If you're using Productboard to manage multiple products, you can either manage all products out of a single shared workspace or across several. The best option for you will depend on how interrelated or discrete your products are.
Note: Starter, Essential, and Pro plan customers have access to 1 workspace. Enterprise plan customers have access to up to 2 workspaces. Enterprise Plus plan customers have access to up to 5 workspaces.
In this article:
- Managing multiple products out of one workspace
- Managing multiple products across several workspaces
Managing multiple products out of one workspace
Keeping everything in a single workspace is best for organizations with interrelated product offerings, overlapping user bases, and standardized product prioritization processes across all products.
Benefits of using just one Productboard workspace:
- Shared Insights – You'll have a common repository of product ideas, requests, and feedback from colleagues and customers including inputs on all products.
- Shared prioritization criteria – Fields like objectives, segments, and drivers can span across all products' feature ideas.
- Shared roadmap – Visualize all products' features in a single portfolio roadmap.
Additional functionality to help you manage multiple products and teams in one Productboard workspace:
- Product-specific fields – If you manage multiple products out of the same Productboard workspace, makers can associate fields with specific products to ensure each teammate can focus on the fields most relevant to them. More info
- Multiple release groups – If you have multiple teams running on different release schedules you can manage these each as a separate release group in the same Productboard workspace. More info
- Multiple portals – You can create multiple Portals for different products or audiences within the same Productboard workspace. More info
- Use different boards to mix and match data slices – Save boards with filters and options that show just the data most relevant to each product area. Optionally, customize the sharing settings of these boards so they can only be seen by the right people or groups. Boards can also be configured to capture data spanning all products for a holistic view of what's being prioritized, planned, and delivered. More info
- Create different roadmaps – Tailor different roadmaps for different audiences. Roadmap boards use the same data as other boards and can be adjusted just like other boards (see above).
- Insights board tags – To help product managers find and process the incoming notes that matter most to them, you can pre-tag new notes arriving on your Insights board — whether they're arriving by email, Slack, Zendesk, Intercom, or the Chrome extension.
- Multiple Jira integrations – With the Jira integration, you can push different features into different Jira workspaces, or even set up multiple Jira integrations in parallel to push the same feature to multiple Jira workspaces. More info
- Enforce SAML SSO – Manage colleagues' access to Productboard in one place using a variety of identity providers. More info
- Advanced team management – Makers that have full access to a product will be able to set the company-level access to full-access, read-only, or restricted access to other users. More info
- Filter your insights boards by product – You can personalize your insights boards for immediate access to the feedback that matters most to you — with less noise from feedback that's not relevant to your customers or product area of focus. More info
Limitations of using just one workspace:
- Feature status is customizable, but is also workspace-wide. If your product lines have very different PDLCs, you may struggle to fit all the statuses for each product into one list.
- If you have many product teams but lack strong product ops processes, your workspace may become cluttered with fields and data from multiple competing teams.
Managing multiple products across several workspaces
Organizations with distinct product offerings, discrete user bases, or unique product prioritization processes for different products might be better off using multiple workspaces.
Benefits of using multiple Productboard workspaces:
- Granular user permissions – Ensure everyone can only access data for the products that matter to them.
- Discrete Insights boards – Separate repositories of product ideas, requests, and feedback from colleagues and customers.
- Discrete product hierarchies – Each product's features are kept entirely separate.
Additional considerations:
- Workspaces are discrete environments – Each Productboard workspace is accessible at a different URL.
- Users can be shared across workspaces – The same Productboard user may be invited into multiple Productboard workspaces with a different user role in each workspace.
- It's easy to switch between workspaces – Once logged in to Productboard, users who are members of multiple workspaces can seamlessly switch between them using the workspace switcher in the main menu.
Limitations of using multiple Productboard workspaces:
- It won't be possible to get a single unified portfolio roadmap that spans all your products. (You will be able to easily toggle between their roadmaps, however.)
- Compared to setting up SSO for a single workspace, there may be more management overhead to managing multiple Productboard workspaces in parallel.
- You'll need to set up processes in your organization to ensure feedback for different products gets sent into the correct Productboard workspace.
- Any ideas, requests, or feedback from customers/colleagues that relate to multiple products will have to be sent into both workspaces.