How Productboard scales transparency across their global team with Rewatch

Product teams are tasked with answering one of the most important questions for any company – what should we build? Founded in 2014, Productboard is on a mission to make it easier for companies to build products that matter. Today more than 4,000 customers, including Zoom, UiPath, and Zendesk, rely on Productboard to do just that.

Tomas Ruzicka, Staff Software Engineer and an early employee, has witnessed the company’s tremendous growth firsthand. Over the last 6 years, Tomas’s own remit has grown to include becoming a steward of the company’s culture and championing initiatives to improve internal communication. But with more people and more meetings, sharing knowledge and empowering teammates to find the information they need is harder than ever.

“We’ve always been a very transparent company,” says Tomas. “People are encouraged to ask questions and watch recordings of past meetings. But there's just so much information now and, when it comes to internal videos, we have to dig recording links out of our email and then they disappear into a blackhole in our wiki or get buried in our team chat.”

So, when Tomas came across Rewatch, he knew immediately they needed it at Productboard. Now teams across Productboard use Rewatch as their central video hub, enabling the company to be as transparent at 250 employees across 3 offices as they were at the very beginning.

“With Rewatch, we’re transforming the way we share knowledge, by having a centralized place where people can easily find and get value from our internal videos.”

Empowering teammates to stay connected, automatically

At Productboard, meetings are critical for keeping teammates aligned, sharing knowledge, and building a common understanding of where the company is headed. But as the team has grown, so has the burden on meeting organizers to distribute that information.

For Tomas, the first magic moment of using Rewatch was having that overhead disappear. No more random links he’d have to remember to post or go back and look for. With every video in one place and automatically transcribed, his teammates could find what they needed right away and on their own in Rewatch.

“Rewatch makes our videos discoverable, searchable, and accessible to the whole team, all without any additional work from us.”

“Now instead of recordings being a hassle to manage, everything gets done automatically,” says Tomas. “I sync my meetings to Rewatch, they automatically get uploaded, and then teammates can find, watch, and get the insights they need from the recordings – without having to ask me.”

“This is pretty much the perfect state,” says Tomas. “I now have meeting recordings that are discoverable, searchable, and accessible to my whole team, all while saving us a ton of time.”

Sharing context with teammates is easier than ever

Catching teammates up on a meeting they missed used to mean having to schedule yet another meeting. Or, if it was recorded, teammates would have to watch the whole thing in order to figure out what few tidbits they actually needed to know.

Rewatch makes it simple for Tomas and his teammates to share just the right context. “If there’s a topic we’re discussing that other people should know about,” explains Tomas, “I can point them to Rewatch and link them to the exact moment where we discussed a specific point.”

Productboard also uses Rewatch’s Slack integration to make sharing recordings even more seamless. Tomas appreciates how easy it is to link a video collection in Rewatch to a specific Slack channel. That way, teammates get notified automatically about new videos they should check out.

“We use Rewatch to save and share company-wide meetings, including Engineering All-Hands,” says Tomas. “Now when someone misses All-Hands, the link to Rewatch automatically gets posted to our #eng-general channel in Slack and anyone can quickly search the transcript for the keyword or topic they want to know about.”

Speeding up onboarding for new engineering hires

Over the course of the last year, Productboard’s team has nearly doubled in size. With features being shipped all the time and the company moving at a rapid pace, that's meant a lot of new faces who've needed to get up to speed, fast.

Tomas runs an onboarding session for new engineering hires where he provides an overview of their application’s architecture. When he first held his regular meeting after bringing on Rewatch, he was surprised to discover that a number of them had already watched a previous session.

“Rather than having to repeat myself,” shares Tomas, “they came prepared with additional questions. That means I don’t have to start at a super high level and can focus on whatever they’re actually interested in. This is exactly how I think onboarding should be.”

Embracing a transparent, recording-first culture

“Transparency is core to Productboard's culture and Rewatch enables us to be transparent at scale, across our global offices and inclusive of remote teammates.”

Tomas sees Rewatch as the first step in moving toward a recording-first culture – a mindset shift that he believes will be key to ensuring the company stays transparent as it continues to grow.

“As a transparency evangelist, I want to see us start recording meetings by default and sharing them in a place where teammates can get real value out of them,” says Tomas. “I believe the more content we put in Rewatch and the more up-to-date we keep it, the more transparent our company will be and feel.”

By bringing on Rewatch, Productboard has set the foundation for a transparent company culture that can scale alongside their growing team and across offices and timezones. Looking forward, Tomas only sees more opportunity to deepen the company’s adoption and usage of Rewatch.