Why I am Building Produmo

When I first stepped into the world of product, I wasn’t aiming for it. I didn’t even know what product management was. I joined a travel startup back in 2013 and quickly became obsessed with how things were made—websites, games, systems, everything. I didn’t have a technical background, but I made a deliberate choice to learn from the developers around me. I asked questions constantly. Over time, I became that PM who could hold their own in conversations about infrastructure, CI/CD, or Kubernetes.

Years later, I’d find myself leading product at that same company, managing cross-functional teams, and building processes from scratch. I worked primarily in startups and scaleups because I loved the pace, the energy, and the creativity. But even in those environments—where experimentation was encouraged—I kept running into the same problem.

We didn’t have a good place for early-stage product thinking.

The Problem with Traditional Product Tools

Tools like Jira, Trello, and Asana are brilliant for execution. I’m a Jira power user—I even use it for personal projects. But when it came to upstream work, they fell flat. Every few weeks during backlog grooming, I’d find myself staring at half-baked tickets, unsure what to do with them. They weren’t ready for development, but I didn’t want to lose them either.

Meanwhile, my desk was covered in Post-its. I had docs and spreadsheets, Slack messages full of ideas, and teams working in silos—design in Figma, data in dashboards, research in Notion. There was no single place to track what was in motion, what was blocked, or what had been validated.

I tried to hack Jira into being that space. I created dedicated projects with swimlanes for idea stages. But it quickly became clear: I was forcing a delivery tool to be a thinking tool. And it wasn’t built for that.

Eventually, I had enough. I started actively searching for tools that could support early-stage product work. I looked into how other PMs were solving the same problems, and that's when I stumbled on forum threads and community posts asking for features like a "backlog for the backlog." It was clear that others had tried to solve this by hacking Jira—and were hitting the same walls I was. When some of these requests were raised directly with Jira, their response was basically: "This isn't how Scrum works."

That was a lightbulb moment for me. The industry standard tool for product and dev collaboration had no space for the ambiguity and exploration that happens before work is dev-ready. And if Jira wasn't going to acknowledge this reality, maybe I needed to build something that did.

From Frustration to Building

At the time, the company I had worked at for years had just shut down. The tech job market was getting tighter. Product roles were especially hard to come by. So I decided to do something radical: I started learning to code.

C# quickly became my favorite language—I even started building a game I’d always dreamed of making. But the idea for a better product tool kept pulling at me. I started sketching ideas. Mapping workflows. Playing with prototypes. Then, I interviewed at a company building something vaguely similar to my concept, but missing a lot of the things I think product people truly need. The experience made one thing crystal clear: I had to build this myself.

And so, Produmo was born.

What Produmo Is (and Why It Matters)

Produmo is a tool purpose-built for product managers navigating the messy, early stages of product development.

It’s a structured but flexible system that lets you:

• Capture loose ideas without rigid formatting
• Assign validation tasks (like "check the data" or "speak to design")
• Track upstream progress across teams
• Store A/B test plans and results
• Push tickets to Jira only when they’re actually dev-ready

It’s designed to reduce noise, align teams earlier, and make sure nothing valuable falls through the cracks.

In short: it’s the tool I always wished I had.

Building While Learning

I’m building Produmo as a solo founder. I’m doing the frontend, the backend, the design, the content—you name it. My husband, a developer with 15+ years of experience, helps unblock me when I hit technical walls and is someone I regularly bounce ideas off of. He’s a constant source of insight, especially when I want to understand what other teams need from a product tool.

I’ve been surprised by how quickly I could get the marketing site up and running using Next.js, Vercel, and a lot of help from GPT. But learning how to connect the frontend and backend—how APIs actually work—has been the biggest challenge. It’s pushed me out of my comfort zone in all the right ways.

The MVP and the Vision

I don’t have a fixed roadmap for where Produmo will be in a year. Right now, I’m taking it one step at a time. The MVP will allow product managers to:

• List and tag early-stage ideas
• Track validation work across teams
• Create separate swimlanes for design, data, or research tasks
• Store and revisit A/B test outcomes

The long-term goal is simple: to give product people everything they need in one place. And eventually, I’d love to expand the tool to support other roles like design and data. But I’ll only do that once I’ve learned from the people in those roles—so the product stays honest and genuinely helpful.

Want to Help?

Right now, I’m still in development. But when the product is ready, I’ll be inviting beta testers to try it out—free of charge.

If you’re a product manager who’s felt the pain of losing ideas, managing messy workflows, or working in a dozen disconnected tools, I’d love for you to join the waitlist.

I’m building this for us.