Category: Product Management

This section explains what it means to be a Product Studio and how the Railsware team operates from the business perspective. We also talk about our approaches to doing business, crafting our products, collaborating with clients, and more.

Product Studio Concept

Railsware is a Product Studio. For us, it means two things. First, it’s a platform for repeatable creation and growth of successful products. No matter who the initial idea belonged to: us or our clients. We build all software solutions using the same approaches, deliver them to market, and ensure steady growth. 

Second, Product Studio is a company model with a continuous improvement loop in its base. Building our own solutions allows us to dive deeper into all aspects of the product life cycle and improve internal processes with each new experience, experiment, and especially a “lesson learned.”

These approaches let us build 3 successful products, Mailtrap, Coupler.io, and TitanApps, which are now trusted by more than 4M users worldwide.

Working with clients to implement their product ideas, we act as a tech partner. We are there each step of the way, from product discovery to product launch, first traction, and stable growth. We strive to walk in our clients’ shoes, feel their pains, and as a result, create advanced solutions that the end-users would be excited about. With solid product management domain knowledge, we create not what customers want but what they need.

Using our knowledge and experience, we build a number of successful products for clients like Calendly, NexHealth, ParentSquare, Tradezella, and many others.

Team Structure

Railsware is growing, and we’re already global. Our organization also modifies and adapts to the business needs. We successfully implemented some holacracy principles that have already proved their efficiency. 

We still have Leaders in important directions and in teams (but not managers, above managers, above managers). At the same time, the responsibility for decisions is equally distributed between all of the teams. Railswarians tend to take ownership of processes, projects, or products they work on. We believe in collective leadership and actively use it for project decision-making.

Guilds at Railsware 

A guild at Railsware is a group of people developing and sharing craft related to a specific domain.

People in one guild can work on different projects with different squads, but they are specialists in the same domain. It allows them to help each other solve domain-related matters and share knowledge internally at guild meetings.

For instance, at Railsware, we have Engineering, Product, Design, People, Marketing, Content, and other guilds.

Squads at Railsware

Unlike a classic hierarchy, the Railsware team consists of project teams (squads). A squad is a small team of people working together on a long-term project. These teams work autonomously through the various stages of the project and include specialists with different backgrounds. Squads can choose their own project management methodology, working approaches, and tools.

One Railswarian can be a member of different squads, depending on their projects.

Inside the squad, we usually collaborate using the RASCI responsibilities assignment matrix. Railswarian can take different roles in different squads. For example, in some projects, you can be a Responsible, and in other projects, you can act as a Team Member or Supportive.

Every squad has a leader who controls project implementation, educates and leads the team, and helps in communicating targets and approaches to the whole company. They act as the connectors between groups and the entire organization, helping everyone move forward in the same direction and with the same speed.

As all RWNs have a high level of maturity and proactiveness, we trust squads to decide what is best autonomously. We call it Collective Leadership.

We don’t care about titles 

…we care about what we do

We believe not in positions but in roles. Railsware doesn’t have classic gradations from Junior to Senior levels. A Railswarian can participate in several projects while not being limited by one specific title. This is what makes us T-shaped professionals with broad expertise in multiple areas. We grow in different desired directions and are never bored with what we do.

Railswarians’ professional growth is usually assessed considering team feedback, hard skills and competencies development, as well as the results in the projects or products.

We create an Individual Development Plan and follow the Performance review processes to help a Railswarian grow in the chosen direction.

Railsware Products

Today, Railsware has 3 products that generate millions in ARR. But it wasn’t all done in a night. We had dozens of prototypes, ideas, and experiments. Some were left on the proof of concept stage because “good” is not enough for us. When we say “remarkable products,” we mean it, and there is a real story and craft behind our solutions.

Our products were successful within the community from the start as they resolved real problems the Railsware team faced. Besides that, we applied the best product development practices to creating them, which resulted in more than 4M users.

Mailtrap

Team Size: 40+ RWNs Founded: 2011 Users: 1M+

Mailtrap is the email delivery platform to test, send, and control your emails. It allows you to safely test emails in staging, send them to production, monitor email infrastructure performance, and improve the performance using the numerous built-in analytics capabilities.

Back in 2011, while working on new features for a client project, we accidentally sent out 200k emails to real customers. We had to find a fast solution so that transactional emails could be tested safely before going live without the risk of spamming customers. Those were the roots of Mailtrap.

