Useful

Useful was co-founded by two former PMs at Amplitude, Mike and Carter. At Amplitude, they learned first-hand the importance of building products and features that solve real and valuable customer needs. But it was hard to talk to users, involve them in the product development process, and tell their stories. In September 2021, over a dinner of chips ‘n queso 🧀 in Austin, TX, they realized they had both been imagining the same thing: a future where it’s easier for product teams to connect with customers, understand their needs, and build products people love.

What is Useful?

Useful is the fastest way for PMs to create powerful highlights from customer conversations to share insights and learnings with their teams. For teams, Useful offers a shared, searchable database of customer calls.

Why does this matter?

Product Managers’ core job is to prioritize the customer problems that, if solved, will grow their business. To execute that core job, PMs must share the observations and insights from customer conversations to provide their teams with clarity on customer needs and understanding. The problem is that current ways to tell those stories are slow, laborious, and ineffective.

The most engaging and compelling stories are the ones that customers share themselves. Today, most PMs settle for using quotes and/or paraphrasing from their notes because the alternative is to produce an actual clip from a customer call by downloading mp4 files from Zoom and then scrubbing those files and clipping them with tools like iMovie and Quicktime. The work is painstakingly slow, time-consuming, and minimally rewarding.

Where are we going?

We're on a mission to bring the world's product development teams closer to their customers. Our vision is to be the system of record for product teams’ interactions with customers through all phases of the feature development lifecycle and ultimately power the collection and use of insights from customer calls about product needs across entire organizations.

We’re a team of deeply passionate people who believe in the generational opportunity to up-level the way world’s organizations build products. If this gets you excited and eager to take on exciting new challenges, take a look at our job board, or send us a note to [email protected].

Our investors

We’ve raised $5M seed round from Spark Capital and other top-tier investors and world-class product builders including Unusual Ventures, Poorvi Shrivastav (VP Product, Hubspot), Justin Bauer (SVP Product, Amplitude), Ekin Oflazer (Head of Growth, Notion), Kevin Wang (SVP Product, Braze), Evonne Johnson (former Sr. Director Product & Engineering, Cisco), Tamar Bercovici (VP Engineering, Box), Surabhi Gupta (VP Engineering, Robinhood), and many more.

What’s it like to work at Useful?

We’re a fast-growing team of bright, and ambitious people with a passion for solving problems for our customers. We love what we do, and the people we get to do it with. Everyone at Useful brings their own unique experiences and expertise and in doing so raises the bar - we’re excited for you to do the same!

We’re remote-friendly headquartered in Austin, TX.

We’re at the very beginning of our journey which means that everyone has an enormous impact, on the product, how we work, whom we work with, the company itself, and our culture.

Our values

Our cultural values are at the core of who we are, and how we operate. Read on to see if these values resonate with you.

• 🤩 Deliver delight We make magic and sweat the details. We deliver the unexpected and wow users with our thoughtfulness. We relentlessly focus on the customer and how we can improve their experience. If we lose sight of our customer. Nothing else matters.

• 🎯 Move with urgency We have a bias for action. We move with direction, speed, and intention. We use our agility to our advantage. Product teams rely on us every day to make the decisions that shape the world’s products. We don’t take that responsibility lightly.

• 💎 Consistent quality Pixels matter. Milliseconds matter. We go above and beyond to deliver remarkable quality. We take pride in our work and leave things better than we found them. We’re here to do the best work of our lives and challenge each other to do the same.

• 🤝 Build together We trust by default. We are open and honest in our communication. We are transparent. This means being vulnerable with one another, and creating the safety to do the same. We have high standards, and low egos.

What makes Useful special?

We’re passionate about what we do, solving problems near and dear to our hearts, and smiling while we do it. Fundamental to our culture is empathy, curiosity, and creating an environment that brings out the best of who we are. Years in the future, when speaking of their time at Useful, we want team members to proudly describe how it was a once in a lifetime experience, how they grew and learned more during their time at Useful than any other time in their careers.