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"Productboard has improved the productivity of our product teams by 30%. They are now able to understand product strategy and use [Productboard] on a daily basis to make decisions."
Executive Vice President of Product Management, OutSystems
At the 2024 Product Excellence Summit, OutSystems’ Anabela Cesário (Executive Vice President of Product Management) and Tiago Leão (Principal Product Operations Manager) shared about the evolution of their Productboard usage—and how OutSystems continues to refine and expand its use of Productboard to foster collaboration, alignment, and innovation.
OutSystems is a B2B software platform that empowers businesses to quickly and easily build apps. With thousands of customers and counting, , OutSystems has substantially grown its staff in order to meet increasing demand.
The enterprise technology company ended 2019 with almost 20 employees in their product management organization. At the beginning of 2020, they decided to separate the organization into an engineering division with a Chief Technology Officer as well as a product management division with a Vice President of Product. Although the groups have different reporting structures, they work closely together.
The company’s expansion continued in 2020, and OutSystems ended the year with 30 PMs and the goal of growing to 40 PMs by the end of 2021. While that fast pace of hiring and reorganizing is necessary to support growth, it also presents challenges to developing efficient processes that scale, such as a smooth onboarding process.
With these challenges in mind, OutSystems created a product operations team to optimize those processes and increase efficiency. Executive Vice President of Product Management Anabela Cesário wanted to explore using new tools that could help. She found Productboard, and was excited about its potential to tightly define the product management process and improve cross-functional cooperation.
Here’s how the transition to Productboard has been a game-changer for OutSystems in leveling up their product management processes over the past 4 years.
Before Productboard, OutSystems' product team relied on a mix of tools, including Jira and Excel. Soon enough, the team began to feel that those tools did not address the unique challenges of a product management organization.
“ The engineering teams used Jira to manage backlogs, but we didn't have that perfect tool to manage roadmaps or product launches. We just had a huge, huge Excel spreadsheet with a lot of information. ”
Anabela Cesário
Executive Vice President of Product Management, OutSystems
In fact, product managers found themselves juggling ten different tools. “It was quite a mess back then,” Cesário shared.
By 2020, Cesário and her colleagues were ready to begin the search for a dedicated product management tool. They had a clear understanding of their current pain points and, with rapid growth underway, wanted to ensure their expanding team could operate efficiently using the best tools available.
They came up with a list of their top pain points that they wanted to solve, which included:
The team looked at both Productboard and Aha!, but ultimately settled on Productboard as it allowed them to solve more of their team’s pain points.
A standout feature of Productboard is its ease of integration and interoperability with existing tools, exemplified by its seamless connections with Salesforce and Jira. The Salesforce integration enables OutSystems to import customer data and company details effortlessly, facilitating customer segmentation based on attributes like revenue and helping identify which features resonate most with different customer segments. Meanwhile, the Jira integration allows engineering teams to maintain their workflows without disruption, while the product management team oversees and prioritizes initiatives efficiently within Productboard.
To help scale the new product management processes supported by Productboard, Cesário and her colleagues developed a training program and set up regular meetings with the product management team. With their help, PMs are already fluent in using Productboard to define initiatives and objectives, prioritize them, and synchronize them in Jira to provide more context to their engineering partners.
“ Productboard has improved the productivity of our product teams by 30%. They are now able to understand product strategy and use Productboard on a daily basis to make decisions. ”
Anabela Cesário
Executive Vice President of Product Management, OutSystems
Leão added, “Having everything centralized in one place—and using consistent rules and templates—has been a real game-changer. It allows us to see feedback trends, track which teams are acting on feedback, and show stakeholders that their input is making a difference.”
Cesário is pleased that the product management team has been able to quickly acclimate to using Productboard and achieve value. She also noted that the product’s ease of use combined with the team’s early successes have made them eager to ramp up their use of Productboard even further.
“ So far, Productboard is very easy to use. Product managers here are highly motivated to use the tool. ”
Anabela Cesário
Executive Vice President of Product Management, OutSystems
After two years of strong adoption, OutSystems faced a turning point. As Leão explained, “Other priorities came up, and everything seemed to be running smoothly, so we put Productboard on cruise control. But by the time we stopped and looked around, adoption had dropped, standards were overwritten, and communication wasn’t where it needed to be.”
The team recognized the need to reintroduce rigor to their processes. They began evangelizing the tool anew, reaffirming its value, and reestablishing standards. “We’re essentially going back to basics,” said Leão, “to remind everyone of the benefits Productboard brings and ensure consistency across teams.”
These efforts quickly started to pay off, with teams realigning around standardized workflows and leveraging Productboard more effectively. This renewed focus not only improved day-to-day operations but also laid a strong foundation for onboarding new product managers with greater efficiency.
As OutSystems continues to onboard new PMs, they’ve noticed another major advantage of using Productboard: the tool helps to lay out the product management workflow in a way that makes the process easy for new employees to grasp. That’s a major change from previous years, when the process was laid out in a PowerPoint with embedded links to multiple outside documents.
“ Not only are we training new employees in Productboard, but we are also defining the product management process on top of it, and that makes a major difference. Now, it's easy for them to understand how we do product management at OutSystems. ”
Anabela Cesário
Executive Vice President of Product Management, OutSystems
That simplicity has expedited the onboarding process for new hires, allowing them to become valuable team members in a shorter time frame.
As the OutSystems team continues to grow, Productboard looks forward to continuing to help them reach new heights.
Leão emphasized how Productboard has enhanced collaboration across departments. “Customer success managers and solution architects can now filter the roadmap to see the status of items tied to their customers’ feedback,” he explained.
“ It’s become almost a mantra: if it’s not in Productboard, it doesn’t exist. ”
Tiago Leao
Principal Product Operations Manager
This transparency has strengthened trust between teams, enabling everyone to work from the same source of truth. OutSystems has also transformed how feedback is collected and processed. “With everything centralized, we can quickly spot feedback trends and connect them to specific product initiatives,” said Leão.
“ It’s not just about collecting feedback—it’s about showing field teams and stakeholders how their input shapes our roadmap and drives decisions. ”
Tiago Leao
Principal Product Operations Manager
By leveraging Productboard’s tools for feedback prioritization, OutSystems has improved its ability to act on insights, reducing inefficiencies and ensuring that the most critical customer needs are addressed promptly. “We’ve significantly reduced surprises and miscommunication,” said Cesário. “Engineering knows what’s coming, and stakeholders see how their feedback influences priorities.”
Both Cesário and Leão are excited about the potential for Productboard’s evolving capabilities. “I’d like to expand workflows to include product marketing and other areas of the company,” Cesário said. “Our vision is for Productboard to serve as a central hub for feedback, insights, and strategy across all teams.”
Leão shared his enthusiasm for new AI-driven features. “AI has the potential to streamline how we gather and process feedback, making everything faster and more effective. We’re eager to explore these possibilities,” he said.
As the OutSystems team continues to grow, Productboard looks forward to continuing to help them reach new heights.
Interested in learning more about how seasoned product leaders like Anabela Cesário and Tiago Leão are transforming cross-functional collaboration? Access the Product Excellence Summit Replay
