Productboard gives you a shared, sourced view of what customers need, what's shipping, and whether it worked. Spark, Productboard's AI agent, builds much of that picture automatically from the feedback and product data already connected to your workspace.
This article covers how directors, VPs, and heads of product get the most out of Productboard. It applies whether you're just getting started 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:
- Reviewing evidence-linked opportunities instead of status reports
- Bringing competitive and market context into your reviews
- Preparing for QBRs and board updates faster
- Closing the loop on what shipped
- Keeping priorities and dependencies visible across teams
- What's next for leadership in Spark
- See also
Reviewing evidence-linked opportunities instead of status reports
Each week, Spark reviews the customer feedback connected to your workspace and surfaces the three problems that matter most on the Spark home page. Every opportunity links back to the original feedback, so you can check the evidence yourself instead of taking a summary on faith.
If you want a fuller view than the top three, the Insights section (Main menu > Library) lists every opportunity and finding Spark has generated. This is useful when you want to check whether a pattern you've heard about secondhand actually shows up in the data.
For the full breakdown of how Spark builds these briefings, see Spark: Explore weekly opportunity briefings.
Bringing competitive and market context into your reviews
When Spark builds an opportunity, it adds context beyond the raw feedback. This includes how the problem lines up with your strategy and OKRs, plus what your competitors are doing in the same space. It also flags which segments the problem affects most.
That context is the kind of thing product marketing or competitive intelligence teams often have to chase down separately. In Spark, it's already attached to the opportunity, with the strategy, competitive, and segment context in one place.
Preparing for QBRs and board updates faster
Every opportunity and finding links back to real feedback. That means you can work with Spark to pull a defensible narrative for a quarterly business review (QBR) or board update without reassembling evidence from scratch.
Pair this with reports on team activity to show progress alongside the reasoning behind it.
Leadership can also join the teamspaces of other product areas to see their roadmaps and leave feedback directly, without a dedicated share-out meeting.
For more information, see Use reports to better understand how your product team operates and Getting started with Productboard teamspaces.
Closing the loop on what shipped
Once a feature ships, Spark's post-launch evaluation skill compares the goals in its spec against analytics data and customer feedback. It produces a document with an impact rating, on track, mixed signals, off track, or pending, plus a recommended next step.
Anyone on your team can trigger an evaluation from a Spark chat or the Skills page. The resulting document lands in that person's personal section first, so plan to share it with your team once it's ready.
For setup requirements and the full walkthrough, see Perform post-launch evaluations with Spark.
Keeping priorities and dependencies visible across teams
Productboard's grid prioritization and roadmap boards help your teams rank work by evidence and visualize it for the rest of the org. Priorities don't have to live only in one PM's head.
Dependency tracking gives you visibility into which teams' work depends on which, without a dedicated cross-team status meeting.