Metromile uses productboard to create fiercely loyal customers
productboard helps UX-driven organizations deliver a superior experience
When Matt Stein first found productboard, he was looking for a better way to visualize their team’s roadmap. At the time his team was using a variety of tools to categorize user feedback and manage the roadmap — from spreadsheets to presentations.
As Director of Product Design, Stein was also looking to improve his system for deciding what went on the roadmap in the first place. Specifically, he hoped to refine their process for gathering incoming user feedback and surfacing the most promising ideas and pressing issues. It’s little surprise this was a priority. Metromile, the modern pay-per-mile insurance provider, owes much of its early success to a customer-centric and savvy data-driven approach. (You could say that Metromile is the David to the auto insurance industry’s Goliath.) But having the will to be customer-centric is different from following through during execution. And for that, his team turned to productboard.
In productboard, Stein quickly set up a new pipeline to send all user feedback from their iOS, Android, and web apps to their Research board via email. Finally all of their user feedback — whether collected by the customer experience team, designers, or submitted by users themselves — would end up in one place. From there, Stein and his team categorize feedback and look for emerging patterns. When new feedback arrives in productboard they can highlight just the most important insights, tag them, and link them to related feature ideas. That helps cut away all the cruft, so during prioritization and design, the team can focus just on the most relevant user insights.
A data-driven approach to deciding what to build next
Today, as Metromile looks to decide what to build next, they count on productboard to power their data-driven approach to prioritization. productboard’s User impact score is the starting point for their efforts. It quantifies how well each feature addresses the needs of different users based on feedback provided over specific time spans, like the past 90 days.
“Being able to see the User impact score pop out for highly-requested features is a major benefit. I actually have some data to back up my decisions, so we’re not tempted to go build things a vocal minority is passionate about but that doesn’t benefit our user base as a whole. This is critical for us.”
With many thousands of feedback notes on their team’s Research board, Metromile has an incredible number of data points to learn from. The whole product design team works out of productboard now, collaboratively processing incoming feedback and discussing new insights daily. When a new trend is spotted, like users struggling with a certain part of the product, they can track this with a new component on the Features board, using sub-features to address each type of confusion. That way, for each feature idea they can see everyone who’s ever expressed a need for it and how critical that need is for them.
“I love the direction productboard is headed and look forward to the day when I can casually check notifications like ‘Hey, you’ve had a 20% increase in feedback related to feature X since that product update you launched last week. Look out!’”
Matt’s vision of a FitBit for product management is not far off. Until then, productboard will continue equipping teams like Matt’s with a wealth of quantitative & qualitative data that helps them confidently decide what to build next.
productboard is the all-in-one product management platform that helps teams understand what users need, prioritize what to build next, and earn buy-in for their roadmaps. productboard is the product management solution of choice at modern, disruptive companies like Metromile — organizations with passionate teams dedicated to making products that matter.
Metromile is revolutionizing car insurance through technology with its pay-per-mile insurance model. By offering affordable car insurance, transparent pricing based on the miles you actually drive, data to optimize how you use your car, and instant access to detailed vehicle diagnostics via the driving app, Metromile is transforming car insurance — and car ownership — to be more intelligent, seamless, and accessible than ever before. Metromile is expanding across the US, and currently empowering drivers Calif., Ill., N.J., Ore., Pa., Va., and Wash.
