Rough for Product Teams
Jacob Duval
•
Aug 07, 2025
What problem does Rough solve?
The problem that Rough focuses on is alignment. Our goal is that you can easily communicate what's going on across your product, without excessive meetings.
Before we started working on Rough, we spoke to 100 Product Managers from 100 different companies about their struggles. One thing stood out - they all spent a huge amount of their time (sometimes all of their time) on alignment meetings.
Often times information lives somewhere, but the people who need to see it aren't looking there. Whether that's stakeholders, engineering teams, or leadership; when someone is lacking context, they fall back to booking a call in a Product Manager's calendar. Worse than that is the disconnect that teams start to feel when they don't understand why things are happening across the company.
As a Product team, you have likely experienced this disconnect in some ways yourself. Leadership "announces" a strategy without your involvement; sales promise features that don't exist; engineering puts you through 100 questions before committing to features (or worse, they don't ask at all).
Our number one priority is to improve alignment across your company. That's why we package certain ideas in a way that's more digestible to everyday people. We believe that a simple tool focused on engagement will perform better than a feature-packed tool that only a few people use.
How does Rough Solve Alignment
To be honest, we don't. Rough solves the technology side of the alignment problem. The rest of that problem is people, process, and culture. We help with that too, but we're not going to claim that our software is going to fix all these issues overnight.
At it's core, Rough is simple. We connect insights to work. We want people to understand the journey that a feature took before anyone started work on it. Sometimes features are built off the back of hundreds of customers calls; sometimes it's demands from investors; sometimes it's just the latest shower thought from the CEO. We're not here to judge how you make decisions, we're just here to show everyone what was involved in them.
How is Rough different from its competition?
Rough's competition can be broadly separated into two camps. All-in-one tools, and PM specific tools.
All-in-ones
Sometimes advertised as an "Org OS", tools like Clickup, or Notion will try to capture 100% of the work you do in an organization. Documentation, tasks, meeting notes, tables; you can do them all inside these tools. For the most part, they do a great job of capturing these workflows.
One unfortunate byproduct of putting everything in one place, is that the place becomes extremely noisy. This leads to massive disengagement across the business as the flood of notifications becomes overwhelming. Individuals only end up checking these tools if they are linked to the specific place they're meant to go beforehand.
The main problem that all-in-one software solves is providing a place to put things. If your work does not involve a lot of collaboration, or this tooling is mainly providing a backdrop for work done in meetings, then all-in-one tools are a great fit. Rough provides the place to discuss and plan upcoming work, without the expectation of meetings. We have a focused feature set, and we don't promise to be everything.
PM-focused tooling
There are a range of tools that are focused on Product Management specifically. You have execution focused tools like Jira and Github Issues, or planning focused tools like Productboard and Aha.
Rough doesn't really compete with products like Jira. Jira is a fantastic tool for tracking your day to day tasks, and seeing what a specific person is working on at any one time. Jira, Trello, Github actions, and any of the all-in-one tools are capable of handling task tracking for in-progress work. Rough is focused on planning your work, not tracking specific tickets. The great side effect of this is that we're more than happy to create deep integrations with whatever task tracker you choose.
Rough's more direct competition is the likes of Productboard or Aha. These are feature-rich products that are more than capable of serving product teams. In fact, we believe that these tools serve product teams even better than us! What makes Rough different is that our focus is not on Product teams, it's on everyone else. We make some rather bold design decisions in service of this. We understand that every esoteric feature drives down engagement from the wider business, pushing product teams back into meetings and reducing the impact of software like ours.
We're just as proud of all the features that we don't have as the ones that we do have. To put this another way, when we do product discovery we don't just speak to product teams. We speak to sales, cs, marketing, engineering, executives. We speak to people across an entire company and discover the reasons they aren't engaging with their current PM software. We build features that all of these people can understand, rather than focusing on Product Teams directly.
What features does Rough have specifically?
Insights are at the heart of Rough. They are how we capture the voice of the customer, as well as the voice of people across the organization. Insights don't represent data, they represent people. The same insight can mean completely different things coming from different people. You can add transcripts, or notes to insights if you wish to group them. This is useful to capture activities like discovery conversations, where many unique insights may come from a single conversation.
Insights are presented as a feed. This feed may feel social-media-esque, and that's a deliberate design decision. We want people in your company to feel comfortable commenting and discussing insights in an informal manner.
Pitches are how we discuss solutions to problems. Pitches can have many linked insights, but at minimum require a problem statement. A unique feature of Rough is our whiteboards, letting you draw up wireframes on pitches so that team members can visualize possible solutions to a given problem.
As you know, one of the toughest problems for any business to solve is prioritization. Rough approaches prioritization a little differently from other tools. Rough presents your pitches in the form of a top ten list. Most other tools present priorities in the form of a Gantt Chart, and if they do offer sequential prioritization it is done within a large, multi-dimensional table. Both of these layouts obfuscate the job of prioritization. There should only be one number one priority, and it should be exceedingly clear what that is to everyone inside a business.
Rough also has another way to prioritize pitches - lists. Everyone starts with a wishlist by default, letting them represent the work that they individually think is most important. You can also create custom lists to represent things like quarterly planning, or to collect multiple pitches that share a similar concept, like pitches related to strategy.
Speaking of lists, Rough has a unique approach to priority changes in a list. In most apps, moving something up or down a list is not an important action. In Rough we track the movement, and give people an opportunity to discuss the change in priority. This gives team members ways to voice their concerns when they see features move up and down in priority.
What features does Rough NOT have
We mentioned earlier that we are proud of all the features we don't have, so here they are.
Task Tracking
Rough is not a task tracker. There are many awesome task trackers out there (we recommend github issues) and we don't feel there is too much we can add to that space. We're happy to integrate with whatever tracker you use, just reach out to us.
Gantt Charts
This was a feature that popped up in discovery that Product Managers specifically wanted out of their products. Gantt charts shift people to think about maximizing resource allocation, rather than prioritizing work. If you can get your org to decide on priorities, creating a Gantt chart becomes trivial.
Knowledge base
Rough is not a knowledge base. We actually think this is the perfect usecase for all-in-one tools like Notion. Rough is not the dumping ground for anything. It's the place people go to discuss and plan the products that they build.
Feature voting
Feature voting tools like Canny are fantastic if you're looking for your customers to prioritize work. We don't believe the concept is sustainable long-term though. Over time, the most difficult features bubble up to the top, and then these tools end up creating quite a bit of internal resentment as people see "less important" features get prioritized over the ones they've voted for. It removes much of the agency that product teams need to do their best work.
Private Documents
Rough is a default-open tool. There is no black box where decisions are made and then "presented" to the team. We know priorities shift behind the scenes, we know difficult discussions can drag on for weeks, we know certain ideas have internal politics underpinning them. These are all things we want to help with, but this is a tool to build alignment, and those situations only serve to create misalignment. If you feel a strong need for this workflow, please get in touch with us!
What sort of support do I get?
We love doing discovery, and we're always happy to explore gaps in Rough. We're happy to support custom onboarding if you feel it's right for your team. Send us an email at hello@rough.app and we'll get you sorted.
We're also happy to connect you with our support network of product and strategy professionals who can help solve those other "softer" parts of alignment.