7. Portal: Validate ideas and share your plans

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Get started with the Portal

What if you could validate your ideas while simultaneously engaging your customer community? That was our vision as we set out to build the Portal.

It's a customer-facing interface that helps you:

  • Validate your ideas by collecting upvotes and feedback
  • Share what's planned to keep everyone informed
  • Celebrate what you've launched to alert users of new functionality and make your team feel proud of what they’ve built

You can even use it to collect brand new ideas from users, that you might not have thought of before!

Learn how in 2 minutes... 🎥

Key takeaways

The Portal is a board where you can share ideas that are under consideration, that are planned, or have already been launched.

Features, subfeatures, and components can all be added to the Portal as cards with customer-friendly names/descriptions. The cards remain associated with the underlying entity on your Features board.

When you're ready, share the Portal with colleagues and customers to collect votes and feedback on the ideas you've added.

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Where does the user feedback go?

Behind the scenes, cards are associated with features, subfeatures, or components on your Features board. When someone votes on a card, that feedback will be automatically linked to the entity it's associated with. The user impact score will automatically be updated as well!

Whenever someone provides feedback on a card or submits a new idea it will appear on your Insights board as a new note. User inputs will never be made public like you might see on a traditional feature voting forum. However, the number of votes a card receives is displayed on your Portal.

Post updates on Portal cards

Post updates to Portal cards that everyone will be able to see. These updates can also be emailed to everyone who contributed feedback on card.

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This is a great way to close the feedback loop and notify users when new functionality is available, as well as for sending out surveys to collect feedback on solution ideas or recruit users for a beta.

Share your Portal

Check your Portal sharing settings to verify who has access to your Portal. There are four sharing options:

Note: The private link sharing option allows anyone with the link to access it. Compared to the Public sharing option, the private link prevents google web crawlers from indexing the page in google search results.

Customize your Portal

The Portal is the best way to share your ideas & plans with external stakeholders, so it only makes sense you can customize your Portal so it fits your brand, and your needs.

Available customizations:

  • Embed your Portal in your website/application and enable SSO for customers
  • Allow users to submit new ideas
  • Show/hide number of votes on each idea
  • Remove Productboard branding (Available on Enterprise plans)
  • Customize primary color

Next steps

✅ Get inspired

Want to see an example of a live Portal in action? See team productboard's Portal to see ideas we're considering, review what's planned, and learn what's been launched.

school Productboard Academy Webinar

Learn best practices around setting up your Portal, posting feature ideas, and sharing with different audiences in our on-demand webinar. A member of team Productboard will explain key concepts, share tips, and answer all your questions so you feel prepared to hit the ground running.

Watch "Close the Loop with Portal"

Note: Webinars are available for trial users and paid customers only.

Wrap-up

We've now reviewed all four boards! All that's left is setting up your workspace. Read on for a checklist of next steps, and some suggested best practices.

Next

See also

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