2010
North America
Challenge:
Devon Galloway
CO-FOUNDER
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a million. According to Cisco’s Annual Internet Report, by 2021, video traffic will account for 82% of all internet traffic. For Vidyard – the video creation, hosting, and sharing platform for businesses, which is headquartered in Kitchener, Ontario – that means rapid company growth and a quickly changing product roadmap to meet the growing demand.
Vidyard helps businesses transform their communications and drive more revenue through the strategic use of online video as well as tie ROI back to their video content. Behind the scenes, the company helps customers understand what, when, and how much video content their prospects watch, updates their lead score, and notifies the right person on the sales team, informing them about the prospect’s viewing history.
We caught up with Jivan Ramsahai, Vidyard’s Director of Product Management, and Devon Galloway, Vidyard’s Co-Founder and CTO, to find out how the organization is using Productboard to get the right products to their customers, faster.
Ramsahai, who’s been with Vidyard for the past six years, has seen the company grow from around 25 people to more than 200 today. “I’ve been doing the product management thing for Vidyard for the last three years, but it’s only in the last year and a half or so that we started to really double down on product management practices,” he said. “Part of it was going out and investing in a tool like Productboard.”
Ramsahai and his team of five product managers had three main problems they were looking to solve with a product management tool. The first was that the team desperately needed a standardized method for prioritization. “Everyone had their own version of spreadsheets and that was something that I struggled with a lot,” Ramsahai explained.
The second challenge was ingestion of feedback. “We needed to take all the feedback that we were getting from various areas of the company, from customers, etc., and consolidate it into a single place,” Ramsahai said.
And the last goal for the team was having a way to surface their roadmap to the rest of the company.
“How do I ultimately surface what we think the roadmap looks like to the company, knowing that it's going to change next week or later today?”
Jivan Ramsahai
DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
One of Ramsahai’s team members suggested Productboard, and the team evaluated the solution alongside several other solutions. “It was really interesting to look at the two products side by side, but ultimately we decided to go with Productboard. It felt like I was going to have to do more lift to solve all three of those problems with other solutions than with Productboard. Productboard seems like it’s a more readily available solution,” he explained.
From “Half a Million Spreadsheets” to Prioritization and Insights
One thing the team liked is that Productboard allowed them to implement a RICE scoring model for prioritizing features for their roadmap according to reach, impact, confidence, and effort.
“We have one product manager on my team who is just the king of spreadsheets. He's got half a million for any project that he spins up. It was nice to see how he reduced that behavior to really drive things forward using Productboard.”
Jivan Ramsahai
DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
Ramsahai worried that it would be difficult to get the team to take action on the insights they received in Productboard. Instead, he was pleasantly surprised. “We had a messy submission process in Jira and I couldn’t get them to prioritize it in Jira, but they seem to have adopted it in Productboard,” he said.
“I was always worried that Productboard was going to just turn into another black hole, the way our Jira did. But I've been pretty happy with how the team has been keeping up with dropping those insights into the relevant category.”
Jivan Ramsahai
DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
Today, the team shares an inbox for product insights that come in from Zendesk, Slack, Heap, the Productboard Chrome extension, email, and other sources. ”Productboard has been really great for those insights. I’d say hands down, that’s probably the most impactful part of it,” Ramsahai said.
Before Productboard, Devon Galloway, Vidyard’s Co-Founder and CTO, was fed up with miscommunication between teams. “I didn’t want to have people saying, ‘That’s news to me’ or ‘That’s a surprise’ when it came to the roadmap,” he said. Today, he explained, that’s no longer a problem. “Productboard is part of how we prepare the business to know what is coming.”
“Productboard solves a cross-functional challenge. A developer can work in Jira to get their tasks done, but Productboard helped the team coordinate across the entire business.”
Devon Galloway
CO-FOUNDER
Vidyard recently refreshed their UI to upgrade the user experience. The Roadmap feature in Productboard enabled the product organization to provide visibility across the business. “Productboard was instrumental in surfacing just how that initiative was progressing over the last five or six months,” said Ramsahai. “Because there were so many moving pieces, Productboard made it easy to very clearly articulate the different pieces that needed to happen and then slot them in.”
“We had a roadmap view that was broken down by delivery dates for each phase of the project and it was very clear. You can accomplish things like that in Jira. But it's obviously a little bit of a heavier lift to implement and not as easily digestible.”
Jivan Ramsahai
DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
During the UI refresh process, the product management team also used Productboard to field questions and provide answers to other team members. “We could say okay, here’s a pretty common piece of feedback that we get and it’s actually addressed by this thing that we’re doing in the new UI,” Ramasahai explained.
Once Ramsahai added other team members from across the organization – from marketing, sales, customer experience, etc. – to Productboard, and gave them viewer access to the Roadmap section, it was much easier to manage the project. “They now have the ability, at any given point, to see where things are,” he said.
“Giving other stakeholders in the business that visibility into what’s coming when solved a big problem for us. Now they can either put their hand up and say ‘No, this thing from Phase Two actually needs to be in Phase One’ or ‘We don’t really care about this thing in Phase One, you can move it to Phase Three,’ that sort of thing,” Ramasahai explained.
Ramsahai added that the team has also found effective ways to use their own Vidyard screen-recording tool to share quick videos of their Productboard, which helps improve internal communication and collaboration across teams.
“Since all of our planning is taking place in Productboard instead of disparate spreadsheets, it’s really easy to share these types of videos while walking through the product roadmap. We’ve also been able to share videos of Productboard with other teams to improve overall cross-departmental collaboration,” he said.
Ramasahai and his team are still ramping up their Productboard usage to fully solve the initial three problems of prioritization, feedback, and visibility that they set out to tackle. But they’ve definitely come a long way in their organization’s cross-functional alignment since bringing Productboard into the business. In the meantime, Ramasahai, Galloway, and their team members at Vidyard look forward to using Productboard in new ways as they keep growing their product suite.
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