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Product Management

10 Product management case studies to learn from

13 Jul 20266 mins read
Emma-Lily Pendleton
By Emma-Lily Pendleton
CONTENTS

The best product management advice doesn't come from frameworks or textbooks; it comes from teams who've already been in the trenches. You could spend months experimenting with new processes, hoping something sticks. Or you could start with what's already working.

What does it actually look like when a company cuts its backlog by 99%? Or doubles roadmap completion during an agile transformation? Or scales product delivery by 20x? We collected product management case studies from real companies to find out.

Each one tackles a different challenge, from scaling global product organizations to reducing backlogs and improving prioritization. But they all share a common thread: product teams that found a better way to plan, prioritize, and deliver. Their experiences won't map perfectly onto yours, but they'll get you a lot closer to the answer than starting from scratch.

Looking for ways to improve collaboration across product teams? Curious how other companies streamline their roadmaps and prioritization processes? These product management case studies show how leading teams solved challenges around prioritization, roadmapping, collaboration, and scaling product operations.

Product management case studies in this article

Visit Group – supporting AI transformation

SNP Group – enabling global team collaboration

Ricoh – scaling product delivery

Unanet – unifying product teams

Apify – reducing backlog by 99%

Sano Genetics – transforming prioritization

Gireve – replacing static documents with a live roadmap

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Why product management case studies matter

Product management theory is useful, but product management case studies have the added benefit of demonstrating how strategies have worked inside real organizations. They provide practical examples of how product leaders handle challenges such as:

  • Prioritizing competing product initiatives

  • Aligning teams around product strategy

  • Managing product portfolios at scale

  • Improving product roadmap visibility

  • Coordinating cross-functional teams

For companies with multiple product teams or growing product portfolios, these lessons can be particularly valuable. Seeing how other organizations solved similar problems often reveals practical approaches that can be adapted within your own product organization.

7 product management case studies from leading companies

1. Supporting Visit Group’s AI transformation with real product intelligence

The AI transformation pressure is real. But AI agents are only as smart as the context you feed them. So how do you make that work in a 180-person product org managing 13 products across five countries, and running on scattered backlogs, disparate tools, and no shared view of strategy?

Visit Group relied on what they call a “poke-on-the-shoulder” coordination system: “We had multiple product management tools. Each team was responsible for its own roadmap, but that wasn't sustainable long-term,” explains Chris Micklethwaite, Chief Product and Technology Officer. “As we added more products into the portfolio, aligning that work has become much more important."

By implementing airfocus, Visit Group is supporting its AI transformation: feeding agents real product context rather than generic information, while giving 20 product teams always-on portfolio visibility for faster, better decisions.

To have something like an MCP on top of airfocus, on top of all of that rich data that we've got, is game-changing.
Chris Micklethwaite
Chief Product and Technology Officer – Visit Group

Read the full Visit Group case study.

2. Enabling global team collaboration, feedback visibility, and better products at SNP Group

Globally dispersed product teams don't just face time zone challenges; they face isolation and inefficiency. Kai Armbruster, Product Manager at SNP Group, witnessed this firsthand: "There was always a little bit of standalone teams, fighting for their product, for their solution, for their ideas, never considering the other products in other teams."

The answer? A dedicated product management tool that brings scattered teams under the same roof. airfocus stood out to SNP for its flexibility, transparency, and customer support.

As a result now have a single source of product truth and a transparent, data-driven prioritization process. They save time and have clear direction as a department, building trust and better products in the process.

My favorite thing about airfocus is the complete transparency, not just for myself and across my own products, but across the developer teams, management, sales, and the rest of our company who have interest in those features.
Lucy O’Shannessy
Product Manager – SNP Group

Read the full SNP Group case study.

3. Scaling product delivery at Ricoh

As product organizations grow, complexity often grows with them. Multiple teams, competing priorities, and fragmented product management tools can make it difficult to maintain alignment between product strategy and execution.

Ricoh encountered this challenge as its product organization expanded. With teams working across multiple initiatives, maintaining visibility into product priorities became increasingly difficult.

airfocus has given us the confidence to take bold steps forward. It's not just about improving processes – it's about transforming how we work together as a global organization.
Nathan Thomas
Head of Product – Ricoh Europe

By introducing a centralized product management approach, Ricoh created a shared environment where teams could align around product goals and collaborate more effectively. Instead of relying on disconnected tools and spreadsheets, product leaders gained a unified view of product initiatives and roadmap priorities.

The result was dramatic: Ricoh was able to scale its product team delivery by 20×.

For large organizations, this product management case study highlights an important lesson: scaling product teams successfully requires strong alignment and visibility across the entire product organization rather than simply adding more people.

Explore the full Ricoh case study.

