Sievo, a leader in procurement analytics, faced challenges with scattered product information, leading to disjointed customer feedback, a lack of confidence among sales, and wasted time on administrative tasks. Seeking a solution, VP of Product Heta Pirttijärvi and the team turned to Productboard for a unified platform to provide clarity on the product roadmap. Heta’s team ultimately enhanced trust in the product org by improving stakeholder collaboration, reducing repetitive and error-prone tasks, and making decisions based on relevant customer data.
It’s easy for spend to get out of control. To make strategic decisions about what to buy and when to buy it, you need real-time visibility into your spend.
The trailblazer in procurement analytics, Sievo protects your future profitability. Their proprietary procurement analytics software provides total spend visibility for some of the world’s largest and most complex procurement organizations. Sievo empowers procurement to move beyond simple spend tracking with uniquely forward-looking solutions that allow for tracking procurement from a wider lens, including sustainability. Sievo serves a diverse global client base including Carlsberg, Deutsche Telekom, and ISS World Services.
Sievo has financial transparency under control for their clients. But to stay cutting-edge and to continue delivering value, innovative solutions require constant reassessment, ongoing competitive research, agile feature updates, and organization-wide transparency. Heta Pirttijärvi, VP of Product who leads Sievo’s product organization, knew that they had to modernize their current product toolkit and processes.
Important product information was scattered everywhere. Not having one place for all the necessary data—direct customer feedback, sales notes, roadmap changes, task prioritization, the list goes on—also meant having to rely on the error-prone copy/paste method. Heta, originally a product manager at Sievo, remembers sifting through all her different Word documents after customer calls. “It was not readable to anyone else except me,” she laughs. Gatekeeping customer insights was causing problems for Sievo’s product org that had cascading effects for the other departments.
“We had a bunch of PowerPoint presentations that were often not up-to-date and that was resulting in colleagues losing trust in the product org’s ability to provide them with correct information,” explains Heta. “It was a lot of, ‘I told you this feature is important. Is it actually on the roadmap?’”
Heta knew that copy/pasting across many different PowerPoints every time an incremental change was made to the product strategy was not a scalable process. Enter Productboard. “I was excited to be getting a product that would help us develop better products. We had a long list of requirements, but the biggest one was having one place to view and update our roadmap, collect information, and integrate to services that we already use. Productboard ticked a lot of our boxes.”
“One place” for everything product-related is what Heta emphasizes the most because customer needs are at the heart of Sievo’s operations and solutions. “We are quite customer-centric. We always listen to their feedback and feature requests, and we are always tracking the feedback and ideas we get from our customers,” adds Heta. As one would imagine, consolidating this real-time customer feedback was a high priority.
Here is how Sievo’s product team uses different features in Productboard to improve collaboration and increase transparency with both sales and customers.
All this culminated into better product decisions that brought trust and confidence back in full force. “The key thing is that we now have all customer data and wishes in one place so we can make better decisions. Previously, this was just spread around in different places and we didn’t have one source of truth on what was truly important,” explains Heta.
With Productboard, roadmaps are no longer a black box for sales, and the features that should be prioritized are prioritized. The most transformative benefits so far are:
“One of the best things is the ease of it. You don’t have to make updates to different PowerPoints, you just make the change once.”
What’s next for the busy product team at Sievo? “We’ve just recently given Portal access to our customers, so I’m expecting to see an increase in customer engagement as they develop more visibility into that,” says Heta happily, knowing this is supporting their vision of always putting the customer at the forefront. “They can submit their own ideas, add new ideas, or comment on the existing ideas.”
Getting everyone on the same page has been the ultimate relief, for product and sales alike.
“As a product team, we have discussions about how Productboard has made our life easier and our cross-functional collaboration much better. We've been a really fast and growing company, and this is taking our product management to the next level.”
