No matter what kind of product a company makes, there are tools to help.
Many tools.
Sometimes too many.
As companies work to launch new products, the processes and tools on the path toward deciding how to build can seem endless, and team members can lose sight of what they’re building for.
According to Harvard Business Review, “Thousands of tools and methods are available to help innovators discover what users want and how to deliver on their expectations. The challenge is to figure out which ones to use when.”
Together with Luma Institute, Harvard Business Review published a framework — titled “A Taxonomy of Innovation” — to help innovators clearly identify the best tools for their goals and use them to move ahead.
The framework aids product teams in finding the right tools, but finding the process that works best for building a new product is specific to every business — and perhaps to every team.
For job seekers looking to participate on a strong team to build great products, Built In has highlighted 20 U.S. companies with exciting recent launches, innovative approaches to development and opportunities to build.
What Magna International Does: Magna International is a global automotive supplier providing a range of services and products, including vehicle systems, assemblies, modules and engineering support to automakers worldwide.
Inside the Product: Magna’s Global Director of Sustainability and Energy Ahmed ElGanzouri is finding innovative ways to repurpose waste into resources. The company is also working with partners to divert materials from landfills and develop recycled fibers for use in building new car components, according to a 2023 Built In article, which reads: “Those fibers are being utilized to build front-end modules, the plastic component that carries a car’s bumper. The diverted landfill materials are compressed into small pellets called UBQ, which serves as a plastic replacement in the component. Currently, the component uses 5 percent UBQ, and Magna is exploring the possibilities UBQ offers in building additional pieces like door carriers, wind guides and skirts for transport trucks.”
What John Deere Does: John Deere is a manufacturer of agricultural and forestry machinery and heavy equipment. The company also offers technological solutions for farming, including precision agriculture tools.
Inside the Product: John Deere’s innovative product line includes See & Spray, “a vision-based system that targets weeds rather than crops.” According to Application Technology Lead Rich Humpel, this technology is the result of decades of development.
“We were developing intellectual property on this in the 1990s,” he said. “But it just wasn’t practical — there wasn’t the full availability of supporting tech like graphics processing units to make it happen at the time. But we didn’t forget where we wanted to be.”
What Block Does: Block is a financial services and digital payments company that serves businesses and consumers.
Inside the Product: “Bitkey is a self-custody bitcoin wallet designed to empower the next 100 million people using bitcoin to truly own and manage their money as well as support the payments use cases we expect bitcoin to increasingly uphold,” Thomas Templeton, a Proto lead at Block, told Built In in 2023. The article explains how “Templeton’s Proto team developed Bitkey, a self-custody wallet designed to be a safe and easy-to-use alternative to other self-custody solutions. It comes with three parts: a mobile app, a hexagon-shaped hardware device and a set of recovery tools.”
What Square Does: Square is a subsidiary of Block that focuses on providing payment processing solutions, point-of-sale systems and financial services to small businesses.
Inside the Product: At Square, meeting the needs of sellers — the company’s key clients — drives constant product evolution and innovation. “The best example of this was during the pandemic in 2020: we were able to pivot our entire organization on a dime to focus on helping sellers survive initially, and then eventually thrive,” Head of Product Orders and Checkout Oseyi Ikuenobe told Built In. “We marshaled our interconnected suite of solutions to help sellers adjust quickly to the challenges they were facing. I’m very proud of how we showed up for them when the rest of the world was falling apart.”
What Cash App Does: Cash App is a mobile payment service developed by Block, allowing users to send, receive and invest money. It also offers a Cash Card and Bitcoin trading capabilities.
Inside the Product: Many users may think of Cash App as a quick way to send and receive money, but making Bitcoin accessible and approachable to users is a central part of the team’s mission to “redefine the world’s relationship with money,” Bitcoin Brand Lead Maria Pesce told Built In in 2023. “Bitcoin doesn’t need to be this jargon-y concept that’s exclusionary, as if you have to read an entire encyclopedia to understand it,” she said. “We’re really building the foundation for something that the next generation will hopefully experience and utilize daily.”
What Northwestern Mutual Does: Northwestern Mutual is a financial services company offering insurance, investment products and financial planning services to help individuals and businesses achieve financial security.
Inside the Product: “If you’ve been reading the headlines, it’s never been more important for companies to have a rigorous security process in place to mitigate risks and challenges,” Northwestern Mutual VP and Chief Information Security Officer Laura Deaner told Built In in 2022. Deaner’s team has taken on the challenge of building products to mitigate those risks before clients are impacted.
“Our mission is to protect our clients and maintain their trust by delivering world-class cybersecurity and risk management services,” she said. “Innovation is important to me as a technologist, but being world-class is important because our adversaries are all over the globe.”
What CNA Does: CNA provides a range of insurance products and risk management services for businesses and professionals.
