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1969
North America
Scott Sandusky
Lead Product Manager
At the 2024 Product Excellence Summit, Esri’s Tripp Corbett (Principal Portfolio Manager) and Scott Sandusky (Lead Product Manager) shared how they successfully managed change to operate at enterprise scale.
Esri, a global leader in geographic information systems (GIS) technology, has been helping organizations solve complex challenges through advanced mapping and data analysis for over five decades. As Esri evolved, its product management function scaled rapidly, growing from a single product manager to a division of over 80. With this growth came the challenge of managing a multitude of user personas, processes, and priorities across the enterprise.
To address these complexities, Esri adopted Productboard as a system of record, revolutionizing how the organization collaborates, prioritizes, and delivers solutions.
With a dramatic expansion in the product management team, Esri needed to align its growing workforce around standardized practices and a shared vision. While the company had internalized the Pragmatic Institute’s framework for product management, there was no centralized environment to capture and collaborate around the results of each product teams’ work effectively.
These challenges in centrally capturing the results of their product management processes created a cascading effect of roadblocks for cross-departmental teams, including:
Esri partnered with Productboard to establish a comprehensive product management system of record. This system enables the company to: (1) centralize customer feedback and market evidence, (2) streamline collaboration and reduce friction, and (3) foster a culture of ownership.
Productboard’s intuitive interface allows product managers to capture and synthesize customer feedback, prioritize features, and align roadmaps in a single platform. The platform’s role-based access and integrations with tools like Salesforce and GitHub ensure that stakeholders across the organization can access relevant information without burdening product managers.
“We integrated with other systems in Productboard, like our CRM, Product Development system of record, and a customer survey with Make.com. It's not complicated—all we're doing is pushing or pulling a couple of values into features or customer notes—but the impact is tremendous. Everything is connected and you don't need to rekey information.”
– Scott Sandusky, Lead Product Manager, Esri
Esri invested in training and engagement, creating internal videos, webinars, and open office hours to familiarize teams with Productboard. Leadership’s visible commitment to the platform further reinforced its importance. “We didn’t outsource this work. We owned it from definition to implementation,” added Scott.
By standardizing processes within Productboard, Esri’s product managers now operate with greater clarity and cohesion. Teams can prioritize features based on robust market evidence and track progress against division-wide goals, enhancing efficiency and alignment.
Tripp explained how Productboard evolved into more than just a tool for product management, becoming a hub for business processes across the organization. By centralizing workflows like licensing changes, product naming, pricing, and marketing readiness, the platform reduced the need for multiple tools and created a single source of truth. “If Productboard is our system of record, let’s use that to be transparent around progress within our business processes too,” said Tripp.
This alignment ensured that all teams—from product and marketing to IT and customer service—followed standard processes and had all necessary information in one place, streamlining operations and collaboration. This holistic approach has minimized redundancies and ensured that stakeholders stay informed and aligned.
Having an enterprise system of record also aided in career advancement. With centralized knowledge kept secure in Productboard, Esri reduced the “friction” of internal promotions, empowering product managers to advance without disrupting product momentum.
“As a division, we were thinking, ‘If we move this person over there, we lose all of their rich knowledge about their product and the market because it’s locked in their heads.’ Productboard helps us get that information out of people's heads, reducing this friction when promoting internal candidates and letting them pursue exciting career growth opportunities.”
– Tripp Corbett, Principal Portfolio Manager, Esri
Esri continues to expand its use of Productboard, with plans to:
Esri’s adoption of Productboard exemplifies how an enterprise can scale product management practices while maintaining agility and innovation. By centralizing processes, fostering collaboration, and embracing change, Esri has set a standard for operational excellence in product management.
Interested in learning more about how seasoned product leaders like Tripp and Scott are scaling processes? Access the Product Excellence Summit Replay here.
