This guide will help you set up an effective prioritization workflow. Each section below outlines key concepts and contains links to other articles in case you need more details. The guide assumes you know what Productboard is and have an understanding of how navigation, board creation, and data structures work.
In this article:
- Introduction: Grids
- Step 1: Prepare your framework
- Step 2: Add planning and tracking tools
- Step 3: Optimize your workflow
- Step 4: Make sure your grid is accessible
- See also
Introduction: Grids
Productboard works best when you shepherd your ideas through discovery and delivery stages using a series of grids tailored to your needs. Grids specialize in visualizing and prioritizing your features based on data provided by stakeholders.
You can create grids centered around any of the main Productboard item types:
- Objectives: Strategic business goals and associate key results.
- Initiatives: High-level deliverables or projects.
- Products, components, or features: Specific product areas or deliverables.
- Releases: Milestones, launch phases, or abstract time measurements (like Now-Next-Later).
You can also create columns to visualize the data fields of each item on the grid, making comparison and prioritization much easier.
Board controls
When you create a board, its board controls sidebar will open automatically, and you'll be asked to select a main item. This determines how the grid is organized, and can be changed at will later on.
After choosing a main item, you can choose which (if any) types of child entities should be included on your grid. For example, if you choose Products as your main item, you can choose to display Components and/or Features beneath them.
There are other options in the board controls sidebar which you'll want to make note of. Here's an example:
- Board controls (A): The button on the left opens the panel on the right.
- Layout (B): You can always change the board's type without erasing your settings.
- Items (C): Choose your main entity type and any secondary entities to be displayed.
- Filter (D): Restrict item visibility based on data values. Also has a button in the header.
- Footer (E): Apply the changes you've selected above or reset them to before you began.
Columns
Columns display data fields for each row's item. Using columns to view and edit data is more efficient than clicking on a feature to open it and editing its details from the sidebar, but both methods show the same data. You can create new data fields from the Data section of your main menu.
To add a data field as a column to a grid:
- Click the + Add columns button at the top of your hierarchy.
- Select a category from the column sidebar that appears.
- Toggle the slider beside a data field to add it to the grid.
Edit data for a given entity by clicking directly on its value in the column. R earrange columns on a board by clicking and dragging the column's header.
Filters
Filters are useful for creating boards tailored to specific audiences or steps in a workflow. You can filter by many entity types and logic sets.
See Advanced filters on New boards for details.
Step 1: Prepare your framework
RICE, ICE, KANO, and MoSCoW are examples of popular prioritization frameworks; your organization likely uses one already. Productboard doesn't prescribe a specific framework, but instead gives you the tools to model whatever you use with relatively little effort. First, create the data fields you'll need and add them as columns to a grid.
Below you'll find descriptions of some useful data field types that will help you prioritize based on the realities of your product team, the strategic goals of your business, and the needs of your customers. You can add these data fields as columns to any grid.
Combine inputs from custom number fields into a single score. Formulas are great for quantifying and estimating the realities of the EPD team when deciding what to build next.
See Create your own prioritization formulas for details.
Drivers are simple fields that let you assign a value between zero and five to an item. They can be used in formulas and visualized on roadmap item cards.
See Use drivers and prioritization scores for details.
When you link feedback to features, you generate Customer Importance Score. CIS tells you how many customers think a feature is nice to have (adds one point), important (two points), or critical (three points).
CIS is an integral part of Productboard because it represents the voice of the customer, but you can't use it if you don't collect and process customer feedback.
See Use the Customer Importance Score to surface your top-requested features for details.
Step 2: Add planning and tracking tools
After you've decided what to build next, these columns help you keep track of when you'll build them and how they're coming along.
These columns define your features' relationships with time, making them important for roadmapping.
- Releases: Releases work best when named after things like version numbers, quarters, relative periods of time (like Now, Next, and Later). Once added to a grid, you can assign features to a release by filling in the dotted bubble. You can assign any number of features to one or more releases.
- Timeframe: Timeframes explicitly represent date ranges. Each feature can only have one timeframe, which you set by choosing a start period and an optional end period from the feature's timeframe cell. The periods can be high-level (like spans of years or months) or specific (this day to that day).
See Plan releases to decide what to deliver when for details.
Productboard is designed for product management, not product development. It works in concert with tools like Jira and Azure DevOps to keep your exploration and execution phases linked but uncluttered.
If you currently use a delivery platform to make prioritization decisions, stop; Productboard is better for that. If you're planning on having your engineering teams use Productboard to track user story progress and squash bugs, don't; delivery platforms are better for that.
Delivery integrations can be added as columns to a grid and allow you to push features from Productboard, import issues into Productboard, and sync several types of fields bi-directionally.
See the dedicated articles on Jira, Azure DevOps, or other integrations for details.
Step 3: Optimize your workflow
Once you've modeled your prioritization framework in Productboard, use the techniques below to increase your team's efficiency.
The Owner column lets you assign features to specific makers, which makes it easier to filter boards based on areas of responsibility.
Features aren't the only things that can be assigned to owners. See Owning entities in Productboard for details.
Don't try to cram every piece of your prioritization system into a single board—it'll be difficult to read. Instead, spread your system out across several boards and have each one focus on a specific question. This also allows you to support multiple product teams with different workflows, as you can give each team its own folder and set of boards so they can use their own frameworks without being limited by the needs of other teams.
For example, imagine a pair of boards that work together. The first board's main items are set to objectives, and its columns and filters build a picture of the company's overall strategy. Makers use that data to evaluate where they may have impact on the business goals.
The second board includes initiatives and features that will help to realize each objective from the previous board, with the appropriate filters and columns to support each team's understanding of what they are responsible for.
Step 4: Make sure your grid is accessible
If you're building boards and workflows that other people will use, don't forget to make sure the people who need to see the boards you've built can actually see them. Access to a grid is determined by that grid's parent teamspace.
See Teamspace types and member access levels for details.