer feedback and insights in Productboard, but surfacing the full rationale behind a decision took time he simply did not have.
“I knew what I wanted to do. I knew why I wanted to do it. I had the evidence within Productboard. But when someone questioned a decision, surfacing those insights was a real challenge. I didn’t have time for the product operations work required to make sure insights were linked correctly, evidence was readily available, and the workflows I’d created were being followed. I was focused on getting launches out the door, so the administrative pieces fell away.”
Darren Smith
Principal Product Manager, Service Express
That challenge was amplified by the scope of Service Express’s cloud portfolio. Darren manages more than 40 services, each with different dependencies and customer needs. Keeping a reliable view of what mattered most—whether that was a new service opportunity, a competitive threat, or a change in security requirements—required more than a manually maintained roadmap.
Productboard gave Darren a central system for product feedback, prioritization, and planning. Spark gave him a way to turn that information into repeatable workflows that stay current as new signals arrive.
Darren built an ideation backlog in Productboard where Spark reviews incoming evidence and applies a documented scoring framework to each opportunity. Multiple fields are scored on a one-to-five scale, then combined into a live prioritization formula.
The workflow does more than assign a number. Spark creates the paper trail behind each score.
“I’ve created a scoring framework that defines how each opportunity should be evaluated. Based on the volume of supporting notes, the evidence available, and the criteria captured in specific fields, Spark is actually doing that scoring of one to five for me.”
Darren Smith
Principal Product Manager, Service Express
Service Express operates globally, with different competitors across regions and service categories. Darren built a multi-source competitor intelligence workflow in Spark that brings together internal and external signals already flowing into Productboard.
That includes Salesforce notes, ServiceNow data, Gong recordings, LinkedIn activity, competitor websites, blogs, case studies, job postings, and publicly available financial records. Spark uses that intelligence to produce weekly competitor packs and an evidence-backed dashboard that helps Darren assess the current market landscape.
“As far as competitors, Spark can see if we’ve got a win-loss against them in the Salesforce notes. It can see if they’ve been spoken about in any of the Gong recordings. It can see what they’re talking about on LinkedIn. It can see what roles they have open on LinkedIn. It’s looking at their financial records for the last five years.”
Darren Smith
Principal Product Manager, Service Express
Instead of relying on instinct or one-off research, Darren can see which competitors are gaining momentum, what they are launching, and why they may represent a threat.
Darren also uses Spark to synthesize customer signals into a more useful format for commercial teams. By bringing together internal customer intelligence and additional public information, he created a digital “blue sheet” that gives sellers a more complete view before a customer conversation. Valuable context is easier to access without asking sales teams to sift through fragmented systems.
“I gave one of our sellers, who’s going off to see one of our big customers tomorrow, a customer intel sheet. They said, ‘Where did you get all that information from? That’s more than I knew.”
Darren Smith
Principal Product Manager, Service Express
With dozens of offerings, Service Express needs accurate service definitions that sales and technical teams can rely on.
Darren uses Productboard Forms to collect input from technical stakeholders, then uses Spark to quickly turn that information into structured service definitions. Those definitions can be written into Productboard fields and surfaced through API integrations in a web-based service catalog. “That way, the sales team can actually just use a web application to see our entire service catalogue. All the service definitions are updated instantly when it does that,” Darren explained.
Spark has changed the pace and quality of product work at Service Express. Darren has moved away from spending large portions of his time on manual administration, repetitive discovery tasks, and the work of reconstructing decisions after the fact.
The result is a more defensible product operating model.
For a product team of one, that operational leverage is especially meaningful. Darren can spend more time preparing the business for what comes next, including the product investments Service Express plans to pursue after its current organizational transition.
The bigger shift is confidence. Rather than walking into a leadership conversation with a point of view that needs to be defended, Darren can bring a current, traceable case for action.
Spark has also made it possible for Service Express to react more quickly to a fast-changing market. Darren’s previous challenge was getting information and materials out fast enough. Now, the work is helping the rest of the organization build the same operating rhythm.
“My biggest challenge used to be speed. Getting products out the door took too long, and sales didn’t always have the information or materials they needed when they needed them. Now, Spark is helping product move much faster.”
— Darren Smith, Principal Product Manager, Service Express
As Service Express grows its product organization and becomes part of Park Place, Darren sees Productboard as the system that can help new team members quickly understand the business, the service portfolio, and the evidence behind product decisions. He is also exploring new ways to deepen Spark’s role, including a sales enablement agent that can act as a product expert and a governance-oriented “CPO agent” that challenges whether new ideas align with strategic priorities.
With Spark, Darren has positioned Productboard as the foundational shared intelligence layer for understanding customers, monitoring the market, and making investment decisions.
As the team grows following the acquisition by Park Place, he plans to leverage this structure to further optimize workflows and scale evidence-based decision-making.
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