A software platform to help product managers align goals across the board has raised $2.3 million in Seed funding.
The round for Sauce was led by Blackbird, and supported by Airtree Ventures , alongside product leaders in several local tech companies including SafetyCulture, Eucalyptus, Respondent, Minnow, EarlyWork, Archangel and UltraViolet Ventures.
Sauce was cofounded by Matt Hinds, James Gabb and James Szklarz, former product and engineering leaders at Atlassian, SafetyCulture and Eucalyptus, who said they experienced the problems and frustrations of building feature wish lists, but then not achieving the desired outcomes or consistently aligning with stakeholders.
Hinds said they’re now building the tools they wish they had to help other PMs build world-class product strategy, deliver robust outcomes and become the ultimate context distributor for their teams. They’ve just launched a beta version of the product.
“We absolutely hated delivering laundry lists of features that didn’t deliver value, manually tagging feedback and updating stakeholders with boring docs. It wasted 50% of our time and didn’t help us achieve outcomes or engage our teams,” he said.
“Setting, delivering and forgetting no longer works. Behind every successful product there is a killer product strategy, many feature iterations and engaging team communications. So that’s what Sauce will supercharge every PM to achieve.”
Gabb said Sauce helps product managers “close the loop” with tools to create strategic opportunities, track feature iterations, auto-summarise customer insights and share reports. The duo are now looking to build a much more strategic “mission control room”.
“We’re building Sauce to be the mission control room in every product-led company,” he said.
“It doesn’t make sense that we can’t point to a product collaboration tool that’s actually created a step-change experience for how teams build game-changing products, when companies like Figma and Slack are becoming more product-driven than ever before”
Airtree partner James Cameron said product managers are the lynchpin in any modern technology business.
“But ironically the products they use have not kept pace with software tools used in other parts of the organisation,” he said.
“There’s a wide open space for a suite of product manager tools that are collaborative, intuitive and focused on business outcomes, not just endless feature roadmaps – and this is what Sauce is building.”
