Getting started as a maker and maker admin in Productboard

Welcome to Productboard - the product management platform which helps product teams figure out what to build next. By setting up the workspace and inviting your team members to it, you're empowering your product teams to align on the right features to build next. With traditional tools, product managers struggle to keep track of user feedback, commit to a solution too early without conducting real discovery, and spend all day fielding questions about what they're releasing next and why. With Productboard, product teams understand what users really need, prioritize what to build based on clear goals, and rally everyone in their organization around a roadmap. 

In this article:

Relevant to both new and legacy boards

What are maker admins and makers?

A maker admin role in Productboard is for your product leaders, product champions, and IT admins. In Productboard this role has full edit rights on all boards as well as managing members, integrations, settings, and billing. 

A maker role in Productboad is for your product managers, product operations, and UX researchers. In Productboard, this role has full edit rights on all boards.

The tab below outlines what you can do as a Maker admin or a Maker in Productboard:

What's the difference between a maker admin and a maker?
  Maker admin Maker
Create, edit & delete notes
Submit feedback via Chrome extension
Create, edit & delete Features
Owner of Features
Customize Feature statuses
Leave comments & "@" mention colleagues
Create new Portals
Update Portal settings
Create & edit Portal cards
Compose updates on Portal cards
Create & edit Roadmaps
Update Roadmap settings
Create Teamspaces
Set up & manage integrations
View integrations
Configure Labs settings
View Labs settings
Configure Insights automations rules 
View Insights automations 
Manage subscription and billing information
Invite team members
Manage roles
Delete workspace and all data

How do I know if I am a Maker admin or a Maker?

To check the role associated with your profile in Productboard:

  1. Click the workspace menu in the top left corner.
    Screenshot_2023-04-04_at_12.16.52.png
  2. Click Members.
  3. On the Members page, you'll see a list of all active members currently associated with your workspace, along with their respective roles. 
    Screenshot_2023-04-04_at_12.21.16.png
  4. Under the Maker list, you will find your profile.

Getting familiar with your workspace

Overview of the navigation
Looking to clean up your workspace?
If you have acquired a workspace or are looking to clean up your current one, we recommend looking at our article Maintaining your workspace which covers all the best practices for this.

Setting up your workspace

1. Organize your feature ideas into a product hierarchy

All of your feature ideas should live in a single flexible hierarchy. Think of your hierarchy like a filing cabinet - but one you can sort, filter, search, and rearrange easily. Add features (and subfeatures) to your board, then create different boards to see your features displayed in useful ways.

2. Create boards to organize and standardize your prioritization process

Figure out what to build next by answering two critical questions: What do my users need most? And what will help sustain and grow our business?

Productboard makes it easy to create different boards for each stage of your product development lifecycle. Each view contains the tools you need for the task at hand, whether you’re sorting through your backlog for good ideas, or assigning your top features to upcoming releases.

Whether you’re using Customer Importance Scores, effort fields, drivers, custom prioritization scores, or custom fields, creating boards helps you focus on the information that matters most for the task at hand.

Once you've created all these useful fields, don't overwhelm yourself by displaying everything at once! Create different boards to focus on the information that matters most for the task at hand.

3. Manage your delivery planning

Once you and your team have figured out which ideas to build next, track them all the way through to launch - no matter what tools your team uses to manage delivery.

4. Consolidate all your user feedback into Productboard

Use the Insights board to consolidate all your user feedback, feature requests, and research notes into one centralized database, and link them directly to related feature ideas. 

5. Build your Customer Importance Scores

Every time you link a note to a feature idea and assign it a certain level of importance, you contribute to that feature idea's Customer Importance Score. A high Customer Importance Score indicates a feature that your customers really want — or desperately need.

6. Create Teamspaces to organize your entire product organization in one workspace

Teamspaces enable you to organize your entire product organization in one workspace.

With teamspaces, each team has its own space to manage boards and data; everyone has easy access to all the information that’s relevant to their work and can customize the Productboard main menu sidebar to reflect their role and priorities.

7. Add colleagues as contributors

Your best sources of user feedback are often your colleagues on customer-facing teams, like Sales and Customer Success. Adding colleagues as contributors allows them to create new notes without giving them edit access over your features or roadmaps. (Here are some tips & resources to get them on board ASAP.)

8. Create a roadmap

Roadmaps are interactive visualizations of your plans that you can share with colleagues and stakeholders. Changes you make elsewhere in Productboard are automatically updated in your Roadmaps - and vice versa!

Check out this handy guide to get started.

9. Share your roadmaps

Share your roadmap with your colleagues or with external stakeholders and customers by using a link or exporting to a PDF or PNG.

Account management

1. Add your colleagues

Productboard works best when teams inside and outside your Product organization can contribute feedback, stay up-to-date and ask questions about the future of your product. See this article for more details about access roles, but generally speaking:

  • Most members of the product team will be makers with admin access or makers.
  • Customer-facing colleagues (e.g. Sales, Support, Customer Success) are usually contributors.
  • Other colleagues and internal stakeholders are usually viewers

2. Turn on Productboard Teams

Group workspace members together into Teams, so they can collectively tackle company objectives, receive access to saved boards or roadmaps, or get contacted collectively with an @-mention.

3. Try out experimental features

Love being an early adopter? Makers with admin access can enable Labs features to get early access to our experimental features. (Watch out - this is a playground, and things change without warning!)

4. Manage your billing

To manage your billing of account, you can update the credit card details by following these steps:

  1. Click on the workspace name in the top left of Productboard, then select Billing.
  2. Navigate to Credit card details, then select Change card.
  3. Enter in the new card details and click Save Changes.

To learn more about Productboard, enroll in our 👉 Getting Started with Productboard 👈 Academy course or check out our Quick Start guides.

See also

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