Objectives are clear, measurable, inspiring goals aligned with specific outcomes you're striving to achieve for your customers, product, or business. In Productboard, you can assign features to objectives to help you determine which ones will most efficiently achieve your business goals. Using objectives helps boost team focus, morale, alignment, engagement, and accountability.
Note: Customers on the Starter and Essentials plans have access to 1 objective. Pro plan customers have up to 10 objectives. Enterprise and Enterprise Plus plan customers have unlimited objectives.
In this article:
- Adding objectives to a features board
- Assigning features to an objective
- Scoring feature value
- Recording effort estimates
- Setting each feature's final priority
- Sorting and filtering by objective
- Using the prioritization matrix
- Using other fields with objectives
- See also
Adding objectives to a features board
Click the Add column button and select objectives to see all objectives
From here, you can create new objectives or toggle on existing objectives to display them as columns on your board. The screenshot below contains examples for how you might name your objectives.
Assigning features to an objective
Select the [+] icon to add a feature to one or more objectives. That way, you can filter your board to see only those features in a given objective.
Scoring feature value
Next, score features based on how well they support each objective. This will allow you to sort/filter your board to surface strategically relevant feature ideas.
Recording effort estimates
Now record effort estimates for each feature, especially those most valuable to each objective. If you've already set the effort for a feature elsewhere, that value will appear here.
Setting each feature's final priority
Within objectives, evaluate each feature's value and effort (along with other criteria) to decide its final priority: must-have, should-have, or nice-to-have.
Sorting and filtering by objective
Now you can sort and filter your board for any given objective by value, score (value/effort ratio), or priority.
This can be helpful for seeing just your top-priority features for your current objectives and updating their status (e.g. to Planned) or adding them to an upcoming release.
You can also filter for all features added to the objectives, regardless of whether they've been assigned a value or priority.
Using the prioritization matrix
To visualize the value/effort tradeoff for features within objectives, group your board by Matrix.
Find your low-hanging fruit (high-value/low-effort) features in the upper left region of the matrix. You can then adjust each feature's final priority within the objective.
See Using the prioritization matrix for details.
Using other fields with objectives
Other prioritization fields like drivers and formulas can be used alongside objectives as secondary prioritization criteria. For example, while your main objective may be to expand into a new market segment, you could create satisfier and delighter fields to indicate which features are table stakes and which are innovative/unexpected.
You might also use other fields to represent something core to the way you differentiate in the market, or something near and dear to your team's product principles. An example would be a UX magic field that keeps the team focused on shipping features most likely to delight — especially important when you're up against clunky competitors.
If nothing else, other fields can useful as "tie-breakers" when you end up with too many must-haves within objectives and need additional criteria to decide which to build next.
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