As product leaders, we’re flooded with feedback across emails, Slack threads, call notes, surveys all pointing in different directions. The real challenge isn’t collecting it; it’s connecting it. That’s where AI starts to shine: helping us see the full picture of customer needs, not just the noisiest signals.
Today’s edition, in collaboration with Productboard, dives into how AI can give product teams that 360° customer clarity—turning chaos into confidence. If you’ve ever wondered how to bring true customer-centricity to scale, this is one powerful path worth exploring.
The Modern Product Leader’s Dilemma: Too Much Feedback, Too Little Clarity
The relentless pace of innovation means product leaders are constantly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. And yet, securing the deep customer understanding needed to make confident decisions is often the most significant challenge.
Kraig Clark, the VP of Product at Arena by PTC, found his team wrestling with a common struggle: the relentless flood of feedback. His team, which provides cloud-based solutions for high-tech design and manufacturing, was receiving feedback across scattered emails, spreadsheets, and CRM notes.
They were “chasing data all the time” and had trouble translating their roadmap to stakeholders. Prioritization was shaped largely by customer needs in the moment, rather than consistently being guided by a strategic, data-backed roadmap.
In today’s competitive business environment, building what you think is right without truly understanding the customer’s problem is a risk you can’t afford. Kraig knew his team needed to do more than just tally requests; they needed to understand the “why” behind them. He saw that AI was the path forward, but the key was making the product management process smarter, not just faster.
Productboard: Laying the Foundation for Customer-Centricity
This is the very problem Productboard was built to solve. Productboard is a true system of record for all customer-centric product decisions - designed by product managers for product managers.
We recognized in 2014 that product managers desperately needed a way to make sense of massive datasets at scale. Our platform provided the structure to gather, organize, and prioritize customer feedback, bringing clarity to complex roadmaps and enabling teams to align on what truly matters.
For Kraig and the team at Arena, Productboard became the clear choice to centralize their feedback and bring order to the chaos.
Productboard Pulse: Cutting Through the Noise with AI-Powered Customer Clarity
Productboard’s initial platform laid a strong foundation, but the team still observed a persistent roadblock: struggles to unlock the full potential of their customer feedback. The sheer volume and diversity of sources was obscuring critical insights and leading to misaligned product strategies, resulting in missed market opportunities. This sparked the development of Productboard Pulse.
Pulse is an AI-powered voice of customer (VoC) solution that leverages AI to analyze massive datasets instantly. The platform automates the most time-consuming aspects of feedback management, like fully-automated feedback categorization and auto-linking for user insights, so teams can get to the “why” faster.
With AI-powered analytics dashboards, teams gain an unprecedented understanding of their customers, and executives get a birds-eye view of insights across product portfolios.
For Arena, this was a game-changer. With Pulse, Kraig’s team can now instantly make sense of thousands of customer insights, ensuring they’re making decisions based on real demand, not guesswork. This has made Arena significantly more efficient in delivering high-quality features and has established a single source of truth that aligns engineering, go-to-market, and leadership.
By connecting insights directly to their work, they’ve started to “nail every update,” ensuring every new feature delivers measurable value.
What This Means for Product Leaders: Navigating What’s Next
Kraig’s journey with Productboard highlights a fundamental shift for product leaders everywhere. It’s about moving beyond reactive development to a proactive, deeply customer-centric approach. AI is changing the way we bet on products and the scale at which we can operate.
This transformative shift is about more than just technology. It’s also about how the role of the PM is evolving with AI. Kraig has encouraged his team to find their own “holy shit” moments with AI, upleveling their skills and confidence and empowering them to do more true product management.
This shared vision led to a new wave of innovation at Arena. Over the summer, Kraig’s team announced their new Supply Chain Intelligence (SCI) offering, which continuously checks for emerging supply chain risks and provides AI-driven component monitoring directly within product development workflows.
This fall, Arena is further expanding this AI product suite to include AI Actions, which are helpful buttons that allow users to execute difficult tasks on demand, and an AI Assistant, an interactive chatbot that answers everyday questions about product data.
The Future of Product Management AI-Empowered
This is why the company is so excited about the future of AI in product development. With solutions like Productboard Pulse, PMs get a 360-degree view of customer needs, uncover hidden patterns, and visualize what’s possible. AI dramatically increases the likelihood of product success, accelerates time-to-market, and frees up valuable teams by significantly reducing the time and effort spent on manual research.
The future of product management won’t be done by AI alone, but by the 10X PMs that can be profoundly empowered and elevated by it.