Built and launched a new product that half of customers adopted in six months
Move three of four. I took action planning from a blank page to a standalone product, and owned it end to end, from discovery and AI to pricing and go-to-market.
- Company
- Hive HR
- Year
- 2025
- Role
- Product Manager (solo)
- Team
- Engineering, marketing, sales, customer success
- Discovery
- UX
- AI in product
- Pricing
- Go-to-market
At a glance
- The problem
- Customers could see their survey results, but had no way to act on them in the product. This gap was behind 20 to 30% of lost deals.
- My role
- Owned it end to end: discovery, UX, delivery, bringing in AI, pricing, positioning and launch.
- The result
- 50% of customers adopted it within six months, and it was included by default in new contracts.
The problem
Surveys give you a snapshot. If nothing happens afterwards, people stop answering. Hive had no way to plan action in the product. It only happened in paid workshops, which couldn’t scale.
Managers knew what the problems were but didn’t know how to turn results into actions, and the responsibility sat with HR alone. For the business, this gap was behind 20 to 30% of lost deals.
What I did
Looked outside the category. Most HR tools treated action planning as a bolt-on. I studied tools like Trello and Jira instead, and realised the real need was task management, visibility and accountability, in a people context.
Designed for low confidence. Organisations new to employee feedback also tend to be less confident with technology. They needed a clear framework and guidance, without being told what to do.
Scoped it tightly. The first release focused on creating actions well. I use simple, lovable, complete (SLC) rather than a minimum viable product: it didn’t do everything, but it felt finished.
Brought in AI where users got stuck. Testing showed a blank-page problem. Managers didn’t know what a good action looked like. So AI suggests actions based on the organisation’s own results, and managers edit and own them. This was Hive’s first AI feature. I chose the vendors (AWS Bedrock and Claude), ran the security and legal reviews, and designed the testing and beta.
Taking it to market
I launched Actions as a standalone product, not a hidden feature. That meant:
- Positioning and branding for a new product
- A new pricing and commercial model
- Enablement for the sales and customer teams
- Launch content, including webinars and thought leadership
The result
- AI feature in Hive, led from vendor choice to launch
- First
- in new contracts
- Default
- of lost deals blamed on missing features, helped by Actions
- Under 5%
Called action planning the “most valuable part of the platform”. A manufacturing customer