Our journey to a better product management solution

ProdPad has been an incredibly exciting journey so far, and in many ways it’s only just beginning.

Product Management is my lifeblood. Growing up, I always dabbled in making sites and designing products for my own enjoyment, and in my first job starting as a customer support rep, I was made a Junior Product Manager before even knowing what this really meant. Since those early days my passion for product management has only strengthened, from various London startup roles to founding Mind the Product and ProdPad.

As a very first version, ProdPad was built for nothing more than to solve our own needs. The tool was built in an older version of Symfony and basic HTML as that’s what we knew at the time, and didn’t even have a name. For the first couple of years we used it internally, gradually iterating as our teams grew and we started to work with different businesses and learnt about their product management challenges.

As Product Managers, we do have a great personal investment in our product and are able to empathize with our user base. But it was quickly apparent that this doesn’t mean that our needs are strictly the same as theirs. Through constantly talking to our early customers we were able to rebuild the ‘wrong stuff’ to move towards the comprehensive solution embraced by teams of many different shapes and sizes today. Already the tool has dramatically transformed from its humble beginnings; we have over 200 customers around the world, comprising more than 2900 monthly active users.

But we’re certainly not slowing down now. I’m excited to finally share the upcoming release of ProdPad Regenerated. 

An entire team is currently working on an overhaul of the ProdPad system based on the new things we’ve learnt about making product management successful from our ever-growing customer base. ProdPad will see a huge upgrade behind the scenes – to the latest versions of Symfony and Doctrine – and the front end will see a complete makeover for an even more user-friendly interface, powered by Angular.js. Our goal is to build on and enhance the system our customers are already using to make it even easier to integrate product management processes across an entire team.

I’ll be giving you an insight into our own product processes over the coming weeks as we move closer and closer to releasing a brand new ProdPad. So keep posted for updates on how we’re using best practice product management processes to build first-class product management tools – it should be an interesting journey!

If you’d like to chat to me about ProdPad, get in touch on @simplybastow or drop us a message here