A portal is a collection of cards. Each card represents an item from your workspace’s product hierarchy—a product, component, feature, or subfeature—that you’ve decided to expose to visitors.
When a visitor clicks on a card, they’ll see a description of the item. This portal description is separate from the internal description, so you can tailor it for external consumption.
If the visitor has feedback or ideas about the item, they can use the buttons at the bottom of the card to indicate how important the item is to them. Clicking one of these buttons reveals a text field where they can provide details, and an email address field they’ll use to validate the feedback.
Note: A visitor to an external-facing portal must validate their email address when they submit feedback. This validation is required only once per browsing session, and it makes feedback more valuable to your team, helps you follow up with the right people down the road, and prevents spam.
See Embed portals via iframe for details about using SSO to circumvent the email validation step.
Once a portal visitor’s feedback is validated, it will appear in your workspace as a note that can be accessed from an insights board. Notes created from portal feedback will arrive with the submitter’s email and company data pre-filled.
Furthermore, the content of the note will be automatically linked to the correct item, meaning it will immediately begin contributing to that item’s Customer Importance Score. This makes notes from portals very efficient, since you don't have to spend time linking them to items.
Visitors can use the Submit idea button in the top right corner of a portal to share brand new ideas that aren’t based on any card. An idea submitted this way will still land in your workspace pre-filled with contact data, but it won’t be automatically linked to your product hierarchy.
Note: The Submit idea button can be hidden if you’d prefer visitors stick to the cards.
Building and sharing your first portal
Each workspace comes with a portal already set up, so you don't need to create one from scratch. Instead, you'll be editing the structure and contents of this default portal to suit your needs.
The following steps will show you how to prepare and deploy your first portal.
Step 0: Before you start
Here are a couple things you need to do before you can get started:
Make sure you’re an admin in your Productboard workspace. Makers, contributors, and viewers can’t manage portals.
Build (or at least start to build) your product hierarchy. Portal cards are based on product hierarchy items, so there’s no point in working on your portal before you have some items ready for it.
Step 1: Open your portal's internal view
From the Main menu, click Portals. This will open the internal view of your workspace's default portal. The internal view is where admins and makers can manage the portal's cards, sections, tabs, and settings.
Step 2: Change your portal's name and logo
Visitors to your portal should be able to instantly understand what it's for. Having a clear name related to your product is important, and the default portal name likely won't cut it.
To rename your portal:
In the top left corner of the portal, click on the portal name.
In the dropdown menu, click the ••• More actions button.
Click Rename.
Type in a new name and press Enter/Return to confirm it.
Additionally, you should add a logo to your portal to make it easier for people to associate it with your brand. The logo you choose will will also appear on any confirmation emails your customers receive when they vote or submit ideas.
To change your portal's logo:
Click the Logo button on the top left, beside your portal's name.
Select an image from your device. 72px by 72px works best.
Note: Adding a logo to your portal also updates the favicon used by browser tabs when displaying your external-facing portal.
Step 3: Delete unnecessary cards
By default, your portal starts with a few sample cards to help you understand how they work. Once you get the idea, you should delete these sample cards to make sure they won't be seen by visitors later.
Note: Sample portal cards are based on the sample features that came with your workspace. If you deleted those features while building your product hierarchy, you can skip this step.
To delete a portal card:
Click a portal card to open its sidebar to the Portal tab.
In the Locations section, under Posted to portal, hover over the portal you wish to remove this card from and click the Remove from Portal button that appears on the right.
Warning: Make sure you're deleting the portal card and not the item it's based on. Deleting the underlying item is irreversible and will likely make many people very angry if you do it by accident.
To avoid deleting the underlying item:
Do not click the More actions button at the top of the portal card's sidebar.
Do not select Delete [item type] from the menu that would appear if you clicked said More actions button.
Step 4: Create tabs and sections
Before you add your own cards to your portal, you should organize your tabs and sections so that your visitors can understand what they’re looking at. The sample portal included with every new Productboard workspace includes a few tabs and sections to give you ideas.
Tabs
Tabs are buttons along the top of your portal that separate your cards onto different pages. You can have as many tabs as you like, but the more you have, the harder it’ll be for visitors to navigate your portal.
Use tabs to make clear distinctions between groups of cards based on capability, use case, progress, or anything else that makes sense for your product.
Here are some examples of how you could arrange your tabs:
PDLC (Default): Under consideration, Planned, Launched
Multiple products: Product A, Product B, Product C
Stakeholders: End users, Developers, Investors
To add a tab to a portal:
Hover over the tabs at the top of your portal and click Add new tab.
Type a name into the Tab label field, then press Enter/Return.
To rename, move, or delete a tab from a portal:
Hover over a tab and click the ••• More actions button.
Select an option from the menu.
