Autodesk
1982
North America
Using static roadmap tools at the enterprise level caused inefficiencies, including limited visibility, lack of alignment, extra meetings, and duplicated efforts.
Mitko Vidanovski
SENIOR PROGRAM MANAGER, AUTODESK
Autodesk
Autodesk
The engineers and architects who use Autodesk’s Building & Infrastructure Design software products (Revit, Civil 3D, ReCap, Dynamo, Advance Steel, InfraWorks, etc.) work on some of the most complicated projects one can imagine — from renovating and expanding an “80-year-old water treatment facility” in Toledo, Ohio to creating an intricate system of waterways and bioswales designed to catch rainfall in New Orleans, Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina.
To help its customers solve problems this complex, Autodesk’s Building & Infrastructure Design org needed to collaborate closely with internal and external stakeholders throughout the product lifecycle. Realizing this would only be possible with a centralized platform that could connect multiple systems, the business unit adopted Productboard. Now, Building & Infrastructure Design teams have transformed their approach to partnering with customers and stakeholders to make the right investments and quickly get to market.
It took less than 2 months for the Building & Infrastructure Design organization to onboard 20 product teams in Productboard. Over just a 90-day period, the business unit saw 2,000+ roadmap views across 167 unique viewers.
Now, Building & Infrastructure Design teams:
- Make the right bets co-creating with customers, capturing 2,000+ insights from Portals
- Save time prioritizing and iterating — PMs now review feedback in 1 place, not 5
- Align faster, gain exec trust; org cuts hours of group calls with 1 intuitive, portfolio view
- Improve EPD collaboration & resourcing with 1 tool to manage comms, dependencies
Senior Product Manager Lilli Smith and Senior Program Manager Mitko Vidanovski share why having a centralized product management platform is essential for their work, and how Productboard now helps the Building & Infrastructure Design organization build what customers need most.
Along the way, they reveal how product managers and engineers now enjoy a dynamic any Engineering, Product & Design organization would envy: being “more aligned without the need to meet and talk,” Mitko explains.
How it started: teams were looking to identify, align, and act on the right problems
Before Autodesk’s Building & Infrastructure Design organization adopted an integrated platform, product teams were spending a lot of time searching for customer feedback submitted across channels. Once PMs did discover valuable trends and insights, they had trouble taking action, as roadmaps were scattered across static tools. Teams hoped to partner closely with their customers, but disconnected systems held them back.
Missing a holistic view across its 20 product lines, the Building & Infrastructure Design org were looking to share the same product vision, effectively manage dependencies to avoid duplicative work, and provide executives the visibility they needed.
Senior Program Manager Mitko Vidanovski and Senior Product Manager Lilli Smith share how.
- Needed an easier way to capture feedback and validate solutions
Sourcing customer feedback from several channels (email, customer calls, forums, conferences, exec briefs from Sales, and more), risked missing high-value opportunities and lost time sifting through feedback.
“ We were not able to quickly find things, so we were sometimes using the limits of our memory to track down customer feedback. That’s the kind of situation where you’re spending a lot of time but maybe not focusing on the right things. ”
Lilli Smith
SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER, AUTODESK
Plus, with no direct way to link feedback to roadmaps, the Building & Infrastructure Design org also struggled to validate and iterate on solutions in development.
“Before, when we shared public roadmaps, there were too many links to always ensure the right version,” Mitko says. “Once product managers did get feedback, it would require a lot of effort to review and summarize it, since the information came from so many different channels,” he adds, making it “harder for us to put the customer first.”
- Lost momentum taking multiple meetings to reach alignment
Strategic alignment also proved challenging as executives and cross-functional teams had to search for roadmaps either by accessing PowerPoint links or navigating a product management platform teams found tough to use.
“We were using a product management tool before Productboard, and it was really hard to sync roadmap data and collaborate with other people,” Lilli says. “We got so confused, because we would have conversations and ask about something, and the other person would say: ‘I thought I just changed that!’”
Here’s where Mitko stresses the magnitude of the challenge when teams use static roadmap tools at the enterprise level. “It increases meeting time, with a lot of extra conversations happening that could be avoided” if teams could share a real-time source of product truth.
- Wanted multi-product oversight to prevent delays, unnecessary work
Without a holistic view of dependencies across their 20 product lines, the Building & Infrastructure Design organization also faced the risk of spending time on the same things, unknowingly.
In order to more effectively allocate costly EPD resources, the Building & Infrastructure Design organization knew it needed a better way to visualize the lifecycle for each of its offerings.
Interestingly, the right fit was within arm’s reach. Mitko says teams from another Autodesk division were already seeing great results from Productboard, and their wins persuaded Building & Infrastructure Design to adopt.
Next step: partnering with Productboard’s Professional Services team to create a seamless implementation experience (details below). With their help, the Building & Infrastructure organization onboarded 20 product teams in Productboard in less than two months.
How it’s going: quick alignment on key customer problems and the right investments
Now, Building & Infrastructure Design teams partner effectively with their customers to consistently prioritize their core needs, align execs and stakeholders faster on product strategy, and drive efficiencies in the delivery process by improving Product-Engineering collaboration.
- Make and validate bets using the voice of the customer
One of the things Autodesk product managers like most about Productboard? They can not only review feedback aggregated from multiple channels in one place, but also link it directly to customizable roadmaps (filtered by customers, objectives, and much more) through a variety of integrations. Product is seamlessly capturing the customer voice — and using it to inform every roadmap decision.
Now, it’s fast and simple to review feedback sent to Sales and CS or synthesize responses to Autodesk’s external Portals that refer to specific feature ideas. As Lilli puts it, “just the speed of being able to find things, that I can search for something so quickly — it’s huge.”
This has transformed Autodesk’s ability to make — and justify — the right product investments.
“ Prioritization relies much more on customer feedback than it did before because it’s now right there in the roadmap. Product managers can easily make references to who the feedback is coming from, how many customers are facing the same issue. With Productboard, it’s much easier for product managers — they spend much less time and make better decisions. ”
Mitko Vidanovski
SENIOR PROGRAM MANAGER, AUTODESK
In fact, Autodesk teams are even using Portals to gather feedback during live events — strengthening customer engagement and data-driven prioritization. Lilli shares the details:
- Soon after adopting Productboard, the Building & Infrastructure org hosted a series of Ask Me Anything webinars and included live links to Portals featuring public roadmaps
- Product and CS encouraged attendees to share feedback live or after the events
- One feature designed to improve search capability for one of the BID org’s offerings sparked an overwhelmingly positive response — 60+ notes from customers – with one user saying: “Please do this! This is the number one thing that’s been stopping me!”
- Product managers hadn’t expected the strong demand, but quickly seized the moment to work on the problem in Productboard during Autodesk’s “recharge sprints,” where teams get to focus on a compelling product challenge beyond their day-to-day scope. Developers could have pursued any work they wanted, but they chose to join PMs in solving the search issue because they were so inspired by customers’ input.
“It surprised us and made us prioritize that issue,” Lilli explains. “Our product managers worked quickly on the problem because they saw all these comments about how much it meant to people.”
And, the story doesn’t stop at data-driven prioritization. Sharing live, public roadmaps that aggregate feedback also means Product has a clear list of interested customers to contact when it’s time to validate ideas. This way, Autodesk saves time ensuring successful adoption.
“ It’s really great that we can go into something on the public roadmap in Productboard and say, ‘look what these 14 people have said about how valuable this feature is.’ We know they’re interested because they cared enough to write in, and then we can easily send them a prototype we have and talk to them. Now, we can do less recruiting and discover key insights with interested customers faster. ”
Lilli Smith
SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER, AUTODESK
- Align stakeholders and execs faster with an intuitive roadmap
Speaking of efficiency, the EPD org and its cross-functional stakeholders are all seeing what Mitko describes as a “huge time savings” now that they can turn to the same source of product truth instead of spending hours on alignment calls, referencing disparate tools.
Teams share one roadmap url regardless of permission levels, whether a Productboard user is a viewer, contributor, or maker. When roadmap plans change, “those happen instantly — everybody can see them right away,” Mitko says.
“ Having everything in Productboard makes us more successful. Now, we’re able to set up roadmaps for different audiences, all using the same data, but we can tag it in certain ways that the business can keep up with. We can see views by team, release, objective — cutting across everything. It’s helped everyone understand what we’re doing and has improved how we communicate with stakeholders across the business. ”
Lilli Smith
SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER, AUTODESK
From his program manager vantage point, Mitko sees a clear improvement in business-wide alignment and productivity.
“Other teams are sharing more constructive feedback, about what they find important for our product vision — either they vote on features or add their insights directly,” Mitko explains.
Executives also appreciate the chance to easily grasp product plans and progress in a single system, plus the proof that teams are closing feedback loops and justifying decisions with data.
