How to bring design to the core of your company strategy

Brining best-in-class experience to the old CRM category

If you’re following top Product Hunt launches this year, you might have heard about Folk, a next-generation CRM that recently made it to the n°1 Product of the Month position.

Folk has recently emerged as one of the hottest startups aiming at reinventing a big category: CRM.

“The biggest SaaS [software-as-a-service] category is CRM. The highest valuation in the SaaS industry is Salesforce,” co-founder and COO Simo Lemhandez said. “But i’s also a category with products that are all considered as outdated,” he added.

When we discussed with Simo recently, he told us that reinventing such a category requires a strong attention to user experience. Like many modern SaaS products, Folk draws inspiration from popular products such as Notion or Airtable that are highly flexible yet very powerful.

But taking down existing incumbents makes the level of expectations from users even higher. Offering the best user experience was strategic from the beginning and the company invested heavily on its Product Design processes to fasten their feedback loop. And Claap has been instrumental for that.

So we decided to interview the Product Design team to better understand how they operate on a daily basis to design and iterate on new features.

Design at the core of the company strategy

While Folk is still an early-stage company with around 20 people, the company has already hired 2 experienced product designers: Kevin Le Pommelec, head of design, and Victor Meulle-Stef as a product designer.

But building a great product experience is not only a one-team mission but a critical task for the entire organization, from founders, to growth, customer success and engineers to provide the feedback the design teams needs to improve it.

While this culture of feedback was there from the beginning, the design team struggled to come up with an efficient way to streamline this feedback loop. Feedback was often scattered across different tools like Figma, Slack, Loom and Notion and it was often very complex to align on new iterations to be made. So they had to spend time in meetings to do that.

That’s when they decided to start using Claap.

Before it was harder. I had to record a video or to create a Loom and to share it somewhere on a Notion and get feedback there. Now I can have everything at the same place. I'm not spending my days in meetings. I can just show a Claap, I receive feedback and I can check this feedback two or three days after if I don't have the time and if I'm in a rush, I still know that I have all this impactful and powerful knowledge somewhere. It’s really easy to share to my colleagues and it removes a lot of noise in my calendar.

Using Claap to iterate on a feature

When working on new features, Victor and the design team has put Claap at the core of his work together with Figma and Slack.

While they are using Slack for punctual interaction, when they want to send a quick message and get an answer quickly, Victor records a claap to show a feature he’s working on and present the new version.

I am working a lot on Figma, and I record my Figma with Claap to get feedback. I'm often making prototypes after each iteration. So after I go to Claap, I record my prototype and I create a vocal flow presenting the prototype. I share it to my colleagues and after I get feedback on the claap on the comment section. And I'm improving the work like that.
Each time I’m working on a feature, I’m doing a claap at the end. And for each version I record one.

The reason that made him switch to Claap is having one unified workflow to collaborate and centralize all feedback.

Now I can record my video, I can sort it by topics, move topics, mention people in those. And the collaboration on the right is smoother and more standard. It feels more natural than Loom that has the feed below the video, you don’t have both comments and video on the same screen you have to scroll so it’s less smoother.

And to finish Victor added:

For me, Claap, it's like my new way of working.

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