Aggreko transforms their product organization with the help of Productboard’s professional service

Stephen Doherty, Head of Product, Load Banks & Electrical Distribution at Aggreko shares his experience working with Productboard’s Professional Services team to transform their product organization.  

Aggreko is a United Kingdom-based power, heating, and cooling rental company that operates a fleet of industrial equipment that includes: diesel and gas generators, solar power systems, heating, cooling, and oil-free compressed air systems. 

As a hardware company, Aggreko’s product backlog has longer and less frequent feature release cadences, unlike most software companies. Productboard fit with Aggreko’s non-iterative products and improved their product lifecycle process. 

Prior to Productboard, Aggreko had been using ProductPlan and Excel, Aggreko, but found that these tools didn’t provide clarity on whether they were building the right things. They switched to Productboard because they wanted a better, faster way to innovate on their new and existing products and cut down on costly inefficiencies. 

What problems led you to evaluate a product management platform?

• By relying on stakeholders to make product decisions, we built many wrong products and features, which was very costly. We also struggled with company-wide communication and transparency. The product team and our 250 cross-functional stakeholders were misaligned, not understanding the why and how of product decisions. We lacked a single source of up-to-date product truth connected to our overall product strategy. 
  • Go-to-market teams, like sales and customer success, didn’t know where to find the latest roadmaps and couldn’t explain feature requests. These teams relied on the product team with ad-hoc communication and meetings to understand product plans. 

• Managing our product backlog with multiple unconnected tools and spreadsheets was also challenging. Without a portfolio view of the features we were working on, their status, and why, we duplicated product efforts and failed to share key insights. 

Describe the Proof of Concept experience and how you evaluated Productboard’s product management platform to ensure it met your needs?

• Why did you choose a POC with our Professional Services team?

• • • Productboard’s depth of functionality and our need to support changes to our product management processes across 20 PMs and 250 stakeholders, led us to believe a more guided evaluation would help us fairly assess Productboard.

• What was valuable during the POC? How did the evaluation support your purchase decision? 

• • • The Professional Services team structured our introduction to Productboard and led us through the functionality in a sensible and manageable way to incrementally build our understanding. We then could make an informed decision about which aspects would be relevant to us and when.

• How did the Productboard team support your use case during the POC phase?

• • • Ozzy, our Solutions Architect, and Jenny, our Account Executive led a structured series of workshops to guide us through the functionality. They helped us adapt Productboard to our own product management processes, workflows, and tools.

• What features and functionality most excited you to solve your pain points?

• • We were excited about a single source of truth for our product team and cross-functional stakeholders. We valued Productboard’s product planning, prioritizing, and roadmapping features, as well as the Portal, to capture internal stakeholder feedback. Easily defining our own feature prioritization categories and connecting drivers to them was a fundamental need other platforms lacked.

How was the implementation and onboarding experience with the core Product team upon purchasing Productboard?

• What was critical to your team during Productboard’s implementation and onboarding? How did the Productboard team support you during this phase?

• • • We needed to document the initial configuration and communicate it to our business-wide stakeholders. Productboard’s public-facing toolkit effectively conceptualized the key deliverables of the onboarding and implementation phase.

• What role did your Productboard’s Solutions Architect and Engagement Manager play in helping you begin transforming your product processes during implementation?

• • • Our Solutions Architect provided his expertise to evaluate which options best solved our problems and also delivered our initial onboarding sessions for core users. Our Engagement Manager was very effective in managing the implementation process, ensuring we maintained a rhythm and momentum for successful onboarding and use of Productboard. We partnered with Productboard to create governance deliverables and collateral to transform our product processes. 

• How did the Productboard team support your post-implementation trainings?

• • The Productboard team provided helpful and easy-to-digest training materials for our product team and cross-functional collaborators. Productboard got our team up to speed quickly to see the value of Productboard and use it effectively.

What benefits have you seen since adopting Productboard at Aggreko? What features/functionality do you want to try next?

• Productboard has met all our requirements and more, while ensuring we’re building the right features and products! By transforming our product organization and establishing new product processes with the help of Productboard and Productboard’s Professional Services, we provide stakeholders across 9 regions with visibility into our roadmap and a keen understanding of our product decisions. 
• We’ve improved communication, transparency, and alignment with a single source of truth for our product team and company-wide. We now manage our product backlog using connected tools, providing a portfolio view of the features we were working on, their status, and why. We have a consolidated tool to manage products, creating consistency across product lines and regions, with an up-to-date and easily accessible roadmap connected to our product strategy. 
• In the future, we hope to use Productboard’s other integrations like Jira. We also desire to further maximize our value from Productboard, leveraging the Insights board which collects and consolidates customer feedback in one place.