How Mercury found a drastic improvement in efficiency and productivity

If you ask any entrepreneur if they like their bank, you’ll quickly get a list of pain points. Nothing about the experience is modern or delightful. Banking can be challenging, confusing and complicated, especially for startups. There are a million things to manage already. That’s why Mercury was born—to enable founders and finance teams to spend less time thinking about banking.

Mercury offers vibrant community programs that provide founders with the connections, advice, and resources to help them build the next great companies. While serving the startup world and building a community, Mercury heavily relies on user feedback. That’s where Canny comes in.

Challenge

Before adopting Canny, Ida Ström, Mercury’s senior product designer, was spending too much tracking feature requests. They would get requests in Slack and email, then tried using Notion and Linear to stay organized.

“Keeping track of all of them was getting messy. Now we use Canny as one source of truth. And it’s much easier to select which things we need to build and focus on them.”

Sometimes, adding another tool to your tech stack doesn’t really feel like a solution though.

“We already use so many different tools, so adopting a new one can come with its challenges. But Canny is so easy to use and so straightforward that switching to it felt natural.”

Solution

Canny offered a solution for every issue that Mercury was experiencing:

1. 1. Prioritization

   The voting feature helps them see which issues are more pressing than others and prioritize accordingly.

2. 2. Workload management

   They use the boards feature to make sure that feedback is triaged to the right team.

3. 3. Getting clarity

   They use comments to reach out and ask people for more details or context around the issues before they work on a solution.

Change doesn’t happen overnight though. Every process takes some time, and the team at Mercury was no different. Requests were still going into Slack for a couple months but then they people got used to it. However, according to Ida, this change was worth it.

“We actually saw an increase in user feedback because our users saw that we really do care about their feedback and invest in it.”

With Canny, the Mercury team does weekly Canny syncs where requests are prioritized and added to the roadmap.

Internal teams reap the benefits of Canny as well. When new features are launched, they're celebrated.

“We always mention if that was a request that initially came from Canny. We give a shout out to the person who submitted it and use a special Canny emoji in Slack. This shows to our users that their requests matter and makes them feel special.”

The Mercury team also streamlines their workflows with Canny integrations like Slack. It allows them to be more efficient because they don't need to switch between apps or browser tabs.

Results

Mercury’s team saw a drastic improvement in efficiency and productivity thanks to Canny.

“We use Canny as a way to distribute product thinking across the team. Now that everything is in one place, it’s so much easier and more efficient.”

They can see clearly that there are many requests that initiatially came from Canny and became shipped products, changes or features.

Overall, Ida truly believes in the importance of getting feedback. And Canny is there to help her and her team to manage it in the best way possible.

“It’s very important to get feedback. Whether you use feedback for your external customers or internal teams, Canny builds a bridge for you. And that’s extremely important for building high quality products.”