Why We’re Building Actioner: A Personal Story

As I look back on my career as a product manager at companies like Atlassian and Opsgenie, there’s a recurring frustration that’s shaped my thinking around product management. It’s the frustration of trying to make data-driven decisions without having direct access to the most critical piece of the puzzle: customer feedback.

In the early days of Opsgenie, customer feedback was something we could easily track and respond to. Berkay, the founder of Opsgenie, was the first product manager, and I was the first PM hire. Together, we were deeply involved in building the product from the ground up, setting the foundation for everything Opsgenie was to become. At that stage, we had the luxury of reading every single support ticket, joining customer calls, and learning firsthand what our users were struggling with—whether it was a design flaw, a missing feature, or a performance issue.

Back then, I knew our customers personally. I knew what they did with our product, how they used it, what features they relied on, and even how much they paid us. We had direct insights into their workflows and could anticipate their needs. Even our developers were in the loop, regularly joining customer support rotations to ensure they understood the pain points firsthand. When they saw a Jira issue in a sprint, they already knew the context, the customers behind the issue, and why it was important. That level of alignment between support, product, and engineering was invaluable.

But as we scaled—onboarding more customers and expanding our internal team—it became impossible to keep up with that direct feedback loop. Reading every support ticket or joining every call simply wasn’t feasible anymore. I could feel us slipping away from the pulse of our customers. And as we grew, the gap only widened.

The Struggle to Stay on Top of Feedback

This is where I started to feel the real frustration. I’ve always been committed to being a data-driven PM. I’ve spent years honing my craft, learning from some of the best in the industry, including through my participation in Reforge programs like Advanced Growth and Product Marketing. I’ve applied frameworks like HEART and AARRR to quantify customer feedback and measure success. But no matter how structured we were, no matter how many frameworks we applied, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was losing touch with the customer.

There’s something deeply personal about reading every support ticket and knowing exactly who’s behind it. As Opsgenie scaled, and as we joined Atlassian through an acquisition, I found myself relying on data analysts to pull reports, synthesize insights, and answer questions that used to be so simple. I would think, “What’s the most frequent complaint from our gold-tier customers this month?” or “How has sentiment shifted since we launched the latest feature?” And what used to take me a few minutes of skimming through tickets now took days, if not weeks, of manual data gathering and processing.

I wasn’t the only one who felt this frustration. Our developers—who had once been closely involved in customer support—were now disconnected from the context behind the issues they were fixing. We’d see a bug in Jira, but without knowing which customer it was affecting or how it was impacting their workflows, it was harder to prioritize and understand its true importance.

Why We’re Building Actioner

That’s why we’re building Actioner. It’s not just about making customer feedback easier to access—it’s about reconnecting product teams with the voice of the customer, in a way that’s scalable and actionable. With Actioner, we’re trying to recapture that closeness I had with our users in the early days of Opsgenie, while solving for the challenges that come with scale.

Actioner is designed to do the heavy lifting when it comes to customer feedback. Using AI-powered insights, it sifts through support tickets, sentiment data, and customer behavior metrics to give product teams a real-time view of what’s most important. Whether you’re tracking the number of bugs submitted in the last month or looking at how customer sentiment has shifted around a particular feature, Actioner makes it easy to stay on top of the data—without needing a team of analysts to sort through it.

But it’s more than just a tool for processing data. Actioner is about prioritization. In my experience, one of the hardest parts of product management is knowing where to focus. You’re constantly balancing feature requests, bug fixes, and technical debt, and without clear data, those decisions can feel like guesswork. With Actioner, we’re bringing clarity to that process. By surfacing key insights, highlighting trends, and even identifying which issues are most urgent for high-revenue customers, we’re giving product managers the tools they need to make better, faster decisions.

A Broader Industry Problem

I know that my experience isn’t unique. I’ve spoken with countless PMs—from junior product managers to VPs of product—and they’ve all echoed the same frustration. The larger your company gets, the harder it becomes to stay connected to the customer. At Atlassian, for example, customer support and product management were often worlds apart, with support teams acting as the intermediary between us and the users. And as it’s becoming more and more popular in many other companies, customer support reports directly to the product department as a way of filling that gap.

Likewise, it’s no surprise that many product managers come from customer support backgrounds. They’ve already experienced the pain points of customers firsthand, and they know how crucial that feedback is to building a better product. In fact, I’ve seen companies intentionally transition employees from support roles into product management because they recognize how intertwined these functions are.

But no matter how closely aligned product and support are, the reality is that without the right tools, valuable insights slip through the cracks. Whether you’re working at a fast-growing startup or an established company, staying on top of customer feedback requires more than just good intentions—it requires a system that can process the data and deliver actionable insights in real time.

Closing the Feedback Loop

At Actioner, we’re building that system. We want to close the feedback loop between support teams and product managers, ensuring that no matter how big your company grows, you’re never too far from your customer’s voice. By integrating support ticket data with customer behavior and CRM information, and by applying AI to extract insights and trends, Actioner makes it possible for product teams to stay informed and responsive.

I’ve spent years feeling the gap between product teams and customer feedback widen as companies scale. Now, with Actioner, I’m determined to close that gap and help product managers everywhere stay connected to the people who matter most: the customers.