What does a good product roadmap look like?

The litmus test for a good product roadmap template to start from is that it’s visual, accessible, and clear. Anyone should be able to scan it and find answers to the following questions:

• What are we doing?
• Why are we doing it?
• How does this tie back to our OKRs?

This is the fundamental idea behind a theme-based product roadmap – and its benefits are enormous and immediate. It will help you be able to:

• Have way fewer meetings – Your priorities (what and why) are clearly documented on the roadmap. You don’t have to explain things differently to different people.
• Foster healthy team debates – Your roadmap can be the reference point team members use to challenge themselves and one another to link their deliverables back to roadmap goals and OKRs.
• Make product decisions everyone understands – You’re no longer the bad guy batting down ideas. You can actually discuss customer feedback and ideas through the lens of your roadmap and priorities everyone can see.

In the words of product discovery coach Teresa Torres:

“We need to let go of the idea that we can enumerate a list of features that represents what we’ll do in the future. This idea is absurd. Rather than sharing feature lists with the rest of the company, we should be communicating how we will make decisions.”

A theme-based roadmap is designed to do just that: communicate problems to be solved and open up the conversation around how to solve them. 

If you want to dig into this more, I recommend checking out our CEO Janna Bastow’s excellent presentation on using your product roadmap as a communication tool.

Start with this theme-based product roadmap template

You’re probably already familiar with feature roadmaps – they usually look like Gantt charts or release plans. These are useful for planning projects, but they don’t communicate the big picture very well.

Our theme-based roadmap of choice, the Now-Next-Later roadmap, replaces that with time horizons, made up of three columns:

1. Now: Stuff that you are currently working on.
2. Next: Stuff that’s coming up soon.
3. Later: Stuff that you’d like to work on in the future, but need to do a bit more research before you move on.

Note that we aren’t showing any timelines. This is not a release planner, it is a bird’s-eye view of your priorities. Those are always subject to change – there’ll always be something that happens in the future that you can’t meaningfully plan for today.

The point is to leave room to adjust to change. If something you’re working on was current but now you want to push it back, you can.

Define Initiatives for your roadmap

Themes are “a promise to solve problems, not build features,” says Jared Spool, founder of User Interface Engineering.

The idea behind Initiatives is that it’s better to tackle the root of the problem with a single, elegant solution than burden yourself with a growing laundry list of features. You should be working at the problem level, asking what you can do to solve specific issues, rather than plotting out what feature to build next, just for the sake of having a feature to build next.

Developing initiatives for your theme-based roadmap enables you to define priorities in terms of problem areas, which are things that everyone can understand. It also enables you to actively incorporate the daily flow of customer feedback into your product planning.

For example, if you’re getting a lot of feedback for Single Sign On, then now’s not the time to drop everything and build 10 new ways to sign into your app. Rather, it’s time to set up a new roadmap card (like the ones you see below) and start pulling all this feedback together to help you explore the best way to start solving this problem (Fun fact: ProdPad’s AI assistant can help do this for you!).

This enables you to communicate with your company that you’re aware of the problem and that you’re thinking about it, but you don’t have to provide anyone with the exact solution at this stage.

Each of the following roadmap cards represents an initiative except the last one.

Why has the last one been crossed out? Because roadmap cards should always be strategic, not tactical. “Rewriting transactional emails” is too specific to be a strategy. It’s a task rather than an initiative.

At this high-level view, those are details you don’t have to worry about yet. Save the granularity for when you get into the details of each card.

Build the case for each Initiative

Once you have your Initiatives down, you can attach more supporting details for anyone who wants to drill further down. These details help us strengthen what we’re putting on our roadmap, which again, could include useful information for those reading it:

• What are we doing?
• Why are we doing it?
• How does this tie back to our OKRs?

Internally, your team will have access to detailed information which will help prepare them and guide them through your workflow. These details include:

• Ideas – Tactical suggestions for improvement. These ideas answer a simple business case: What problem are you trying to solve?
• Customer feedback – We attach feedback directly to ideas in ProdPad, so they can be linked to potential improvements and we can easily track what our clients are asking for.
• User stories – Use case scenarios for ideas: As a user, I want to X in order to Y.

