Land & Expand is a series of articles for founders building from India to the world. In part 1, Rocketlane’s co-founder and Chief Product Officer Vignesh Girishankar shares his playbook — gleaned from over a decade of building enterprise products. The team’s deliberate approach, underpinned by the philosophy of "slow is smooth, smooth is fast" is a blueprint for founders looking to build products that land well with customers right off the bat.

In January 2020, just as the world stood on the brink of a global pandemic, Vignesh Girishankar made a rare and difficult call. He turned down term sheets from top-tier VCs for his new idea.

“We’ll come back when we’ve thought this through.” Vignesh, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Rocketlane, told investors. It wasn’t his first high-stakes call. In his last stint, he had helped build Freshchat into one of the fastest growing products at Freshworks—without moving to the U.S., or even traveling there frequently. That journey taught him how to build category-leading software from India for the world.

Building for U.S. enterprise customers from Chennai, with no plans to relocate, wasn’t going to be easy. And yet, within a year of launch, Rocketlane became a category-leading product with customers like Salesloft, Clari & Moveworks, and with recognition from platforms like G2 and Gartner. We spoke to Vignesh about his journey to PMF, and his product philosophy.

Lessons from the Past

Before Rocketlane, there was Konotor—a startup born out of ambition, not so much from experience, and ultimately absorbed into Freshworks, one of India’s most iconic SaaS stories.

Konotor started as “WhatsApp for voice,” way back in 2012, the year that 4G was launched in India and smartphones were about to become commonplace. When it didn’t take off as a consumer app, Vignesh pivoted into building customer service for mobile apps and targeted B2B customers.

Around the same time, Freshworks was looking to expand into mobile customer service. In 2015, the two teams joined forces through an acquisition. Within Freshworks, Konotor, now rebranded as Hotline, was adopted by clients like Zomato, who soon began asking for a web interface. But Vignesh’s product was still mobile-only. Meanwhile, Intercom was gaining momentum, and chat-based support was rapidly becoming mainstream.

Vignesh was admittedly rigid in how he saw the world, and how he believed customers should engage with their product. “We were dogmatic about being mobile-only.” recalls Vignesh.

“Sales teams told us customers wanted a web interface too. We ignored them for years. When we finally made the switch to web + mobile, Freshchat took off.”

The breakthrough came when Vignesh let go of that purist worldview, a year into the acquisition after Hotline failed to take off, and leaned into market pull. In late 2016, he made a third pivot, rebuilding the product into a chat-first customer service platform for both web and mobile. While Intercom was resonating with early-stage product managers, Freshworks’ customer service DNA gave Vignesh a different advantage: he positioned Freshchat squarely for mid-market support teams.

The result? Freshchat became the fastest-growing product in the Freshworks portfolio, hitting $3M in ARR in its first year and eventually $13 million with anchor customers like Discover Cards and Klarna. A star product that very nearly failed in its early innings.

The lesson? As Srikrishnan Ganesan, the CEO & Co-founder of Rocketlane, wrote in a 2017 Hackernoon article: The market trumps all. Freshchat’s breakthrough didn’t come from building faster. It came from listening better in a market that offered momentum (AKA an idea whose time has come).   

The team committed to entering large markets, but only with a clear product wedge. They chose to play to their strengths, align with pull from real users, and hold off on building until they had clarity.

That hard-won mindset shaped everything that followed.

From Rough Thoughts to Refined Ideas: The Big Market and the Wedge

Primed with the lessons from Konotor, Hotline and Freshchat, the Rocketlane team knew one thing for certain: clarity must come before code.

“We weren’t in it for a middling outcome,” says Vignesh, now a seasoned founder with over 15 years of product-building experience. And experience taught him that he couldn't “just build a better mousetrap and sell it for a third of the price.”

Rocketlane, founded with Vignesh’s long-time friends and collaborators Srikrishnan Ganesan (CEO) and Deepak Bala (CTO), needed a clear wedge: a killer feature that did one thing exceptionally well for a well-defined persona. A job to be done well, if you get our drift. 

The idea: a sleek blend of Jira and Confluence for internal project management, sounded great. The funding was real. But the conviction wasn’t.