Inside the Product: Reimagining outdated billing processes for law firms is no small undertaking, but CNA is taking on the challenge. “Through the integration of AI, CNA sought to achieve increased accuracy, improved collaboration across departments, significant time savings, cost reductions and enhanced support for clients,” VP of Business Relationship Management and Innovation Colleen Thomas told Built In in 2023. The company’s Bill Review solution helps firms move beyond manual workflow from the submission of invoices to issuing payments.
What Datadog Does: Datadog is a cloud-based monitoring and analytics platform that provides observability solutions for infrastructure, applications, logs and security across an organization’s IT ecosystem.
Inside the Product: Datadog’s DevOps copilot Bits AI simplifies incident response from one unified platform, as a 2024 article from Built In explained. “Imagine a client receives an alert in the middle of the night about high error rates for ‘user service.’ Opening the Datadog mobile app, they might ask Bits AI, ‘What’s going on with user service?’ Bits AI quickly identifies an ongoing incident with the ‘database service’ along with other key insights such as the recent deployments and relevant alerts. Thanks to Bits AI, the client can efficiently triage the issue without switching between multiple tools — and they’re still able to catch some z’s.”
What Skillsoft Does: Skillsoft is a global leader in corporate learning and training solutions, providing a platform of online courses in areas like leadership, technology and compliance.
Inside the Product: Skillsoft’s CAISY Conversation AI Simulator offers scenario-based practice “designed to mimic real-life situations.” CAISY’s experiential learning provides a safe environment to practice important conversations and receive relevant feedback. According to one executive and Skillsoft user, “Skillsoft has effectively combined the on-demand support of a virtual assistant with leadership and management training to create a transformational new way of building interpersonal skills.”
What Samsara Does: Samsara is a provider of IoT solutions for industrial operations, offering real-time data and analytics to help businesses improve fleet management, safety and efficiency.
Inside the Product: Powered by Samsara Gateways and the entire Samsara Network, the new AT11, also called the Asset Tag, allows Samsara’s clients to track and manage small, high-value assets and equipment, like toolboxes, containers, lawn mowers, generators, pumps, fiber spools and more. It’s the first asset tag that’s industrial grade in both performance and reliability.
“Previously misplaced equipment would take us weeks to locate, and if lost entirely, cost up to a million dollars to replace annually,” one Samsara customer explained. “With Samsara’s Asset Tag, we are hoping to minimize this downtime, cut costs and digitize manual inspection processes — all while keeping our employees safe and efficient.”
What Applied Systems Does: Applied Systems is ushering in the next generation of insurance, offering tech-forward cloud-based solutions for agencies and brokerages to deliver better, simpler experiences, which not only enhances efficiency and customer experience but also attracts more talent to the industry.
Inside the Product: As Applied Systems steps into the next generation of insurance, the company is committed to finding secure and practical ways to realize the value of AI for customers and partners. From the release of new AI-powered features in select Applied products and exploring AI capabilities through the Applied AI Lab to acquiring the AI-focused insurance tech company Planck, Applied Systems has spent the year investing deeply in automated technologies — with opportunities for growth ahead.
What BlackLine Does: BlackLine is a cloud-based software company that offers solutions for automating financial close and accounting processes, helping organizations improve their efficiency and accuracy.
Inside the Product Team: For tech professionals looking to make their mark in digital finance transformation, BlackLine offers unparalleled opportunities, Senior Manager of Talent Acquisition Amie Updike told Built In last year.
“BlackLiners make their mark and build talents through a variety of resources such as ongoing education, training and career pathing,” Updike explained. “As BlackLine continues to experience growth and emerging new spaces, BlackLiners gain experience with key customers, new markets and delivering innovative solutions.”
What Achieve Does: Achieve is a fintech company focused on personal financial services, offering solutions for debt management, financial coaching and loan consolidation to improve customers’ financial well-being.
Inside the Product Process: At Achieve, building powerful products starts with identifying foundational building blocks that will lead to long-term success. “To build systems that can thrive amidst uncertainty, we must start with fundamental principles. Identify the essential requirements that make the system function,” Nathan Broslawsky, senior vice president of product and engineering, wrote on Built In earlier this year. “Identifying these core principles provides a stable foundation upon which you can build the system while also identifying areas where you don’t need to be overly prescriptive. Understanding where to draw the line comes down to being very intentional about the goal and what the principle is achieving.”
What Udemy Does: Udemy is an online learning and skills development platform offering a wide range of courses in technology, business, arts and personal development for learners worldwide.
Inside the Product: Udemy is integrating generative AI features into its platform to “help learners more easily discover and consume content and help instructors maximize their time,” according to a Udemy blog post by Senior Vice President of Instructor and Content Strategy Scott Rogers.
“Products like our AI Assistant for learners are designed to enhance the learning experience and provide learners with timely support based on the instructor knowledge captured in the course. It will also help reduce instructor Q&A workload by automating responses and surfacing frequently asked questions,” he explained. “Additional features like AI-powered learning paths for Udemy Business administrators will increase instructor course visibility. Offering these personalized, responsive learning options has the potential to drive increased engagement and revenue for both instructors and Udemy.”
