Creating one source of truth for all teams helps Transcend close new customers seamlessly

The Challenge

Create one source of truth for every team’s projects, flexible enough to scale as Transcend does.

When Transcend first started, the team was engineering-driven, with about 70% of early team members on the engineering side. At that point, engineers managed their projects with GitHub Issues, but even in those early days, it was clear that this wasn’t going to be a long-term solution. For cofounder and CTO Mike Farrell, "as soon as the company started to break out into teams with managers, things fell apart.”

He explains that with GitHub Issues, it was almost impossible to organize teams in a way where everyone understood what people were working on, or plan projects out in a reasonable manner. And for a while, they tried to make do, playing around with layering on other tools like GitHub Projects, but for Farrell and the rest of the team, these options all felt clunky: time-consuming, disconnected, and prone to creating miscommunications.

Since then, Transcend has experienced a whirlwind of growth, including scaling the team from just a handful of employees to over 60 team members around the globe, building out their sales team, and bringing in new big clients. With a consistent flow of Fortune 500 and other enterprise clients, the challenge of creating one source of truth meant:

• Centralizing project management between product development teams and the rest of the company
• Standardizing product roadmapping as they scaled
• Facilitating seamless communication between cross-functional teams

The Solution

Transcend brings everyone together with one centralized project management tool.

The team at Transcend knew they needed a tool that would serve all facets of the company: managers and ICs, engineers and sales team members, customer support, and more. Because the company is fast-growing, priorities shift rapidly — and keeping everyone up-to-date can be its own headache. Everyone on the team now works inside Height to manage projects, so projects are no longer siloed in multiple tools that seemed too rigid to fit every team.

And as the team grew, having one central source of truth became more important. Height serves as that source of truth, yet allows each team member to manage their own list the way that works best for them — making it practical for the entire team to use just one tool for project management and roadmap planning.

“With Height, everyone has the flexibility to keep things moving, but also work in the way that works best for them.” - Michael Farrell, CTO at Transcend

Transcend’s product roadmap helps the team focus and prioritize as they scale.

Transcend was recently highlighted in the “Major Players” category in IDC MarketScape’s 2023 Vendor Assessment, particularly for how well their individual product offerings stand out from the industry as a whole.

Alongside Transcend’s differentiated consent management solution, the IDC MarketScape also highlighted Transcend’s approach to handling complex infrastructure via integrations as a strength. The report noted that the Transcend platform integrates with the majority of data sources storing sensitive information today, and that customers find those integrations seamless despite a patchwork of required data sources.

Creating your product roadmap as a fast-growing company means being nimble and willing to adapt. Most of Transcend’s individual product offerings have their own lists in Height to house tickets, where particular product managers own specific areas. Almost all of these boards use the spreadsheet view, Farrell says, except the actual product roadmap: a kanban board to track multiple projects.

Since each product area has a list owned by a product manager, feedback and tickets are tagged onto the correct lists, and then the PM evaluates and categorizes those individual tasks into milestones. High-level milestones get added to the roadmap to execute on, and so forth. Because Transcend recently brought on new team members, a goal for Farrell and the rest of the team is to update the product roadmap more consistently to help them scale long-term.

Every startup is ever-evolving, and with a fast pace, project timelines and priorities can shift in an instant. By dynamically prioritizing tasks, keeping up-to-date with those shifting priorities is easier for Farrell and team.

“Having all the data in one place makes it simple to create complex filters to track specific parameters, and with Smart Lists, we’re able to examine data and make decisions without any manual effort.” - Michael Farrell, CTO at Transcend

With more updated data and timelines, the team is able to make better decisions — and communicating about those decisions needed to be effortless.

As a global remote team, Transcend needs to facilitate seamless communication.

Being able to chat right within each task helps streamline asynchronous communication. According to Farrell, one major benefit is eliminating some of the back-and-forth chat right within bug tickets, making it easy for an engineer to step in with full context to make a fix.

And beyond just gathering context asynchronously through chat, the team also streamlines things like bug ticket submission with a task form. Whenever someone completes the task form and submits a new bug, it’s tagged with the correct product area, and then the team uses automations to finalize the task:

• Once the area is tagged, the correct product manager for that product area is automatically assigned to the bug
• When the bug’s priority is set, the due date is automatically assigned according to the team’s service-led agreements (SLAs)

Finally, the team at Transcend often works on projects that span multiple teams and lists, and custom attributes have helped them create a system that works. For Farrell in particular, each workday flips between customer and engineering work, so it’s essential to have a project management tool that can keep up.

Sometimes, he says, he’ll spend the entire day bouncing from meeting to meeting while receiving tidbits of sporadic feedback — in the moment, Farrell’s able to add it to Height and tag for CX review, then go back in later to complete the ticket and delegate properly.

Productivity tools shouldn’t weigh down your workflow, but accelerate it. As Transcend continues to scale and bring on those bigger clients, Farrell, who sees Height being used on all sides, believes it’s flexible enough to grow with the team and simple enough to set up that the entire team is using it.

“People enjoy Height for both the IC perspective and management — it’s easy to track what you’re doing individually and move projects forward, as well as break down projects and delegate as needed." - Michael Farrell, CTO at Transcend

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