Product teams used to build features for customers.

These days, it can feel like product teams are clocking in at a feature factory. A conveyor belt optimized for output. 

Tools and automation have emerged to help product teams take features from design to deployment faster than ever. Or to “Done”, as issue trackers call it.

But features aren’t done when they’re deployed. That’s when customers see them for the first time. It’s the most important time in a feature’s lifecycle but it’s also when product teams drop attention.

Modern practices preach releasing features quickly, reviewing them with customers, and then iterating. But in most companies, there’s no follow-through and customers end up with scoped-down features that don’t do it for them.

With such an approach, it’s not surprising that 50% of all features fail to make a customer impact in the first iteration. It’s nuts!

Maybe customer success will pick up negative feedback, but it’s too slow and by that time, the customers are already dissatisfied.

Similarly, product analytics is rooted in product-level lagging indicators that teams can’t immediately influence. It’s also data-driven rather than use-case-driven.

What product teams can act on are leading indicators - quantitative and qualitative - like feature awareness, adoption, satisfaction, and feedback. Yet, they need a workflow to surface these indicators in a repeatable way that’s as automated as possible.

Only then will product teams truly become data-driven and customer-centric.

Fast-moving companies get this. They want empowered product teams and are hiring product engineers. But how do they actually achieve it? Consistently getting leading indicators to product teams is a ton of manual work. Some hire new roles, like ProductOps, to facilitate this feedback loop.

We believe the problem isn’t a people problem but a tooling problem. No one has built a feature management tool for rapid iteration specifically for B2B product teams.

Why is that? Maybe because it sounds like a niche product for a narrow audience. But it’s addressing a problem that happens every month for every product team at every tech company. And companies are spending 50% of their budget on those teams.

Bucket’s mission is to empower B2B product teams to build better features.

We’re bridging the gap between feature deployment and product analytics and we believe doing so is tremendously impactful for any tech company’s R&D ROI.

‍We call it Customer-Centric Feature Management.

Rasmus Makwarth
Co-founder & CEO
Bucket