The idea stemmed from their own experience at Freshchat, where they’d used tools like Jira, Confluence, and Asana to manage implementation projects, and constantly ran into friction. They believed there had to be a better way to build project management that was intuitive and easy. Like Notion or Airtable, but for projects. They pitched this idea to VCs, received term sheets, then decided to walk away. Something felt amiss.

“We asked ourselves, what’s our right to win? And we didn’t have a good answer. A better UI? Cheaper pricing? None of that gives you structural advantage.” 

The market was crowded. Software giants such as Microsoft came in at the top, and scrappy startups like Asana and Smartsheets snapped at their feet. A better user interface (UI) or a cheaper product wouldn’t be enough. They were searching for a wedge—an underserved entry point into a large, growing market, where they could build long-term structural advantage. 

Vignesh had a hypothesis: A large chunk of projects, maybe even 50%, were customer-facing. He spent hours lurking in public forums digging into any thread that mentioned “clients” or “customers.” These weren’t just complaints. They were early signals of latent demand. One user would mention how hard it was to invite customers into Asana. Another would talk about duplicating onboarding templates, again and again. Some wanted a “professional-looking” project plan to share externally.

So, internal tooling was crowded. But customer-facing project delivery? Still manual, clunky, and underserved—especially in the mid-market and enterprise segments. But this wasn’t just a feature gap. It was a strategic beachhead to the much larger professional services market, where teams have to collaborate with customers and each other deeply. 

How did they get there? Deep research. 

80+ Conversations, 200+ Hours of Show and Tell

Rather than jump into building, the team committed to world-class discovery. They conducted over 80 interviews, clocking more than 200 hours of recorded calls. But these weren’t opinion polls or pitch meetings. They were walkthroughs. This was primary research at its finest.

Rocketlane’s team asked every participant to show—not tell—how they currently handled onboarding. That meant screen-sharing internal trackers, email templates, project sheets, and even hacked-together customer portals built on Notion or Drive.

“We weren’t looking for validation. We were looking for pain,” said Vignesh. The kind people solve manually because no product helps them do it better. “We were also looking for the intensity of pain to help prioritize.” 

They saw onboarding teams duplicating Smartsheets manually for every new customer. They saw deal notes scattered across Slack threads. They saw delivery teams guessing which tasks were customer-facing, and which weren’t.

The team created a set of Figma mockups: lightweight, visual prototypes that brought their evolving ideas to life. These weren’t just design artifacts—they became a tool to drive clarity and conversation. Prospects reacted to what they saw, not abstract explanations. It helped the team refine the interface, validate workflows, and discard ideas without writing a line of code.

“It’s 10x easier to change your mind at the screen level than after you’ve written code.” Vignesh explained. 

When you're listening carefully, weak signals become strong patterns. The team would quickly create mockups and showcase them in subsequent calls. “We then let the customers guide us,” said Vignesh. This way, they arrived at patterns and features.

Day One Differentiators

Two standout features shaped Rocketlane’s earliest product bets:

1. Multi-Org collaboration from day one

Teams were trying to collaborate with customers inside tools built for internal workflows. The result? Chaos. Customers were either left out entirely or exposed to messy backend data.

Rocketlane made multi-org collaboration a first-class primitive. In product management, primitive refers to a foundational building block used to build on top of.  Even tools like Slack and Asana hadn’t fully solved multi org collaboration. Customers, vendors, and internal teams could all interact in one place—with magic links for seamless login, scoped access, visibility controls, and login flows tailored to each party. They also built automated project updates that were sent to the customer on a preset schedule.

The other feature, a customer facing portal, came from the ‘throwaway line’ we wrote about earlier. 

2. Customer-First by Design

Implementation and onboarding teams wanted to look sharp in front of customers—but existing tools were no good and teams often hacked together different tools to onboard customers and give them progress updates. This not only meant tedious work, but also took longer for a customer to start paying — in other words, time to revenue was longer. 

Rocketlane built a dedicated customer portal: login-free, magic-link access with clean visuals and scoped project views. This wasn’t fluff. It addressed a core business outcome: customer confidence for one and secondly, lower time to revenue.  It helped teams establish credibility from Day 1 of the relationship.