Cards sitting in the Later column don’t have to have all those answers yet, but as a card moves closer to the Now horizon, they should become a lot more detailed.

Assemble Initiatives into a product strategy

As you build your theme-based roadmap, you can color code and tag them to allow the viewer to sort through and filter down based on a particular interest. Kind of like you do with Post-it notes!

How about that basic usability, huh? This keeps it visually easy and engaging, and everyone will be happy you didn’t make them sort through herds of cards to find what they came for.

Instead of staring blankly at one big roadmap, your colleagues can focus on the ones that are relevant to them.

Now tie it all together with ‘The Guide to Roadmapping’

Cool, nice roadmap! But what do you do with it? Our CEO, Janna Bastow, gave the most comprehensive talk out there about how you can introduce your new product roadmap template across your business. It’s just 20 minutes – a perfect companion to the flexible roadmapping method you’ve just learned.

We’ve also crafted a free course which takes you through all the steps to move your organization from a timeline roadmapping approach to a Now-Next-Later theme-based roadmap.

And to really get the job done, we’ve even created a ready-made presentation deck that you can download and present to your stakeholders to convince them that moving to a theme-based approach is better for business!

Start building your new theme-based roadmap in ProdPad

Hit the button below to start your free trial today! Discover how to build a product roadmap in a tool that’s designed by product managers, for product managers.

Start your free trial

Enjoyed this article? Check out our product management blog for more key insights.

The post Theme-Based Product Roadmaps: Something Everyone Can Understand appeared first on ProdPad.

Well, we went ahead and fired up a new Slack chat. What we found very quickly that Andrea’s argument was correct: Slack did help us establish closer relationships with our customers.

Then as time passed, we started seeing a pattern we really liked: Customers who join our Slack community were not cancelling their ProdPad plans at all.

In fact, 99% of our cancellations were (and still are) coming from customers who weren’t part of our community.

Amazing news for us, obviously. But why was Slack becoming our strongest channel for customer retention?

Not because Slack is magical (sorry guys, we still love you!).

This is all us. We’ve applied the same values that have made us an effective product team to our product community – and it’s worked!

So we’re going to go ahead and take a little credit for this one. These are the 5 reasons why we’ve been able to reduce our customer churn rate through our Slack community.

Reason #1: We’re open and transparent with our customers

Imagine if we had a Slack product community and said stuff like: “We’re not at liberty to say…” or “That’s under wraps at the moment.” How frustrating that would be and a waste of time for our customers too.

But that’s not how we talk to our customers anywhere. Our Slack community is an extension of product-focused values that we follow across all our channels:

• We value all customer feedback: We log all conversations as customer feedback whether it’s good or bad.
• We don’t believe in saying “no”: We work with our customers to get to the heart of the problem instead of rejecting their feedback and opinions.
• We believe in transparency: We’re honest about what we can and can’t do, and what customers can expect from us.

We can have that open dialogue with our customers because we have a public roadmap to help us talk about our plans.

We can handle all kinds of feedback because we engage with it and actively work to find our solutions for our customers.

Live chat forums where customers can potentially yell at you, complain and put you into a corner is a scary prospect. But we have none of that. Our customers know our doors are open and that we’re listening. And they appreciate it!

Reason #2: They get help from us and from each other too

Sure, we do plenty of customer support in our Slack channels. Our customers get quick access to us and our co-founders in Slack.

But we’ve found out that our customers are getting along just fine without us. The percentage of DMs being sent in our community hover somewhere between 47-75%.

What are they up to? We’ve asked!

Some of our users have told us they’ve connected with each other to discuss similar challenges, give each other advice, hitting each other up for help. (Or maybe they’re talking about us behind our backs? We’ll never know.)

In any case, this is great.

Members of our community are connecting with each other on the other side of the world even when snoozing ;). Check and check.

Reason #3: They get to influence our product

When we’re thinking about trying something new, we turn to our Slack community first. Our customers are more than happy to tell us if we’re about to build something awful. And we’re more than happy to receive this feedback before we’ve gone ahead and built it.

There’s a mutual benefit here: We get valuable early customer feedback and in turn, our customers get to influence our product decisions.

