Hi Benchling Community! My name is Shawna Wolverton, and I’m the Chief Product Officer here at Benchling. I joined Benchling in June 2022 to bring my experience in building SaaS products at companies like Salesforce and Zendesk to help make science better, faster, and more efficient.

I’m passionate about putting customers at the center of our product strategy. Doing this requires developing deep, deep empathy and opening up good communication channels, which is why I’m thrilled we’ve launched the Benchling Community to hear directly from users like you!

In the Benchling Community, you’ll find a few places to interact with our team, learn about our product strategy and – most importantly – make your voice heard.

💡 Ideas Portal 

Your go to place to share ideas and help us build better products. A few call outs before you dive in:

• Take a few minutes to read how we’ll review & respond to your ideas and how to write a great idea. These are your go to resources to understand how our process works and how to make your voice heard. Our goal is transparency – so if it’s not clear, reach out.
• So many different factors go into our roadmap planning. If my years of community experience have taught me anything, it's that you all will have many more ideas than we'll be able to deliver. Our commitment is to make this a place where we engage and are transparent about what we're prioritizing, and sometimes, what we're not.
• This is our first go at opening up a product ideas portal so it’s going to take a few iterations to get right – you’ll likely see some changes to the process over time but we’ll do our best to unpack what & why the process is changing and we’re here if you have questions.

🗞 Product News

• We know there’s a lot of product news coming your way from documentation to our quarterly what’s new releases, that’s why we’ve created a central place for you to discover, skill up & ask questions on all our product news.

📆 Events

• Keep your eyes peeled for regular AMA (ask me anything) events both virtually – here in the online community – and in-person at our offices. These will be informal chats between you, your peers and me and your product managers. We’re excited to hear your input, unpack our strategy and just talk it all out.

That’s all for now but we’ll talk soon! You can expect me and my team to be popping into the Community in the future to share updates, respond to your ideas & post more articles like this so you can get to know us a little better.