The idea was to build parts of the wedge well so customers would be delighted and not peg them lower than the products they were used to.

For the first time ever, Rocketlane has opened up this internal deck, originally presented at a closed-door SaasBoomi Roundtable, for public viewing.

A rare look into the product decisions, pivots, and playbook behind Rocketlane's 0–1 journey. Download it here.

Build, but with discipline 

With conviction in their wedge and clarity in user pain, the team moved to building—but with discipline. This meant focusing on high-conviction features, letting ideas marinate, thinking outside in and building a foundation that could last well into the future. 

Feature Differentiation

Rocketlane didn’t aim for parity with project management tools. They targeted 10x differentiation in specific areas: templating, visibility, onboarding workflows, and client interaction.

They built templates that adapted dynamically based on what the customer bought. They enabled automatic project generation. And they surfaced performance insights based on repeatable, structured delivery (this again, came from a customer insight that they wanted to figure out time to revenue with a new client). They also invested time in building an extensive projects module, because customers moving over from MS projects or Asana would see that as an absolute must-have. 

Prioritization: Ruthless, Not Reckless

The team prioritised only the things that helped them test their core thesis. For example, Rocketlane didn’t build billing integrations until they crossed $1M ARR. They didn’t segment features by pricing tier. They avoided dashboards and internal tooling.

“We gave everyone all the features. No plans. No gating. If it didn’t validate our core thesis, we didn’t build it,” Vignesh said.

At the same time, they didn’t shy away from hard builds when those were essential. Salesforce was their first integration—despite HubSpot being easier—because it opened doors to high-value enterprise accounts.

Developing Ideas with Depth

Good ideas weren’t rushed. They were allowed to marinate. Product and design stayed 3–6 months ahead of engineering, iterating on mocks before committing code. This gave them room to explore, discard, and refine—without racking up tech debt.

“It's easier to throw away a screen than to undo a sprint,” said Vignesh.

A large part of this ‘marination’ is to use their own products — the practice, known as dogfooding, is taken seriously. Rocketlane uses Rocketlane to onboard customers, of course. This also extends to new features.

This slow-cook approach ensured the ideas that made it into code had already been tested for shape, clarity, and customer resonance.

Outside-In, Not Inside-Out

Every feature starts with user pain. The term “feature requests” is banned inside the company. Everyone is compelled to use customer language only. The team has to articulate the problem, not just the solution. “Don’t tell me what you want. Tell me what hurts,” is the rule, says Vignesh, who starts his day listening to customer call recordings.

This keeps the product anchored in customer experience, not internal speculation.

Building a Product That Evolves With You

Rocketlane avoided shortcuts that would come back to bite them. Access controls, permissioning, and multi-org scaffolding were solid from Day 1.

They understood that SaaS products eventually become interlocking systems. If built sloppily, they slow you down. If built right, they compound speed.

They avoided “one-way doors”—decisions that would be hard to reverse later—and made sure to keep the system extensible from the start.

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The Rocketlane Way: Thoughtfulness as a Habit

Perhaps the most important thing Rocketlane built early wasn’t a feature. It was a culture that delivered great product quality.

Every Friday, the whole team runs a live demo. Engineers, designers, and PMs show what they’ve built that week. UI, copy, UX—everything is critiqued, live.

“It sets the bar. Everyone sees what great looks like,” said Vignesh.

The habit forces clarity, creates accountability, and aligns everyone on quality. It’s not a ceremony or a checklist activity—it’s a feedback system.

Combined with outside-in thinking and careful prioritization, Rocketlane’s culture made sure their product didn’t just work—it felt right. The approach is a bit like sculpting, Girishankar notes. They chisel away at a block of insight until the shape is obvious. 

The team has set its sights higher now: to consolidate their position as the modern leader in client project delivery, expand its offering to become the default option for anyone thinking about running collaborative initiatives with customers.

Like what you read? This is just the start of our Land & Expand series. Follow Pranay Desai for updates.

Penned with ❤️ by Z47 & SaaSBoomi