Welcome to Productboard! Your organization’s product team uses Productboard to discover what customers need, decide what to build next, and share their plans with you. As a member of the customer success and sales team, you’ll play an important role in helping your product team build the right things next. By submitting ideas and user feedback, you're empowering product managers to make better prioritization decisions. You're also providing context that will determine how designers and developers build those features to address users' underlying needs and stay informed on the direction the product is taking. When you use this information to guide how you interact with your customers by sharing roadmaps, you have the ability to close the loop on requests and demonstrate your commitment to being customer-focused.
In this article:
- How Productboard works
- What can customer success and sales do in Productboard?
- What does Productboard look like for customer success and sales?
- Share customer feedback
- View your Product team’s backlog of feature ideas
- Get customers excited about upcoming feature releases
- Prepare for customer calls
- Enable customers to submit their feedback directly to your product team using the Portal
- Watch our on-demand webinar
How Productboard works
Productboard is software designed for product teams, giving them a dedicated space to figure out what they should build next. First, product teams consolidate feedback from a wide range of sources and turn them into ideas for future features. We call these ideas insights, and most of them come from front-line colleagues like you. Once the product team has collected all of this feedback, they can make informed decisions about which feature ideas to prioritize building next. Then, they can communicate their plan by building shareable roadmaps. Finally, product teams can create a Portal, which is a public page where product teams can collect ideas directly from users, validate ideas they’re considering, and announce the launch of new features.
What can customer success and sales do in Productboard?
When using Productboard in customer success and sales, you’ll be able to track feature requests that you care about, including those submitted by accounts in your book of business. You’ll be able to see the status of those feature ideas and leave questions about them as your team works on them.
As a member of customer success and sales you can:
- Create and tag new notes.
- Highlight and link insights to related features in notes you own or create.
- Assign ownership of notes you own or create.
- Submit feedback via the Chrome extension.
- Receive email notifications when an insight is created from a note you created or follow.
- View data on Features and Roadmap boards.
- Review the Portal if shared with the company or made public.
- Leave comments, react with an emoji to comments, and @mention colleagues.
- Follow notes or features to receive notifications.
What does Productboard look like for customer success and sales?
When you log into your workspace, you will have access to the Insights board, Features board, Roadmap board, Portal, and Customers (Available on the Enterprise plan).
Share customer feedback
By submitting user feedback into Productboard, you’re advocating for your customers and keeping them happy.
In a typical company, the number of people who speak directly with customers outnumbers product managers by 20 to 1. customer success and sales is the eyes and ears of the company - but there’s often a disconnect between the feedback they’re seeing and hearing and the product team’s understanding of their customers. Two of the most obvious sources of feedback are customer calls and support tickets, but there are many other channels as well, like online reviews or even comments on social media.
Submit your customer's feedback using the Insights board
Using the Insights board you can share this feedback into Productboard, advocating for your customers and keeping them happy.
Use the Insights board to:
- Create and tag new notes of customer feedback.
- Highlight and link insights to related features in notes you own or create.
- Assign ownership of notes you own or create.
- Follow notes created by your customers and other users to stay up to date on the progress of the note.
- Receive email notifications when an insight is created from a note you created or follow.
- Filter the Insights board by Companies to see all the feedback shared by particular customers.
For more information about the Insights board, see the article Insights: Understand what your users need.
Share customer feedback, no matter where you are!
No matter which channel your feedback is coming from, there’s a way to get that feedback into Productboard. For most customer success and sales teams, this means setting up an integration with your ticket systems and CRMs, like Intercom, SalesForce, or Zendesk, forwarding emails from customers, and pushing messages from Slack. You can even use Zapier to connect Productboard with thousands of other tools and services.
These integrations are very easy to set up, but your product team may not know all the ways you’re collecting feedback - if you think something’s missing, let them know! Once you’ve figured out which channels are relevant to your team, it’s easy to begin pushing customer feedback directly to your product team.
For more information about our customer feedback integrations, see these articles.
Capture feedback on the fly using the Productboard extension for Chrome
With the Productboard extension for Chrome, you can capture interesting observations, requests, and feedback when you hear it, and send it to the product team for review.
