Product operations and program management both keep a product org's information current, coordinated, and visible across teams. The two roles work at different scopes, but Productboard supports both. Spark, Productboard's AI agent, adds automation for the parts of that work that used to be manual.
This article covers how product operations and program managers get the most out of Productboard. It applies whether you're new to the platform or already using Spark alongside your team.
Note: Every workspace has access to Spark, but activation is up to your admins. Anything described below that references Spark requires it to be enabled on your workspace. See Activating Spark in your workspace for details.
In this article:
- Keeping your hierarchy and entities current without manual data entry
- Automating recurring reports and digests
- Processing feedback at scale
- Sharing roadmaps and tracking dependencies across teams
- Monitoring program and process performance
- See also
Keeping your hierarchy and entities current without manual data entry
Setting up and maintaining your hierarchy, backlog, and objectives used to mean creating and editing each entity by hand. If Spark is enabled, you can create or update features, subfeatures, components, initiatives, objectives, key results, and releases directly from a conversation.
Describe the change in plain language and review Spark's proposed edits in a preview card before confirming them. You can handle up to 25 entities in a single request, including the parent and child relationships between them.
For the full list of supported fields and relationship types, see Create and update entities from Spark.
Automating recurring reports and digests
Some updates need to go out on a regular cadence: a weekly competitive scan, a daily feedback digest, a periodic strategy check-in. Instead of running these manually each time, you can schedule them as a Spark automation.
Set the frequency (hourly, daily, on weekdays, or weekly), and Spark delivers the output as a new chat thread you can review whenever it's convenient.
For setup steps, see Schedule automations with Spark.
Processing feedback at scale
Feedback triage is often owned by product operations, from tagging incoming items to routing them to the right feature. Insights automations can route matching feedback for you, instead of requiring someone to sort it by hand.
For more information, see Use insights automations to create triage rules and Turn customer feedback into actionable insights, faster and at scale.
Sharing roadmaps and tracking dependencies across teams
Share your roadmap with other teams so they can plan around your work, instead of fielding status questions directly. This also reduces the number of ad hoc questions product managers get about what's coming.
Dependency tracking gives visibility into which teams' work depends on which, so a blocked item doesn't surface for the first time in a status meeting.
For more information, see Share your roadmaps with external stakeholders and customers.
Monitoring program and process performance
Track metrics like cycle time, lead time, resource allocation, and efficiency using Productboard's reporting features. Custom reports and dashboards help you spot where a process is slowing down.
To share progress with stakeholders, export features as a CSV or through the API, or provide a health update directly on the feature itself.
For more information, see Use reports to better understand how your product team operates and Exporting your features into a CSV. For feature-level status, see Provide health updates for your features.