Case study Robin
Visitor Management
A 0→1 feature launch built on 40+ customer interviews. Took visitor management from concept to GA in a few months, helping Robin to compete and capture share from eleaders in the space like Envoy.
Robin, a workplace experience and management platform, had desk booking and conference room scheduling. The product had no visitor management, a category Envoy and a few others owned outright. Customers buying Robin for desks and rooms still bought a second tool just to check guests in at the door. Two logins, two admins, two invoices, one office.
- Ran 40+ interviews across IT managers, office managers, receptionists, legal, and security teams to map the real edge cases before writing a spec
- Ran a one-day design sprint with engineering instead of the usual week and walked out with a clear MVP
- Shipped thin in 2021: guest registration with email invites, a COVID health checkpoint, touchless check-in with a host alert, and a visit log. No custom forms, no badge printing, no host directory yet
- Layered in the rest as usage justified it: custom registration forms and NDA sign-off through 2022, badge printing and Slack/Teams host alerts by late 2023
Visitor management launched in 3 months and reached GA parity with the established players inside a year. It became a real line in Robin's revenue, over $4M in ARR. When I moved into a director role, the next PM inherited a roadmap built on 40 real conversations, not guesses. He told me later it made the handoff seamles and easy.
Deep dive
Robin's pitch wasn't "we built a better Envoy." It was consolidation. The launch post I wrote put the real customer question on the page directly: why are desk booking and guest tracking separate tools when they're both just ways to schedule an office visit? That question, not a feature list, was the wedge.
The MVP left things out on purpose. No custom forms, no badge printer support, no host directory. Just registration, a health check, touchless check-in, and a log, bundled into every existing plan at no extra cost. That last part mattered for adoption. It gave every current customer a reason to try it with zero procurement friction, which is where the usage data for the next 18 months came from.
The build-out that followed tracked real requests, not a backlog someone dreamed up in a planning offsite. Custom forms so admins could collect things like dietary needs. NDA and legal-document sign-off, since a meaningful share of interviewees were legal and security stakeholders worried about exactly that. Badge printing and Slack and Teams host alerts once hybrid offices needed guest awareness where employees actually spent their day. Robin later extended the same visitor software onto Neat's hardware line, running arrival displays on other companies' devices instead of Robin-only kiosks, which is its own signal the platform bet paid off.
The part I'd point to if you want the honest read: none of this beat Envoy on visitor management depth. We won by not making customers choose between a good desk booking tool and a good guest tool.