We decided it was about time product-led pioneering teams got some recognition for all the incredible work they do, every single day.

We went out to our community to nominate their product-led superstars and believe us, narrowing the list down to our top five was just too difficult.

So here's our top six Product-Led Team of the Year nominations!

Pet Circle - Growth Team

Contributors to the success of the team

  • Negar Mokhtarnia - Senior Product Manager
  • Igancio Colino - Growth Analyst
  • Kino Matuguina - Front End Engineer
  • Nadiah Syazana - UX Designer
  • Samira Ranjbar - UX Designer

In the last year the team have delivered tremendous business value upwards of half a million dollars a quarter as well as improved their understanding and relationships with customers.

The Growth team was established just over a year ago as a 6 month experiment to show:

1. They could create enough value.

2. They could get internal buy-in across the organization.

3. They could propagate a culture of data driven experimentation to other teams.

With hard work and a lot of creativity they soon showed the value to the business. Once the other teams saw the type of work they were doing and how it could help them understand their customers better, they also got advocates throughout the company.

However, getting buy-in from the executive team was the hardest to achieve, due to the nature of growth it was quite difficult to position the team between Product and Marketing to be most valuable.

Through the uncertainty of creating a new function, multiple changes of priorities and trial of many newly formed processes, the team was able to focus on the task at hand and work together tirelessly to achieve and surpass their goals.

They have truly embraced a test-and-learn mentality to everything they do and have shown that by collaborating with other teams they can accomplish more than ever expected.

LexisNexis - Product Marketing Team

Contributors to the success of the team

  • Violet Diamanti - Product Marketing Manager

Violet is a one-man band and takes care of a £13m software product for the legal sector.

During her first year of being within the company (mid 2019 to pre-pandemic) she rebranded the whole product portfolio into a simpler offering, aligning efforts with the internal LexisNexis UK team.

From GTM marketing campaigns, to content in specific legal publications and joint legal events, she also created the first playbook for the product to make sure that the department was aligned from within.

She has also recently launched the new product evolution of their core offering, which she has been working long hours during this pandemic for, and spent numerous hours and weekends on creating, planning and executing the launch.

She has been upskilling relentlessly during all of this work, improving her SEO knowledge, basic UX skills enabling her to create frameworks on UX Adobe and also basic Illustrator and InDesign, the suite of which she has funded herself.

A truly amazing feat from an individual!

Teacherly - The Teacherly Team

Contributors to the success of the team

  • Joanne White - Head of Marketing
  • Vlad Luzin - Product Lead

Teacherly is a collaboration platform that launched in 2014, and is focused on enabling the teaching workforce to work in a distributed teacher model.

It is rare in EdTech to have a bottom-up approach and to use what Atlassian did as a playbook and make it work in education.

But they did, they focused on teachers and teams to nurture and support and get enterprise sales.

They smashed certain KPIs including:

  1. Growing the ARR by 111% from $478K to $2.8M.
  2. Shortened the sales cycles to 14 days with a freemium/no trial subscription model.
  3. Built a community of over 14,000 educators worldwide.

It’s an incredible achievement from a small team!

Spotify - NYC Infra Team

Contributors to the success of the team

  • Vivian Santos - iOS Engineer
  • Alex Beggs - Android Engineer
  • Erik Junberger - Engineering Manager
  • Sami-Amran Bouchebaba - iOS Engineer
  • Sukriti Chadha - Product

1 in 4 people in the US have some form of disability. This team was responsible for developing tools so mobile developers at Spotify (with over 300 million users) can catch bugs related to accessibility as early in the development lifecycle as possible.

They also made assignment and reporting easy by integrating them with their open source front end. Their work was recently accepted by CSUN, the largest annual accessibility conference.

Over the past 12 months they have been refining the solution and building even more reliable tooling for accessibility on mobile.

The engineers and managers went above and beyond to work through the complexity of two very different ecosystems (Android and iOS) with little guidance.

They took into account actual user needs and tied them back to developers' day to day so accessibility becomes second nature.

This is a practice the industry as a whole can benefit from given the increasing adoption of mobile and awareness around the importance of accessibility.

SUSE - Artificial Intelligence Team

Contributors to the success of the team

  • Gabriele Santomaggio - Lead Developer
  • Kenneth Wimer - Lead UX Engineers Team
  • Sorin Curescu - Frontend Engineer
  • Thomas Hutterer - Frontend Engineer
  • Jaime Caamano - Backend Engineer
  • Victor Pereira - Backend Engineer
  • Jordi Massaguer Pla - Project Manager
  • Hui-Zhi Zao - SME

This team is an incubator team within SUSE. Their job is to pivot new ideas and products.

They aim to create a set of solutions to help AI folks to solve their pain when it comes to deploying and managing AI projects. They are focused on fostering innovation at a high pace.

This team is made of volunteers, each one had to learn the AI domains they are building the solutions against, they had to spend time researching and growing while simultaneously doing their daily job.

They had to forget the "standard ways" to approach a completely different way to build solutions and products.

They showed how an agile approach and a continuous innovative brainstorming approach may make the difference.

They achieved it and they deserve to be recognized.

ProdPad - Development Team

Contributors to the success of the team

  • Janna Bastow - CEO & Co-Founder
  • Simon Cast - CPO & Co-Founder
  • AleÅ¡ Blaznik - Backend Technical Specialist
  • Kavan Webb - Product Designer
  • Danielle Vautier - Team Lead & UI Developer
  • Will Newmarch - Tech Lead
  • Adam Moore - Junior UX/UI Designer
  • Samuel Peerless - QA & Support Engineer
  • Arran Gravestock - Javascript Developer
  • Tomaž Å trukelj - DevOps Engineer
  • Wills Grigg - Backend Developer
  • George Francis - UI Developer
  • Kirsty Kearney-Greig - Senior Product Manager

ProdPad's development team live and breathe product-led development and growth.

As a company that provides the best tools and resources to help product teams achieve their goals, they ensure that best practices are followed at all times.

In short, ProdPad eats its own dog food, employing product-led focus and product management strategies throughout the entire company.

Over the last 12 months, the development team have continuously gathered user feedback to ensure the features they build deliver benefits to their customers.

These have included:

  1. Enhanced product portfolio and product canvasses to help manage and improve transparency in multiple products across multiple teams.
  2. DotBot, the AI help bot helps users maximize efficiency by suggesting related ideas and user feedback to keep product backlogs prioritized.
  3. Seamless integration between ProdPad and workflow tools like Slack and Confluence.
  4. Objectives and Key Results feature that helps product teams link roadmap initiatives to outcomes.

Everything this team do is focussed on building the best product by solving real problems and bringing benefits to customers.

They have shown dedication and drive through the pandemic and lockdown and lead the company in their product-first culture.

The winner will be revealed at the Product-Led Festival! Be sure to tune in and find out the inaugural Product-Led Team of the Year.