Marking the first regional category in the Product Awards, our 2023 Québec Awards featured six innovative products hand-selected by our Québec Awards Advisory Board. The Awards Advisory Board comprises influential product leaders who determine verticals, interview industry leaders, and choose the winners.
Meet the three members of the Québec Awards Advisory Board below, and discover more about the six winning products.
The Québec Awards Advisory Members
Unito Director of Product Laura Di Costanzo
About Laura: Being curious about how things work led Laura to become a product manager in SaaS. From the product vision, she leads every stage of product development and collaborates with every department.
With 10+ years of experience working in early-stage startups, this is the environment she thrives in the most, contributing to building not only a product but a team, with the structure and the tools that are best adapted to help them reach their goals.
With a background in marketing, Laura now finds the most exciting part of product management when a product is being launched and getting the expected traction on the market, while envisioning what’s coming next.
Actively participating in the product community in Montreal & volunteering at TechAide events for years, she loves giving back to the tech community.
In continuity with her mission as a product manager, Laura directs the product team at Unito, implementing the structure and the tools needed to achieve goals. Unito automatically synchronizes projects, tasks, and conversations between different work management tools, allowing users to work seamlessly without switching tools all the time.
S&P Global Director of Product Jamie Matlin
About Jamie: Jamie is a senior product team leader with a track record of building and managing high-value desktop and mobile products and platforms. He drives product strategy, prioritization, development, and delivery with data, intuition, and customer-centricity. Jamie is acutely focused on connecting the dots between the “what” and the “how” in an ongoing pursuit to deliver business and customer value. He drives business strategy with continuous engagement with customers, stakeholders, and cross-functional teams.
As the S&P Director of Product Management, Jamie assumes the responsibilities of digital platform/mobile app development and management, product strategy & roadmap, elevating the user experience, user testing, embodying the voice of the customer, assessing usage analytics, SDLC, release management, and product and design team leadership.
Pender Ventures Partner Issac Souweine
About Isaac: Isaac is an early-stage investor and community builder based in Montreal, Canada. He is currently a partner at Pender Ventures, where he invests in early-stage software and digital health companies. Previously, he was a partner at Real Ventures, where he led a Québec-focused investment strategy and ran the firm’s accelerator, FounderFuel. Prior to joining Real, Isaac spent more than a decade as a product leader. This included stints at Sonder, Frank and Oak, Yahoo!, and Scholastic.
In addition to investing, Isaac is passionate about building communities. He is the co-founder of two meetups, BlinkBl-nk, and Product Tank Montreal. Isaac also co-founded APM Montreal, a community-based training program. He sits on the board of APM Canada and Front Row Ventures, Canada’s only student-run venture capital firm. Born and raised in Massachusetts, Isaac has lived and worked in New York, Singapore, Hawai’i, India, and now Canada. He has a BA from Columbia University in Religious Studies and an MBA from INSEAD.
About Our 2023 Québec Product Awards Winners
Libro
Elevate the reservation experience
In Libro’s own words: Just like our easy-to-use software, we keep it simple here at Libro. Our Quebec Awards winning product empowers restaurants with the tools to manage online reservations, increase dining room profits, and elevate the guest experience without pricey commission models.
Local Logic
You know the asset, we know the location
In Local Logic’s own words: When our founders Vincent-Charles Hodder and Gabriel Damant-Sirois met at McGill University’s Graduate School of Urban Planning, we were looking for a way to build better cities at scale. As we grew familiar with the real estate industry’s tool suite, we realized all players – no matter their size – still relied on intuition and gut feeling to make major decisions.
We decided to fill that gap and build a tool that would provide objective, quantifiable data, and metrics. This way, the real estate industry could remove the guesswork from their processes and accelerate decision-making.
Local Logic was born. Our mission was clear: digitizing location to help build more livable and sustainable cities through granular and powerful insights.
Planned
Where your events come together
In Planned’s own words: Humans are social animals. We are happier when we connect with each other, we thrive when we feel we belong.
At Planned, we believe that in-person events—with employees, clients, partners, or all of the above—are the foundation of a strong culture. Our mission is to help companies bring people together through exceptional events that cannot be re-created at home.
ReviewStudio
Online proofing and creative workflow software
In ReviewStudio’s own words: Founded back in 2014, we were a team of art directors and creators frustrated by the challenges of coordinating feedback and approval. At the time, we were working on a film production involving teams spread over several continents.
We recognized that there had to be a more efficient way to review and get approvals on creative project elements.
In our research, we discovered a clear need for an intuitive, easy-to-use platform, for collecting internal and client feedback. Then, we found the same obstacles we were facing within our creative workflows existed across a wide range of industries, projects, and media.
So we started ReviewStudio. We set out to become the leading software for teams looking for a better way to collaborate on creative workflows.
Stay22
Monetizing the travel intent of your audience
In Stay22’s own words: At Stay22, our mission is to empower all travelers to search and find accommodations that best fit their needs through our technology. Our location-based interactive map aims to provide travelers and event-goers with the ideal accommodation for their stay, regardless of budget. We also aspire to drive intelligent growth for businesses by offering a truly customer-centric approach. This is offered through the access of unparalleled data, a dedicated support team, and seamless integration.
Unito
Connect your apps and automate your workflows in minutes
In Unito’s own words: Over the course of our incubation with Montreal’s executive Institute program, our three co-executives created the Québec Awards winning product Unito: a project and task management “untool.” Rather than building another project management or collaboration platform, we chose to create collaboration through easy-to-use, two-way integrations.
Unito was launched on Oct 31, 2016. It featured automatic syncing between Github. Github is a popular developer tool for tracking code changes, and Wrike, a well-known project management tool. Soon after, we connected Asana and Atlassian’s Jira. We have since added Trello, Basecamp, BitBucket, GitLab, HubSpot, and Zendesk to their list of integrations.
Using deep, two-way integrations, Unito empowers workflows in project management, customer support, software development, sales, IT, and more. Whatever business you’re in, we have a solution for you.
About the speaker
Products that Count is a 501(c)3 nonprofit that helps everyone build great products. It celebrates product excellence through coveted Awards that inspire 500,000+ product managers and honor great products and the professionals responsible for their success. It accelerates the career and rise to the C-suite of >30% of all Product Managers globally by providing exceptional programming – including award-winning podcasts and popular newsletters – for free. It acts as a trusted advisor to all CPOs at Fortune 1000, and publishes key insights from innovative companies, like Capgemini, SoFi, and Amplitude, that turn product success into business success.