About the company

Productboard is considered one of the fastest-growing technology startups, and it also appeared on the list of the World's 30 Most Powerful Technology Companies 2020. In the same year, Forbes magazine named it the most valuable startup in the Czech Republic. Productboard develops an online platform that helps companies and product managers develop their products.

What was the problem

The Czech branch of Productboard is located in the Palmovka district of Prague in the new business complex DOCK by the company Crestyl. Productboard's rapid growth brought with it rapidly filling offices and increasing demand on parking. Another specific feature of Productboard is that some employees commute to the office irregularly and from other parts of Europe. Most of these are employees commute for team meetings, making it difficult to maintain dedicated parking spaces.

Productboard takes a fair approach to its employees - so it wanted to provide a parking space for everyone. However, Productboard did not have that many parking spaces available. Additionally, employees were not yet fully oriented in the new offices and often did not even know which parking spaces belonged to Productboard.

Solution

We've deployed our Yedem Garage booking system for Productboard and created parking plans. Any Productboard employee who wants to park a car in the garage can reserve a parking space for a specific day or week in the Yedem Garage mobile app. When a parking space is allocated, the app notifies the user which space has been allocated and directs the user to it.

The deployment took place during the height of the pandemic in the spring of 2021, so the offices were half-empty. As the number of confirmed cases began to decline, office traffic slowly increased and the demand for parking spaces increased proportionately. Plus, there were employees at Productboard who need to get a parking space as a priority (they commute to the office in bursts and from farther away, so they always need to use a car). This gave the company the opportunity to assign a higher priority to these employees so that they would then be assigned a parking space every time they requested one.

Results

As soon as the number of reservations exceeded the number of available parking spaces, the system started to select the applicants based on our smart algorithm. On the following days, the selection process was repeated to include those who did not get parking spaces at the beginning of the week. In this way, it reaches all employees. Drivers could also see the number of bookings for a particular day in the app and see how likely they are to be allocated a parking space. This gave them an overview of which days they can drive to the office and when it's better for them to use another mode of transport or stay at home.

Employee satisfaction was enhanced by the certainty of where and when their parking space is available. If someone is already parked in a reserved parking space, it is immediately reported in the app and the system immediately assigns the driver a new parking space.

Facility management is also able directly assign parking spaces to visitors or important people in the company. People who have permanent parking spaces can free them up during their days off. This way, the space will be available to others during the absence of its owner. The administrator has an overview of the system when parking demand is at its highest and what is the traffic behavior of the employees. From this data, they can then easily assess whether the company needs more parking spaces or vice versa.

It is my pleasure to confirm that Productboard has found a reliable parking management solution partner in Yedem. Yedem Garage is an intuitive, easy to use application that provides fair parking allocation and easy administration.David Petříček - workplace experience lead, Productboard