How Pipedrive accelerates innovation
In the tech industry, “innovation” often feels like a buzzword casually thrown around — but in my team at Pipedrive, it’s the real deal. We don’t just talk about innovation; we’re doing it.
To be clear, by innovation I don’t just mean integration with OpenAI’s API. For example, within just eight months, our team developed a groundbreaking AI-powered Sales Assistant which we recently presented to more than 100,000 our users worldwide. Our innovations are not just for show; they’re delivering real results, helping clients win up to three times more deals. Now, Sales Assistant stands as one of Pipedrive’s most popular features, with over 60% of active customers using it — another proud achievement for this year.
I’m Tanya, a Senior Product Manager at Pipedrive, and here’s our story of innovation.
At Pipedrive CRM, our mission is to help our customers win more deals. Our team’s vision is to transform the CRM market and help SMBs with actionable recommendations they previously never had access to. We don’t only aim to keep track, but rather, help improve their performance as well.
This year, we’ve taken a significant leap forward by developing a solution that helps sales professionals identify the next best action with their clients. Imagine a salesperson opening our system and receiving a tailored suggestion, such as sending a follow-up email to a customer they haven’t interacted with for a week. This suggestion is based on data-driven insights, indicating that reconnecting at this point could significantly increase the chances of closing a deal.
This year, we’ve not only achieved all our goals but surpassed them, delivering what I believe is one the biggest innovations in Pipedrive’s history. As the year draws to a close, it’s the perfect time to reflect on what sets our small but ambitious team apart and how we’ve made a real difference in the world of CRM.
The data-driven heartbeat
First things first: our team’s passion for a data-driven approach. It’s another buzzword, but hear me out — you recognize it when it’s real. How do I know? Consider this. One of our developers is so engaged with data that they’re the second most frequent user of Amplitude (our behavioral analytics tool). That’s right, a developer, not a data analyst. Another developer proactively experiments with AI models and contributes to the data community in their free time. Our designer utilizes p-value statistical models to gauge design performance and I’ve pursued a second degree in data analysis to bolster our team’s capabilities.
We have fostered a truly data-driven mindset across our team. All decisions we make are backed by data: We know which data we can use and how, we have knowledge of libraries and open-source projects and we feel confident in making decisions.
Tip for implementation: Empower your team to dive into data themselves by giving them ownership of their impact. Support their learning journey, show them how and encourage them to ask questions rather than just providing them with answers. You can’t just check dashboards once per month and say you are data-driven.
Сustomer obsession
While knowing the data is crucial, there’s always something harder to quantify — empathy, insights and feelings. We’ve been conducting ongoing user research for nearly six months, meaning we’re constantly talking to, asking questions of and walking in the shoes of the user. Our developers participate in these sessions as well as content designers and product folks.
But not only that! One developer starts each day by reviewing user feedback and adoption of our updates and sharing it with the team. When we discuss early-stage ideas, we ask ourselves “Is the user problem clear?”Our focus is squarely on the users, not just the company or ourselves. Our approach to innovation is always driven by the need to solve user problems, not just for the sake of innovating. It is really easy to invent, but it is really hard to fulfill the needs of users.
In some teams, research is a separate function. Those teams conduct research for a specific idea, and then just use the final deck with insights. We found it really important to have ongoing connections with customers just to be connected.
Pro Tip: It can be hard to invite developers to join user interviews, so try first to include them with the camera off with no active participation. It is still more powerful than just listening to the recording later on.
Experimentation as a key to growth
Even if you baked with data and talked to dozens of users, it is not enough to make a final judgment. Experimentation should precede significant time investments.
We break down projects into smaller components and test them through A/B testing. We never build and then test, it is always a “how can we prove it first” approach.
While A/B testing isn’t a panacea, it’s an effective way to measure impact. Some of our test results have been quite surprising. Experiments are also a way for us to turn our hypotheses into something measurable. Not everything we do is successful, but as a research and development team, we find value in the process. Experimentation is key to our research success.
“If you’re going to take bold bets, they’re going to be experiments. And if they’re experiments, you don’t know ahead of time whether they’re going to work. Experiments are by their very nature prone to failure.” — Jeff Bezos.
What’s important here is that operational failure is not acceptable and should never be. If we can’t deliver on time, if we can’t support the quality — it’s not a type of learning failure, it’s just failure. Don’t allow low-performing teams a chance to use these failures as an excuse.
Pro Tip: Convincing the development team to implement solutions that might require less-than-ideal code can be challenging. However, we always maintain our commitment to quality. To increase engagement, we’ve gamified the process by having developers bet on which variant they think will perform better. This approach has helped them understand and appreciate the value of A/B testing in the beginning and now they are the pioneers of this approach.
Team makes the difference
In my view, innovation stems from extreme ownership, understanding goals and purposes and empathy for user problems as well as ultimate passion to achieve results.
We know we might fail, but we still have our goals and are driven by the impact, meaning from each idea that didn’t work, we have five more we will try out even faster. We don’t use technology just for the sake of it; we’re curious about how technology can change the world and apply it based on our experiences.
AI is definitely an important piece and it requires knowledge and understanding to be effectively implemented in relevant domains. My take: If you are not really data-driven, your AI world will end on the API connection — which is not always bad, but has some cons in the end.
When I started to write this article, The Pragmatic Engineer published an article titled “Inside OpenAI: How does ChatGPT Ship So Quickly?” and many things they were saying really resonated with me.
“Senior teams can ship very, very quickly. Thanks to the focus on high talent density, we’ve intentionally skewed towards senior engineering folks when hiring within Applied. We also tried to stay as small as possible. And it turns out that we were right to do so, as senior teams that are very small can ship very quickly!”
I’m very keen on the idea of keeping the team small and increasing talent density. There is nothing better than working with a highly engaged, experienced, aligned team towards an ambitious goal. Here, I have to say thank you to my entire team for the most exciting year of innovation, delivery and success.
As I reflect on a year marked by remarkable achievements and innovation at Pipedrive, it’s important to remember that there is no one-size-fits-all solution in the realm of product management. What has worked wonders for us might not yield the same results for another team in a different context. However, amidst this diversity of approaches and strategies, I can confidently highlight the four key strategies above as having been instrumental in our journey.