4. Unanet: Unifying product teams and improving collaboration

Collaboration is easy when teams are small. As product organizations grow, however, communication often becomes fragmented. That was the challenge facing Unanet. As its product organization expanded, teams struggled to maintain a shared understanding of priorities and strategy.

By consolidating product planning into a unified platform, Unanet was able to bring its product teams together around a common framework for prioritization and roadmapping.

Seeing the power of a suite of tools that could drive productivity and collaboration from ideation to roadmap execution – and having that dynamically built in – was so important for us.
Director of Product Operations – Unanet
Christina Trocco

As the Unanet team explains in their case study: “airfocus helped us unify our product teams and enhance collaboration across the organization.”

With a shared system for planning and prioritizing work, teams could collaborate more effectively and make better product decisions together. The outcome was a more connected product organization where teams could align their work with broader strategic goals.

Read the full case study.

5. Reducing Apify’s backlog by 99%

Backlogs are meant to help product teams manage ideas and requests. But when they grow unchecked, they can quickly become overwhelming.

This was the situation facing Apify. As the company grew, its backlog expanded to the point where identifying the most important work became increasingly difficult. Without a clear prioritization framework, product teams were spending valuable time managing backlog items instead of focusing on high-impact initiatives.

To address this, Apify introduced a more structured prioritization process that allowed teams to evaluate initiatives based on strategic value and effort.

I would recommend airfocus to opinionated companies that don’t just follow a standard methodology but build processes in a way that works best for them. Other tools are dictating how you have to work – that's not the case with airfocus.
Jan Ženíšek
VP of Product – Apify

The impact was immediate. By focusing on the work that mattered most, Apify reduced its backlog by 99%.

For product leaders, the takeaway from this product management case study is clear: backlog management is a key strategic discipline that helps teams focus on delivering meaningful outcomes.

Read the full Apify case study.

6. Sano Genetics: Transforming prioritization with data-driven decision making

Prioritization is one of the most difficult responsibilities for product teams. With ideas, requests, and feedback coming from multiple sources, deciding what to build next can quickly become overwhelming.

Sano Genetics faced this challenge as its product organization expanded. Without a structured prioritization framework, aligning stakeholders around product decisions became increasingly difficult.

It's been a huge time saver and a huge enabler for us and saved hours a month for me specifically. It's given us a lot of clarity and a lot of focus.
Sarah Green Snider
SVP of Product & Delivery – Sano Genetics

By implementing a more transparent prioritization process, the Sano Genetics team was able to evaluate product initiatives based on clear strategic criteria. As a result, the team dramatically improved delivery performance, reaching 90% sprint completion.

Beyond improving delivery metrics, the shift helped product teams focus on the initiatives that delivered the greatest value to users and the business.

Read the full Sano Genetics case study.

7. Replacing Gireve’s slides and spreadsheets with a living, breathing roadmap

When Manuela Merletti joined Gireve as Senior Product Manager, the "scattered PowerPoints and spreadsheets" method just couldn't keep up with their growth. Internal teams across sales, marketing, and operations kept asking the same burning question: “What is the product team building, and why?”

Meanwhile, the product team was struggling with poor cross-team visibility, static, quickly outdated documents, the lack of a clear prioritization framework, and disconnected strategy and delivery. 

By unifying strategy, roadmaps, and delivery in airfocus, Gireve unlocked cross-team alignment at scale: a living, breathing, always-current roadmap, clear priorities and decisions, and improved stakeholder relationships.

With airfocus, everything is possible. It really lets you do what you want. It’s open and really easy to use.
Manuela Merletti
Senior Product Manager – Gireve

Explore the full Gireve case study.

What these product management case studies teach us

Although these companies operate in different industries, their product challenges are remarkably similar.

As product organizations scale, maintaining alignment becomes increasingly difficult. Teams must manage competing priorities, growing backlogs, and expanding product portfolios.

What these product management case studies show is that successful teams focus on improving how they plan, prioritize, and communicate product work.

Whether the goal is reducing backlog complexity, aligning teams around a shared roadmap, or improving collaboration across departments, the underlying objective is the same: enabling product teams to focus on delivering value.

Want to explore more product management case studies?

If you’d like to see how other organizations improve prioritization, roadmap planning, and collaboration, you can explore more product management case studies from the airfocus customer community.

Each story offers a deeper look at how product teams overcome real challenges and scale their product operations.

Explore more airfocus customer stories.

Share what you learned or ask questions in the community

Emma-Lily Pendleton

Senior Content Manager @ airfocus by Lucid
Emma-Lily is a senior content manager at airfocus bringing stories to life – driving brand growth, leads, and sales with words, and pixels. She lives in the English countryside, and spends her spare time boating on the broads.
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