See why:

• 97% of Zapier makers are active in Productboard
• 200 contributors across Zapier consistently view roadmaps

In an age of frequent interruptions and ever-growing tech stacks, Zapier promises a sweet escape from the manual tasks so many of us dread by helping people and companies automate work across 5,000 apps.

Product-led to the core, Zapier only recently invested in a Sales team. So, its winning formula for growth over the last decade stems from a decision leaders made on day one: build customer-centricity into company culture.

Over time, however, an influx of customer feedback became too much of a good thing. Data poured in, but Zapier had no central place or standard process to maximize its potential as teams scaled rapidly. It was time for Product Operations to do what it does best: operationalize.

Shira Bauman, Zapier’s senior manager of product operations, was ready for the moment. 

Here’s how Shira helped Zapier’s global teams use Productboard to turn feedback into actionable insights across every stage of the product lifecycle.

How it started: the challenges before Productboard

With a Master’s in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon and four years of experience using Productboard in a previous role, Shira was uniquely suited to help Zapier drive the changes it needed to see.

Early on, Shira identified the value Productboard could bring in helping teams across Zapier align around real-time roadmaps. Experts in automation, Zapier had set up plenty of ways to instantly generate calendar invites and Slack notifications for user discovery opportunities. But, as teams shared findings and built roadmaps within disconnected systems, Zapier saw the following:

• Team leads came to different conclusions about which customer needs to prioritize, and would occasionally pursue solutions without connecting cross-functionally
• Product managers faced frequent “shoulder taps” from global team members, fielding feature-related questions across the day & losing time for “valuable work”
• Leaders lacked a comprehensive view of feature prioritization and roadmap progress

“When your product is all self-serve, you need transparency around what Product teams are working on — how every feature on the roadmap connects back to company initiatives,” Shira says. “You can have the best user insights repository, but if it’s not actioned the right way, it’s not valuable.”

Determined to help teams improve transparency, communication, and standardization so Zapier could make the best customer-centric decisions as it scaled, Shira persuaded decision-makers about the benefits of choosing a comprehensive product management platform.

How it’s going: the results from a single product management platform

What has a single source of truth made possible for Zapier’s teams? Shira was happy to share.

• 97% of Zapier makers are active in Productboard
• 200 contributors across Zapier consistently view roadmaps

“There’s been a lot of excitement.” Shira is pleased to report that teams across Zapier are now working more transparently and collaboratively with Productboard as their one-stop-shop for product management:

• Global teams can easily find customer feedback and start brainstorming solutions cross-functionally, driving alignment around real-time roadmaps
• Product managers spend more time on users’ challenges than fielding internal questions
• Leaders can quickly check real-time data to understand how Product is driving revenue
• Sales now has a customer-facing roadmap in Productboard that account execs increasingly share in conversations

But, Operations professional that she is, Shira went one step further than standard adoption to ensure Zapier’s global employee base could reap significant benefits. 

Before onboarding Zapier teams, Shira partnered with Productboard’s Professional Services department to create a standardized approach to product management that would help current and future teams at Zapier collaborate based on a shared understanding of best practices. 

Whereas Zapier’s Product teams once debated the most pressing user needs to prioritize, they now leverage Productboard’s extensive feature prioritization functionality assessing value, estimating effort, and setting scores, among many other areas, so that data informs the product management process.

Shira has also seen another meaningful change in the way Zapier teams exchange and explore ideas, post-Productboard.

And, Zapier being Zapier, the company’s product operations team has made sure automation fits into the equation wherever it’s bound to make work easier.

“We’re using Zapier to automate work so that it’s easy for the Sales team’s notes to end up as Productboard Insights,” Shira says. “We’re also automating any Slack feedback into Productboard, as well as feedback from the different collections gathered by Product. And, from there, we’re automating Slack reminders for product managers to fill out their weekly updates in the Productboard Portal. Productboard has great Zapier integrations, though of course we’d love even more!”

Ever since Zapier teams started using a comprehensive product management platform and leveraging standardized (and in some cases automated!) workflows, Shira says it’s been great to see internal teams strengthen their relationships with each other and with customers.

If you’re hoping to scale or rebuild your customer-centric product strategy, Shira was kind enough to share her 5-step approach to training enterprise teams on new software (including Productboard!).