Category: Product Management

When building successful products and running an efficient business, our team relies on the craft we started building in 2007. With a history of over 17 years, we have already found proven techniques or approaches that we use daily across all the guilds and squads. Some of those are widely known on the market, and some are modified or developed by us.

Check brief descriptions of the most common techniques that we use daily below.

BRIDGES Framework

There are lots of concepts on the market to use for product discovery, decision-making, and solution development. However, most of those frameworks are usually focused on a single type of subject like a user, a company, or a product. 

Using quite a lot of different approaches through the history of Railsware, we have developed our own one – BRIDGeS Framework, a flexible decision-making framework, designed by us and inspired by Pivotal Labs’ Inception. BRIDGeS offers a solid approach for multiple types of subjects that we use to ideate products, design a new feature or solution, build strategies and operations, make work or personal life-related decisions. 

BRIDGeS is an abbreviation – Benefits, Risks, Issues, Domain knowledge, Goals, and Solutions. We use Subject’s descriptors (BRIDG) to investigate the context of the problem and create a Solution that can meet all the essential requirements.

We use BRIDGeS every time we deal with complex, multidimensional contexts. The framework has a well-described flow that explains how to collect, analyze, and process information to develop an optimal solution. Unlike many other tools and frameworks, BRIDGeS is relatively simple, it’s versatile, and has a long list of advantages that helps us make data-driven decisions fast. If you want to try it — just use our Figma template!

Prioritization Framework by Dai Clegg 

Daily routine usually includes a bunch of tasks. Ideally, you’ll have enough time and energy to cover all of them – but it just might happen that the number of tasks is immense and the resources available are not in abundance. The art of setting priorities shows the efficiency of your workflow and the success of the company itself. Railsware’s choice is the project management framework by Dan Clegg- a simple yet powerful solution to set priorities both with and without timeboxes.

The framework has four priority categories it works with. These are Must-haves, Should-haves, Could-haves, and Won’t-haves. And that’s how you can define which task falls into which category:

• Can you move forward with the project if this task is undone? – if NO, it’s MUST
• Will you move forward with the project if this task is done a bit later? – if YES, it’s SHOULD
• Can you sacrifice this task till the deadline? – if YES, it’s COULD
• Can you get back to it when things go better? – if YES, it’s WON’T

These questions help you correctly figure out the importance of any task/process/feature/etc.

RASCI Responsibility assignment

RASCI matrix is used for the allocation and assignment of responsibilities to the team members in projects, processes, or tasks. Our team has a long history of creating and using RASCI charts for both inner and external projects. Over the years, we have defined some additional roles that allowed us to distribute responsibilities more accurately and achieve better outcomes. 

As a result, we have developed a RAtSCNIuo model which stands for responsible, approver, team, supportive, consulted, if no one else, informed, user, and occasional user.

Let us explain what the new roles mean.

• Responsible (R). The person who takes direct responsibility for the overall result of the project, no matter what blockers they face. The Responsible controls the execution of all project participants and is accountable for the final successful outcome.
• Approver (A). The person who helps the Responsible and the team to make the right choice and approves the final results. Has limited hands-on involvement.
• Team (t). Is actively involved in the project execution, does the recurrent work, proactively contributes to the vision, stays on track of the project progress.
• Supportive (S). Helps the team on request only to do work, to spread results into masses. Anyone with partial hands-on engagement. For example, a Finance Manager who helps the team to pay for a specific service.
• Consulted (C). Shares knowledge and opinions to the team to tune outcomes into what they believe is right without doing any significant work. If RWNs have marked themselves as Consulted, it means “consult with me before you design the solution/ ask my opinion”. For instance, some RWNs mark themselves as Consulted during a ​​survey, related to a new security system, which means they want to be interviewed and they have some ideas on the topic.
• IF NO ONE ELSE (N). The person that wants to move away from the activity, but possesses domain knowledge and will help, if no one else is available.
• Informed (I). Is actively or passively informed about changes.
• User (u). Does not participate in the task, but will use the end result.
• Occasional User (o)︎. Occasionally uses something.

However, each project is different. On some small projects, we may only have a Responsible and Approver and on other ones, we might have even more roles than described above.

