Feature Prioritization and Employee Retention at Front

Collin describes Front as a shared inbox with collaboration features and workflows for teams handling high volumes of email. The company later added individual inboxes, and she says 40% of daily active users used Front for both shared and individual email at the time of the interview.

Front made its roadmap public so users could vote on proposed features, and the team tracked common customer requests through incoming inquiries. Collin says they rated expected user benefit and implementation complexity on scales of one to three, while also weighing the company’s vision and need to stay focused. A change that let conversations flow beyond individual messages increased comments per daily active user, despite upsetting some customers at first.

Front launched a basic product without attachments to test whether assigning emails and adding comments solved a strong enough problem. Collin wrote content and personally onboarded beta users; she says 3,000 companies signed up, but perhaps 10 used the product. Those efforts helped the company reach about $1 million in ARR and roughly 1,000 customers before hiring its first marketing employee in January 2017. Collin says she felt closer to product-market fit around the Series A, when Front had about $1.5 million in ARR.

Collin attributes high employee retention and internal NPS to three factors: a clear mission, strong coworkers, and employees understanding their impact. Front’s mission, “Work happier,” was repeated across the growing company, and hiring emphasized talent and values such as low ego, high standards, collaboration, and care. To help people see their impact, the company reviewed metrics weekly and shared quarterly updates, board decks, and access to many customer inboxes, while keeping sensitive personal and compensation details private.

Collin describes her co-founder’s cancer diagnosis as her hardest moment and says it reminded her that life outside the company matters. She logs out of work apps on weekends and during time off, exercises, meditates, and aims for at least eight hours of sleep. At Front, wellness activities and a deliberate effort to make late nights and weekend work exceptions supported that approach.