The New Productboard experience: FAQ

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We are thrilled to announce significant updates coming to Productboard this year, designed to deliver a faster, more adaptable, and more intuitive user experience. Our next-generation boards—Timeline, Columns, Grid, and Document—are set to empower your teams to maintain alignment, execute strategies effectively, and exercise greater control.

We’ll be using a phased-rollout approach to minimize disruption and to ensure everything’s working the way it should. This article will be kept up to date with the latest information on what to expect in the coming months.

In this article:

Relevant to new boards only

Quick information

What’s happening?

There will be two distinct Productboard experiences during the phased rollout. Some elements of Productboard will be common across experiences, while others will be unique to one or the other.

  • The New experience includes the New board types (Grid, Columns, Timeline, and Document), as well as new functionality like initiatives, objective hierarchies, key results, and advanced filters. Some Legacy board elements which aren’t compatible with New boards will be unavailable on New boards until use-case parity is achieved.
  • The Legacy experience retains Legacy board types: Features boards and Roadmaps (Release Plans, Sprint Plans, Now-next-later roadmaps, Kanban roadmaps, Features timelines, Releases timelines, High level objective timelines, and Feature launch timelines).

Both experiences will receive access control changes to accommodate an eventual migration from the Legacy experience to the New one. Neither experience will receive changes to the core functionalities of insights boards, reports, portals, or the Customers board.

Get a better sense for the big-picture-changes on our launch page.

What comes next?

On October 14th, we released new support documentation alongside the early access option for select customers as described above. 

On December 11th, we provided New experience opt-in access to all customers, along with a migration tool to help create New boards based on Legacy boards. 

Then, in early February, we'll be expanding New experience availability to all Productboard workspaces (no opt-in required).

Some time in late 2025, we'll deprecate the Legacy experience entirely. You'll have at least 90 days' warning before this happens, giving you plenty of time to complete your transition and get used to operating with the New experience. 

What are these banners?

Experience banners have been added to the Productboard Help Center to help you determine whether an article’s content is relevant to you. You’ll see them tucked beneath section headers (usually the “In this article:” header found at the top of any article long enough to have a table of contents).

There are three types of experience banners:

The Legacy banner

Relevant to Legacy boards only

Articles with a Legacy banner at the top are only relevant to features boards or some other unique element of the Legacy experience.

The New banner

Relevant to new boards only

Articles with a New banner at the top are only relevant to grids, timelines, or some other unique element of the New experience.

The Both banner

Relevant to both new and legacy boards

Articles with a Both banner at the top contain information about functionalities common to both experiences, like teamspace management or insights boards.

Banners are meant to help you decide how to spend your time in the Help Center, not gatekeep useful information from you. A New experience user may find the concepts discussed in a Legacy article useful, even if the article’s features, examples, and screenshots don’t match what they see in their workspace.

Note: You can always click on an experience banner to return to this article if you forget how they work.

Reading multiple banners

Some articles have more than one experience banner. Unlike the main banner at the top which applies generally to the entire article, secondary banners indicate specific exceptions related to the sections in which they appear.

For example, this article about objectives has a Both banner at the top because objective entities exist in both Legacy and New experiences, but the section within that article called “Key results” has its own New experience banner because the key result entity is only available in the New experience.

Capability questions

What new capabilities are included in the New experience?

The New experience is packed with so many great improvements, such as:

  • New entity types (initiatives, hierarchical objectives, and key results) and a new board type (Document) to better support strategic planning use cases.
  • Significantly improved performance when working with large data sets.
  • An overhauled access management system that gives you much finer control over who can access your boards and teamspaces. 
  • Increased flexibility and consistency across three more new board types (Grid, Timeline, and Columns) which allows you to display almost any entity on any board, and to switch board layouts and groupings without having to start from scratch. 
  • Auto-population of entities to ease the burden of manually building up new boards.
  • Enhanced filtering capabilities that allow you to use AND/OR filtering across multiple parameters, including indirect relationships.
  • Filters, columns, and groupings that support almost all entity types and data fields, increasing your visualization options. 
  • All entity types now support every type of custom field, including the new custom date field.

Here's a little more info on three of the major changes we're most excited about, along with a 20-minute demo video showcasing a preview build of the New experience.

