Product People sharpened product focus with RICE-driven prioritization
About how we focused the team on the highest-impact, most-requested customer problems by consolidating Commercial input and Productboard insights into a single prioritized roadmap.
Our Client
Our client is a fast-growing enterprise SaaS platform for brand management, used by global marketing and brand teams to manage digital assets, brand guidelines, and creative workflows at scale. Headquartered in Switzerland, it serves thousands of organizations worldwide and operates in the highly competitive Brand Management and Digital Asset Management (DAM) market.
With 300+ employees, $80M+ in venture funding (EQT Ventures, Revaia), and an estimated $60M+ in annual revenue, our client sits in the upper tier of modern B2B SaaS companies, where speed of execution, product clarity, and cross-team alignment directly impact commercial success.
At the time Product People joined, it was simultaneously scaling its Automations feature, Brand Governance toolset, and Developer Ecosystem, creating a fast-moving environment with strong commercial demand and competing product priorities.
The Mission: Interim Product Manager, Developer Experience Squad
Our client maintained momentum across Automations, Integrations, and their own Finder by having Product People step into an interim Product Manager role to support continuity during a team transition.
The squad consisted of a Product Designer, Engineering Manager, and four engineers, operating in a high-throughput, high-ambiguity environment with competing demands from Sales, Customer Success, Product Leadership, and Innovation.
Product People kept the mission commercially grounded and execution-ready by bringing senior product judgment, commercial awareness, and prioritization discipline. This translated customer demand, commercial opportunities, and platform strategy into clear, executable product priorities.
Our Main Quest: Advancing Developer Tools Ecosystem
Launch: Onboarded Very Fast
Product People established delivery momentum quickly by following a detailed transition plan from the outgoing PM, including direct handover sessions and comprehensive documentation review.
Within the first two weeks, we created faster team alignment by adapting to our clients 6-week planning cycles, running coffee chats with key stakeholders across Engineering, Customer Success, and Product Leadership, and surfacing quick wins that built momentum and trust with the team.
Explore and Conquer: Delivering on Multiple Fronts
Product People advanced three interconnected product areas while managing cross-functional dependencies and laying foundations for long-term strategic growth.
Initiative 1, Rebuilding Product Signal Across Automations, Finder, and the Developer Platform
Result
Prioritization became transparent and strategy-aligned, with a single source of truth that improved clarity across stakeholder input.
What was happening
Our client's Developer Experience squad was managing a high volume of cross-functional input from Sales, CSMs, Productboard, and internal product teams. Requests spanned Automations, Brand SDK, Marketplace apps, integrations, and Finder, creating an opportunity to improve prioritization clarity and align focus with their strategy.
What Product People did
Product People created clearer strategic alignment by consolidating customer requests, commercial insights, and Productboard feedback into a single opportunity landscape.
Using FigJam, we made demand easier to evaluate by grouping raw input into clear opportunity areas aligned to our client's platform strategy.
We then enabled objective trade-off decisions every cycle by introducing a RICE-based prioritization framework for the Product Trio. As a result, what the team built, discovered, or deferred stayed tied to customer value, commercial impact, and strategic direction, and remained visible to Product Leadership.
📚 Their Finder is an embeddable UI widget that lets users browse and select the client's assets directly from within third-party applications, streamlining asset workflows across integrated systems.
Initiative 2, Maturing Automations from Beta to Enterprise-Ready
Result
Automations moved toward a stable, commercially viable platform by prioritizing governance, safety, and reliability alongside high-demand enhancements.
What was happening
Their Automations product had strong customer demand, and as it progressed from beta toward broader enterprise readiness, there was an opportunity to strengthen governance, safeguards, and reliability to support wider adoption.
What Product People did
Product People created shared clarity on enterprise readiness by aligning the Product Trio, Security, and Customer Success on table-stake capabilities across safety, control, governance, and extensibility, not just feature breadth.
Through continuous discovery with CSMs and real customer use cases, we supported broader adoption readiness by prioritizing and delivering loop prevention, trigger additions, governance and safety improvements, automations execution history, and webhook payload improvements alongside high-demand functional enhancements.
Initiative 3, Defining their own Finder as the Strategic Entry Point of the Platform
Result
The organization aligned on Finder as a platform, not just a UI surface, along with a clear backlog of high-impact, strategy-aligned initiatives.
What was happening
Our client's product strategy positioned Finder as the central point of interaction for the entire brand ecosystem, and the next step was to evolve implementation, ownership, and technical foundations to fully support that ambition.
What Product People did
Product People turned strategy into executable platform work by leading cross-platform discovery across Automations, Marketplace apps, Brand SDK, and asset workflows.
We created clearer execution paths by working with Product Leadership, Engineering, Design, and adjacent product teams to reverse-engineer the strategy into concrete initiatives.
A key milestone was facilitating a multi-stakeholder event-storming workshop that improved shared understanding by surfacing dependencies, clarifying ownership, and mapping integration flows across the ecosystem. This helped build a shared mental model of Finder’s role and clarified what to do next.
Discovery Mini-Missions: Our Side Quests
As Interim Product Managers, Product People supported the Developer Experience teams with multiple side quests:
- Result: EU-compliant conditions for releasing AI-enabled Automations in a regulated European environment
- Supported compliant rollout by working with Legal and Security to define EU-compliant rollout and governance guidelines, including GDPR, emerging EU AI Act considerations, and enterprise controls
- Strengthened safe deployment by introducing geo-restrictions and guardrails to support compliant rollout
- Result: Visibility into real-world Automation usage patterns to guide reliability and adoption improvements
- Improved evidence-based prioritization by instrumenting Automation usage in Amplitude and ThoughtSpot to observe real configuration patterns
- Identified adoption drivers by launching a focused power-user survey that highlighted trigger flexibility and reliability
Mission Achievements: Delivered Outcomes
💡 Protected delivery focus by improving prioritization clarity. By introducing RICE-based prioritization across Automations, Finder, and the Developer Platform, Product People helped the squad manage inbound demand and kept the team focused on the highest-impact customer and commercial opportunities.
💡 Supported Automations as an enterprise adoption engine. With Product People’s help, Automations demonstrated strong enterprise adoption and reliability at scale. Importantly, customers with at least one active automation showed meaningful engagement among larger accounts.
💡 Aligned the organization on Finder’s platform strategy. Through cross-team discovery and event storming, Product People brought Product, Engineering, and Design onto a single view of Finder’s current state, future role, and the platform capabilities required to get there.
Engagement Expansion
We were asked to help our client with another mission with different scope because of the immediate impact on delivery focus, prioritization clarity, and fast onboarding.
In the Client’s Own Words
Space Crew of this Mission
For Clients: When to Hire Us
You can hire us as an Interim/Freelance Product Manager or Product Owner
It takes, on average, three to nine months to find the right Product Manager to hire as a full-time employee. In the meantime, someone needs to fill in the void: drive cross-functional initiatives, decide what is worth building, and help the development team deliver the best outcomes.
If you're looking for a great Product Manager / Product Owner to join your team ASAP, Product People is a good plug-and-play solution to bridge the gap.
Interested in working with us?
Our Interim/Fractional Product Managers, Owners, and Leaders quickly fill gaps, scale your team, or lead key initiatives during transitions. We onboard swiftly, align teams, and deliver results.