Xoba

We grew our user base slightly over the previous few months but spent the majority of our time talking with people and learning as much as we could.

We came to the realization that we needed to go 'beyond our network'. We needed to get the beta in more people's hands to really understand the use cases, if it's solving a real pinpoint, etc.

Now, we're focused on getting more users and running a proper 'beta'. Going back to traditional product management.

They say wait to quit your job until you have your first customer, but we wanted to give it a go. We all had demanding jobs, so it was difficult to balance the day job alongside Xoba. We felt that we had something here and if we didn't, we would have the headspace to search for other problems and build something different.

We had created a 'cross-platform' search bar, but we wanted to go beyond the search bar and build a 'knowledge engine'. From our customer research, a search bar isn't the solution to the problem we were trying to solve.

Our next step was to think beyond the search bar and really pinpoint what challenges people are facing due to information being unorganized and fragmented. From there, we could move 'beyond the search bar' and figure out a solution for a particular use case/set of users.

Naturally, our first alpha user was a friend of ours. We had a group of about 10 friends/colleagues willing to give the product a try and give initial feedback. We knew this was going to be biased feedback, but we wanted to get their general thoughts and help us figure out any bugs or glaring issues.

We knew that we wanted to build something that aggregates information across multiple applications (e.g. Slack, Gmail, Gsuite, Jira, etc.).

We believed putting a search bar on top of these applications would give us insight into what people are searching for and why. The plan was to build out an alpha version to get into early users' hands and work with them closely to really learn their problems.

In parallel, we continued to do customer/user discovery to understand the problem at a deeper level and talk through potential solutions.

I had previously bouncing some ideas around with a co-worker and we both felt this pain. We're both previous engineers, now PMs, so we wanted to find someone technical.

Luckily, we had a good network of technical friends and were able to bring on a friend who was working on machine learning at the time and was compelled by the problem and the potential solution (especially on the technical side)

I didn't know what a solution to this problem looked like. Naturally, I thought being able to search across all of these applications would be a good start, but I wanted to vet this further (typical product management type stuff).

I spent time talking with other co-workers, other product managers, and just anyone that I could speak with about the challenges they faced around information being all over the place.

It turned out that many people had issues that stemmed from information being unorganized or across several applications, but it still wasn't clear what the solution was. Though, I was excited enough to start going down this path.

Previous to Xoba, I was working as a product manager at a large tech company. I was working on launching a new feature/initiative that I had been working on for a couple of years. I noticed I was spending so much time updating and trying to collect information across all these different applications.

There was information in Gmail, Google Docs, Jira, Wrike, Confluence, Jira, and the list goes on. Not only did I have to update this information all the time, I was constantly being pinged by others for information. I always had specs, roadmaps, etc. all documented, but no one knew where to look or was just too lazy.

I took a step back and realized that my job was hard because information was everywhere and unorganized. I needed to talk to others to see if they had similar problems.