Today’s digital products require cross-functional teams that include product managers, designers, and developers combining their unique strengths to achieve common objectives. As organizations grow, so does the complexity involved in keeping track of who’s working on what, and which objectives you have the capacity to tackle.
In this article:
- How teams work
- Creating teams
- Assigning a member to a team
- Assigning objectives and features to teams
- Assigning teams to a feature
How teams work
In Productboard, you can now clarify which teams are working toward which objectives and features to provide alignment and accountability.
But that’s not all teams are for.
Teams also allow you to create team-specific views (Feature boards, Roadmaps, Reports) using the Teams filter given your features are properly assigned to teams.
Teams also make it easy to share a saved view (on the Features board) or a roadmap with just those on a specific team. It means you could easily share a tentative roadmap with the leadership team without inviting the individual members one at a time.
And by @mentioning a team by name (e.g. @sales, @prodmktg, @design) you can notify all its members about a discussion taking place on a note, feature, release, objective, or any other entity that supports comments.
As you can see, teams can be defined around functional areas (marketing, design, leadership) in addition to being conceived as cross-functional product teams, Scrum teams, or squads. Since the same workspace member can belong to multiple teams, you’re free to use both types of teams for different purposes. We’ll discuss how that works below.
Creating teams
In workspace settings, under Teams, makers can group members of a Productboard workspace together:
- Click + Create team and give it a name, description, and avatar, and specify what handle can be used in a comment to notify all members of that team.
- Search workspace members to add them to the team.
Assigning a member to a team
You can assign a member to a team from the team’s settings (above), from the member’s account info page, or when first inviting a new member into the workspace.
Keep in mind the same member can be added to multiple teams. So a designer could belong to one or more product teams as well as a design functional team.
Note: If you have SAML SSO configured, you’ll still need to assign members to teams from within the application.
Assigning objectives and features to teams
For product leaders, associating teams with their features and objectives helps keep track of who’s working on what and plan the capacity to tackle these over various time horizons.
And for the teams who will be working toward these features and objectives, this system provides clarity and accountability — the good, empowering kind that comes when teammates feel ownership over a problem and are equipped to hurl their curiosity, creativity, and intellect into finding the optimal way to solve it.
Assigning an objective to a team:
- On the Features board, click the
Add columns button and select Objectives.
- From an objective’s details, assign it to a team.
Once assigned to an objective, the team’s avatar will appear beside it in the objectives list, among other places in the application.
When visualizing your Roadmap by objective, you can display each team’s avatar beside their objectives.
You can also filter the Features board and Roadmap by one or more teams to see just those features that belong to their objectives.
Assigning teams to a feature
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On the Features board, open the feature detail and assign it to teams.
Once assigned, the team avatars can appear, depending on your settings, in multiple places in the application (e.g. Roadmaps, Features boards, Reports).
Note: We list all teams alphabetically across the product, so if you want to have some teams listed at the top, e.g. your product teams, you can use * as a team prefix.
- When visualizing your roadmaps, you will have the option of displaying team avatars beside the feature card instead of the feature owner.
- When working with the Features board, you will have the option to visualize and change your teams assigned to a feature as a / via column.
- When working with Reports, some reports (e.g. Efficiency, Allocation [beta]), show teams assigned to a feature in the feature list.
- You can also filter the Features boards, Roadmaps, and Reports by one or more teams to see only features that belong to such selected teams allowing you to create team-specific views on such data.
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