How HR startup turns user research into product insights

We started by offering financial wellness products to employers, including on-demand pay and financial education, and now give employers the ability to offer self-service HR, via WhatsApp. Employees can book leave, get payslips, and submit queries and feedback, all on WhatsApp.

We use Fibery for product management and all our customer research efforts.

We’re an early-stage startup so we used tools like Airtable to organise our product work before we grew a little bigger, and needed a more formal and complex tool.

An advisor came across Fibery and recommended we give it a try. We were looking for a place to link our overall company goals to research, and then eventually to features in one golden thread. And Fibery allowed us to do exactly that.

How do you do user research?

We love using Fibery for user research. To start with, we input detailed interview notes and then we take excerpts from those interviews and link them to our ‘Customer Problem’ database.

Our sales team also puts notes from their client interactions in this database so we get the broadest input.

Then when we’re planning our roadmap, we can see the number of references to each customer problem and easily understand which issues cause the most pain for the largest group of clients – and that helps us validate our decisions.

Each customer problem, if we decide to solve it, is then linked to an epic or specific feature, which Fibery allows us to do.

When we release new features we also go back to those user interviews, so that we can tell those specific clients that we’ve created a solution to their problem!

This way, Fibery helps us manage the entire research process, from customer interviews to feature release and feedback loop closure. And all this information is linked.

How do you prioritize features?

We look at all our customer feedback, and we also take note of how they’re using our product. We decide what feature to develop next based on how much value it will provide for our customers.

How do you plan and track features?

We’ve created a roadmap with epics and features. We always have the ideal feature in mind but we break it into phases for development and make sure we’re always getting customer feedback as we take a feature from 0 to 100.

For me, the ability for bi-directional linking has been amazing.

We can identify customer problems, figure out where the most urgent need is, then build those features and have a way to figure out which customers we can get back to about the new feature. Sometimes that turned prospects into customers! 💖

The learning curve is quite steep and we’ve struggled a bit to link Fibery efficiently with Jira in such a way that product end engineering teams are totally aligned. The integration didn’t quite get us there.