The situation
COVID closed school buildings and left districts with no reliable way to keep families connected to individual classrooms. Apptegy had a successful flagship product and an operating rhythm built entirely around it. I conceived Rooms in that gap and shipped it, and the temptation was to build it the way the first product had been built, on conviction and speed, and let the market sort it out.
The actual problem
The request was
“Build the second product and get it to market fast.”
Discovery showed
The risk was not build speed. It was that the second product's buyer, budget cycle, and success criteria were different from the flagship's, and the existing go-to-market motion quietly assumed they were the same.
Discovery had to cover the commercial model as much as the product. If we shipped into the flagship's motion, adoption would stall for reasons no feature could fix.
What I learned
- Ran structured discovery with design-partner districts before committing scope.
- Validated willingness to pay and budget ownership separately from product interest.
- Mapped the adoption path inside a district, who champions, who blocks, who renews.
How I framed it
Exhibit
Adoption Curve: Launch to Year Two
The flat opening is the whole strategy. Everything after it is compounding.
What we built
- 01Rooms itself: a validated product definition grounded in design-partner evidence.
- 02A go-to-market motion tuned to the actual buyer and budget cycle for Rooms, not the flagship's.
- 03Adoption and expansion mechanics that let Rooms grow inside existing accounts.
She has strong convictions and ideas, and backs both up through methodical research and validation.
Kathleen ConleyProduct Manager at ApptegyRead in full →My role
- Conceived
- Came up with Rooms during COVID and shipped it, from the original idea to a product districts paid for.
- Discovery
- Led customer research and validation directly.
- Product
- Owned definition, scope, and sequencing.
- Commercial
- Partnered on pricing, packaging, and the adoption path.
The outcome
- 436 customers within two years of launch, from two design partners.
- No post-launch rebuild. The definition held as it scaled.
- Rooms later evolved into Messaging Essentials and Group Connect.
- A repeatable pattern for launching adjacent products in the portfolio.
What I'd do differently
Holding at two customers for two quarters was the least comfortable decision of the project and the one that made the rest work. I have since learned to name that phase explicitly up front so it reads as strategy rather than as slippage.