At Atlassian, Mr. Gabb said he was exposed to how to better identify product areas to move into, as well as how to scale a product, while at Eucalyptus he experienced how to build something from scratch.
Hinds said he also experienced how to scale, but also build a SafetyCulture product from scratch, having worked on its iAuditor inspection solution as well as newer products.
Learning from problems
The pair discovered in mid-2021 that they often ran into the same problems as product managers, and before launching Sauce wrote an e-book on how to become a product manager.
“We thought we should test if there was a problem in the space and we wanted to shed some light on what looks good for early-stage product managers,” Hinds said.
“Now, there are two important problems that we are solving. One of the key responsibilities of a product manager is to ensure success [of a product]but most product teams don’t have a strategy, or it’s static and doesn’t evolve, so engineers end up delivering a list of features that don’t achieve a result.
“Then product managers and stakeholders get frustrated, and customers don’t like what you’re building.
“The second issue is around communication … where product managers struggle to distribute context to teams like engineering and marketing.”
To address these issues, Sauce has built tools to track feature iterations, automate customer insights, and facilitate stakeholder reporting, including a library of templates that can be adapted to speed communications.
These templates, Hinds said, were inspired by social media and are designed in attractive and easy-to-consume formats.
As early beta customers, the company has signed up a group of portfolio companies Blackbird and AirTree.
“We’re building Sauce to be the mission control room for every product-driven enterprise. It doesn’t make sense that we can’t point to a product collaboration tool that has actually created a step-changing experience in how teams building game-changing products, when companies like Figma and Slack are becoming more product-driven than ever before.” said Mr. Gabb.
The co-founders said they had no problem raising capital, but believed that was thanks to their efforts to build a relationship with Blackbird more than a year ago.
“We loaded up the front,” Gabb said.
“Instead of going to them with a cold idea, they knew who we were and saw that we had built the product kits and the e-book.”
The raise gives the start-up a runway of up to four years at current cash burn rates, but is expected to last around two years as it hires more staff and ramps up its expansion efforts l next year
“Having spent their careers looking for the very product they’re building, Sauce’s founders understand the critical role product managers play,” said Blackbird partner Rick Baker.
“Their experience gives them an unfair advantage to build a platform that supercharges teams in the same way that Atlassian and Dovetail have.”