The Hamburg startup that made deciding what to build its whole business

Ask a product manager how they spend their week and you will rarely hear "inventing the future." You will hear about the feedback inbox nobody has triaged, the roadmap that is already out of date, the strategy deck that says one thing while the sprint board says another. Somewhere in that gap between what customers ask for and what actually gets built, whole quarters disappear. airfocus was founded on the unglamorous bet that the gap itself is the product opportunity.

Started in Hamburg in 2017 by Malte Scholz, Christian Hoffmeister, and Valentin Firak, airfocus began as a single, sharp tool: a way to prioritize features without turning every planning meeting into an argument. Scholz had lived the problem as a product manager - juggling spreadsheets, slide decks, and gut feeling - and built the thing he wished he had. From that narrow starting point, the company kept adding pieces until it had a full platform for running product work.

One connected system, not five tabs

airfocus is a product management platform. In plain terms, it is where a team decides what to build, in what order, and why - then shows everyone the plan. It collects customer feedback, scores and prioritizes ideas against strategy, turns the winners into roadmaps, tracks progress against OKRs, and publishes a branded portal so customers can see what is coming. The pitch has never been "we do one thing best." It is "the pieces finally talk to each other."

The design choice that separates airfocus from most rivals is modularity. Rather than forcing every team into one rigid template, it lets teams assemble the workspace they need - a scoring framework here, a Kanban roadmap there - and connect it to the tools they already run on, like Jira, Azure DevOps, Trello, and Asana. A favorite touch is "Priority Poker," which turns the usually contentious job of ranking features into a structured, almost game-like session where everyone scores at once.

Product teams who outgrew the spreadsheet

The customers are product managers, product leaders, and the cross-functional crowd around them - engineering, design, and go-to-market - at mid-market and enterprise companies. These are organizations with enough products, teams, and stakeholders that alignment stops being casual and starts being a job. Named users include Ricoh Europe, Oodrive, Papirfly, and Visit Group. One customer used airfocus to bring 32 products and more than 300 services under a single, coherent setup in roughly a year - work that traditionally drags on for two or three.

Software's bottleneck moved

airfocus makes an argument worth sitting with: as AI speeds up the writing of code, the hard part of building software is no longer engineering throughput - it is agreement. What to build, for whom, and why. When teams disagree quietly, or agree on stale information, they ship the wrong thing quickly, which is worse than shipping the right thing slowly. The platform exists to make alignment cheap and continuous rather than expensive and occasional, replacing the static roadmap that is wrong the moment it is printed with something that updates as reality does.

Modular, not monolithic

The product management category is crowded - Productboard, Aha!, ProductPlan, Roadmunk, Craft.io, and Atlassian's own Jira Product Discovery all fight for the same buyer. airfocus's answer has been flexibility. Where some competitors ship an opinionated, all-in-one workflow you adapt to, airfocus hands you building blocks you adapt to yourself, then wires them into your existing delivery stack instead of trying to replace it.

Subscriptions, and a new owner

airfocus runs on a straightforward B2B SaaS model: subscription software sold in two tiers, Professional and Enterprise, both priced on request. Multiple workspaces come under one subscription with no per-workspace surcharge, and Enterprise layers on portfolio dashboards, capacity planning, SCIM provisioning, and a dedicated success manager. Then, in April 2025, the ownership question got a new answer - Lucid Software acquired airfocus, folding it in alongside Lucidspark and Lucidchart so teams could move from loose ideation to structured product work without leaving the family.

Agents that read your product context

Under Lucid, airfocus has leaned into the AI-era pitch. In 2026 it shipped what it calls a Product Intelligence Platform: a connected layer that unifies feedback, strategy, OKRs, roadmaps, and delivery in one data model, plus AI agents that triage incoming feedback, co-author product requirement docs, and draft stakeholder updates. The technical piece that raised eyebrows is a bidirectional MCP server - a way to make a team's live product context readable and writable by the AI agents already running in their stack. Whether or not that becomes standard, it is a clear statement of where airfocus thinks the work is heading: humans and agents planning from the same source of truth.

The through-line, from a Hamburg spreadsheet-killer in 2017 to an agent-ready platform in 2026, is consistent. airfocus keeps betting that the scarce resource on a product team is not effort or ideas - it is a shared, current picture of what matters. Build that, keep it honest, and the rest of the work gets easier.