Most Product Roadmaps Get Built Before Anyone Touches an OKR

01 /The Concept

Airfocus describes itself as a product management platform for "a new way of working" – though the underlying concept is familiar enough. At its core, it's a roadmapping tool: a place to plan what features to build, visualized either as hierarchical tables grouped by category or as timeline-based calendar views.

The real value is in how roadmaps get built.

The foundational step is defining OKRs – Objectives and Key Results – before a single feature is added to the map. The idea is to anchor every proposed feature to a specific goal and a measurable outcome, so that product development doesn't devolve into a random wish list generated by whoever happens to have the loudest voice.

From there, every proposed feature gets an automatically computed priority score based on a defined rule set – giving teams a way to sanity-check subjective preferences against agreed-upon criteria.

But rules aren't gospel, and human judgment still counts. The platform includes a "Priority Poker" feature – a collaborative, manual prioritization exercise modeled loosely on a card game, familiar to anyone who works in Agile.

User feedback is also a first-class input. The platform includes a dedicated feedback portal where end users can submit ideas and feature requests. Everything that comes in is processed and aggregated by the platform so product teams can act on it without a separate workflow.

A recent addition is an AI assistant trained specifically on product management topics.

With it, teams can quickly generate product requirements documents (PRDs), user stories, and sentiment summaries from customer feedback – as well as plain-English summaries of dense technical documents that non-technical stakeholders in sales, marketing, and leadership can actually read.

Pricing starts at $83 per month per editor. Enterprise plans require direct contact with the team.

More than 800 companies use Airfocus, including Caterpillar, The Washington Post, and Orange.

Airfocus has just raised $7.5M in a new round, bringing total funding to $14.9M.

02 /Why It Matters

This space already has established players. Productboard, [covered previously](/review/uluchshenie-plana-uluchshenija) back in 2021, has since raised $261.7M in total – including a $125M round in 2022, after that review was published. That kind of investor confidence is a signal: product management platforms have real enterprise demand.

What's interesting is how Airfocus frames its pitch for the current round.

Product development today involves specialists from many departments, each using different tools – Notion for notes, Excel for planning, PowerPoint for presentations, email and messaging for everything else. The result is that no one has a complete picture of where the product is going, because there's no single place where all that information lives. Airfocus argues this fragmentation explains why 50–70% of newly shipped features generate no measurable impact – or actively cause problems.

Airfocus positions itself as the unified home for product management: one place where everything relevant to the product roadmap can live.

It's targeting growing and large companies with multiple products, multiple product managers, and many stakeholders involved in the development process. These companies need powerful, flexible platforms that can be configured to their specific processes – which is exactly what Airfocus is designed to support.

In other words: why chase small clients with small contracts that churn constantly, when you can land large companies that pay well and stay for years.

Cohort data supports this strategy. Monthly revenue from Airfocus's Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) clients doubles within 12 months – and in some cases continues growing beyond that. Churn in this segment is minimal.

There's an additional tailwind: almost every sizable company, regardless of industry, is becoming a technology company. Digitizing internal operations requires building and maintaining internal products – and those products need to be managed with the same rigor as customer-facing ones. Internal product users are employees rather than customers, but the management discipline is the same. And because internal product development tends to be the domain of large enterprises, that audience maps directly onto Airfocus's ICP.

All of which, according to Airfocus, means a "massive, global, untouched niche just waiting to be claimed" is opening up in product management platforms – and Airfocus wants to be the one to claim it.

03 /Opportunities

First takeaway – for B2B founders: enterprise focus is a sound strategy.

Large clients are harder to win, but once won, they pay more and stay longer. The economics justify a high cost of acquisition, because a single enterprise contract can recoup it many times over.

The most impressive illustration of this principle is Pactum, [covered in detail](/review/snimaem-slivki-s-milliarda-dollarov) back in 2021. They built a platform where AI autonomously negotiates better prices and terms with suppliers. And they had the confidence, from day one, to put it right on their website: "built for companies with more than $1B in annual revenue."

When their site was revisited in 2022, that threshold had moved to $5B per year. The strategy is working – Walmart, Wesco, and Maersk are among their clients, and they've raised $35.2M.

Second takeaway: the internal products market deserves more attention than it gets.

In 2021, a [review covered](/review/50-jeto-ochen-mnogo) Retool – a platform for building internal software tools – which had raised $141M. Their market research paints a striking picture:

- Companies spend $4.5T annually on IT infrastructure, with an increasing share going to internal product development.

- 77% of companies with 500+ employees have in-house developers building internal applications.

- Companies of all sizes spend 20–45% of their engineering time on internal tools. That figure jumps sharply once headcount crosses 1,000.

- 86% of respondents expect their companies to spend even more time on internal product development in the coming year than they did in the last.

So here's an unexpected but promising direction: platforms that make building and managing internal products faster and more effective.

One approach is to stay at the management layer – like Airfocus or Productboard – rather than going deep into development tooling like Retool.

Specifically, that means building an equivalent of those platforms but purpose-built for internal products, which have genuine quirks. All potential users are known and reachable – they can be surveyed and analyzed directly. Feature requirements can often be derived automatically from enterprise planning systems and performance metrics – whatever isn't working efficiently is a candidate for automation.

So: what would a version of Airfocus or Productboard built specifically for internal products look like? That's a billion-dollar question. Airfocus itself believes internal products represent a "massive, global, untouched market just waiting to be claimed"