Maintaining your Productboard workspace

Welcome aboard the journey to maintaining your Productboard workspace like a pro! Just like tidying up your physical workspace can lead to increased productivity, decluttering your digital workspace is a smart move that can supercharge your team's efficiency. In today's fast-paced world, maintaining a clean workspace is more crucial than ever, especially when you're collaborating with teammates. Let's dive into some easy-to-follow tips on how to keep your Productboard workspace organized and optimized.

In this article: 

• Conduct a feature audit
• Reorganize your feature hierarchy
• Review saved boards and roadmaps
• Re-evaluate your insights processes

Conduct a feature audit

First things first, let's declutter your feature ideas. Imagine your workspace as a garden; you need to prune the features regularly to let the most promising ones bloom. Here's what you need to do:

• ✅ Ensure that the status of all your features is up to date. Consider promoting new ideas to candidates or sending them into discovery if they show potential. This is also an excellent opportunity to review and refine your feature status values to align better with your team's workflow.
• ✅ Hunt down any redundant or duplicate features and merge them. Sometimes, ideas may have been indirectly addressed within other features that have already been delivered.
• ✅ Identify feature ideas that won't see the light of day in the foreseeable future. Archive them or assign a special status like "won't do," which can be configured to hide them by default on your boards. This is particularly useful for ideas that are too challenging to build or don't align with your product vision.

💡Pro Tip for Larger Teams: Divide and conquer! If you have many product managers on your team, consider assigning each of them a portion of the features to audit. Alternatively, use a custom field to keep track of reviewed features.

Reorganize your feature hierarchy

Think of your feature hierarchy as the blueprint of your product. It should make navigating your workspace a breeze. Here's how to spruce it up:

• ✅ Assess whether rearranging features within your product hierarchy could make responsibilities clearer or help your team find ideas more efficiently. If your understanding of the problem space has evolved, this is a great time to make adjustments.
• ✅ If needed, move features between components. You can do this in bulk on the Products board by selecting multiple features and using the Hierarchy field in the side pane to specify their new location.
• ✅ Consider renaming or archiving components as necessary. Keep in mind that merging components is not currently possible.
• ✅ Review insights linked directly to components and consider relinking them to relevant feature ideas that could benefit from further product discovery.

💡 Pro Tip for Larger Teams: If your organization handles multiple products, ensure that each team member only sees the fields relevant to the products they work on. This saves time and streamlines maintenance.

Review saved boards and roadmaps

Your saved boards and roadmaps are like treasure maps leading to your most valuable insights. Let's make sure they're organized:

• ✅ Evaluate whether any saved boards or roadmaps can be retired. Drag and drop frequently used ones to the top of your list for easy access.
• ✅ Start with private saved boards and roadmaps (those with a lock icon). You can delete them without affecting anyone else.
  
  
• ✅ For shared boards or roadmaps, check with colleagues before removing any that others may rely on.

Re-evaluate your insights processes

Are you getting the most out of the insights flowing into your workspace? It's time to fine-tune your process:

• ✅ Set aside time to catch up on processing insights if needed.
• ✅ Review your triaging process. Ensure that notes are assigned to the product manager best suited to handle them, or use provisional tags to help categorize them effectively.
• ✅ Clean up any old or irrelevant tags to keep your workspace neat and organized.
• ✅ Take a moment to revisit your processing best practices.
• ✅ Explore additional integrations that could help you gather fresh user insights.
• ✅ Discover how to efficiently archive or delete insights in bulk to keep your workspace clutter-free. Use filters to identify insights older than 12 months, for example, and archive feedback that's no longer relevant. This ensures your insights remain fresh and actionable, helping your team focus on what truly matters.

By following these tips, you'll be well on your way to maintaining a streamlined and efficient Productboard workspace. Remember, a tidy workspace leads to sharper thinking and better results. Happy organizing!