Note: Some New experience capabilities are only available on certain Productboard plans. See each capability's documentation for details. 
Strategic planning

We've made it easier to align your product objectives with your company’s broader goals. This clarity gives stakeholders confidence in your strategy and helps ensure every effort contributes to business success.

Objective hierarchy

  • We have restructured objectives into a hierarchical format to help you provide clarity into the company's strategy and cascade goals down from the company level to the individual team level.
  • Visualizing this hierarchy significantly improves communication and alignment across the organization.

Learn more

Key results

  • We now support the OKR framework for product teams directly in Productboard.
  • Key results can be rolled up into objectives to align tactical work with company goals.
  • You can track the health, progress and status of OKRs with KR-level detail to identify potential blockers.

Learn more

Initiatives

  • Initiatives live between objectives and features, allowing teams prioritize work across multiple teams, and products.
  • Initiatives connect your tactical work with the company's high-level strategic goals to maintain alignment on plans and help communicate the progress of key projects with stakeholders.

Learn more

Collaborative documents

Document boards serve as a single source of truth for all things product, bringing together product teams and cross-functional stakeholders in a unified space where critical documentation is created, managed, and shared.

Unlike traditional document editors like Confluence or Notion, document boards are seamlessly integrated throughout the entire Productboard ecosystem. This enhances real-time collaboration by enabling you to tag teammates, embed key Productboard entities like features and insights directly into your documents, and maintain all your product information in one place.

By bridging the gap between strategy development, planning, and execution, document boards ensure that everyone stays informed and aligned throughout the product development lifecycle.

Learn more

New access management

Robust access control is the key to managing business segments that require different tiers of data security. Productboard can now be configured so that certain parts of your workspace are hidden by default and visible or editable only by authorized users.

Closed and Private Teamspaces

Teamspaces are organized collections of boards relevant to a team's work. Anyone can browse teamspaces and join the ones related to their area of focus, but with these latest enhancements additional teamspace permissions are now available, providing more control over who can see and join certain teamspaces.

  • Closed teamspace: Everyone can see the teamspace exists, but can only join when invited by an owner or member (or when their request to join is approved).
  • Private teamspace: Similar to a closed teamspaces not visible to those browsing the list of all teamspaces.

Learn more

New Product access controls

A product access model is a set of rules that Productboard uses to determine who is allowed to see or edit a product and its subordinate entities (like components and features).

The new product access model offers different access levels:

  • Everyone in the workspace: This product is visible to everyone, and editable by all makers and admins.
  • Everyone in the workspace can view only: This product is visible to everyone, but editable only by admins and by makers who are members of specific teamspaces chosen by you.
  • Specific teamspace(s): This product is hidden from everyone except for admins and for members of specific teamspaces chosen by you. Products with this access level can not be shared with Open teamspaces.

Learn more

Demo video

What are the current limitations of the New experience?

We are still hard at work bringing the New experience up to full use-case parity with the Legacy experience. The following capabilities are still available in the Legacy experience without any limitation, and will become available in the New experience over the coming weeks:

  • Some of the popular default fields, such as Progress and a few others.
  • Public board sharing and exporting to various formats.
  • Advanced roadmap visualization capabilities such as milestones, customizable swimlanes, and some of the roadmap card attributes.
  • Advanced interactions such as entity conversion and duplication, bulk actions, and the ability to reorder columns and groupings via drag-and-drop.
  • Integrations with Trello, GitHub, Pivotal Tracker, and other partner integrations such as Shortcut.

There are also some system behavior limitations to keep in mind:

  • The New experience relies on the global stack rank of all entities across the system, which ensures consistency. However, this can lead to changes on one board affecting the entity order on others. To address this, we're developing contextual ordering for individual boards, enabling more tailored storytelling.
  • In the Legacy experience, assigning a subfeature to a release automatically assigns the parent feature as well. We're working on a more transparent and scalable approach for the New boards, where users can clearly see if the release relationship is explicit or implicit (i.e. inherited). For now, we suggest manually assigning features to releases in addition to subfeatures until the new relationship concept is implemented. This will ensure accurate tracking and reporting.
  • In the New experience, all newly-created fields can be used with all items right away without further configuration. This is different to how it worked in the Legacy experience, where you had to assign certain fields to specific products before you could use them. We are aware that the old functionality was useful for reducing field noise in item detail sidebars and are considering equivalent solutions for the New experience. 

