Mixmax struggled to manage scattered market and customer feedback in Jira, hindering efficiency, slowing down the product development process, and giving in to the loudest voices. But Productboard transformed a culture of disconnection into a customer-dedicated, data-driven organization that delivers unmatched value to users, all while surfacing new opportunities for growth. Mixmax can now centralize and prioritize product feedback, streamline roadmapping, retain customer loyalty, and foster continued collaboration and trust across internal teams.

In a world where inboxes are overflowing with an average of 121 business emails per day and attention spans are shrinking, sending the right message at the right time is critical. Sales engagement and prospecting platform Mixmax helps revenue teams start and engage in meaningful conversations with prospects by tracking what’s working and automating administrative tasks like scheduling.

And while Mixmax clearly helps its customers take a data-driven approach to the sales process, this was an area where its own product team was struggling. They were overwhelmed by too much data, too many tools, and no clear process for prioritization.

Challenge: Disparate Data, Disorganized Feedback, and a Growing Product Void

“When I joined Mixmax, there was no Productboard,” says Mike Bartlett, VP of Product. “One of the most significant challenges we faced was how disorganized feedback and feature requests were. People would create tickets in a Jira repository called ‘product ideas,’ and it was fairly messy. Multiple teams, like customer success, support, and product, would create tickets in silos, often resulting in duplicates. Sometimes the requests would be attributed to customers who no longer existed. Trying to find valuable insights was like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

Product prioritization was often based on the size and prominence of the customer requesting it — neglecting the needs of smaller clients whose needs were just as valid or who could even have a larger combined impact than one larger customer. Additionally, their roadmapping process relied on manual methods and PowerPoint presentations, lacking the necessary insights and data for informed decision-making. A few of Mixmax’s biggest challenges included:

• Prioritization bias resulting from disorganized data, with a lack of standardized processes and little support for collaboration, meant some customers were completely neglected while others received all the attention.
• Internal teams and customers unable to follow and track feedback, eroding trust in the product team and their approach to decision-making.
• Manual product roadmapping, leading to inaccuracy, inefficiency, and misalignment with customer and market demand.

For help tackling these problems, Mixmax turned to Productboard.

Solution: Centralized Feedback,Unified Data, and Streamlined Workflows

Since Mike had used Productboard at a previous company, he knew it wasn’t just about rolling out the tool and calling it a day. After introducing Productboard, implementation took around six weeks to achieve widespread, real adoption. Mike knew it was important to create different touch points for people throughout the company to learn more about Productboard’s capabilities, so he created a dedicated page in Notion offering self-service documentation, screenshots, and videos. The product team also held live sessions with interactive demonstrations and opportunities to get questions answered. Once product and cross-functional teams like customer success, support, and engineering became familiar with the tool, they jumped in.

Some of the most impactful features include:

• User Impact Scores that help the product team assess feature requests based on their actual impact on users, allowing for more customer-centric decision-making
• Salesforce integration that provides a holistic view of customer segments and the financial impact of decisions
• A unified Productboard Roadmap that enables cross-functional quarterly planning
• Jira integration that keeps engineers in their own workflow but informed and aligned with product thanks to roadmap items staying synced in real-time with Jira epics

Results: A Total Transformation of the Product Ecosystem

The implementation of Productboard completely transformed Mixmax’s product development and iteration processes. By centralizing feedback, prioritizing based on user impact, and fostering collaboration across teams, Mixmax achieved:

• Increased revenue with data-driven decisions that delight customers, improve ROI, and help Mixmax stay competitive.
• Higher customer-centricity and faster time-to-value with deeper, more accurate insights from Salesforce.
• Streamlined communication and increased trust across product, engineering, and design and with customer-facing teams

The engineering, product, and design teams can now more easily connect their work to revenue. Every quarter, they have an OKR to deliver incremental improvements based on existing customer ARR and Mike says they can easily measure this with the Productboard and Salesforce integration. The data that Productboard’s integration with Salesforce provides — especially in terms of SFDC Opportunity and current customer value — allows the product team to make more analytical assessments of product value in a similar manner to what they can do with Amplitude. Data from Salesforce helps ensure that decisions are based on actual revenue potential — not just the loudest voices. “The Salesforce integration allowed us to take full advantage of aggregated fields and proved to be one of the most successful aspects of the entire Productboard implementation,” said Mike. “It gave us valuable perspective into financial data that everyone could understand, and has had a major impact on how we do business.”

With Productboard, making informed investment decisions has become a more reliable and trustworthy process. Mixmax now incorporates revenue-focused perspectives throughout the product development process, such as attributing opportunity-lost value or customer ARR impact to different milestones. This makes it easy for their leadership team to better understand and appreciate financial metrics, greatly influencing how the company prioritizes initiatives in the product portfolio. The transparency has been particularly valuable for the Mixmax Customer Success team to understand the context and rationale behind different product decisions.

Product and CS now have clear communication channels, so CS understands the status of requests and accurately represents this information to customers. “With access to Productboard, the CS team can now see and submit trackable feature requests, improving workflows and interactions with customers. The customer view in Productboard has become a valuable tool for the team and made it possible to better serve clients across industries, while expanding our reach into new markets,” explains Mike.

With Productboard Roadmaps, cross-functional communication across engineering, product, and design is now much smoother. “This is now one of the primary communication vehicles across EPD for planning,” says Mike. Having customized statuses for each strategic feature initiative like “identified,” “ready for engineering,” and “committed” ensures everyone is speaking the same language and working on the agreed timeline.

Productboard has led to better decision-making and communication, which also increases trust in the product team. Mike says he now feels prepared to tackle the challenges his team faces today — and tomorrow. “The addition of Productboard helps me prioritize projects effectively, and focus on new opportunities as they surface — and as they change.”