For this first article of 2024, we warmly welcome you to Closd with a portrait of Antonin, Head of Product, who has been leading the Product department for two years.
Antonin sheds light on his role, missions, features launched in 2023, and gives a glimpse into what’s ahead for 2024.
Can you explain your role as Head of Product at Closd?
As Head of Product at Closd, my responsibilities encompass overseeing Product teams, formulating and executing strategy, supervising development, and ensuring roadmap execution aligns with customer expectations and company growth.
I collaborate closely with other managers to implement, align, and execute product strategies.
What are your main challenges on a daily basis?
My daily challenges involve listening to customers, internal teams, and stakeholders, maintaining a balance between technical, marketing, data, and UX aspects.
It’s a comprehensive role with no typical day but plenty of meetings.
We know today that it is important to have a customer-centric approach for the success of a product. How does this approach materialize at Closd?
At Closd, a customer-centric approach is vital. We engage with customers throughout discovery, design, and development phases.
The Closd User Club, launched last year, fosters exchange with customers, gathering their ideas and suggestions.
Continuous feedback collection and analysis, facilitated by Productboard, guides our feature prioritization.
What were the features and new developments deployed in 2023?
We take pride in having launched several significant features last year, including:
#1 : Our data room solution provides a secure and controlled space to share and review confidential documents with an unlimited number of users, particularly beneficial for due diligence and other legal or financial audits. This enhances our current offerings for legal and financial professionals, especially in certain M&A operations.
#2 : In March, we integrated a qualified electronic signature into our project management solution. This signature represents the highest level of security in the market, proving the digital identity of the signer through authentication, emphasizing the voluntary nature of the signature with a unique and secure imprint. It is further attested by the issuance of a qualified electronic signature certificate.
#3 : The eagerly awaited “Group documents” feature allows customers to send and have up to 15 documents signed in a single send. This feature significantly saves time for project managers and signatories, enabling them to sign all relevant documents at once.
#4 : In June, the platform integrated the ability to send documents in a bulk. This allows customers to send an individualized copy of the same document to several different signatories with just one click. This feature proves particularly useful in fundraising, company transfers, and sending HR documents involving numerous employees.
#5 : Lastly, for a few days now, users can create and save document templates and reuse pre-set documents in a signing session. This functionality, beneficial for NDAs and commercial leases, brings real productivity gains to our customers in handling repetitive document setup tasks.
Can you tell us about your vision for the coming year?
Currently, we are intensely engaged in crafting the strategy and planning features for 2024. Our primary focus revolves around three key areas:
- launching new features ;
- enhancing existing ones ;
- and resolving bugs.
With each release, our objective is to enrich and elevate the client and user experience, aspiring to position Closd as a comprehensive Transaction Management platform covering dataroom, project management, signatures, and archiving.
In 2024, our efforts will center on the following features and improvements:
- Enabling users to edit and modify documents directly within the solution, facilitated by Microsoft Office integration
- Allowing the redacting feature (hiding) of information on Data Room solution documents and providing more nuanced management of the Q&A component.
- Delivering a more modern interface and an even simpler, more intuitive experience through the integration of a new Design (System) and UX enhancements for highly utilized features like the Signing session and the checklist ;
- Providing access to LexisNexis checklist templates and allowing users to import checklists from an Excel file for increased productivity;
- Introducing the capability to generate document summaries, comparisons, and questions using Generative AI to enhance efficiency. In this regard, we leverage technological advancements and insights from the LexisNexis group, to which we belong.
They recently launched their Lexis+ AI solution after months of collaboration and experimentation with around fifty law firms, including Baker McKenzie, Reed Smith, and Foley & Lardner. Further details are available here.
The final word?
In concluding, at Closd, our product is central to our ambitions. We strive to be a global leader in legal project management with a secure, efficient, and user-friendly product.
Our ongoing challenge is to enhance the customer and user experience by continually enriching the solution with new features while preserving its user-friendly simplicity.
