Develop a user-centric product strategy with Productboard
Productboard is a customer-centric product management system
Customer-centric product strategy 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 a roadmap.
Start here with a 2 minute overview of Productboard:
In this quick start guide:
Features board
Your Features board helps you decide what to build next. Gather all your ideas into one place, surface the most promising ideas, and plan your upcoming releases.
Feature hierarchy:
All of your features ideas live in a single flexible hierarchy. Think of your hierarchy like a filing cabinet — but one you can sort, filter, search, and rearrange easily. Add features (and subfeatures) to your board, then create different views to see your features displayed in useful ways.
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 user impact score to surface your top-requested feature ideas.
- Use the effort field to find feature ideas with a good ROI.
- Create drivers to score features against your most important criteria.
- Create custom prioritization scores to surface your most valuable ideas quickly.
- Missing anything? Create custom fields to associate numerical values, text, URLs, or people with your features.
Once you've created all these useful fields, don't overwhelm yourself by displaying everything at once! Create Features views to focus on the information that matters most for the task at hand.
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, GitHub Issues, Pivotal Tracker, or Trello. Your engineering teams can continue managing their development pipeline as usual, allowing you to stay in sync without switching tools.
- 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.
- Keep track of other individual to-dos for each feature using task fields.
Insights board
Use the Insights board to consolidate all your user feedback, feature requests, and research notes into one centralized database, and link them directly to related feature ideas. Identify urgent or popular feature 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 - a process which 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.
Processing notes:
We're big fans of the "Inbox zero" philosophy - and that applies to your Productboard Insights board, too! Once you finish creating an insight, process the original note to archive it. (Don't worry, you can always retrieve it later!)
Building user impact scores:
Every time you link a note to a feature idea and assign it a certain level of importance, you contribute to that feature idea's user impact score. A high user impact score indicates a feature that your customers really want - or desperately need.
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. (Here are some tips & resources to get them on board ASAP.)
Roadmap board
Rally everyone around where the product is headed - and why - 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 in your Roadmaps - and vice versa!
Roadmap types:
- Release-based roadmaps help communicate when features may be available: Release Plan roadmap, Sprint plan roadmap, Now-next-later roadmap
- Status-based roadmaps show where your features are in the development process: Kanban roadmap
- Time-based roadmaps visualize exactly when you might work on various releases or specific features, and help you track against important milestones: Releases timeline roadmap, Features timeline roadmap
Share your roadmaps:
Create different roadmaps for different audiences. (Psst - Here's a handy guide!) Share your roadmap with your colleagues or export to a PDF or PNG.
Account management
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 can view Features views and Roadmap views that you've explicitly granted them access to, and they can only interact by leaving comments on those specific features.
- Other colleagues and internal stakeholders are usually viewers. They can only see Roadmap views 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!
Try out experimental features:
Love being an early adopter? Makers with admin access can enable Labs features to get early access to our experimental features. (Watch out - this is a playground, and things change without warning!)
Manage account data:
Clean up redundant users and companies with our merge feature.
Maintain compliance with GDPR regulations by removing certain customer data.
Help and resources
Need help? Start right here in the Help Center. If you have questions, don't be afraid to reach out to our amazing Support team at support@productboard.com. Finally, check out our Events page for upcoming webinars, trainings, events, and more!
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