Which experience am I part of?

You can determine which experience(s) your workspace has access to by checking which boards you’re able to create. You must be a maker or admin to do this.

  1. Go to Productboard.
  2. Under Teamspaces on the left, hover over the General teamspace (or any other teamspace you can access).
  3. Click the + Create a new board or folder button that appears to the right of the teamspace name.
  4. Observe your options in the board creation dropdown menu. If your options include…
    1. Features board or Roadmap: you have access to the Legacy experience.
    2. Grid, Timeline, Columns, or Document: you have access to the New experience.
Note: The Legacy and New experiences aren’t mutually exclusive. Select customers will have access to both, while others will have access to one or the other depending on the phase of the rollout and other considerations.

Availability questions

When can I access the New experience?

All customers on all plans can opt in to the New experience as of December 11th. After the full release (February 2025), everyone will have access to the New experience without having to opt in.

I need access to the New experience immediately. How do I join?

If you're an admin, you can opt-in to the New experience from your workspace's Labs menu. This activates the New experience for all users in your workspace. 

See Activating the New experience for instructions.

Can I turn on the New experience for a select group of users?

No. If you enable the New experience, it will be available to all users across your workspace. In order to provide a smooth transition to the New experience,

We've decided to make New experience enablement apply for all users at the workspace level in order to provide a smoother transition from one to the other. This way, everyone can benefit from the new features when creating plans and sharing boards.

Remember: enabling the New experience doesn't disable the Legacy experience. People can still create features boards if they wish. 

When will I need to switch to the New experience?

We anticipate a gradual transition to the New experience tailored to individual customer needs, and are aiming to have the Legacy experience deprecated in late 2025. An exact deprecation date for the Legacy experience will be announced later this year, allowing customers at least 90 days for migration.

Considering the average number of actively used boards per maker, we expect the transition to take relatively little effort when spread out across several months and many individual makers.

The New and Legacy experiences will operate simultaneously throughout the extended transition phase.

What if I don’t want to switch to the New experience?

You'll be able to use the Legacy experience right up until it's deprecated in late 2025. That said, given our rapid progress on making Productboard significantly better, more flexible, intuitive, and feature-rich, we're confident that you'll love the New experience enough to leave Legacy behind before then!

Migration questions

How can I migrate my current boards to the New experience?

As soon as you have access to the New experience, you can start manually creating new versions of your Legacy boards using the equivalent board types:

Legacy board type New experience equivalent
Features board Grid
Release plan, sprint plan, Now-next-later, and Kanban roadmaps Columns board
Features timeline, releases timeline, high level objective, and feature launch roadmaps Timeline

 

New experience migration tool available in December

In December, together with granting the ability to opt in to all workspaces, we released a simple board migration tool. Makers will be guided through the process of cloning actively-used features boards and roadmaps into the New experience. This approach allows you to control the timing and pace of the transition, offering flexibility to suit your needs.

With just one click, admins and board owners can effortlessly clone existing Legacy boards to their New experience equivalents. Key board configurations will be automatically transferred to ensure a smooth transition. Cloned Legacy boards will remain accessible until you are ready to delete them and fully embrace the New experience.

Comprehensive documentation is provided to guide you through the migration process, including any potential limitations.

Will I lose any of my data when I transition to the New experience?

No. None of your underlying data—such as products, features, objectives, releases, or fields—will be affected. The boards and their configurations only determine how this data is visualized.

Data will be synchronized across both experiences to maintain consistency.

Will I still be able to create and access Legacy boards after switching to the New experience?

Both the New and Legacy experiences will run concurrently during the extended transition phase to ensure that no context is lost, which means you'll be able to access and work with existing Legacy boards right up until the deprecation date.

What kind of training is available for the New experience?

Help Center

Every article in this Help Center has been updated to reflect New experience capabilities, and will be kept up to date as things progress. The following articles may be particularly useful to you:

Productboard Academy

Our library of courses has been updated to match the advanced capabilities of the New experience. Access the new learning path by clicking here. 

Hands-on walkthroughs

We are offering the chance for eligible customers to set up a session with their CSM/Professional Services counterparts for hands-on walkthrough of the New experience. Eligible customers are those on an Enterprise plan (or the older Scale plan) and that have a dedicated CSM.

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