Note: When deleting a tab that contains cards, you’ll be asked where you’d like the cards to go before confirming the deletion.
Sections
Sections are horizontal lines that divide your pages up into subcategories. For example:
The Under consideration tab of a PDLC portal might have sections related to the different areas of your product.
The 2024 tab of a release note portal might have one section for each month.
The Product A tab of a multi-product portal might have each section represent a specific use case of Product A.
The Developers tab of a stakeholder portal might have sections for different compatible APIs.
To add a section to a portal tab:
Hover over the grayspace above or below a group of cards and click New section.
Give the section a name and press Enter/Return.
To rename, move, or delete a section from a portal tab:
Click on a section’s name to rename it.
Hover over a section and use the arrows on the right side to move it up or down.
Hover over a section and click Remove section title on the right side to delete it. Cards in a deleted section will automatically join the next section above them.
Step 5: Add cards to your portal
Once your portal is structured to your liking, you can start adding cards!
To add a card to a portal:
Click the big blue Add feature to portal button in the bottom left corner.
Use the product hierarchy menu to find and click the item you want to add as a card, either by browsing the tree or by using the search bar at the top of the menu. You can add any product hierarchy item (not just features!)
Note: Items with grey checkmarks are already present on the current portal.
When you select an item to add to the portal, its sidebar will open to the Portal tab. From here, you can configure how visitors will see the card.
Upload image: Add an image to the card to catch the eye of visitors. If you leave this blank, the card will display the first few lines of the card's public description.
Public name: This name will match the item's internal name by default. You'll probably want to change it to something more forward-facing, especially if you encode sensitive information in your item names.
Note: Be careful not to change your item's internal name by mistake. On the portal card creation tab, the internal name is at the top (next to the colored square), while the public name is nearer the bottom.
Public description: This description will match the item's internal description by default. You should definitely change this one. Take the opportunity to clearly describe what the item is and why visitors should care about it.
Note: Portal feature card descriptions do not support certain sequences of special characters such as // or /#. If these characters are used, when shared, the portal will load a blank page.
When you're done configuring the card, click Create.
Moving cards after placing them
You may want to play around with the location of each card.
To move a portal card between sections, simply drag and drop it.
To move a portal card between tabs:
Click on the card to open its Portal sidebar.
In the Locations section under Posted to portals, click the filepath showing the card’s current location.
Select another tab from the popup menu (or expand a tab using the arrow and choose a section if you want to be more precise).
Step 6: Customize your portal's settings
If you're a maker or admin, you can access customization options for your portal by clicking the Portal settings button in the top right corner.
Within Portal settings there are three tabs.
In the General tab, you can:
Enable/disable new idea submissions: When new idea submissions are disabled, users will be able to vote on existing cards but won't be able to suggest new ideas.
Show/hide the number of votes for each idea: Users will see how many have voted on each idea.
Customize the naming and explanation of the importance scoring: Name the “Critical”, “Important”, “Nice-to-have” and “Not important” differently.
Change the portal UI's language: If you've enabled the portal localization Labs feature, you can change the language used in your portal's UI. This does not automatically translate your portal cards or descriptions, only text that's part of the portal itself, like the search bar ghost text and the Submit idea button.
Note: On the Enterprise plan, there is also an option in Portal settings to remove Productboard branding from the portal (this hides the "Powered by Productboard" badge in the footer).
In the Voting tab, you can:
Change the feedback question: When visitors click a card, they'll see "How important is this to you?". You can change that question if you like.
Change the voting button text. When visitors vote on how important a card is to them, the default options are 'Critical', 'Important', 'Nice-to-have', and 'Not important'. You can change those options if you like.
In the Appearance tab, you can change the colors used in your portal to match your company's branding. You can customize the colors for:
The font.
The primary UI buttons.
Card backgrounds.
The entire portal background.
Step 7: Share your portal
Portals are meant to be shared! There are a few different ways to do so, but they all start from the same place.
To begin sharing your portal, click Share in the top right corner to open the Share portal menu.
The four main sharing options are:
Hidden: The default setting. Only makers and admins can access the portal. Use this option when the portal isn't ready for visitors.
Company: This allows contributors and viewers to access the portal from within the workspace (Main menu > Portals). They can look at cards, but can't edit cards or settings, and they can't submit feedback the same way a visitor to the public view of the portal would. Use this if your portal is meant to function more like an internal roadmap.
Private link: Generates a link for you to share. Anyone who clicks the link can access the public view of the portal (which allows them to submit feedback as outlined at the top of this article). This link is harder (but not impossible) to find via web search. They look something like this:
Public link: Generates a link for you to share. Anyone who clicks the link can access the public view of the portal (which allows them to submit feedback as outlined at the top of this article). This link is very easy to find via web search. They tend to look like this:
