Cribl has been experiencing rapid growth over the past six years as customers increasingly seek tools to modernize their data strategies. We introduced a new product, Cribl Lake, to help customers address even more diverse data management challenges. With customer data growing at a 28% CAGR, organizations are looking for solutions that can help them manage and optimize their data infrastructure. Our team has expanded to over 700 talented individuals, and we recently secured an exciting Series E round, positioning us for even greater momentum. Needless to say, we’re thrilled about what’s ahead!

However, with rapid growth comes new challenges for the product management team. As the number of customers, products, and team members increases, it becomes crucial to ensure that everyone remains aligned with the overall strategy and company goals. Maintaining this alignment is essential to scale effectively without losing focus.

As your customer base grows, you begin to attract users beyond your original core audience. While these adjacent users are essential for driving company growth, they come with different needs and expectations. It’s important to account for these differences when handling their requests and feedback.

Similarly, as you expand your product offerings and assign dedicated teams and product managers, it becomes critical to maintain alignment across the organization while still allowing teams the autonomy to move quickly. In a fast-growing startup, no one wants to be bogged down by excessive processes or reviews. The product management team is already balancing customer engagement, internal enablement, and collaboration with engineering.

Finally, as our product management team has scaled, we’ve needed to restructure internally. It’s crucial to be mindful of Conway’s Law and avoid letting your organizational structure dictate your product’s design. Thoughtful organizational design and strong systems are needed to ensure that teams can collaborate effectively across product lines.

Refining Our Approach to Handling Customer Requests

Over the past year, we’ve made strategic improvements in how we handle customer requests and prioritize ideas. These updates have helped us scale more effectively while ensuring that we remain focused on solving the right problems.

Differentiating Customer Requests

One of our initial challenges was differentiating between customer requests. Our sales engineering teams were capturing feedback by filing JIRA issues or tagging customers on existing issues. While this system worked for a time, it struggled to scale as the company grew. Some customers experienced urgent problems, while others dealt with minor annoyances. Worse still, in some cases, entirely different problems were being bundled into the same issue, leading to confusion in how we should respond.

Prioritizing the Most Impactful Problems

Our next challenge was ensuring that we consistently prioritized the most critical problems for the business—not just those coming from the largest or noisiest customers. We wanted to avoid bias and ensure that every product manager was working from a common framework for prioritization, leading to more consistency across the team.

Managing the Engineering Backlog

Lastly, our engineering backlog was becoming cluttered with a mix of essential tasks, potential ideas, and account team requests that may never materialize. We had to confront the reality that we would always have more ideas than we had the capacity to build. Being selective about what we pursue is essential to delivering the highest impact.

Implementing Jira Product Discovery for Smarter Decision-Making

To address these challenges, we adopted Jira Product Discovery, which has significantly improved how we manage our idea and engineering backlogs. This tool allows us to:

1. Separate the idea backlog from the engineering backlog, giving both more focus.
2. Refine our customer feedback system to provide greater clarity on each issue.
3. Create a standardized framework for evaluating the potential impact of every idea.

Improving Our Feedback System

Our enhanced feedback system empowers anyone in the company to capture detailed customer insights. Each entry includes a description of the problem, a rating of the problem’s importance (on a 0-5 scale), and a link to the related account, opportunity, or support case in our CRM. This system allows us to pull in critical information such as total ARR, upsell potential, and the support burden each issue carries. Additionally, account teams can use specific labels to flag dealbreakers or major blockers to adoption.

Standardizing Impact Evaluation

We’ve also developed a standardized impact rating system that factors in four key components:

1. Product managers assign each idea to one or more company goals and rate its potential impact on those goals (from 1-5). Although somewhat subjective, this process provides a consistent, lightweight approach that works well across the team.
2. Product managers also consider the feedback comments and aggregate data, such as the total ARR influenced by the idea.
3. The number of insights we’ve received on an idea helps indicate broad customer interest.
4. Strategic importance is factored in, recognizing that some ideas are critical to other internal teams or long-term company goals.

By implementing these systems, we’ve created a scalable and consistent process for fielding customer requests and prioritizing the most impactful ideas.

Incorporating Insights and Impact Ratings

The second and third components of our evaluation process are the number of insights we’ve gathered and the cumulative impact ratings assigned to them. These elements help us identify ideas that have broad support and address critical customer issues. Importantly, we intentionally avoid relying solely on financial metrics, as this could skew our priorities towards the demands of a few large customers at the expense of addressing the broader needs of our smaller customers.

Factoring in Strategic Importance

In addition to customer insights, we include an option to rate ideas based on their strategic impact. This allows us to account for ideas that are vital to other internal stakeholders, like our Technical Alliances Program. Recognizing the value of certain requests to teams beyond product management ensures that we support the broader organizational goals and foster cross-functional collaboration.

Normalizing the Scoring System

We combine all four components—alignment with company goals, customer insights, impact ratings, and strategic importance—into a single normalized score on a 1-100 scale. This scoring system enables us to review the entire backlog and prioritize the most important problems to solve first.

Measuring Progress and Adoption

Since implementing these improvements, we’ve seen strong adoption across our product team, as well as with our partners in sales engineering and customer success. We track progress through two key metrics:

• Total Number of Insights Created: We monitor the volume of insights created by product managers (PMs) and other team members. While PMs naturally generate many insights through customer interactions and roadmap discussions, we aim to empower account teams and others to contribute insights directly. Given the relatively small size of our product team, expanding this responsibility ensures that customer needs are captured more broadly across the organization.
• Insights Created by Non-Product Managers: Our goal is to see an increase in insights contributed by non-product managers, especially from account teams who are in direct contact with customers. Encouraging broader participation helps us build a more comprehensive understanding of customer needs and ensures we’re not missing critical information that may not surface in typical product management channels.

Linking Insights to Our CRM: Driving Deeper Understanding

The second key metric we track is the number of insights linked to our CRM. By connecting insights to our CRM system, we can communicate in a common language of “dollars and cents” across various parts of the business. These links to customer accounts or opportunities provide product teams with a breadcrumb trail that leads to a much deeper understanding of customer needs and priorities.

When insights are tied to support tickets, we can also estimate the resources—both time and money—that have been invested in addressing these issues. This allows us to dive into the entire troubleshooting process, giving us a clearer picture of the problem’s overall impact on the customer.

Currently, almost 80% of our insights are linked to the CRM system. This high level of integration reflects the strong buy-in from both our account teams and product managers, and it demonstrates how valuable this additional context is for more informed prioritization decisions.

Conclusion: Staying Aligned with Customer Needs

At Cribl, our ultimate goal is to build features that solve problems for our customers. By continually refining our processes for gathering insights, prioritizing ideas, and managing our product backlog, we ensure that we are focused on solving the most important problems. Staying in constant contact with our customers through various channels—whether it’s feedback from our account teams, insights from our CRM, or real-time discussions in our Community Slack—allows us to stay closely aligned with their needs.

This ongoing dialogue ensures that our roadmap not only drives innovation but also delivers meaningful solutions to the challenges our customers face. As we continue to grow, this customer-first approach remains at the heart of everything we build.

Cribl, the Data Engine for IT and Security, empowers organizations to transform their data strategy. Customers use Cribl’s suite of products to collect, process, route, and analyze all IT and security data, delivering the flexibility, choice, and control required to adapt to their ever-changing needs.

We offer free training, certifications, and a free tier across our products. Our community Slack features Cribl engineers, partners, and customers who can answer your questions as you get started and continue to build and evolve. We also offer a variety of hands-on Sandboxes for those interested in how companies globally leverage our products for their data challenges.