How Unanet unified its product teams and enhanced collaboration – with airfocus + Lucid

Unanet is a scaling product organization delivering project management, ERP, CRM, and compliance tools for specialized markets. With recent acquisitions and an expanding product suite, the product team are in the midst of transformation. 

"We're going through a transformation, questioning what do we want product to look like at Unanet, says Christina ‘Xina’ Trocco. “We're continuing to grow and scale, and as product ops, I want to make sure that we're scaling in the right way.” 

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… A centralized tool that could help us bring teams together was a great motivator for us to move forward with airfocus.

Christina Trocco

Director of Product Operations – Unanet

Unifying tools to enhance collaboration

The production operations team identified a need for dedicated product tooling: “It was primarily engineering-driven when Product & Engineering was operating as one team,” explains Xina. “It was very Jira-oriented, using the Atlassian suite, but we didn’t have tools that would support the product side.” 

1. Out-of-date, fragmented roadmaps: “A lot of the challenge was just working within slide decks, spreadsheets,” explains Xina. Roadmaps started in spreadsheets, moved into slides, and ended as screenshots. “The team was spending so much manual time just toiling away at updating these artifacts on a constant basis.”

2. Siloed product teams and processes: With multiple acquisitions and new product teams, each group worked differently. “These teams were so used to working in their own tools that they had carried over into the company. Each team was doing something different There wasn’t much collaboration or visibility across teams.”

3. Communication overload: Stakeholders lacked custom views and self-serve visibility.  “Slack has been helpful in getting teams to communicate day-to-day. But [the product team]  felt really overwhelmed by the amount of messages. A lot of those questions were customer facing teams asking questions around the roadmap, and updates – they were constantly asking the product leads for this type of information.”

4. Low unified tool adoption & change readiness: More than half the product org had never used a dynamic tool before. “Another challenge was getting folks to actually use the tools to collaborate.” Every team had preferred legacy tools and Unanet wanted more integration and connectivity across its suite of products. “We needed to get folks to actually use the tools to collaborate.”

Why airfocus: Dynamic, flexible product management tooling

“In my first 30 days I actually just hit the ground running and started looking at the current, most powerful roadmap tools that not only had the features we needed, but were also aligned with the way we work – because we have so many product lines with different markets, being able to adapt and be flexible and modular was highly important for us," says Xina. 

• Single source of truth: "Here's a tool that can help unify us as a team to work together, and be able to collaborate. [The teams] have working sessions around airfocus now."

• airfocus + Lucid allows end-to-end solutions: "I noticed that airfocus was in the middle of an acquisition by Lucid. We can see it being used across our product development lifecycle." From brainstorming and process mapping through to delivery.

• Internal portal for centralized stakeholder feedback: “The internal portal was something that I didn't expect. Typically it's used for external customers, but we can leverage it for internal use. It's been nice to have a one-stop place for people to give feedback and be able to directly move that into our feedback workspace.”

• Jira integrations to connect product and engineering processes: “By connecting Jira and airfocus together, we're going to be able to map Epics to initiatives and it's going to help that visibility and connectivity across the two systems.”

• Best-in-market UX: “A demo of airfocus and went very well. Out of the three [we shortlisted], airfocus was the most impressive. As a tool that the team they knew they were going to be using every day, it was important for them to have a tool that was just easy to navigate and pleasing to look at."

• Support from the airfocus Customer Success team: "It wasn't just the tool, we also want to make sure we're properly supported, and that we're onboarding in the right way. The team was so supportive, and really blew me away. Having a relationship where you’re really talking as people, and not just a business transaction, is such a great differentiator.”

• Flexible and modular: "The ability to be flexible and experiment and just being able to adapt the tool based on our needs was highly important when we decided to go forward with airfocus."

More proactive and collaborative teams

airfocus has definitely been a game-changer for us so far. Here’s a tool that can help unify us as a team to work together, and be able to collaborate. The ability to be flexible and modular... with the recent acquisition with Lucid, and the power of a suite of tools that really drives productivity and collaboration – that's something we have been missing. 

Christina Trocco

Director of Product Operations – Unanet

• Moving from reactive to proactive: "In the past, the product team has been very reactive. In the last few months, that [stakeholder] feedback's actually been changing."

• Improved cross-department collaboration: “I didn't expect our engineering counterparts to be as interested. They wanted to know how to use the Jira integration to start conversations around aligning the statuses between Jira and [airfocus], and how we could map things bidirectionally. By connecting Jira and [airfocus] together, we're going to be able to map Epics to initiatives, and it's going to help [improve] visibility and connectivity across the two systems.

• Culture and utilization: “Our counterpart in engineering said that it was fun, and I was just surprised [by] the amount of folks that have said [airfocus] is really enjoyable to use. And I thought that was just an interesting take because I'd never heard anyone say they had fun using a tool before.”

• Becoming more cross-functional: “We've been developing products that are more cross-functional, in the past few months, so some teams really did need to know what the other side's doing, because we wanted more integrations and connectivity across our suite of products."

• Reduced spreadsheets, docs, and meetings: "One spreadsheet has already been eliminated, and I think one recurring meeting has been eliminated."