Note: Note: Aggregated customer field availability is tied to the same architecture that drives the new Customers board. You won't be able to use aggregated fields until your workspace's Customers board migration is complete.
See Customers board: View and understand customer context for migration details. (TLDR: It's automatic!)
Aggregated customer fields are custom number fields that dynamically roll up values from related customers. For example, If dozens of customers all expressed interest in a certain feature idea, you could put an "Account ARR" column on a grid to see a combined total of all the ARR tied to that idea.
Aggregated fields are filter-aware, sortable, and visible in grid cells. This means you can instantly see the business impact of work items during prioritization.
In this article:
- Creating aggregated customer fields
- How aggregated customer fields work
- Other key information
- See also
Creating aggregated customer fields
To create an aggregated customer field, you must assign a regular custom number field to the Companies item type, the Users item type, or both. Here's how:
- From the Main menu, click Data > Custom fields.
- In the list, click on a custom number field. Its details sidebar will open on the right.
- Scroll down to the Assigned item types section and toggle Companies, Users, or both.
- A confirmation window will appear. It explains that manually-entered values will be overridden by aggregate values. Check the box and click Enable to finalize the field conversion.
Aggregated fields from Salesforce data
If you've set up a Salesforce integration, you can turn a regular custom number field into an aggregated customer field by connecting it to a Salesforce field, like so:
- (Optional) Create a new custom number field.
- Access your Salesforce integration settings (Main menu > Settings > Integrations > Salesforce > [name of Salesforce integration]).
- Follow these instructions to link a Salesforce data field to your custom number field (it must be a custom number field!).
An aggregated company field based on Salesforce data will behave the same way as one created entirely within Productboard.
How aggregated customer fields work
All customers who have expressed interest in an item via insights or importance score have their aggregated customer field values added together. This is tricky to explain in the abstract, so here's an example.
Let's say you have an aggregated customer field called "Total ARR", and you have a few customer items to which you've assigned ARR values using that field. (These ARR values might have been piped in from Salesforce, or maybe you typed them in yourself; it doesn't matter.)
At the same time, let's say you've got enough capacity in the next quarter to develop just one of two improvements to an existing piece of your product. You've set up a new component to hold these possible improvements, which are represented as "Feature A" and "Feature B" in your workspace. (You've momentarily forgotten what their real names are, but it's fine).
As part of your decision-making, you ask the three companies mentioned above for their opinions on these two possible features. You get feedback from each customer, which is stored in your insights board. Turns out Blueoak is interested in Feature A, Emberline is interested in both, and Kata Software is only interested in Feature B.
In order to model their interest in these features, you link each of their feedback notes to the correct features using the insights system.
Later, it's time to make a decision. Which feature are you going to invest in next quarter? You can use your Total ARR field to help you decide based on the aggregated ARR that's associated with each idea. You do this by adding the Total ARR column to a grid board, like so:
- On a grid, click Add columns.
- Browse or search for the aggregated customer field you want. In this case, "Total ARR".
- Click the toggle beside the field in the list.
What we see in the image above is that Feature A has a Total ARR of $35,000, while Feature B has $40,000. Why?
Well, Blueoak and Emberline both have insights linked to Feature A. Blueoak's Total ARR value is $10,000 and Emberline's is $25,000. Those values are aggregated to make $35,000.
And for Feature B, which is linked to feedback from Emberline ($25,000) and Kata Software ($15,000), we have $25,000 plus $15,000 for a total of $40,000.
So the aggregated customer field here suggests that if we build Feature B instead of Feature A, we'll stand to make our more valuable customers happy. That's good to know!
Note: The Total ARR for the parent component is $50,000 and not $75,000, because aggregated customer fields don't count values twice when they roll up the product hierarchy.
Think about it this way: The component's Total ARR isn't a sum of its children's Total ARR values; rather, it's a a sum of the Total ARR values of all the companies which have expressed interest in those child features via insights, which works out thusly: Blueoak ($10,000) + Emberline ($15,000) + Kata Software ($25,000) = $50,000).
Other key information
- The example above uses ARR, but remember that aggregated customer fields can represent any number ("Company size", "Contract value", "Monthly Active Users", anything).
- Aggregated values are board configuration- and filter-aware. For example, if your board's hierarchy is Initiatives > Features, the aggregated value for initiatives will only reflect the data related to the features visible on the board.