Chisel targets product managers with new platform, raises $1.5M

Today, product management platform provider Chisel announced $1.5 million in pre-seed funding.

Chisel aims for its solution to become the primary app for product managers, and to enable users to gather product roadmap data alongside team and customer feedback in a single product.

Its Team Radar feature is designed to gather internal team feedback from sales leaders, UX leaders, engineering leaders, and marketing leaders, with survey templates so that employees can help drive the creation of new products.

This approach is designed to offer both product managers and technical decision-makers the capability to plan product delivery, with instant access to customer and team feedback that can help them to gather insights and make data-driven product development decisions.

A single system of record for product managers

Chisel is aiming to become the definitive solution for product managers in the product lifecycle management market, a market that researchers valued at $45.08 billion in 2020, and estimate will grow to reach $75.65 billion globally by 2028.

Since its launch in 2021, the organization has advanced under the leadership of founder and CEO Praful Chavda, following a successful funding round and achieving a spot as a G2 High Performer: Winter 2022.

With over 20 years of experience as product management leader, shipping products to billions of users across enterprise and consumer markets including Microsoft Office 365, Xbox, and Windows, Chavda aimed to create a solution that would streamline the ad-hoc processes that product managers rely on every day to bring products to market.

“Product managers are mini-CEOs but there is no system of record/primary app for them. This results in [a] waste of time and product failures that cost millions of dollars,” said Chavda in an exclusive interview.

“Most product managers use spreadsheets, slides, and project management tools,” he began. “These tools are also not very conducive to collect internal team member feedback, external customer feedback, and integrating this feedback with the roadmap data,” he said.

The wider product management market

Chisel is one of many product management solutions that have emerged over the past few years, and is competing against a mixture of product lifecycle management solutions, project management applications, and ad-hoc legacy tools like spreadsheets and slides.

Two of Chisel’s biggest competitors are SaaS-based project management planning board Trello, acquired by Atlassian for $425 million in January 2017, and workplace productivity app Asana, which has raised $453 million in funding to date.

However, while these solutions are widely used by organizations for product roadmapping, they don’t cater specifically to product managers.

One of the only other solutions in the market to do this is Productboard, which raised $72 million in Series C funding last year and provides a central repository for customer feedback.

Although Productboard caters to product managers and offers customer feedback, Chisel claims to go a step further with new features like customer surveys and audience targeting while adding team feedback to the mix as well, to create a central solution to manage internal and external feedback alongside the broader product roadmap.

Chisel’s funding round was led by Array Ventures with participation from Ridge Ventures.