Rethinking Product Management

As the leading provider of product management software, Productboard is on a mission to help its customers build truly excellent products. The company tasked April Six with the creation and execution of a high-funnel brand-awareness campaign. The campaign was initiated to increase familiarity, recognition, and authority for the Productboard brand with targeted prospects, buyers, and influencers worldwide. The campaign needed to connect emotionally with the hearts and minds of a multi-lingual audience while positioning Productboard as a thought leader in the space. In addition to driving interest in the marketplace, the campaign would also need to work as a recruitment tool.

April Six wants to convince Productboard’s audience of product managers that there’s a modern tool/system (really, a new way of thinking) that can transform how they see the world around them, process data, and make faster, better product decisions. We want them to know that the status quo no longer applies. We want to inspire them to break the rules, do new things, and change the future of their products. In other words, “Stop trying to use the tools of yesterday to build the products of tomorrow.”

Key Idea: When you’re less consumed with the decision in front of you, you can solve problems that are yet to come. Productboard was created to help you win today and plan for tomorrow.

The Productboard campaign takes relevant, recurring problems product managers face on the regular—and invites them to imagine a world in which those problems no longer exist. Through the omission or “striking-through” of selected words, the problem-statements become modern solutions. With some playfulness and attitude added for effect, the concept conveys to Productboard’s audience that the brand understands their challenges—and, better yet, knows how to solve them. 

Supporting this creative concept, April Six planned and executed a global integrated campaign featuring high-impact Out-Of-Home (OOH) placements, Radio, Digital Audio, and Digital Media executions based on the strike-through campaign concept. OOH placements were acquired strategically around key product management and related event-dates in highly visible transit hubs. Supplementing the OOH placements, programmatic digital and audio placements reached product managers on the web.