Playground Partners
Helping sales teams build and maintain a healthy, predictable pipeline.
Overview
Founded in 2015, Playground Partners began as a small incubator focused on building sales enablement products and services. Over a three-year span, we transformed the business into a hyper-focused sales enablement agency. The mission was to empower sales teams with better messaging, technology, and processes to create a more effective prospecting engine. In our third year we worked in partnership with SalesLoft and JBarrows to provide service for over 40 clients, including notable SaaS companies like Intercom and EasyPost.
Role
As Director of Product, my main responsibility was to work with our founders to create and implement a growth strategy for our core products and services. This responsibility included setting performance goals, building roadmaps, shaping our services, and advocating on behalf of our clients and users. Given the nature of a seven-person startup, I wore many hats on this journey. While I was focused on product & business goals, I continued to lead our UX/design projects as we worked through user flows, client onboarding, and internal processes. I also worked directly with clients, managing services and gathering feedback.
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PRODUCT ITERATION
It took many iterative cycles for us to arrive at the final version of our services. The beta version of our core service—“Hunt & Gather”—sought to create a streamlined, pay-for-performance lead generation model. This model evolved as we tested our solutions, collected feedback, and continued to experiment with different tools, workflows, and designs.
Throughout this process we worked hard to balance the customer’s point of view with what was technologically feasible and economically viable. You can see a selection of my work below, which highlights the evolution of our product and marketing efforts over time.
Learning Lessons
Though we made significant strides building a service that delivered results and was popular with our 40+ clients, Playground Partners ultimately failed to deliver a sustainable revenue model. The company closed after three bootstrapped years, wrapping things up in early 2019. The journey was an incredible opportunity—I learned a great deal about what it takes to build a product or service from the ground up.
