Teamspaces enable you to organize your entire product organization in one workspace. With teamspaces, each team has its own space to manage boards and data. Everyone has easy access to all the information that’s relevant to their work and can customize the Productboard main menu sidebar to reflect their role and priorities.
In this article:
- Why should you use teamspaces?
- Best practices to set up and use teamspaces
- How Productboard uses teamspaces
- General teamspace
- Product teamspaces
- Leadership teamspace
- Functional teams teamspace
- Additional tips to help you manage your teamspace
- See also
Why should you use teamspaces?
Your Productboard workspace doesn’t have to be one size fits all. With teamspaces, each department and team has the flexibility to choose how they view information and set up unique workflows. Individuals may belong to many teamspaces based on their department, role, or product in the company. With teamspaces, your organization is able to unlock the following benefits:
- Unite cross-functional product teams — Create teamspaces for your product teams to focus on their day-to-day work by collaborating on shared roadmaps, cycle planning boards, and more.
- Join forces with other departments — At Productboard, we have teamspaces for Product and Engineering as well as our go-to-market teams, such as Customer Success, Marketing, and Sales. Create GTM checklists so everyone can stay aligned on launches.
- Enhance project collaboration — You can create a teamspace to organize the boards and tasks for any project or initiative, even if it’s short-term. When the work is done, you can archive the teamspace (all its contents can be recovered later, if you ever need them).
Best practices to set up and use teamspaces
To get the most out of teamspaces, we recommend you follow a 5-step process to get started:
- Remove folders if you don’t need an extra level of hierarchy.
- Rename the General teamspace to help users understand the purpose of the teamspace.
- Keep all organization-wide boards in the General teamspace.
- Create a folder for archived boards and move any boards that are no longer used to this folder.
- If you have a need to group boards for a specific audience, create additional teamspaces.
How Productboard uses teamspaces
General teamspace
At Productboard, our General teamspace gives everyone a high-level view of the product and answers the following questions:
- Who owns which part of the product (domain ownership)?
- When are we expecting to ship new features?
- What can we share with our customers?
- What objectives are we working towards and what initiatives are we pursuing?
- Are we hitting our OKRs?
Note: Everyone will be added to the General teamspace by default.
Product teamspaces
At Productboard, our product teamspaces are used by cross-functional teams of designers, product managers, and anyone else directly involved in the product development work. The content and structure might differ, but they usually include:
- Holistic view of all the backlog
- Team-specific roadmap with a more granular view
- Discovery folder with an overview of the past and existing discoveries
- Opportunity backlog regularly assessed for new candidates
- Boards to help the PM and the Engineers with cycle (sprint) planning
- Boards to plan releases together with PMMs
Leadership teamspace
At Productboard, our leadership teamspace provides a high-level overview for the product leadership and the executive team. It is used by our leadership team to:
- Track our yearly and quarterly OKRs
- Report and review health for each product, domain, and initiative
Functional teams teamspace
At Productboard, our functional teams teamspaces allow individual teams to customize their dedicated teamspace for their own roles and responsibilities. For example, our research team has a dedicated teamspace that is used to:
- Track the status of various product discoveries
- Gather information from previous research
- Curate templates for other teams
Additional tips to help you manage your teamspace
- Delete any old or un-relevant boards. If you are not sure about the purpose of a particular board, you can move them to a folder titled To review and ask the teams to review them.
- Make sure the boards that should be shared widely are shared with all roles
- Remember to invite your teams into teamspaces
- Create board shortcuts to the most relevant boards instead of duplicating them in different teamspaces
See also