As the tool appeared to be very useful and made our life easier, we decided to share it with the community. Mailtrap was warmly welcomed and truly appreciated by the users. Due to product quality, word of mouth was a major growth contributor with minimum marketing efforts from our side. All these inspired us to turn an internal tool into a full-fledged product with a dedicated team. It was an important milestone in the Railsware history as a Product Studio.

Our team has big plans for Mailtrap. Today, Mailtrap is no longer a niche product but a fully-fledged platform that covers all aspects of email delivery – testing, sending, deliverability optimization. Mailtrap is now in the competitive landscape for a brighter future.

Coupler.io

Team: 30+ RWNs Founded: 2020    Imports: 78+M Users: 800K+

Coupler.io is a no-code data analytics and automation platform. It allows users to create live dashboards and reports, transform and manipulate values, collect and back up insights in one place, and much more.

An idea to create an importer was born out of a real need. Being a data-driven company, we have always collected tons of information from various sources. We tested some existing solutions but quickly realized their limitations. So, we created our own Airtable importer first. Then it grew to “anything” importer. One by one, we wrote all the plugins we needed. Eventually, all these pieces were combined in one – Coupler.io. 

Proper idea validation, CustDev interviews with potential customers, and market research showed that Coupler.io has a huge potential. Soon after its launch as a standalone product, Coupler gained great community support and was installed over 70k times during the first few months. From a Google Sheets add-on, Coupler.io has evolved into a fully-fledged data integration tool, and in the spring of 2020, we started getting revenue. In 2023, Coupler.io evolved into an automation and analytics platform with a strong focus on marketing analytics. The platform now offers extended data transformation and blending capabilities, more data sources and destinations, as well as a ready-to-use dashboard template gallery that covers various use cases.

By now, the product has got 500+ integrations with the most popular tools such as Google Sheets, Shopify, HubSpot, QuickBooks, Airtable, Xero, Jira, Trello, Pipedrive, and BigQuery.

The Coupler.io team constantly interacts with its users to improve and grow the product’s functionality. This way, we build a product to help businesses automate routine operations, streamline processes, and extract maximum value from their data.

TitanApps

Team: 20+ RWNs Founded: 2017 Total Sales: $1+ mln Active users: 2.2M+

TitanApps started as a Smart Checklist, is a task organizer for Jira. Without messy and slow sub-tasks, it allows users to manage recurring processes and organize to-do lists and workflows inside Jira issues. It solves a lot of users’ pain, decreases manual work, and significantly extends Jira’s functionality. Today, this add-on is the Atlassian Platinum Marketplace Partner and one of the Top 3 Checklist add-ons on the Atlassian marketplace. What’s more, it’s the most profitable Railsware product. 

The Railsware team created Smart Checklist for internal use during the company-wide transition from Trello to Jira. We needed to set up automated processes by adding multiple items to a Jira ticket. At that time, there were no user-friendly checklist plugins on the market. So we created it. We ran a BRIDGeS discovery session, and in 3 days, the first version of Smart Checklist was already in production. The plugin grew to 500 clients independently, and in February 2017, we earned the first $23 from it.

Since then, this product has evolved into a whole set of solutions, united under the umbrella of TitanApps. This suite of smart productivity tools works in popular ecosystems, such as Atlassian and monday.com. The number of these tools keeps growing, letting professional teams codify their processes and move their projects forward.

Railsware Clients

At the beginning of the Railsware path, we didn’t consider our solutions as commercial products. We created some tools to solve internal issues, optimize work, or streamline some processes. Also, our team shared them with the community. However, we didn’t have an intention to commercialize and grow them at that time. 

Our main focus was on the clients’ products. We decided to cooperate with one client with an appealing idea instead of taking five clients who had an unclear vision and vague understanding of the problem (quality over quantity, remember 😉?). Our desire was to comprehend the holistic picture of the product creation process, from a basic idea to launch, gaining sustainable traction, reaching product-market fit, and maintaining stable growth. Here are some of the most successful products our team has helped bring to life.

Calendly: Turning a startup idea into a $3.5 billion business 

Calendly is an online calendar tool with over 10M users worldwide designed for appointment making. It’s an easy-to-use platform that saves between two and three minutes with every appointment people make.

Our team supported Calendly from the initial ideation phase through to its growth into a $3.5 billion company. We began with idea validation, then created a roadmap, and eventually delivered the first working version of the Calendly product.

Railsware assisted the Calendly team in testing the product, gathering initial feedback, and scoping the product for further development. We were engaged in establishing a robust product development process driven by customer feedback, which contributed to the company’s growth into a unicorn.

