Finding Our Stride: How Artera’s Product Council Evolved for Better Prioritization

At the heart of every product team is the constant struggle: What do we prioritize? No one has unlimited resources—time, people, and so on—and it’s crucial that we’re focused on the right work. Sometimes these are easy decisions, but most times they involve hard trade-offs. Potentially harder is aligning stakeholders after you’ve made those tough roadmapping decisions. That’s where our Product Council comes in.

The Start: Build A Stakeholder Group

The concept of a product council isn’t new and we started ours by following Marty Cagan’s playbook. We built a dedicated group of individuals across different departments who regularly came together to discuss, evaluate, and prioritize product initiatives. Its core purpose was to ensure that product development aligns with the company’s overall strategic goals, addresses our user needs, and considers the impact across various internal teams. The goal was to get diverse perspectives in one room to make the smartest choices about our product roadmap.

Key to a successful product council meeting was thorough preparation.  We wanted our Product Council to be focused intently on pulling as much data together as possible to inform our roadmap.

Where We Struggled: Taking on Too Much

When our Product Council was first formed, we tried to keep our membership to less than 10. However, we quickly found that membership was expanding. Good product leaders and managers inherently want all the data, and we’re inclined to ask as many people as many questions as we can. We quickly found ourselves inviting more and more stakeholders to the meeting in an attempt to get as many questions answered live as we could. This created three new challenges for us:

• Organizing calendars: With so many attendees, scheduling became a nightmare, and we ended up meeting less frequently.
• Longer meetings: More people meant more input and more discussion, causing meetings to run over consistently.
• Less constructive dialogue: Too many voices in the room made it difficult to have focused, conversations.

To try and organize our information better, the Product team was spending more and more time creating slide decks to explain our work. The decks progressively got longer after each meeting as we identified new information that would be helpful context for the large group of stakeholders. This became an inefficient use of our product team’s time and didn’t necessarily lead to better understanding.

The Pivot: Focused Representation and Narrative Pre-reads

After several quarters of struggles, our teams pivoted and overhauled both our attendees and, most critically, our expectations. We reduced the size of the council back down to 10, with a critical friend representing each of the following departments:

• Sales/Rev Ops
• Customer and Internal Education
• Professional Services
• Engineering
• Product Marketing
• Design
• Product
• Customer Support

The Product team committed to a narrative pre-read. No more slides. This narrative approach allowed us to not only more thoroughly describe the work that we were doing but also communicate more clearly the “why.” It added additional context that was often lost in slides and significantly increased our transparency. Pre-reads now include an update on work that is in flight, as well as an overview of what’s next on the roadmap. They’ve become a historical artifact we frequently reference for important context as well. 

Stakeholders are provided the pre-read in advance of the meeting and encouraged to make asynchronous comments and ask questions. During the meeting itself, our focus is squarely on areas that are not clear or where crucial information might still be missing.

With this new structure, stakeholders are responsible for adequately representing the interests of their department, as well as communicating updates post-meeting. This refined approach has allowed us to streamline our decision-making, ensure critical departmental insights are included, and ultimately, build better products more efficiently.

The End: Continuous, Thoughtful Improvement

Our Product Council continues to evolve, but it has become a core component of how our product teams gather feedback and prioritizes work at Artera. Our council has transformed into a lean, effective, and indispensable forum. We’ve learned that the true power of a council isn’t just in gathering input, but in structuring that input for maximum impact and clear decision-making.

This journey of refining our Product Council mirrors our broader philosophy at Artera: continuous improvement. We’re always seeking ways to work smarter, collaborate more effectively, and ultimately, deliver more value to our users. 

Founded in 2015, Artera is based in Santa Barbara, California and has been named a Deloitte Technology Fast 500 company (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024), and ranked on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies for five consecutive years. Artera is a two-time Best in KLAS winner in Patient Outreach.

For more information, visit www.artera.io.

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