The situation
Apptegy was winning, which is its own kind of problem. Every quarter brought more customers, more districts, more feature requests, and more people who needed to know how decisions got made. The instincts that worked at 800 customers, talk to everyone, decide fast, ship, stopped scaling somewhere around 1,500.
The actual problem
The request was
“We need to ship faster to keep up with sales.”
Discovery showed
Velocity was not the constraint. Repeatability was. The same decisions were being re-litigated in every squad because there was no shared operating model for how work entered, got prioritized, and got judged.
Hiring more product managers into an undefined system produces more opinions, not more throughput. The durable fix was designing how the portfolio operated, intake, prioritization, discovery standards, launch criteria, and the coaching model that let new PMs become good ones quickly.
What I learned
- Traced how requests actually entered the roadmap versus how the process claimed they did.
- Segmented the customer base by district size and maturity to find where the portfolio was over- and under-serving.
- Interviewed sales, implementation, and support to surface the recurring commitments product was absorbing invisibly.
How I framed it
Exhibit
Customer Growth, 2018–2023
Exhibit
Product Operating Model
- 01
Intake
One front door for every request, from any function
- 02
Framing
Problem statement, evidence, and the decision being asked for
- 03
Discovery
Minimum evidence bar before anything enters a roadmap
- 04
Commit
Explicit tradeoffs, named owner, defined success measure
- 05
Launch & learn
Adoption reviewed against the stated measure, not vibes
Same spine, every squad. Different products, comparable decisions.
What we built
- 01A durable product operating model, intake, framing, discovery standards, commit criteria, launch review.
- 02A portfolio strategy that segmented investment by district size and product maturity.
- 03A coaching and development model that produced product leaders whose impact continued after my tenure.
- 04Repeatable launch and adoption practices shared across squads.
She set the tone for the product team and laid the foundations for the majority of the products that are growing today in Apptegy.
Guillermo AraizaStaff Product Manager at CrunchyrollRead in full →My role
- Strategy
- Owned portfolio strategy across an EdTech product line spanning multiple countries.
- Operating design
- Designed and iterated the product operating model three times as scale demanded.
- Leadership
- Hired, coached, and developed product managers.
- Execution
- Ran discovery and launch on the highest-risk bets personally.
The outcome
- 5X customer growth: 800 to 4,000 customers.
- Contributed to sustained growth reaching $20M ARR.
- Operating models that remained the foundation for growth after I left.
- A generation of product managers who went on to lead elsewhere.
What I'd do differently
I rebuilt the operating model twice before accepting that it needs rebuilding roughly every time the company doubles. Treating the model as a product with its own version history, rather than a policy to defend, was the shift that made the third one much easier than the second.