Brightbytes: Research-based decision support platform

BrightBytes is an online data analytics platform that was designed to gather ideas from the best experts in the world and create evidence-based frameworks combined with data from schools or regions. In 2022 Brightbytes was acquired by Google.

Railsware has extended the BrightBytes tech team with our engineers to help build complicated parts of projects and thus achieve product and business goals. We were working with the BrightBytes team both on-site and remotely to ensure the best collaboration, as well as sharing our best practices to help strengthen and further develop BrightBytes.

TradeZella: From a problematic prototype to a solid trading journal

TradeZella is a trading journal and analytics tool designed to help traders level up their performance. The app collects data on users’ trading habits, processes it with its data analytics capabilities, and provides users with insightful statistics, feedback on their trading patterns, information on common trading mistakes, and educational content to upgrade their skills.

Our cooperation on the TradeZella project started with the evaluation of an existing MVP that didn’t work properly. We began with reshaping the development strategy and resetting the task priorities. 

Now, the work on the product continues. We regularly collect the users’ feedback, plan and implement product improvements and new functionality.

While working on such incredible products, we got invaluable experience and knowledge that we used and perfected in each new case. Our clients felt and appreciated it. Later, we applied all of it to our own products and continued our evolution.

Mission

The global mission of the Railsware team is to:

Every day, we create, test, and improve unique products, tools, and management techniques that are the main asset for our team’s growth. We share this treasure with the world and want to help other companies skyrocket their businesses with our solutions.

Strategy

As a team, we want to be sure that every Railswarian is in the right place and that they understand the purpose of their work. This way, we keep everyone motivated and fulfilled. Here’s what the Railsware Strategy looks like.

Values

Railsware is a global team of mature experts with a high level of responsibility. As we experiment, explore new approaches, and master our craft, we share our knowledge with the community and help other companies along the way. We believe that our culture and values bind us together and make us a great team.

Master your craft

Railswarians tend to excel in their craft and stay on the edge of the new technology, applying best practices, improving, and adapting to what fits the best. We learn a lot from the community, partners, clients, and own experiments and practices. This way, we build our mastery in all we do, implement highly effective solutions, create our approaches, and share our insights with internal and external communities. We never stop at just “good enough,” but always strive for “great” — and then some more :)

Experience flexibility

Establishing workplace flexibility helps us maintain life-work balance and stay fulfilled in life. Since the team members are located on 3 continents, we don’t have a fixed full-time remote schedule and are flexible in organizing our work. Railswarians are highly responsible and committed to bringing quality results. This is what enables us to give people as much flexibility and freedom as they need – whether for a project, working hours, or benefits packages.

Do what makes sense

We never make a decision based only on a gut feeling. We use data, facts, and knowledge to shape the best possible solution. Railswarians value quality over quantity and do things we believe in and make sense to us and our business. We always shape our vision, define our goals and develop an implementation plan before doing anything. A data-driven approach and well-tailored processes are the core of everything we do.

Contribute to transparency & feedback

You don’t know what makes sense unless you’ve gathered input about it. This is why Railsware is built on feedback. We keep transparency in sharing business updates and communicating complex things, both success and lessons learned. Our team openly shares feedback with candidates, teammates, clients, and partners. And treat this as something that should motivate, improve our performance, and leverage product development processes.

Believe in Collective Leadership

As all RWNs shape a team of remarkable experts, we trust groups and individuals to decide what is best autonomously. We don’t have “bossy bosses.” Instead, we build company structure that requires the whole team to participate in decision-making. Each RWN takes ownership of projects or products and creates a meaningful solution to any problem.

Treat each other with empathy & respect

We are a team of 200+ professionals spread over 25+ countries with distinct mentalities and life rhythms. We are convinced that empathy and respect are critical in building a healthy work environment and friendly atmosphere. Railswarians treat each other as individuals setting aside nationality, political, or religious views.

Railswarian Portrait 

When we are searching for a new Railswarian, we clearly understand the traits a person should possess to join our team. We are convinced that there’s no way our team can efficiently grow and develop if we all have a different understanding of the team’s goals, values, and mission. 

What we expect from a Railswarian:

• Live the full life: learn new things, contribute to the community, enjoy hobbies and share their diverse interests with us
• Be ready to take responsibility for small and large projects and care about the final successful outcome of each activity they are involved in
• Complete tasks till the end on time with a needed level of quality and do not give up because of difficulties
• Be ready to dive into a new context or domain
• Make data-driven decisions
• Care for others and approach each one in a pleasant, optimistic, and kind manner
• Admit mistakes and share obstacles with others openly to find the best solutions
• Understand how your results affect others’ work

I had a dream – to create a place where happy, talented people work in unison, craft quality products, and do things that matter.

