Browse Case Studies

GitHub Copilot is an AI pair programmer that provides real-time, multi-line code suggestions powered by OpenAI's Codex model. Incubated within GitHub's R&D team (GitHub Next) after OpenAI's accidental mass cloning of GitHub repositories, it evolved from early experimentation to a technical preview that generated viral enthusiasm before achieving general availability. The product represents a fundamental shift in developer productivity, with Python developers writing approximately 40% of their code with Copilot assistance.

ProductPad is a SaaS tool for product managers built by Jana Basto to help teams organize roadmaps, OKRs, ideas, and feedback. Jana is also the co-founder of Mind the Product, the world's largest community of product people, and invented the popular Now, Next, Later roadmapping framework. The tool actively helps teams become better product managers by enforcing discovery, measurement, and thoughtful product practices.

Mixpanel, founded in 2009, started as a product analytics solution for mobile and web teams. After explosive early growth fueled by a proprietary event database (Arbor), the company expanded into adjacent categories like messaging and data infrastructure. By 2018, facing 40% revenue churn and under-investment in core analytics features, leadership made a strategic pivot to focus exclusively on the core analytics product. Through rapid feature development (100+ features shipped in one year) combined with design-led architectural improvements, Mixpanel increased retention from 60% to 90% and NPS from 16 to 50 by 2021-2022.

Miro is a global collaborative whiteboard platform used by teams for innovation and cross-functional collaboration across 1,800+ employees and 12+ hubs worldwide. Led by CPO Varun Parmer (formerly at Box), Miro competes in a crowded space dominated by players like Figma but maintains differentiation through team-centric architecture, broad applicability across industries (manufacturing, healthcare, aerospace, etc.), and unique capabilities for workshops and agile practices. The company emphasizes product culture centered on empathy, teamwork, and a philosophy that products either improve or worsen with each release—never staying the same.

Spotify is a music and podcast streaming platform founded in 2008 that pioneered the shift from curation to algorithmic recommendation to generative AI. Under Gustav Soderstrom's 14+ year tenure as a product and technology leader, the company evolved from a desktop application to a global platform with half a billion users. Spotify's major innovations include Discover Weekly, personalized recommendations, and recently AI DJ—a generative product that couldn't exist without AI.

dbt Labs built the de facto standard for data transformation in the modern data stack, growing to 20,000 weekly users through a powerful combination of open-source product leadership and community-driven distribution. Starting as Fishtown Analytics consulting firm for nearly two years, the founders learned customer pain points firsthand before productizing dbt as an open-source tool with a proprietary cloud offering, achieving viral adoption through word-of-mouth and ecosystem integration.

Rightly was a groundbreaking web-based word processor founded in 2005 by Sam Schalache and co-founders that pioneered real-time collaborative document editing in the browser. The product gained rapid traction after advertising on Google and being featured on TechCrunch, becoming one of the first points on the curve that demonstrated viable web-based office applications. Google acquired Rightly, and it became the foundation for Google Docs, which now has over 1 billion active monthly users.

DX is a SaaS platform for measuring and improving developer productivity, designed by the researchers behind the DORA, SPACE, and DevX frameworks, including Nicole Forsgren. The platform is used by both startups and Fortune 500 companies including Twilio, Amplitude, eBay, Brex, Toast, Pfizer, and Procter & Gamble to gain full clarity into how their developers are performing through combined qualitative and quantitative insights.

Deal is a payroll, HR, and compliance platform for global teams that grew from less than $1M ARR in July 2020 to $295M ARR by early 2022, making it one of the fastest-growing SaaS businesses in history. Under Meltem Koran Berkowitz's leadership as head of growth, Deal leveraged low-cost channels like SEO, Reddit communities, partnerships, and content marketing to drive approximately 50% of current growth, with the early days relying 80-90% on non-paid channels. The company maintained EBITDA profitability throughout this explosive growth trajectory while building a robust 8-person content team that publishes 5-10 articles weekly and operates a proprietary traffic-light keyword ranking system.

