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company founded
2000
location
North America
"Productboard has fundamentally changed the way we plan, communicate, and deliver our product strategy. I would absolutely recommend it to any company struggling with alignment."
VP of Product Management
04/03/2025
Software
company founded
2000
location
North America
"Productboard has fundamentally changed the way we plan, communicate, and deliver our product strategy. I would absolutely recommend it to any company struggling with alignment."
VP of Product Management
Arena by PTC provides cloud-based product lifecycle management (PLM) and quality management system (QMS) solutions that help high-tech manufacturing companies accelerate complex product development. By facilitating collaboration across global teams, Arena ensures that manufacturers have access to the latest product information, streamlining development from design to production.
As Arena’s business scaled, so did the complexity of managing product strategy, cross-functional alignment, and customer-driven innovation. To maintain efficiency and drive continuous product improvements for their customers, the team needed a centralized source of truth for their own product decisions.
Before Productboard, Arena’s product development process was less structured, making it difficult to align engineering, go-to-market teams, and executive leadership. Decision-making was driven by requests from larger customers rather than a strategic, data-backed roadmap. As Kraig Clark, Arena’s VP of Product Development, explained, “Collaboration was far less formal, sometimes even reactionary based on a specific need or set of customer requirements. We were chasing data all the time. We weren't as organized as we needed to be andour team couldn't clearly articulate our roadmap.”
The lack of a centralized system for managing feedback and roadmaps led to misalignments and inefficiencies, including:
“The biggest challenge was a lack of visibility both ways,” said Kraig. “Our go-to-market team had no visibility into what we were building and why, and our product organization had no visibility into how our product was perceived and where the gaps and flaws were.”
Recognizing the need for a single source of truth, Kraig’s team evaluated multiple product management platforms before selecting Productboard. “We evaluated several product management-focused, roadmapping-focused solutions. Ultimately, we felt very strongly that Productboard had a leg up on the competition,” explained Kraig. “We felt like we could get it up and running quickly and achieve our goal of having a single source of truth for our product roadmap information.”
“We evaluated several solutions. Ultimately, we felt very strongly that Productboard had a leg up on the competition.”
Kraig Clark
VP of Product Management, Arena by PTC
This decision was driven by Productboard’s ability to capture insights, align teams, and create a clear roadmap—all while scaling with Arena’s growth. Below are the key improvements Productboard helped Arena achieve.
With Productboard, Arena can now capture and analyze customer feedback systematically, ensuring that product decisions are backed by real demand. This visibility has eliminated internal skepticism around prioritization. According to Kraig, “Before, we just had a spreadsheet where we would tally requests. Now, we know exactly which customer wants a feature, what they said, and how it aligns with other requests. We can have a true understanding of what we want to build and back it up by saying, ‘Yeah, there’s 37 customers that represent X million dollars worth of business asking for this.’”
With Productboard's AI capabilities, Arena significantly reduced the time spent on digesting customer feedback and analyzing insights. Dani Cordsen, a Principal Product manager on Kraig’s team finds that she can sift through “really verbose” feedback, some with links to meeting notes and other external components, by the hundreds. “I don’t have to spend weeks and weeks reading every single insight. I’m working on a feature with 800 supporting insights. Instead of reading each one manually, I use AI to summarize the feedback, ensuring we’re making the right decisions—without bias.”
“I don’t have to spend weeks and weeks reading every single insight.”
Dani Cordsen
Principal Product Manager, Arena by PTC
One of the most impactful tools for Arena has been Productboard’s Grid Boards, which provide a structured way to communicate priorities, insights, and strategic direction across teams. “The grid view has been super helpful for our customer-facing teams,” said Dani. “We’ve added custom fields to capture our point of view, high-level problem statements, and proposed solutions. It makes it easier for teams to understand the ‘why’ behind each feature.”
By incorporating jobs-to-be-done language and customer-friendly messaging, the product team ensures that features are framed in a way that aligns with broader business goals. Dani refers to this as “storytelling language.” She added, “Instead of saying, ‘We're fixing a view,’ we’re now saying, ‘We're delivering a view that’s valuable and efficient for customers.’ And that changes how everybody talks about it internally and the tone when it goes to market.”
By providing a shared roadmap, Productboard enabled Arena to improve alignment across all stakeholders—product, engineering, go-to-market teams, and executive leadership. Previously, Arena’s product planning focused primarily on short-term feature releases, making it difficult to establish a cohesive long-term vision. Productboard’s Objectives and Initiatives Boards introduced a structured, multi-level planning approach that connects feature-level work to overarching business goals.
“[Grids] makes it easier for teams to understand the ‘why’ behind each feature.”
Dani Cordsen
Principal Product Manager, Arena by PTC
With this structured hierarchy, Arena’s teams now:
“For the first time, we can provide direct access for customers to see what we’re working on and vote on the solutions and features they’re interested in. It's been very well received by them,” said Kraig. With the Portal, Arena can communicate roadmap updates directly to customers and gather feedback efficiently. This shift has transformed their product culture, making transparent customer collaboration a core part of the process.
“I’ve watched our customer-facing teams change how they respond to feature requests in real-time,” noted Alan Goodrich, Senior Product Manager. “They jump straight to the Portal, log votes, and are much more comfortable engaging customers on what’s coming.”
Since implementing Productboard, Arena has experienced tangible improvements in efficiency, alignment, and product strategy execution:
“We regularly release features that mostly hit the mark. But in the last 15–24 months, we’ve rarely missed something simple or obvious,” explained Kraig. “The satisfaction with the quality and thoughtfulness of the features we’re delivering is much higher, and that’s because we’re directly connecting insights to what we’re working on.”
“Productboard has fundamentally changed the way we plan, communicate, and deliver our product strategy. I would absolutely recommend it to any company struggling with alignment.”
Kraig Clark
VP of Product Management, Arena by PTC
Arena’s journey with Productboard has transformed their product management function, turning it from a reactive, disconnected process into a well-structured, insight-driven system. With a single source of truth, Arena’s teams now work cross-functionally with clarity, confidence, and customer focus.
But Arena isn’t just keeping up—they’re getting ahead. By leveraging AI-driven insights, structured product planning, and direct customer engagement, Arena has established itself as a leader in modern, data-driven product development. Their ability to seamlessly integrate AI into decision-making and plan initiatives years in advance—all while maintaining transparent communication with customers—sets them apart in a competitive market.
