How Neon One's product team stopped doing in days what Obvious does in ten minutes
Days → 10 min
for manual research
“It has effectively become a key team member to help us be more productive and more effective in our work.”
Anna Van Cleef VP of Product Management, Neon One, Neon One
The challenge
The data problem
Neon One’s product fact base doesn’t live in one place. Churn insights, lost sales data, customer visit notes, survey results, Strategic Advisory Council feedback, competitive intel — each in its own source, many of them inconsistent with each other. Excel spreadsheets, a CRM, documents from the sales team, notes from customer success calls. “There’s a lot of different data,” Anna says, “and a lot of it comes from different sources.”
Before Obvious, making sense of it was a manual process. Product managers spent their time on alignment work — pulling data together, matching it up, writing report-outs — before they could get to the thinking. It was slow, and things slipped through.
The clearest example: when a nonprofit churned to a competitor, the team needed to know which one. The only way to find out was to visit each customer’s website, one by one, and piece it together by hand. Days of work to answer a question that should take minutes.
The solution
What changed
The speed improvement matters, but what Anna describes as the real shift is what Obvious does with context. Where other tools lost the thread — shared workspaces where the conversation disappeared, storage limits that capped how much you could bring in at once — Obvious kept it. Every artifact, every analysis, every dashboard built along the way stayed in the project workspace.
When Anna’s team came in to continue the work, they weren’t starting over. “When my team came in, they had that context and they could keep going based on all the artifacts already created.”
That persistence changed how Obvious functions in the work. Anna calls it a “brainstorming and challenging partner” — something that builds with you rather than responding and forgetting. It doesn’t just retrieve. It thinks alongside.
The result
What it means for the mission
The results landed higher than expected. “The CEO was shocked. Our CTO was shocked. This is something we hadn’t been able to accomplish before.”
Neon One exists to remove friction for nonprofits — the administrative burden, the back-end complexity — so the people running those organizations can spend their time on what they’re actually there to do: building relationships, engaging their communities, advancing their mission.
When Obvious made Neon One’s product team faster and more precise, the effect ran downstream. Better product decisions meant nonprofits fighting houselessness or food insecurity got tools that actually worked for them, without having to patch gaps with additional solutions. Fewer workarounds. More of their money going where it was supposed to go.
“We want to be able to support them in a similar way to how Obvious is now helping to support us.”
