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company founded
2010
location
North America
"Being agile and lean is more important than ever. With Productboard, we can quickly sift through insights, reach out to customers, and reduce the time needed for research and validation."
Product Manager
28/02/2025
Software
company founded
2010
location
North America
"Being agile and lean is more important than ever. With Productboard, we can quickly sift through insights, reach out to customers, and reduce the time needed for research and validation."
Product Manager
Fathom is a powerful insights and analytics platform designed to help small businesses, accountants, and their clients gain a clear understanding of their financial performance. By integrating with accounting systems like Xero and QuickBooks, Fathom simplifies financial reporting, forecasting, and benchmarking, empowering users with the information they need to make smarter business decisions.
As Fathom grew, so did the complexity of its product strategy. With an expanding customer base, increasing competition, and a rapidly evolving market, the company needed a structured way to capture customer feedback, prioritize product initiatives, and align its teams—without losing sight of what truly mattered: delivering an exceptional user experience.
Like many product managers, Luke Ryan faces the ongoing challenge of working in a competitive, rapidly evolving industry. With the rise of AI, the landscape has become more crowded, and staying ahead of competitors requires constant adaptation and focus on delivering unique value to customers. “There’s a lot more competition in the market,” Luke shared. “I’d say that’s probably one of the main challenges I’m facing in my role and we’re facing at Fathom.”
In addition to increased competition, economic challenges have also impacted Fathom’s customers, with many small businesses struggling due to inflation and interest rates. According to Luke, “Making sure that businesses have access to the solutions we’re offering to be able to understand the health of their business and how they can navigate through uncertain times is critical.”
“I came in with a backlog of about 1,500 user requests that hadn’t been actioned yet.”
Luke Ryan
Product Manager, Fathom
Unfortunately, this was easier said than done. Before adopting Productboard, Fathom faced significant hurdles in managing customer feedback and translating it into actionable product decisions. When Luke joined as a Product Manager, he inherited a backlog of user insights stored in Intercom. “When I started at Fathom, there was a bit of a gap between the last product manager leaving and myself joining. I came in with a backlog of about 1,500 user requests that hadn’t been actioned yet.” None of it was processed, categorized, and prioritized.
This lack of an organized system for managing customer insights meant that product decisions were often reactive rather than strategic. Additionally, Fathom needed a way to communicate roadmap priorities across teams to ensure everyone was aligned on what was being built and why.
Fathom adopted Productboard to reinforce its commitment to customer-led development. The platform helped Fathom in four key ways.
With Productboard’s integration with Intercom, Fathom was able to capture, categorize, and analyze customer feedback in real time. This meant Luke and his team could make data-driven decisions based on actual user needs rather than anecdotal evidence. “Productboard has been hugely beneficial, not just for me as a product manager, but for the whole team to understand what matters most to our customers,” said Luke.
“We initially thought a simple toggle for nonprofits would work, but after diving into user research in Productboard, we realized we needed a far more customizable solution. The insights available to us helped shift our approach, resulting in a feature that better served our entire user base.”
Luke Ryan
Product Manager, Fathom
By structuring customer insights, Fathom could proactively identify recurring pain points, ensuring their product roadmap addressed the most pressing user needs.
With Productboard, Fathom could prioritize product features based on actual demand and business impact, ensuring they were always working on what mattered most. One standout example was the development of custom terminology settings—a feature initially scoped for nonprofits but later expanded to other industries after reviewing Productboard insights.
“We initially thought a simple toggle for nonprofits would work, but after diving into user research in Productboard, we realized we needed a far more customizable solution,” explained Luke. “The insights available to us helped shift our approach, resulting in a feature that better served our entire user base.”
Fathom’s roadmap is constantly evolving. According to Luke, “Our roadmap changes basically every month. With Productboard, we can share it internally so everyone knows what we’re building and when. It’s been really beneficial for company-wide alignment.”
Productboard enables seamless internal roadmap sharing, ensuring cross-functional teams—from engineering to customer support—stay aligned on the latest priorities. This transparency ensures that teams can plan their efforts accordingly, reducing silos and improving efficiency.
Productboard also helped Fathom shorten the product discovery phase, making it easier to validate ideas and iterate quickly. By leveraging Productboard to support an iterative, customer-driven approach, Fathom ensures its product development efforts are both efficient and impactful. “Because competition is ramping up, being agile and lean is more important than ever. With Productboard, we can quickly sift through insights, reach out to customers, and reduce the time needed for research and validation,” said Luke.
Luke shared some exciting updates about Fathom’s product development. One of the key projects they’re working on is designed to help accountants serve their broader client base more effectively. Luke explains that accountants often struggle to sell advisory services to their clients, so Fathom is focused on building a solution that will make it easier for them to discover insights for their clients at a firm-wide level.
“Being agile and lean is more important than ever. With Productboard, we can quickly sift through insights, reach out to customers, and reduce the time needed for research and validation.”
Luke Ryan
Product Manager, Fathom
They are also also working on a bulk update feature, allowing users to update all their cloud-sourced entities at the click of a button—something that was previously a manual, time-consuming process. “If accountants are working in the books throughout the day, a common use case is needing to update all these companies quickly and then send a report out by the end of the day,” Luke explained. This project required close collaboration between platform and experience teams, highlighting the importance of cross-functional teamwork—and properly listening to customers feedback—in building and delivering new features.
For Fathom, the transition to Productboard enabled them to reinforce a customer-first product culture that ensures the right problems get solved, the right features get built, and teams remain aligned every step of the way. Fathom has positioned itself to scale smarter while maintaining a deep connection to users. Since implementing Productboard, Fathom has transformed its product management approach, driving measurable improvements:
Productboard is pleased to be the solution that supports Fathom’s customer-driven prioritization. By leveraging Productboard, Fathom is able to quickly understand customer needs, prioritize the most impactful features, and deliver solutions that empower small businesses and accountants to manage their financial health with ease.
