What is Productboard?

Productboard is a customer-centric product management platform.

Customer-centric product management is hard. With traditional tools, product managers struggle to keep track of user feedback, commit to a solution too early without conducting real discovery, and spend all day fielding questions about what they're releasing next and why. With Productboard, product teams understand what users really need, prioritize what to build based on clear goals, and rally everyone in their organization around shared roadmaps.

In this article:

• Collect stakeholder feedback with insights boards and portals
• Prioritize your work against your business needs
• Visualize your plans with roadmaps
• Manage your team and workspace
• Further learning

Collect stakeholder feedback with insights boards and portals

Insights boards help you consolidate all your user feedback, feature requests, research notes, and sales opportunities into one centralized database, where you can then link them directly to related feature ideas. Identify urgent or popular ideas, see relevant context and comments in one place, and center user needs at the heart of your product strategy.

Consolidating feedback

Highlight useful snippets of feedback from your notes and link them to feature ideas in a process we call creating insights. It's easy to add notes from anywhere:

• Integrate with Zendesk, Intercom, Slack, or Gainsight to pull feedback directly into your account.
• Use our Notes API to push feedback into Productboard from any source.
• Install our Chrome extension to capture feedback on the fly—especially useful for customer-facing colleagues!
• Forward individual emails into Productboard, or set up auto-forwarding.
• Use feedback forms to empower customer-facing teams to submit feature requests directly to product teams on behalf of their customers or prospects.
• Read about our other feedback integrations here.

Processing notes

We're big fans of the "Inbox zero" philosophy—and that applies to your Productboard Insights board, too! Once you finish mining a note for insights, mark the note as Processed so everyone knows it's been looked at.

Building Customer Importance Scores

Every time you link feedback to a feature idea and assign it a certain level of importance, you contribute to that feature idea's Customer Importance Score. A high Customer Importance Score indicates a feature that your customers really want—or desperately need.

Note: Customer Importance Score used to be known as User Impact Score, and still appears as such on older board types. The two are functionally identical.

Collecting feedback is a team sport

Your best sources of user feedback are often your colleagues on customer-facing teams, like Sales and Customer Success. Adding colleagues as contributors allows them to create new notes without giving them edit access over your features or roadmaps. You can also create feedback forms for them to fill out, ensuring you're collecting the kind of information you need. 

Setting up your first portal

Portals are interactive interfaces you can share with colleagues and customers to collect votes and feedback on ideas you're still considering and features that are planned. You can also use portals to share what's currently in beta or what's recently been launched—an effective way to keep customers informed and boost new feature adoption.

Collaborate on product-related documents

Document boards are designed to help you create, manage, and share essential documentation within Productboard instead of having to go to an external tool like Notion, Google Docs, or Confluence.

Document boards behave like other boards in that they live in teamspaces and are integrated with your workspace and product hierarchy, meaning you're able to embed items like features and insights in-line during a discussion or tag teammates in a comment to get their attention.

Prioritize your work against your business needs

Productboard's prioritization tools help you decide what to build next. Gather all your ideas into one place, surface the most promising ideas, and plan your upcoming releases.

Product hierarchy

All of your ideas live in a single flexible hierarchy. Think of your hierarchy like a filing cabinet—one you can sort, filter, search, and rearrange easily. Add features (and subfeatures) to your hierarchy, then create different boards to see your features displayed in useful ways.

Strategic planning

Objectives are clear, measurable, inspiring goals aligned with specific outcomes you're striving to achieve for your customers, product, or business.

Key results enable product teams to drive toward common, measurable goals. They streamline quarterly and annual planning by attaching easy-to-track metrics to objectives that help leaders monitor progress.

Feature prioritization

Figure out what to build next by answering two critical questions: What do my users need most? And what will help sustain and grow our business?

Productboard offers many different ways to support your team's prioritization process:

• Sort and filter by Customer Importance Score to surface your top-requested feature ideas.
• Use custom fields to represent important decision metrics.
• Create formulas to combine your fields and simplify your processes.
• Associate feature ideas with high-level objectives to ensure you're always driving toward your business goals. 

Once you've created all these useful fields, don't overwhelm yourself by displaying everything at once! Create multiple boards to focus on the information that matters most for each step in your workflow.

Delivery planning

Once you and your team have figured out which ideas to build next, track them all the way through to launch—no matter what tools your team uses to manage delivery.

• Assign features and subfeatures a status to track their location in the product development lifecycle.
• Ready to push a feature into delivery? Integrate with Jira, Azure DevOps, and other delivery tools. Your engineering teams can continue managing their development pipeline as usual, allowing everyone to stay in sync without getting in each other's way.
• If your team uses releases to plan feature launches in advance, assign features to releases to track what you're building now, next and in the future.

Visualize your plans with roadmaps

Rally everyone around where the product is headed with dynamically updating roadmaps.

Roadmaps are interactive visualizations of your plans that you can share with colleagues and stakeholders. Changes you make elsewhere in Productboard are automatically updated on your roadmaps—and vice versa!

Roadmaps for all audiences

Whether you're building roadmaps for the folks upstairs, a hundred clamoring salespeople, or your friends in engineering, Productboard roadmaps can be configured to match the level of detail expected by any audience. 

• Keep things high-level with release-based column roadmaps or get granular with timelines. Or fiddle with the settings and build something in-between!
• Surface important data onto your roadmap items, like how popular an idea is with your customers or who to go to with questions.
• Control who sees what by managing board access permissions so your colleagues aren't distracted by roadmaps that weren't built for them. 

Manage your team and workspace

Add your colleagues

Productboard works best when teams inside and outside your Product organization can contribute feedback, stay up-to-date and ask questions about the future of your product. For that reason, we make it easy to restrict how other cross-functional teams and colleagues can use your account using access roles.

• Most members of the product team will either be makers with admin access or makers.
• Customer-facing colleagues (e.g. Sales, Support, Customer Success) are usually contributors. They're limited to providing feedback on behalf of customers, though they can also leave comments on certain items.
• Other colleagues and internal stakeholders are usually viewers. They can only see roadmaps and features that you've explicitly granted them access to, and they can only interact by leaving comments on those specific features.

Tip: When in doubt, you can feel confident adding new people to your Productboard account as viewers. Unless you grant them access to a roadmap, by default they won't see anything!

Manage account data

Clean up redundant users and companies with our merge feature.

Maintain compliance with GDPR regulations by removing certain customer data.

Further learning

• For detailed training, Productboard Academy has you covered.
• If you're in a hurry to support a particular use case, check out the other guides in this section.
• Visit our events page to find product strategy webinars, training, upcoming events, and more!