ALPHA: Creating custom roles in Productboard

Note: Over the coming months, Producboard will be working on our first phase of custom roles. As we iterate through the early stages of this offering, we intend to run an early access program. This document will outline that program.

When you invite colleagues to your workspace as new members, use roles to define what they can see and do. Roles can always be updated from the Members page but may affect how much you pay. We'll let you know if so.

Before our Early Access Program, Productboard had 4 “out of the box” roles:

• Admin
• Maker
• Contributor
• Viewer

For more information about these roles, see Define roles of workspace members.

That changes with custom roles. Customers can now define as many roles as they require, alongside our existing roles, in order to fit their own organizational structure & internal processes.

In this article: 

• Pricing and impacted ‘seats’
• Alpha program
• Creating a custom role
• Defining a custom role
• Reviewing roles
• Assigning a member to a role
• Entity action definitions
• Limitations

Pricing and impacted ‘seats’

Throughout this early access program, each custom role will count as a ‘Maker Seat.’ In addition, only the Maker role can be customized.

Alpha program

During our Alpha Program, customers will be able to define a custom role. This role will be a variation of the Maker role; however, customers can remove certain capabilities from the role, and give this custom role its own name. The ability to restrict the following capabilities is in scope during our Alpha:

• Restrict the creation of certain data fields
• Restrict editing of certain data fields
• Restrict deletion of certain data fields

The following data fields are in scope:

• Release Groups - includes releases
• Drivers & Scores
• Tasks
• Tags
• Custom Fields

Creating a custom role

You will need to be an Admin in Productboard to create a custom role.
To create a custom role: 

1. Click your workspace name in the top left of your account, and then click Settings.
2. From here, you’ll see a new option on the left-hand navigation. This option is listed as Roles.

Within the Roles section, you’ll see the four ‘out of the box’ roles we offer today and a button inviting you to Create a custom role. Click this button to begin the role-creation process.

Note: There is currently no limitation on the number of roles that can be created.

Defining a custom role

When defining a custom role, there are several options available to you:

• You can give the role a name
• You can make any selection from the configuration options displayed

Once you’ve given the role a name and defined the capabilities of the role, click Create to complete the process.

Reviewing roles

Once you’ve created your role, this will be reflected in the Roles section. You’ll now have visibility of all the custom roles you’ve created and a high-level oversight into how many members have been assigned this role.

In addition to this, you can also review and edit the capabilities that are associated with a given role. Simply click on the role to do this.

Whilst only Admins can create a custom role, all other members will be able to see the definition of the roles in Productboard. This will clarify to members what their role is and why they don’t have access to specific capabilities. For further clarity, the member will also see who created the role and when it was last updated.

Assigning a member to a role

Once you’ve created a custom role, it’s now time to assign members to this role.

To assign a custom role: 

1. Click your workspace name in the top left of your account, and then click Members.
2. Update the role associated with a given member.

In addition to the current role assignment process, you can now assign a member a new role via the Account Info section. Click on the member name, and update the role associated with a given member.

Entity action definitions

Limitations

For the duration of our Alpha program, we will not disable the ability to perform an action from within Productboard. For example, if you create a custom role that restricts the ability to create a tag, the member will still see the create tag button and go through the tag creation process (as shown below). However, our UI will provide an error message back to the member to alert them that this action was not saved.

Note:
When sharing Boards, sharing a Board with a ‘Maker’ will also include sharing the Board with anyone that is assigned a custom role.

SSO/SAML updates to leverage custom roles are not included in the Alpha Program.
SCIM provisioning updates to leverage custom roles are not included in the Alpha.

See also: 

• Define roles of workspace members
• Getting started as a maker and maker admin in Productboard
• Getting started as a contributor in Productboard
• Getting started as a viewer in Productboard