Building Products That Never Stop Evolving: Sprint CV Lessons

As a founder, one of the questions I hear most often is: “Where do you see your product in a year?” It sounds simple, but it’s one of the hardest answers. When you build products and companies, especially in a SaaS context, you are constantly experiencing change. The tools grow, your users grow, the market grows. If you want to stay relevant, your product must also evolve.

At Sprint CV, our approach to product development has always been about adaptability, customer feedback and continuous improvement. We believe that successful agile product strategies come from closeness to users, not from rigid long-term plans. Planning too far ahead often feels unrealistic. That doesn’t mean that vision isn’t important, but it is. But true innovation rarely follows a calendar. That happens if you listen carefully, act quickly, and solve real problems in a timely manner.

Why Long Term Product Planning Can Be Limiting

When people ask me where SprintCV will be in a year, I think about how many times we’ve had to pivot. We don’t stick to a strict roadmap. Instead, we work in short, agile development sprints of two to three months, constantly rolling out new features, testing, and improving.

Each sprint brings us closer to what our users actually need. Every demo, sales call, or support chat provides valuable insight that influences our next steps. After eight years, one thing is clear: staying close to customers is the best product strategy ever.

No matter how much planning you do, user feedback will always surprise you. That’s why our products are never final. It is a living system that changes every day. Of course we have direction and goals. But priorities keep changing. A new technology can appear overnight and change everything. Large clients may uncover usability issues we never anticipated. That’s the beauty—and challenge—of agile product evolution.

When One Feedback Changes Everything

I’ll never forget the summer of 2023. That’s when I first tried ChatGPT, and I knew immediately that it would change everything. Within minutes, I realized the potential of automation and AI-based product innovation. I stopped all other projects and made integrating this technology our top priority.

We saw an opportunity to automate repetitive work: writing summaries, handling translations, revising CVs. The decision to pivot was quick and instinctive, but that’s what building a thriving product requires, namely adaptability. Then came May 2025. We took on a huge client base: eight different companies, over 150 recruiters. This should have been a historical milestone, but instead it became a turning point. We started receiving feedback we didn’t expect:

• “The platform felt too complicated.”
• “We weren’t sure how to use it.”

At first, it was frustrating. But as a founder, you learn that negative feedback from users is the most valuable. That moment led to one of our biggest product enhancements: Mailbox AI CV Parser. This simplifies the way recruiters handle CVs and makes our platform intuitive again. That’s how agile product development works. This is not a straight line. It’s a conversation between your product and your users.

When Feedback Hurts but Helps Build the Product

Not all comments are pleasant to hear. Several years ago, we repeatedly complained about our CV parser. At that time, we used a third-party tool, Textkernel. We hear things like:

• “It doesn’t parse the language properly.”
• “It doesn’t meet certification.”
• “It’s easier to do it manually than to fix the parser.”

As a founder, it hurts. You put your heart into your product, and hearing that it fails for your customers is hard. But what is even more difficult is realizing that they are right. Rather than blaming external providers, we decided to take control. I gathered the team and said: “We will build our own AI CV Parser from scratch.”

One month later, Sprint CV has an AI-powered CV parser: faster, smarter, and completely under our control. Now, if something breaks, we fix it ourselves. That ownership changes everything: product performance, client trust, and team motivation. Negative feedback is no longer a threat. This becomes fuel for progress.

Listening: The Founder’s Most Powerful Tool

In the startup world, people love to talk about leadership, vision, and innovation. But there is one skill that is often overlooked: listening. If you want your company to grow, you have to really listen to clients, users, and even critics.

When you listen deeply, you realize most users don’t know exactly what they want. But they always show what they need. Your job as a founder is to translate that into meaningful product decisions. Many founders hide behind analytics and dashboards. But numbers don’t tell you how users feel. Talking to them does.

That’s why I still participate in demos, training sessions, and support discussions. They keep me close to reality. At SprintCV, our culture is built on one belief: feedback drives growth. Even today, I remind my team: The most valuable feedback is negative feedback. It shows directly what needs to be improved. Happy users sustain your success. Unhappy makes you better.

Built for Today, Not Someday: The Mindset for Building Adaptive Products

One of the most important startup lessons I learned was simple: build for today. In the early days of Sprint CV, our admin tools weren’t perfect. But no one needs it yet. We focus on features that solve immediate problems and save time for our users.

Then, when larger clients came along with more complex workflows, we adapted quickly. Within a month, we built the missing pieces. It’s an agile product strategy in features that prioritizes actions that provide value today, not hypothetical features for next year.

Not every update has to be groundbreaking. Some make workflows smoother. Others improve compliance, clarity, or user satisfaction. Every little improvement will add up. The key is to focus on what’s important right now.

Failure, Flexibility, and Focus

Not all ideas turn into success stories. Some features you think are revolutionary may not work at all. The other party will only make minor repairs. And that’s great. Failure is part of innovation.

Every founder must accept that product evolution involves experimentation, learning, and iteration. Every “failure” is just information that shows you what worked and what didn’t. The secret is flexibility: knowing when to move on and when to double down.

Product development it’s not about building everything possible. It’s about building what really matters to your users.

The Product is Never Finished: The Continuous Journey of Building a Product

If I had to summarize the Sprint CV philosophy, it would be this: the product is never finished. Month by month, quarter by quarter, we review what’s working, what’s not, and how to make it better. There is no final version, no static roadmap—just continuous improvement.

Recently, we launched Sprinty, our AI Chatbot Assistant that helps recruiters evaluate candidates faster. It wasn’t part of our original plan, but came directly from user observations. That’s what I love most about SaaS product innovation: the best ideas rarely come from long-term planning. They come from listening, observing, and acting in the moment.

Listening Is Real Product Strategy

Everything I’ve learned as a founder, can be summarized as follows: Don’t fall in love with your roadmap. Fall in love with your customers’ problems. Great products are not created in isolation. They are built through conversation, trust, and humility.

At Sprint CV, we thrive by embracing change, not resisting it. Every piece of feedback, every shift in priorities, and every new idea has helped us grow. So, if you’re building a product, stop worrying about what it will look like in a year. Focus on the current situation. Make sure it solves real problems, creates real value, and continues to improve.

Because in the end, the best products are the ones that never stop improving—just like the people who created them. Let us help you grow too: Book your demo today!