How Endgame Builds a Customer-Centric Product Roadmap Using Grain

With a product that’s still in beta, Endgame’s engineering teams are continuously learning from customers to iterate on the product, deliver value and inform their roadmap. Like many companies in today’s virtual-first world, connecting over Zoom is the primary way they interview customers for feedback.

The challenge was in capturing valuable insights from the meetings and sharing with the team. Every meeting contained important moments that would help the team understand their users and market, but notes weren’t capturing the complete context.

“I used to take a lot of notes. I would be typing detailed notes during the call. But, that's the old way of me working."

- Ty Kauffman, Customer Imagineering

Text-based notes often live with one meeting attendee and are difficult to find, share, or act beyond the call. Valuable information can be lost as a sticky note on an employee's desk, or more commonly, as an hour-long recording in an inbox somewhere.

There’s a cost to taking text-based notes. There’s a cost to maintaining the status quo.  

Endgame needed an effective way to capture and share customer feedback into its product development process. And, that’s when they found Grain.

Grain empowers everyone at Endgame to annotate their meetings with video clips that capture both the moment and notes—making it extremely easy to share knowledge first hand.

Building a Customer Feedback Loop using Highlights

Endgame created a dedicated public Slack channel “#grain-highlights” and Notion database where customer-facing teams share feedback and insights from their calls with the rest of the company.

The engineering team keeps up with the channel, listens to the customer feedback, and creates pull requests—without having to watch hour-long recordings or join any meetings. First hand exposure to a customer's perspective empowers them to solve problems and act on ideas from their users.

“Grain highlights become part of how we process customer feedback and develop our product”

Validating Roadmap Features using Stories

Before Grain, it was difficult for Endgame to validate the roadmap and prioritize the right features.

Someone from the go-to-market team would spend hours summarizing their notes and thoughts into a report about what they learned after walking customers through mockups and wireframes. Even then the report isn’t capturing the actual customer feedback, only the takeaway from the interviewer.

They built a simple workflow using Grain.

• The go-to-market team clips highlights of key moments and feedback from users during the call.
• Once the call ends, highlights are grouped thematically and stitched together to form a narrative directly from the customer.
• Then, the Grain story gets shared with the relevant teams (i.e., product and engineering) or sometimes, the entire company via Slack or Notion.

Use Customer Insights to Build a Better Roadmap

While Zoom helped Endgame to facilitate customer feedback, they needed a way to capture and share the most important moments beyond the call. With Grain, anyone at Endgame can bring customer perspectives into development cycles and help engineering build a better product roadmap.