Grammarly is a 15-year-old B2C/B2B SaaS company that has built one of the few successful consumer subscription businesses by operating quietly beneath the radar of giants like Google and Microsoft. Now Chief Product Officer, Noam Levinsky has joined the company as it navigates the shift from writing assistance to AI-powered communication tools. The company has been profitable since day one and is significantly larger in revenue than most people realize.

Cred is a fintech startup founded by Kunal Shah that processes credit card bill payments in India. With a last valuation of over $6 billion, Cred processed over 20% of all credit card bill payments in India a couple of years ago. Kunal's insight was to focus exclusively on the 25 million high-income families in India rather than trying to serve the mass market, and he raised a $25M Series A based on this conviction and his prior successful exits.

New Bank is a branchless, digital bank operating in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia that has grown to serve more customers than Bank of America while operating in only three countries. The company drives 80-90% of its growth through word-of-mouth by obsessing over making customers fanatically love the product. Under CPO Jack Dugle (formerly at Facebook and Google), New Bank uses the Sean Ellis Score methodology to ensure 50% of customers would be very disappointed if the product disappeared before scaling.

Wiz is a cloud security posture management platform founded in March 2020 by a team of former Microsoft cloud security leaders. After a failed initial pivot into network security, the team pivoted to cloud security within 6 weeks after realizing customers were intensely pulling for that solution. The company achieved product-market fit rapidly through founder-led sales, hitting $100 million ARR in just 18 months (the fastest in software company history) and grew to over $500 million ARR within 5 years. Roz Hersberg, the first product manager and current CMO, played a critical role in identifying the failed initial strategy and pushing for the cloud security pivot.

Salesforce, founded by Mark Benioff in 2000, pioneered cloud-based CRM software when most believed enterprise software would remain desktop-based. The company used guerrilla marketing tactics (staging protests outside competitor Siebel's conference) to break through the noise and build awareness. Today, at 25 years old with $38 billion in ARR and 135,000 customers, Salesforce is the second-largest B2B SaaS company in the world and is aggressively pivoting toward AI agents as its next major growth vector.

Mercury is a fintech company that evolved from a single core banking product to a multi-product platform in 2024, launching personal banking, bill pay, invoicing, spend controls, and employee reimbursement features. The company scaled from zero product managers at 400 employees to 30 PMs by focusing on quality and user experience as a competitive differentiator in the 'boring' financial services space. Their approach to multi-product development emphasizes intentional organizational structure and craft-driven design.

Shopify, founded by Toby Lutke, is an e-commerce SaaS platform built from first principles to optimize for the Internet of the future rather than porting existing retail complexity online. Lutke leads the company with a philosophy centered on maximizing human potential, rejecting KPIs in favor of taste and intuition, and emphasizing unquantifiable values like joy, delight, and craft quality. The company operates without traditional OKRs, instead using data as a cockpit to inform but not drive decisions, achieving scale while maintaining a founder-led engineering culture where Lutke still codes alongside engineers.

WordPress powers 40% of all websites on the internet and was co-founded by Matt Mullenweg at age 19 as a fork of an abandoned blogging platform called B2. Automattic, the commercial entity behind WordPress.com and related products, has grown to 1,700+ employees across 90 countries and is valued at over $7 billion, with WooCommerce now representing over half its revenue.

Stackblitz, founded by Eric Simons, pivoted from a 7-year deep-tech play building WebContainer (a browser-based operating system) to launch Bolt, an AI-powered text-to-app builder. After launching with a single tweet in October 2023, Bolt achieved $20M ARR in two months and $40M ARR by month five with 1M monthly active users, making it one of the fastest-growing products in startup history.

Captions is an AI-powered video creation platform founded by Gorav Misra, a former design engineering lead at Snap. The app enables anyone to generate and edit talking videos with AI, democratizing video creation for non-professionals. With over 10 million users and $100M+ in funding, Captions achieved viral growth by shipping innovative features like AI eye contact correction and maintaining a unique product development methodology where every engineer ships a marketable feature weekly.

Wes Kao co-founded Maven, a platform that makes it easy for people to host live cohort-based courses. She previously co-created the alt-MBA program with Seth Godin. She has since left Maven to launch her own course on executive communication and influence, teaching frameworks and tactics for better written and verbal communication.