What Bullhorn Does: Bullhorn is a provider of cloud-based software for recruitment, staffing and workforce management firms, enabling them to streamline talent acquisition and CRM activities.
Inside the Product: As Bullhorn builds the software that recruitment, staffing and workforce management firms need, the company remains committed to its internal stakeholders as well, Director of Software Engineering Ethan Schroeder told Built In in 2023.
“We invested in growing our platform engineering group, increasing our ability to leverage technology to ensure the long-term stability of our software, improve the engineer experience, minimize errors during development and enable engineers to efficiently deliver high-quality products,” he explained. “We built a service framework and code generation tools that allow teams to generate production-ready services and code within seconds, giving them more time to focus on enhancing existing functionality and building new features.”
The company has also implemented a knowledge-sharing platform and automatic code review software to support its team’s time to shipment without sacrificing quality.
What EDB Does: EDB is a company specializing in enterprise-class software and services for the PostgreSQL database, helping organizations deploy and manage scalable databases.
Inside the Product: “EDB is passionate about supporting open-source communities and helping modern enterprises accelerate innovation by leveraging the Postgres database platform,” Senior Vice President of Product Marketing Celest Turner Hall told Built In in 2022. This commitment led EDB to launch CloudNativePG on May 16 at KubeCon 2022, the flagship conference for leading open-source and cloud-native communities.
“CloudNativePG is an open-source operator that manages Postgres workloads on Kubernetes clusters, running in private, public, hybrid or multi-cloud environments,” she explained. “Some of the key benefits of combining the power of Postgres with Kubernetes are faster application development, reduced cost of development, highly automated operations and increased scalability in database services.”
What Apex Fintech Solutions Does: Apex Fintech Solutions is a provider of a suite of financial services and digital solutions for fintech companies, focusing on account management, trading and investing infrastructure.
Inside the Product: In July 2024, Apex Fintech Solutions launched Apex Ascend, a real-time, cloud-native, B2B investment infrastructure. “Platform breakthroughs like this don’t come around every year or even every decade,” Chief Executive Officer Bill Capuzzi said in a press release about the launch. “But serving hundreds of financial service companies and over 20 million investors has taught us a thing or two about what the future of investment infrastructure has to be.” Apex Ascend offers a real-time ledger, a cloud data and business intelligence platform, modern developer experience, trading, execution and order management and more.
What Cohere Health Does: Cohere Health is a healthtech company focused on transforming utilization management by using AI to streamline healthcare processes and enhance patient outcomes.
Inside the Product: “In utilization management, an important step is for trained clinicians to review patient cases to ensure that the requested procedures are not detrimental or wasteful for the patient. While Cohere Health automates these approvals as often as possible, when our technology can’t determine that the request should be approved, the case will be sent to a nurse for review,” Director of Product Management Mike Sobolewski told Built In in 2024.
This cumbersome process can involve scrolling through many pages of clinical documentation, and Sobolewski and his team found the opportunity to support nurses through machine learning and AI.
“Our team has reimagined the entire nurse review experience to extract the key clinical data that nurses are looking for into an easy-to-read format right at their fingertips. This allows our nurses to operate at the top of their licenses by spending their time using clinical expertise instead of scrolling through reams of documents. While we launched the original version of this feature early in 2023, like any good product team, we have been focused on measuring, learning and iterating,” he said.
What Sonar Does: Rooted in the open-source community, Sonar’s clean-code solutions support more than 30 programming languages, frameworks and infrastructure technologies, and they’re used by more than 7 million developers across 400,000 organizations worldwide.
Inside the Product: SonarQube is a self-managed tool that helps developers ensure clean code as they’re building, before the code reaches production. The newest features of this tool are Sonar AI Code Assurance and Sonar AI CodeFix, which improve the quality of code produced by generative AI. These new capabilities are available on the self-managed offering, SonarQube Server, and the SaaS offering, SonarQube Cloud.
“AI is transforming the way developers work, streamlining processes and reducing the toil associated with writing code. As the adoption of AI coding assistants grows, however, we are seeing a new issue emerge: code accountability,” Sonar CEO Tariq Shaukat said in a press release about the new SonarQube features. “With AI Code Assurance, we're helping organizations ensure that AI-written code receives the high level of quality and security review that you would expect from your developers.”
What Bectran Does: Bectran is a cloud-based credit and collections management platform designed to automate credit-to-cash workflows for B2B companies.
Inside the Product: Thanks to a new collaboration with Cobalt Intelligence, Bectran’s API integration is providing users with powerful anti-fraud and efficiency-generating tools.
“This collaboration is a realization of our goal to make fraud solutions easier to implement and provide impactful solutions for improving risk management,” CEO Louis Ifeguni said. “The integration will equip credit managers with real-time SOS data at the moment of application submission, resulting in tighter fraud security measures and faster credit approvals.”
