Firstbase is on a mission to make sure no one else has to; the startup offers a platform that helps hybrid and remote companies manage the entire remote work equipment lifecycle from onboarding through offboarding.
Yet, as Firstbase started defining the stages of its lifecycle and growing in maturity as a fully remote product organization, leadership realized quickly: Product needed a comprehensive platform of its own.
Justin shares why Firstbase’s tech stack wasn’t meeting the mark for product management — and how the company now delivers quickly and collaboratively on its customer-centric mission.
How it started: early tools limit ability to visualize and share a customer-centric strategy
Despite the best intentions to consistently identify and build what their customers needed most, Firstbase’s teams were missing value-driving opportunities and losing time organizing their work. The problem: relying on disconnected tools from discovery through delivery, Justin says.
1. Aggregating feedback in a Jira board and linking to features proved too manual
In its early days, Firstbase leveraged a Jira board to collect and categorize requests customers shared with Sales and Customer Success teams. Unfortunately, teams felt the tool cost more time than it added value for the challenge at hand.
“It was pretty manual, and there wasn’t really an easy way to vote on things that were on the ask board, let alone to look back and tie them to features,” Justin explains.
2. Customers asked for more roadmap visibility; current tools fell short on sharing
Additionally, as Firstbase successfully positioned itself to customers as a company that cared deeply to keep learning about their needs and delivering effective solutions, more and more of its user base was excited to get a glimpse of the future.
“A lot of customers had been asking for our roadmap and wanted to know what we were building,” Justin says. Yet, Firstbase didn’t have an easy way to offer external visibility into Product’s next steps.
3. Product started to outgrow collaboration tools for roadmapping and planning
After all, in the realm of roadmapping, Firstbase was quickly outgrowing its early systems. Over time, teams longed for a more effective way to visualize the entire product lifecycle and infuse every decision with customer data.