“ Executives appreciate being able to review roadmaps in one place. They love the single view they can have across the portfolio based on different objectives, categories, and customers — and that teams are sharing roadmaps directly with customers now, and linking the feedback they get directly back to the roadmap. ”
Mitko Vidanovski
SENIOR PROGRAM MANAGER, AUTODESK
-Mitko Vidanovski, Senior Program Manager, Autodesk
- Greater efficiency and better resourcing across EPD
From Mitko’s perspective, Productboard has also improved the relationship between Engineering and Product in clear ways. “Teams can now spend more time doing than coordinating,” he says.
When product managers have questions for developers, they can go right into the Jira field of Productboard and add comments that go directly to the engineer linked to a given project — helping Autodesk reduce risk and maintain momentum.
“I see it working,” Lilli says. “They’re helping us keep Productboard up-to-date and we’re making progress on what we’ve set out to do.”
Above all, engineers can now appreciate the meaning behind their contributions.
“ Once we enabled the integration with Jira, engineers can now see how their work fits into the bigger picture, why they’re doing the things they’re doing. That increases value for them, they see the benefit. ”
Mitko Vidanovski
SENIOR PROGRAM MANAGER, AUTODESK
And, with a real-time view of dependencies spanning the Building & Infrastructure Design org’s 20 product lines, Autodesk leaders can now prevent a major cost for any enterprise: duplicative work. In an economy where efficiency is everything, this kind of oversight goes a long way.
On that note, Mitko describes something particularly valuable about Productboard’s intuitive interface: the opportunity for program managers at large companies to more effectively identify areas of improvement across the business.
“ Having a view of our own in Productboard, we can spot more opportunities to be helpful to the business. Because we’re able to set up specific tags for different categories and see what’s coming, we can identify things where more coordination might need to happen. We can visualize areas of the business and ask: ‘is this aligned with our company vision and group strategy? ”
Mitko Vidanovski
SENIOR PROGRAM MANAGER, AUTODESK
- Build stronger customer relationships
Above all, Mitko says the biggest winners are Autodesk customers.
Sales and CS teams in the Building & Infrastructure Design org now share Portals directly with prospects and customers days ahead of calls to gather feedback on specific feature ideas or the roadmap in general — setting the tone that Autodesk genuinely cares to partner with its users on product development.
“ Now, instead of giving presentations on the roadmap, customer-facing teams can have a different kind of conversation — more constructive, because they’re not going over what’s coming. The customer has already reviewed that, so they can offer something that’s one step ahead to help our strategy. ”
Mitko Vidanovski
SENIOR PROGRAM MANAGER, AUTODESK
-Mitko Vidanovski, Senior Program Manager, Autodesk
How it changed: collaborating with Pro Services for a seamless onboarding
Curious to see the same results? Mitko was happy to share how teams at Autodesk realized value so quickly from Productboard through a thoughtful collaboration with Pro Services.
From the beginning, Mitko says product managers on his team were more than ready to help support the transition.
“ I owe a big thank-you to our product management team, because they understood the value of Productboard right away. They saw the benefits and they jumped right into it, moving roadmaps from our previous setup to the new one. Our lead product managers attended champion calls with Productboard and became experts who were able to guide others. ”
Mitko Vidanovski
SENIOR PROGRAM MANAGER, AUTODESK
To get started, the Building & Infrastructure Design org partnered with Pro Services on:
- 6 product architecture sessions for small groups
- 4 training sessions for all product managers
Critically, Mitko says the solutions architects and customer success managers leading trainings from the Productboard side were not only “very knowledgeable,” but also highly engaged.
“They were flexible in how they ran trainings [to suit our needs], but also what was very helpful was the Slack integration we had,” Mitko says. “Whenever we had a question, we could ask on Slack and they would answer, so it helped with communication a lot.”
The end result: onboarding 20 product teams in Productboard in less than two months.
Plus, Autodesk’s dedicated Productboard account team has helped the Building & Infrastructure Design organization realize more and more value by holding:
- Multi-division Roundtable Discussions — connecting Productboard users at different Autodesk orgs to help teams share platform best practices and solve common operational challenges
- Monthly, live AMA sessions — giving teams the chance to pose questions to Productboard experts
These days, Mitko is proud to field questions about Productboard from other Autodesk teams.
“We’ve seen quite a few other Autodesk teams reaching out about how we’ve done this, how much time it took,” Mitko says. “They want to know more about how Productboard works.”
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