How Figures uses Cycle and nailed an efficient product delivery workflow thanks to Cycle
"As product people, our main goal is to understand what is the highest value work we should focus on now and later. Without a clear feedback management tool, achieving that kind of impact would be very challenging. Cycle has empowered us with better control over our feedback loop, which is crucial for making more focused and impactful decisions."
Annie Li - Product @Figures
TL;DR
Challenges: Figures faced issues with scattered customer feedback, inefficient product decision-making, and a lack of focus.
Solution: With the adoption of Cycle, Figures significantly improved product decision-making, product quality, productivity, collaboration, and user engagement.
About Figures
Figures is an innovative compensation platform that provides HR teams with real-time compensation insights and tools to promote equitable pay practices. The platform offers market data features and a gender equality index, assisting companies in data-driven compensation decisions.
Person: Annie, Product Manager
Industry: Compensation and HR Software
Headquarters: Paris
Founded: 2020
Company Size: 70
Figures' story
Figures faced several challenges before implementing Cycle:
- Scattered customer feedback: Feedback was relayed through customer success and sales teams and often ended up on Slack, causing confusion.
- Difficulty in systematic prioritization: There was a need for better methods to track issues and categorize feedback based on parameters like Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) or customer segmentation.
"We then realized that just dumping those feedbacks on Slack would not suffice because we wanted to take into account specific parameters, like how many times a certain problem was mentioned? If it's just free-form text on Slack, you don't always have the same keywords."
Annie Li - Product @Figures
Alternative comparisons
Initially, Figures considered creating templates in Slack for structured feedback input by the customer success team. However, they encountered issues with this approach, including low adoption.
Cycle emerged as a compelling alternative due to its user-friendly, efficient modular data model, and its familiarity to the team. Annie recalls two key moments:
1. In refinement meetings with software engineers, providing rich customer context became effortless. This streamlined discussions and led to quicker, more refined solutions.
2. Figures was pleasantly surprised when the sales and customer success teams seamlessly integrated with Cycle. Their active contribution to feedback collection showcased Cycle's immediate value and fostered improved collaboration.
"The software engineers also realized that it's taking us much less time to arrive at refined solutions, thanks to the better contextualized feedback."
Annie Li - Product @Figures
How Figures uses Cycle
Figures relies extensively on Cycle for feedback processing. The customer success and sales teams input feedback directly into Cycle, often through integrations with Slack, HubSpot, Intercom, and Zapier for forms. Product managers frequently review these feedback entries, creating insights linked to product initiatives, and executing the delivery process in Linear.
Impact
The integration of Cycle has brought significant impacts to Figures workflow:
1. Improved focus and clarity: Figures achieved better decision-making by centralizing customer feedback, enhancing their understanding of customer needs.
2. Structured approach to feature prioritization: Insights into customer pain points streamlined their product development process and improved sprint productivity.
3. Enhanced control over the feedback loop: Figures systematically collected and managed customer feedback, keeping stakeholders informed of progress.
4. Increased satisfaction and collaboration with customer success and sales teams: Effective feedback capture and contextualization boosted confidence in the product development process.