Chose a PWA launch over native mobile apps to maximize reach, reduce operational complexity, and bypass regional payment infrastructure challenges. Optimized for user acquisition and market validation before investing in app store distribution.
Resisted expanding into multiple industries despite feature requests. Focused the roadmap on IT professionals, the strongest early-market segment, enabling a simpler product experience and a clearer path to product-market fit.
We interviewed professionals across engineering, product, business, legal, banking, healthcare, military, and leadership roles. Achievement tracking was a widespread challenge, but software engineers consistently reported the strongest need around documenting accomplishments, quantifying impact, and preparing for promotions — making them the most compelling initial ICP for validating Bragsheet's core hypothesis.
Beyond primary customer personas, we identified LinkedIn influencers as a strategic decision-influencing audience. Because influencer-driven awareness was one of our top growth hypotheses, we mapped their goals, audience expectations, content preferences, and partnership motivations to inform marketing and distribution.
| Stage | Realizing Growth Matters | Doing Great Work | Performance Review Approaches | Preparing Evidence | Self-Advocacy Discussion | Career Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Activity | Wants promotion, raise, or recognition | Delivers projects, solves problems, helps team | Manager announces review cycle | Tries to remember accomplishments from past months | Discusses impact with manager | Receives rating, promotion, raise, or misses opportunity |
| Touchpoints | Manager feedback, peers, career goals | Meetings, email, Slack, Jira, GitHub, documents | HR systems, review forms | Personal notes, inbox, chat history, calendars | Review meeting, promotion panel | Performance rating, promotion decision |
| Experience | 😐 | 🙂 | 😐 | ☹️ | ☹️ | 🙂 / ☹️ |
| Thoughts | “I should be progressing in my career.” | “I'm contributing valuable work.” | “I need to show everything I've done.” | “Where did I put all those achievements?” | “Am I underselling myself?” | “Did I get recognized fairly?” |
| Pain Points | No clear way to track growth | Achievements scattered across tools | Review cycle becomes stressful | Hours spent reconstructing accomplishments | Difficult to quantify impact and articulate value | Strong work may go unnoticed |
| Opportunity for Bragsheet | Introduce continuous achievement tracking | Capture wins as they happen | Remind users to record accomplishments | AI automatically organizes evidence | Generate impact-focused summaries | Improve visibility and promotion readiness |
Every card follows the same trail: what customers actually said, the insight it revealed, the decision it drove, and what shipped because of it.
Happy to walk through the discovery work, the trade-offs, and learnings.