For more information on the Productboard extension for Chrome, see the article Submit user insights with the Productboard extension for Chrome.
What is good feedback?
Good feedback gives your product team everything they need to understand the customer’s needs. Eliminate miscommunication - or endless back-and-forth emails with your product team - by making sure your feedback includes these important fields. Productboard enables you to do this by providing special fields for tracking the source of the feedback (the name of the company AND the individual) and for adding tags. Formatting options in the body of the note also help you format your feedback for maximum clarity. You generally want to include these 5 pieces of information when crafting your feedback.
Good feedback should include:
- The company name
- The user's name and email address - not your own!
- Tags
- Use case
- Problem
View your Product team’s backlog of feature ideas
On the Features board, you can:
- Click on the name of a feature to read its description and see which member of your product team owns the idea.
- View the status of a feature idea: Hover over the colored square to the left of the feature name to see where this idea sits in the product development lifecycle.
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Filter your Features board by Companies to see the feedback from your customers and how it relates to the features your product team is building.
- Follow features to stay updated on the latest developments.
- Leave comments, react with an emoji to comments, and @mention colleagues.
For more information about the Features board, see the article Features: Capture and organize your feature ideas.
Get customers excited about upcoming feature releases
Your product team uses Productboard to create roadmaps showing which features they’ll be working on and when they’ll be ready. By creating customer-facing versions of your roadmap, you’ll be able to get customers excited about what you’re building next - and when they can expect to see the features they’ve requested. When it comes time for your quarterly business review, you will already know the questions at the top of your customer's mind and close the loop with these roadmaps.
On the Roadmap board, you can:
- Discover which features your product team will be working on next, and click on those features to learn more
- Leave comments, react with an emoji to comments, and @mention colleagues.
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Filter roadmaps by companies to understand what feedback your customers have provided and share with them a roadmap of features they contributed to, demonstrating your commitment to being customer-focused.
- Follow features on the roadmap to stay updated on the latest developments.
For more information about the Roadmap board, see the article Roadmap: Communicate your plan.
Prepare for customer calls
Having a customized roadmap already puts you a step ahead of other customer success and sales teams, but there are a few more ways that you can be extra-ready for important customer calls.
We just designed a brand new feature specifically for customer-facing teams, which makes it easier for product teams to hop on customer calls and gives customer success and sales teams a birds-eye view of everything a customer has asked for - including the valuable features you’ve already shipped!
For users on Enterprise plans, our new Customer Board is here to help! The Customer Board acts as a one-stop shop to help you and your product team accomplish all of this preparation - without needing to spend time in huddles and debriefs ahead of time.
Enable customers to submit their feedback directly to your product team using the Portal
The Portal is a great way to engage your accounts by validating ideas and collecting upvotes and feedback. The Portal can be shared with customers, which is excellent for Customer-facing teams like customer success and sales who want to point customers in the right direction for leaving feedback and also see what your product team plans.
On the Portal, you can:
- Enable customers to submit their feature ideas and feedback directly to your product team - no more forwarding emails!
- Share Portal cards with customers, this is great for Customer Success and Sales Managers who want to point their customers in the right direction for leaving feedback and also see what's planned by your product team.
- Export a list of users who expressed interest in an idea. Doing this makes it easy to celebrate wins with customers! Send an email letting them know their feature request was launched.
For more information about the Portal, see the article Use the Portal to share your plans and collect feedback at scale.
school Productboard Academy Customer Success Content
To further enhance your Productboard skills and explore advanced features, we invite you to check out the Productboard Academy. It offers a wide range of courses and webinars curated specifically for customer success managers like you, helping you extract the maximum value from the platform. So, don't hesitate to dive into the Productboard Academy and continue your journey towards becoming a Productboard power user.
school Productboard Academy Sales Content
To further enhance your Productboard skills and explore advanced features, we invite you to check out the Productboard Academy. It offers a wide range of courses and webinars curated specifically for Sales managers like you, helping you extract the maximum value from the platform. So, don't hesitate to dive into the Productboard Academy and continue your journey towards becoming a Productboard power user.
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