Starting 2019 with a bang!

2018 was an amazing year for us. We tripled our team, more than doubled our customer base, and rolled out some great new features to deliver the best product management system experience. But we’re only just getting started and planning an even bigger 2019!

As we’ve talked to so many of you, particularly this past year, it’s obvious that product managers matter now more than ever and are taking the lead in setting business strategy and driving revenue. It’s also clear that a dedicated product management tool is becoming so critical and we see a huge opportunity to lead this space. That’s why we’re excited to announce that we’ve raised $10M in additional funding, led by Index Ventures with significant participation from Kleiner Perkins!

With this funding, we’re going to accelerate development on our core product experience, focus on functionality for enterprise customers, and broaden the reach of our customer and community engagement. Our mission is to help companies make products that matter, and we’re excited by how many of you are striving for exactly that.

The rise of product-led companies

We’re in the middle of a tectonic shift of how companies win. Great sales execution, marketing genius, and spectacular customer support can’t cover for subpar products anymore. If your product doesn’t work or if there are better alternatives, people will find out. That’s why product teams are taking the lead. UiPath is currently the fastest growing enterprise software company in history and their product managers, Alex Filipov and Mircea Grigore are focused on building a “tool that will be used by millions,” which means basing their strategy around customer feedback and passing on large sales deals if they are a distraction.

Even organizations in more traditional industries are joining the product revolution. This year, H-E-B, one of the largest grocery store chains with about 100,000 employees, hired its first Chief Product Officer to focus on digital experiences for their customers. At around the same time, The Atlantic hired Alex Hardiman from Facebook as their first Chief Product Officer and doubled the size of her team. The United States Department of Health and Human Services also hired its first Chief Product Officer to deliver a consistent set of experiences for those who depend on them.

A complex mess of tools

Unfortunately, most product teams don’t have the right tools to win. Chances are that your company is using a bunch of tools like Jira, Trello, email, Powerpoint, handwritten notes, and vague memories of conversations to make crucial product decisions that significantly affect your business.

Customer feedback sits in emails, chat apps, and spreadsheets used by marketing, support, and sales teams. Product managers have to sift through all these tools, and that’s only if they know where to proactively look. But you can’t build the right product if you don’t have a clear view of the customer.

Prioritization happens in Post-In Notes or Google Docs. But these aren’t connected to the tools and processes used for analyzing customer feedback, so there’s no good structure to truly know if customer feedback, sales deals, or the loudest voice in the room is driving prioritization.

Roadmaps are in Powerpoint and pieces of them are in different task management tools, but none of these communicate any context about why you’re releasing a specific feature instead of a different one. Without this clarity, executives, engineering leads, salespeople, and others are left in the dark, or worse, have a completely different set of expectations about what’s coming next.

We are delivering the product management system

To win, what product managers and a growing number of Chief Product Officers need is a tool that provides the customer insight, structure, and clarity to align the entire company about what to build next and why. They need a dedicated tool—a product management system.

We deliver the leading product management system that helps you get the right products to market faster. Built on top of the Product Excellence framework, productboard serves as the dedicated system of record for product managers and aligns everyone on the right features to build next! With productboard, everyone at your company, intimately understands what truly matters to customers, fully understands the product strategy, and knows what’s on the roadmap.

Growing productboard in 2019

In 2019, we’re going to keep delivering on our mission to help companies make products that matter. We’ll be integrating even more tightly with other tools so product managers can better organize and coordinate product development from within productboard. We’ll also be rolling out new ways to analyze insights and prioritize features. Multi-team functionality is going to help enterprise customers with several product teams work out of a single productboard experience. We’re also going to support and educate our customers and the broader community about making great products with more content and events.

If you’re looking to build the best products and are tired of working out of an assortment of tools that don’t do what you really need, then you can start a free trial here. Also, if you’re excited by what we’re working on and want to be a part of it, then check out our open positions!

Thank you!

We started productboard because we’re inspired by the people who genuinely care about making something that deeply matters to others. We also believe that every product manager should be able to deliver the best products they can and their tools or lack of tools shouldn’t stand in their way. Product managers spend so much time making delightful experiences for their customers, and we want to do the same for them. That’s why we do what we do and why our mission is to help companies make products that matter.

We want to thank everyone who has been a part of this journey with us. Our customers, teammates, investors, partners, and supporters have all made this possible. We are incredibly grateful for all the support you have all provided!

About our funding

This new funding of $10M adds to our existing Series A and brings our total funding to nearly $20M. Index Ventures led this round and the firm’s General Partner, Jan Hammer, joins our board of directors. We’re excited to have Jan as he brings valuable experience and industry insight having invested in companies like Adyen, Robinhood, and Zendesk. All our other investors, including Kleiner Perkins, Credo Ventures, Rockaway Capital, and Reflex Capital, also participated in this round. You can find our press release here.