A software platform to help product managers align goals across the board has raised $2.3 million in Seed funding.
The Round for Sauce was led by Blackbird and supported by Airtree Ventures, in addition to product leaders in several local technology companies, including SafetyCulture, Eucalyptus, Respondent, Minnow, EarlyWork, Archangel and UltraViolet Ventures.
Saus was co-founded by Matt Hinds, James Gabb and James Szklarz, former product and engineering leaders at Atlassian, SafetyCulture and Eucalyptus, who said they experienced the problems and frustrations of creating feature wish lists but then failed to achieve desired results or consistently match with stakeholders.
hinds said thathey are now building the tools they would like to have to help other PMs build a world class product strategy, deliver robust results and become the ultimate context distributor for their teams. They just launched one beta version of the product.
“We absolutely hated delivering laundry lists of features that delivered no value, manually tagging feedback, and updating stakeholders with boring documents. It wasted 50% of our time and didn’t help us achieve results or get our teams involved,” he said.
“Setting, delivery and forgetting no longer works. Behind every successful product is a great product strategy, many iterations of features, and compelling team communication. So that’s what Sauce will boost each PM to achieve. ”
Gabb said Sauce helps product managers close the loop with tools to create strategic opportunities, track feature iterations, automatically summarize customer insights and share reports. The duo is now looking for a much more strategic “mission control room”.
“We’re building Sauce to be the mission control room in any product-driven company,” he said.
“It doesn’t make sense that we can’t reference a product collaboration tool that has actually created a step-by-step experience for how teams build groundbreaking products, while companies like Figma and Slack are becoming more product-driven than ever before. ”
Airtree partner James Cameron said pproduct managers are the linchpin in any modern technology company.
“But ironically, the products they use have not kept up with software tools used in other parts of the organization,” he said.
“There’s a wide open space for a range of product manager tools that work together, are intuitive and focus on business outcomes, not just endless feature roadmaps — and this is what Sauce is building.”