How Xoba Upscales Product Managers
Product Management. You are at the intersection of business, design, and engineering. You own the success or failure of your product, and so many people look up to you. On the surface, it’s a fantastic job (I know, I’ve been one before). But, when you dive deep and take a look at the day-to-day, the job is chaos. You’re pulled in ten different directions at any given moment, you have ten #1 priorities, colleagues are asking you for information all the time, and everything seems to be on fire. As a PM, it is crucial to stay organized, be on top of everything, and share your ideas and information with your colleagues.
Take a quick minute to think about the tools and applications you use on a given day. Email, chat, project management software, cloud storage, documentation platforms, and the list goes on. It’s hard to find information across all of these applications and organize them as well. You have Confluence Docs that are associated with Google Docs that are associated with Jira tickets that are related to Slack messages.
Since PMs are at the center of everything, they’re at the ‘mercy’ of the other teams in the organization regarding which applications they use, how they communicate with everyone, and how they ingest and share information. This causes Product Managers to use several applications, many of which perform similar functionalities (e.g., Confluence and Google Docs). The most common question I asked myself as a PM was, “Is the doc in Confluence, or is it in Google Docs?!”.
How do you make sense of all this? Well, just like everything else, you copy/paste links into a spreadsheet and expect everyone to treat that as the master doc, and you’re in good shape. In reality, that’s not how it works. You’re pinged left and right from everyone in the organization for information. You’re always searching all of your applications for that doc you forgot the location of. You struggle to get information from all teams across the organization.
There are several great tools for PMs to help them gather feedback, view product metrics, create documentation, prioritize and track initiatives, and more. The one thing that is missing is a method to find, organize, and share information across all the applications you use as a PM. Xoba is that missing piece.
One of the core reasons we built Xoba was because we wanted to solve our pain as Product Managers. We started by building a universal search that allows you to search across all of your work applications in a single place. No longer do you have to recall where that doc is or where you had that last conversation with your boss.
After search, we took Xoba to the next level and created a way to let you group and organize information across all of your work applications in a single Card. Cards are handy for keeping track of documents, files, tasks, and messages across an initiative or project.
If that wasn’t enough, Xoba offers dynamic Cards that automatically populate information across all of your applications with you having to lift a finger. For example, Xoba has a Card that shows all files and documents that have recently been shared with you across all of your applications. If you use Xoba as your main search engine (which you should) Xoba displays your most recent and top search terms. In the future Xoba will display all of the chat messages, comments, and tickets you need to respond to in a single Card. Never again will you have to scour your email for notifications or go into each application to figure out what needs your input.
Xoba has already helped Product Managers at companies of all sizes. Our universal search bar and dynamic Cards have enabled them to find and discover information faster than ever. They’ve created their own Cards to organize information across all their applications, saving them time and frustration. One of our favorite use cases is when one PM told us Xoba helped her spot duplicate Jira tickets (the bane of all PMs existences)!
Xoba is easy to set-up. Our users can go from set-up to their first search in 2 minutes. We have some Product Managers as heavy searchers, others that are heavy users of our Cards, and everything in between. Xoba is dynamic but straightforward enough to handle workflows of all types.
At its core, Xoba is a web-based application, but we enable users to access our universal search within their workflows. Via the web application, our browser extension, within Slack, via Alfred, or with a Chrome custom search.
We encourage you to sign-up for free today and give Xoba a spin!
