Why Your CRM Needs to Be Managed Like a Product

Most organizations don’t launch a new website and then walk away from it for five years, but that’s exactly how many treat their CRM systems. After a months-long implementation, they go live with a sense of relief… and then the system quietly stagnates.

But your CRM is not a static tool. It’s a living, breathing system that evolves alongside your organization. It intersects with fundraising, communications, program delivery, events, volunteers, and more. When managed well, a CRM becomes the engine that drives insight, coordination, and impact. When neglected, it becomes a cluttered and confusing liability, misaligned with how your organization actually works.

To get the most from your investment, your CRM needs more than support tickets and quarterly clean-ups. It needs vision. It needs strategy. It needs someone who owns its success.

In short: your CRM needs to be managed like a product.

What It Means to “Manage a Product”

Product management is the practice of aligning people, technology, and business value. Good product management means maintaining a vision, prioritizing features, balancing stakeholder input, and ensuring the product is always delivering value.

In the world of software, a product is never “done.” It evolves through feedback, iteration, and roadmap planning. The same should be true for your CRM.

CRMs are deeply embedded in operations. They touch every team, every process, and every report. The way your organization tracks constituents, manages programs, or measures success is constantly shifting. If your CRM isn’t adapting to those changes, it quickly falls out of sync.

Without product management:

• Small requests pile up with no prioritization.
• Staff builds workarounds in external systems like Excel or Google Forms.
• Automations break and no one notices.
• Users lose trust in the system or never adopt it at all.

Managing your CRM platform like a product ensures continuous alignment between your system and your strategy. It helps you avoid the cycle of expensive overhauls every few years and replaces it with thoughtful, incremental improvement.

Signs Your CRM Needs Product Management

How do you know if your CRM is being treated like a product or just left to drift? Here are a few red flags:

• There’s no roadmap (i.e., big-picture plan) or backlog (i.e., prioritized to-do list), just an inbox of requests.
• Different teams use different tools for the same task.
• No one is quite sure who “owns” Salesforce.
• Reports don’t reflect reality or take hours to compile.
• There’s data in spreadsheets, data from the CRM in spreadsheets, and data that should be in the CRM living only in spreadsheets. And the spreadsheets are multiplying.
• New users say onboarding feels like trial and error.

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s time to rethink how you’re stewarding your CRM.

What Good CRM Product Management Looks Like

A well-managed CRM isn’t perfect, but it’s responsive. It adapts to your needs without disrupting your flow. That typically includes:

• A governance structure: Clear roles, decision rights, and processes.
• Regular stakeholder check-ins: To gather feedback and share updates.
• A prioritized backlog: So the right work gets done at the right time.
• Metrics and KPIs: To track usage, data quality, and system value.
• Iteration, not overhaul: Continuous improvement through small changes.

Just like a product, your CRM should evolve based on what’s creating value for users and address what’s holding them back.

How Salesforce Partners Can Fill the Product Management Role

Not every organization has the capacity to dedicate a full-time product owner to CRM. Sometimes the responsibility falls across multiple departments, the person managing Salesforce has deep system knowledge but limited time for strategic planning, or CRM upgrades are assigned to IT teams with less frequent exposure to industry trends influencing the company’s direction.

That’s where experienced Salesforce partners, like Arkus Inc., can step in. We’ve seen it across dozens of organizations: the CRM gets implemented, then the team gets pulled in too many directions to drive it forward strategically. That’s why we approach our client relationships as more than just technical delivery. We act as thought partners, guides, and yes, product managers. We don’t just implement features, but help you think like a product team by:

• Clarifying vision and goals: Translating organizational strategy into a CRM roadmap.
• Prioritizing for impact: Helping you weigh which enhancements deliver the most value.
• Facilitating stakeholder alignment: Making sure voices are heard and decisions are made.
• Delivering with agility: Implementing changes iteratively, with rapid feedback and improvement.
• Acting as a steward: Keeping the system aligned with your mission as needs evolve.
  
  

At Arkus, we often work with clients over multiple years, not just to "build something and walk away," but to co-create a living CRM ecosystem that gets better over time. We bring deep expertise in Salesforce architecture, operations, and user-centered design, and combine it with an agile approach that balances vision with execution.

Looking to get more out of your Salesforce investment? We can help. Arkus offers strategic CRM health checks, defined project implementation, and ongoing support to help you manage your system like a product – because that’s exactly what it is. Whether you’re launching a new CRM or trying to revive a legacy system, having a partner who acts like a product manager can be the difference between a CRM that merely exists and one that truly works. 

Reach out to our team through our contact form to learn how we can help your organization. We also invite you to stay connected to us by following Arkus on LinkedIn and subscribing to our newsletter and events lists by using the form in the sidebar to the right.