Yaroslav Lazor

CEO at Railsware

Today Railsware is a remote-friendly team with three offices and remarkable professionals spread over 28+ countries.

A big dream and people who share the same values led us to what Railsware is now – the team with outstanding product expertise acknowledged by clients and millions of users. We grew into a Product Studio that successfully combines two business directions: the development of own products and consultancy. These directions are integrally connected and complement each other. Due to well-functioning product management, engineering, design processes, and polished approaches, we turn ideas into growing products. 

The Start

The Railsware roots go back to the year 2007, when a small group of tech-savvy enthusiasts established it. One of them later became CEO and plays this role nowadays. That was a long winding road full of experiments and insightful learnings. We worked hard to gain our expertise in business processes and product management. All while continuing to polish our software development approaches. Our first profitable project shaped the product team inside Railsware. That also was a time when our coding culture and delivery approaches evolved.

Product Studio Model

Our team always wanted to be involved in the product creation and growth process, not just coding. We practiced different business models and even tried co-founding a few products in the early days. That was a valuable experience, which exposed our business management gaps. The need for new knowledge was evident, and we decided to gain it through learning from successful product companies based in Silicon Valley. We analyzed their cases and approaches in order to apply them to our business. 

In 2012 we met the Pivotal Labs team, and it was a real game-changing experience for us. That knowledge-sharing trip aroused our consciousness and took the Railsware business to a new quality level. We learned about a powerful product discovery tool – Inception, the advantages of pair work and pair programming, and many other great things, which later boosted the quality of our business processes and product development cycle. 

Powered by this knowledge and a clear vision of how to manage the team, we transformed our team model. 

Today, we use the same approaches no matter if we’re working on a client’s product or our own. We invest in our craft and then apply it to building better products. This way, we form a continuous improvement cycle and shape the Product Studio as a platform for successful products’ repeatable creation and growth.

Railsware Products 

Experimenting with internal tools laid the foundation for our paid products – Mailtrap, TitanApps, and Coupler.io. Today, they are used by millions of people around the globe and acknowledged by world-class teams like Atlassian, Adobe, GitHub, Yelp, and Pivotal.

Mailtrap

In 2011 while working on a project with our client, we accidentally sent out 200k test emails to the real customers. That was painful but a fateful mistake. We created a solution to never make such mistakes again, without having a goal to earn money on that. The internal tool we crafted appeared to be very helpful, so later we decided to share it with the community. The demand for this product grew and motivated us to turn it into a profitable business. This is how the journey of the Mailtrap began and started our transformation into a Product Studio. Now, Mailtrap is a mature email delivery platform to test, send, and control emails.

Learn more

TitanApps

In 2017 the Railsware team created a tool for a company-wide transition from Trello to Jira. It was a task organizer built into the Jira application for internal use only. As there was no checklist plugin that had an API on the market, we decided to build one. The same story we had with our first product Mailtrap repeated. We shared our solution with the world, and it turned out to be profitable. With time, it grew into a set of smart tools for productivity, and earned us a status of Atlassian PlatinumMarketplace Partner.

Learn more

Coupler.io

Railsware is a data-driven team. Documenting, storing, and keeping everything in perfect order is something that we always care about. Our team has done a lot of work importing data into Google Spreadsheets from different data sources, which later resulted in creating a Google Sheets Importer add-on Coupler.io – our third product that was released in 2020. Later, Coupler.io evolved into a fully-fledged data integration solution.

Learn more

Culture We Build

To leverage the Railsware business, we reinvest profit in our own products and team development. 

From the early days, we made development culture the core of our business. It paid off big time, both with the quality of our projects and Railswarians, who tend to stay with us for 5+ years. The T-shape personality approach unlocks our professional potential in different areas. Through the collaborative way of work, we constantly share our knowledge, learn from each other and master our craft every day. Flexibility and trust are at the core of everything we do.

Our culture has developed over the long course of Railsware evolution. Now our team stands for a strong belief in the end value of what we do along with continuous learning and improvement.

We strive to influence the way companies are managed through the proven approaches and the products we build. Our goal is to expand the Railsware formula to the industry, leveraging company reputation and market visibility.

There is a difference between, “I think” and “I know”. You can build a team only with “I know”. But you can get to “I know” only going through successful experiments and mistakes

Yaroslav Lazor

CEO at Railsware