Inside SpotDraft's Customer-Centric Approach

Most PMs lose a lot of sleep over building products. While development is a challenge, the trick to creating products that stand out is to master the perpetual balancing act of building, and sustaining at the same time.

It’s common to get pulled in multiple directions, especially when iterating and shipping new features for customers. Understanding your customers and their challenges isn't just important—it's everything. At SpotDraft, product development has evolved significantly over the years, shaped by numerous lessons learned and a commitment to solving real customer problems.

To get an inside look at how we approach product development, we sat down with Jaskaran, who’s a product manager at SpotDraft. His journey offers valuable insights into how we identify customer pain points and transform them into effective solutions.

From Silos to Global Focus: SpotDraft's Product Evolution

When SpotDraft first started, like many growing B2B SaaS companies, we found ourselves being "pushed around by customers," as Jaskaran puts it. The result? A product with a massive footprint—covering far more functionality than most competitors with similar customer counts.

"We ended up with a huge product footprint. For someone who has just about 400 customers now, we actually cover a lot in terms of what our product offers."

~Jaskaran
Product Manager, SpotDraft

This breadth came with many challenges. Every feature modification could cause potential ripple effects throughout the system. 

"Anytime you had to touch anything about the product, you would have to think through the impact that it could have across."

~Jaskaran

The turning point came when the team began refining their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and approaching product development differently.

Breaking Down Walls: From Pod Structure to Thematic Focus

Contracts usually move in stages. You create a contract, send it for review, get all required signatures, and then store it. Originally, SpotDraft's product team was organized into "pods" based on these contract lifecycle stages. Each pod focused exclusively on its domain, creating silos that made it difficult to address customer needs holistically.

"The pod structure actually came about because there was just so much to cover. To tackle everything, you needed to work in those silos."

~ Jaskaran 

However, the product team realized this approach wasn't optimal. Pods should develop a more global outlook - zero down on what are the common paint points across the board.

This led to a significant restructuring:

"We broke those walls down. We said, fine, let's look at the product holistically. Let's find a global list of problems that all of our customers care about."

~Jaskaran

The result was a shift to thematic, quarterly planning—focusing on specific customer problems regardless of which part of the product they touched. Each quarter now revolved around solving a particular high-impact challenge:

• Q1: Improving legal and sales collaboration (addressing 60% of legal teams' bandwidth)
• Q2: Making it easier for customers to manage their workspace in a self-serve way
• Q3: Enabling better contract data management and insights

This approach ensures the entire company understands the core problem being addressed each quarter, maintaining focus while delivering cohesive improvements across the product.

Being Insight-Driven, Not Just Data-Driven

At SpotDraft we follow a unique philosophy when it comes to understanding customer pain points. 

"You hear the phrase 'data-driven,' being used a lot. I like to think of us as being  'insight-driven' instead–essentially using customer anecdotes and all the qualitative “gut” feeling that you have developed about the customer on top of all your data to make decisions."

~Jaskaran

Collecting customer feedback is multi-pronged with crucial insights coming from:

• Support tickets
• Direct customer conversations
• Feedback collection from Sales, Customer Success, and field teams
• Usage patterns

These inputs are collated and analyzed to identify patterns and themes, often using AI to process large volumes of feedback efficiently. The goal is to develop a comprehensive mental model of customer challenges and use that to inform product decisions.

First Principle Thinking: How We Solve Real Problems At SpotDraft

One of the best examples of SpotDraft's customer-centric approach is how the product team transformed the contract expiration notifications system.

The product would send standard 90-day expiration emails every Monday. This was the standard for all users. However, many customers requested more customization options in how and when they could send expiration emails to their clients. This included different timeframes, email frequencies and the ability to filter receivers. 

Our team had two choices: continue adding configurability to the existing feature or rethink the problem from first principles.

They chose the latter, asking themselves: "When people come to SpotDraft, how do they proactively find these contracts?"

The answer was in the repository, where users were already filtering contracts by department, expiration date, and other criteria. Rather than building more complexity into a separate notification system, they enhanced the existing workflow by adding scheduled reporting capabilities directly where users were already working.

This solution not only addressed the immediate need but created a flexible foundation that could automatically incorporate any new filters added to the system. What began as "expiration reports" evolved into a powerful, general-purpose reporting system that users intuitively understand.

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“Users already know how to use filtered views within SpotDraft. All they have to do now is click one additional button and schedule a report,"

~Jaskaran

.Not Everyday Is A Win: Learning from Failures

Not every product decision works out as expected, and at SpotDraft, we value these learning opportunities.

"You'd be surprised, there are actually more of those than anything else."

~Jaskaran, on features that didn't meet expectations.

Essentially there are two types of product "failures":

1. Misunderstanding the problem: Building something different from what customers actually need
2. Deliberate scope limitations: Making conscious decisions to limit scope, knowing full adoption might require more functionality

The team has gotten better at avoiding the first type by asking deeper questions:

"Why do you need to do this? 

What do you want to achieve? 

“Don't tell me what they're saying. Tell me what they want to achieve, what world they want to live in."

~Jaskaran, on understanding customer feature requirements

The second type is an ongoing challenge of resource allocation. For example, the team built a "contract packets" feature that allows users to group related contracts together. However, they only completed the first milestone—allowing users to manage contracts together, but not to review, sign, or create them together.

While a handful of customers use and value this feature, the limited adoption makes it difficult to justify further investment. These are the tradeoffs product teams constantly navigate.

Leveraging AI for Better Products and Productivity

AI has become integral to both how SpotDraft builds products and how they understand customer needs.

For customer insights, AI helps process vast amounts of feedback data. When planning recent quarters, the team analyzed 4,000 individual feedback items using AI to identify themes and patterns, then categorized them as tickets and prioritized them accordingly.

"Once we use AI to go over all these different sources of feedback, we segregate those into different categories so it becomes very easy to double click and find specific feature requirements."

~Jaskaran

Weaving AI Into The Product, Slowly But Steadily

AI features are increasingly integrated into the product itself—but not always with fanfare.

"We don't believe that every time we ship an AI product, we have to make a big bang launch."

‍~Jaskaran.

Instead, AI is becoming woven into the fabric of the product in ways that quietly improve the user experience. For example, "Smart Data Capture Light" automatically extracts key contract details during upload, reducing processing time from 15 seconds to 5 seconds—"improving your life one click at a time," as Jaskaran puts it.

The Path Forward: Customer-Centric Product Development

SpotDraft's journey illustrates several key principles that guide our product development:

1. Focus on your ICP's biggest pain points first
2. Think holistically about problems rather than in silos
3. Prioritize insight over just data
4. Approach problems from first principles
5. Be willing to make tough scope decisions
6. Learn from both successes and failures
7. Leverage technology to amplify human insight

By staying relentlessly focused on solving real customer problems and continuously refining our approach, we're building a product that empowers legal teams to work more effectively with their business counterparts.

As we move forward, this customer-centric philosophy will continue to guide everything we do—ensuring that every feature we build addresses a genuine need and creates tangible value for our users.

This article is part of a series exploring SpotDraft's product development approach. Stay tuned for more insights into how we build products that solve real customer problems.