Turning "why this approach?" into product strategy

A 20-person team, moving fast without pausing for clarity.

Boomerang's founders, including the CTO and CRO, were racing to ship under real investor pressure to show momentum fast. What got built worked as individual pieces, but none of it connected into a system a rep could actually rely on.

Nobody was asking why before building.

Every customer call produced a new feature idea, and the backlog grew faster than the team could ship or measure any of it. I flagged the core problem early, but there was no room for that conversation yet - Mutual Success Plan shipped anyway, and it failed. That's when the real question showed up: what do we do next. Three months of silence and roadmap thinking followed before Warm Referral came out of it.

I initiated it, and owned the whole workflow.

Warm Referral wasn't handed to me - it came out of the three months of ideation after the pivot. I spent that time going through hundreds of sales tools to understand how they positioned themselves and where the real gaps in the market were, and going back to an influencer map I'd built as part of Mutual Success Plan - org structure, and the individual influencers sitting inside a buying team.

That map became the base I kept building on: I started asking what other data we could surface to a rep beyond it, and the Chrome extension idea came directly out of that question. The proposal that landed was simple - surface the data inside the workflow a rep already lived in, instead of asking them to adopt something new. That's the idea that changed the direction of the company.

I owned the complete workflow end to end from there: how a lead gets understood the moment it lands in the CRM, how a warm path gets surfaced, and how the ask actually gets sent. That meant working directly with the founder, CTO, and CRO on product direction, not just screens - it became the new roadmap.

Since the workflow was mine to build, I created it end to end and validated it directly with partners, with the CEO in the room. My own team was three designers who'd been split across the website and marketing workstream - we were small enough that working with engineering, marketing, and product wasn't a separate ritual, it was just how the day went. Three months of design and partner validation later, we had our first customers.

The system is fully automated once a rep connects their CRM. When a new lead lands in Salesforce, Warm Referral reads it, cross-references the account's org chart and each stakeholder's work history, and surfaces the warmest path in - through a Chrome extension that overlays directly on Salesforce or LinkedIn.

A rep picks a path, and the system drafts and sends the referral ask by email or Slack. Once the connector responds, the referral gets added straight into the rep's lead list. None of these tools were built to talk to each other, so getting Salesforce, LinkedIn, and a Chrome extension to work as one continuous workflow meant chaining automations across all three - a pattern I leaned on from automation work I'd done earlier at Zoho.

These numbers came from Mixpanel, which tracked rep activity through the rollout, not an estimate. The Chrome extension is what took Warm Referral to Armis, a $300M-ARR cybersecurity company - that's where Boomerang's enterprise story actually started. The product is now Boomerang's core offering, live today at getboomerang.ai.

I'm incredibly proud to know Vignesh as a phenomenal colleague and an incredible friend. Vignesh was one of the first people to join us at BuyerAssist (Boomerang) and someone who truly brought his full self into our small startup team. I'm a big fan of the passion and user-first perspective Vignesh brings to the whole decision-making process. He's a self-starter and someone who's always challenging himself and pushing the limits.- Shyam HN, CEO & Founder, Boomerang.ai