Interests approach

Railsware takes advantage of collective leadership based on the RASCI model and makes decisions on different things including prioritization through voting. Team members can express the desire to work on some project, complete a task or pick a solution by choosing from several options like:

• Really Want. The context of very high interest for you that matches your life goals or values. This context makes you excited and happy to be a part of.
• Want. The context that you are already doing and want to continue or in general something that you enjoy doing. 
• Ready to experiment. You don’t have much experience in this, only have a general interest, and are ready to contribute when necessary.
• If Really Have To. Your contribution will be requested only when necessary and there is no one else to help. Meaning, if there is no other possible option available.
• Don’t Want. If you do not want to be involved in a certain context. When used in voting, it means that you do not want to go further with that option. 
• Ask me again later. You cannot decide right now, you need more time to think and investigate.
• I will go with the crowd. You cannot decide at the moment and will follow the choice of the majority. 

We designed this framework to ensure every team member is happy to contribute to a particular project. The approach allows us to stay motivated, engaged, and positive at work. When we form squads, we take people’s preferences into account. Also, the framework helps make the decisions easier and the choice much more understandable to the team.

Documenting things

Being a remote-friendly and distributed team we understand the value of documenting everything. Documenting is a vital approach meant to put all kinds of verbal communication and decision-making into a written format. This approach helps us stay on the same page and always have access to details needed, no matter what time of the day or part of the world it is. Other than that, documenting promotes transparency and continuity of information and prevents the bus factor.

However, there are also other purposes for writing things down:

• To ensure that all parties are on the same page.
• To have a point of reference.
• To capture ideas and turn them into actions.
• To help people make the most of their memory.
• To take a retrospective look at things later.
• To make your knowledge or experience shareable for anybody.
• To be better informed and prepared. Documenting helps you prepare for meetings based on having questions/agenda/plan typewritten in a doc and this way you save time on the meeting and get the outcome that you want.
• To help the brain go deeper. When you capture thoughts, your brain can use them to go deeper. It’s no longer busy thinking about them.

Processes culture

Railsware is built not only on feedback but on processes too. To be precise, we have around 1000 repeatable process templates described and ready to be used on a daily basis. Those are the checklists that help us make the most of our memory and always deliver high-quality work.

When we have a task that should be done with some frequency but stays more or less the same, for example, the onboarding process for a new person, we write everything down. Basically, we create a checklist detailing all the steps that need to be completed each time for some repeatable activity or task. We make it even more useful by adding all the needed links and details to it. This way we make sure that no small details are left out unseen as everything is written down. Once the process template is ready for usage, each Railswarian can complete a process without additional help from anyone else.

As a result, we get a reusable process template. Usually, those templates are created with help of our SmartChecklist and Smart Templates (a part of the TitanApps suite) and are stored in the task management system. Each Railswarian can create such a process at any time if there is a need and it will be automatically added to Jira and assigned to a needed person. 

Inputs culture

Railsware is built on feedback.

Yaroslav Lazor

CEO at Railsware

We encourage Railswarians to share ideas about what can be improved or changed in our cooperation (e.g. finance, hiring, team events, etc.). We have a joint commitment to support and help each other grow, no matter one’s position or amount of experience. This is a culture where no one is afraid to share feedback and is eagerly waiting to receive it.

At Railsware, we implement feedback on many different aspects of our work. There are one-on-ones where teammates share their thoughts with each other and can thus resolve issues. There are regular retrospectives that allow a lot of feedback to be shared and discussed, helping improvements be made on the spot. There are continuous feedback sessions integrated into onboarding and individual development processes where RWNs can receive feedback from a variety of teammates. A lot of feedback is given casually while working together or reviewing each other’s work. It can be a quick Slack message or a brief call.

We gather inputs about almost all processes that we have or before/after launching a new project. No matter the form, all feedback will be taken into consideration. This encourages people to share more constructive thoughts without the worry of being judged or misinterpreted.

Pair work

We believe in Pair Work and practice it not only in programming. By working on a problem together, RWNs may create more effective high-quality solutions from the start. Multiple pieces of research show that pair work helps to avoid biased thinking while keeping all team members engaged and accountable in the process. It makes the outcome of work more linear and predictable. When working together we are more concentrated and able to generate better ideas for the project or task receiving better results at the end.

Sharing can happen in many forms, from internal training to talks headed by different team members. It can be a pair-work or mentoring session that more experienced teammates have with newcomers. It can be simple updates posted bi-weekly or monthly, letting everyone catch up and adopt new ideas.

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