Our UX team has REALLY enjoyed taking advantage of this:

• They share mockups and sketches for ideas they’re working on
• They find user testers to participate in research and interviews
• They talk to customers quite openly about what would/would not be helpful to them

This all but ensures that we don’t walk blindly into a big, useless project. We don’t end up wasting design time. We don’t wasting dev time. We don’t kill team morale by investing in a product idea that later goes bust.

We just go with common sense first and ask our customers what they think. In return, they volunteer valuable information back to us.

Hey, we keep it lean and mean. Our customers are our pulse check. We have their back and they have ours.

Reason #4: You get value even if you’re a lurker

Andrea started sending out email roundups because there were interesting discussions happening in there that she didn’t want people to miss out on.

Pretty soon, we spotted another welcome trend: the open rates on these emails are much higher than active users on Slack.

People just seem to love getting these in their inbox. Since we started, the average open rates on these have been consistently in the neighborhood of around 50%. Not bad!

There could be any number of reasons that our customers aren’t actually participating in our chat. Maybe they’re not allowed to use Slack at work. Maybe they don’t have the time to contribute. Maybe they don’t really have anything to say yet.

This tells us that the lurkers in our community are still finding value in passive engagement.

That’s great news for us. They like keeping tabs on discussions, they like seeing our product updates and they like seeing the progress we’re making. These emails remind them that we’re here when they do finally want to reach out.

They can join the party whenever they want, they know that. 

Reason #5: The offline friendshipping perks

Our “brand” is all about being personal, authentic and honest with our customers. But then again, that’s just who we are as a team.

We like to take our Slack community offline sometimes. We grab drinks with our customers when they’re in town. And sometimes, our customers come down to Brighton to see us!

We grab coffee with them, show them around our office, hang out and talk shop. As our community grows, so does the frequency of customers pinging us to see if they can drop by.

But we travel quite a bit too, so we always ping the community to let them know that we’re coming to a city near them.

All I’m saying is that Slack has helped, but we’re going to take a little credit for this one.

The post Our Slack Customer Community Has Made Our Churn Rate Insanely Low appeared first on ProdPad.

Good question

1. An effective product team makes product discussions accessible to everyone else at the company

One day, a deeply annoyed Elon Musk sent all of SpaceX a memo titled “Acronyms Suck.” It was an executive order to stop using acronyms in the workplace because it was hindering basic communication among employees. 

“Excessive use of made up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication and keeping communication good as we grow is incredibly important.

Individually, a few acronyms here and there may not seem so bad, but if a thousand people are making these up, over time the result will be a huge glossary that we have to issue to new employees. No one can actually remember all these acronyms and people don’t want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance.”

He was right. When you start to speak in your own language, in team speak, others can’t meaningfully participate in the conversation. 

The product mindset requires everyone at the company to be able to discuss the product in terms everyone can understand.

A truly effective product team communicates with sales, support, marketing, development, QA, and so on, in a way that is meaningful to each of those teams.

We do two things to keep our product conversation open to everyone on the team:

1. We give everyone access to our product backlog. Everyone can drop in ideas, suggestions, and comment on existing ideas. (We review and respond on an ongoing basis.)
2. We don’t accept ideas without a short 1-2 sentence business case, a high-level argument for moving that idea forward. This filters out frivolous ideas. 

This process forces everyone to think about their suggestions in terms of business value rather than personal preferences:

• What problem are we trying to solve?
• What value would it provide if it were solved?

Essentially, if you want something done to the product, you have to defend it in terms everyone understands. If you’re suggesting something that doesn’t move the needle, then is it worth suggesting? Is it worth taking up several people’s time to work on?

These kinds of questions are now baked into our company culture.

2. Effective product teams use high-level product and business goals to drive their team-level work

Call them what you want – OKRs, KPIs, objectives – but effective product teams assign high-level product goals that everyone else can contribute to.

Any of these are tangible enough to work:

• Increase trial-to-paid conversions by 15%
• Reduce new user churn by 3%
• Increase trials to 500 per month

When we decided to increase our trial-to-paid conversions, each of us took off to complete our own set of tasks.

Our CPO went into our analytics to dig up user behavior during the trial period.

That told us which actions our most successful users were taking before they became paid customers.

Our Head of Growth designed an email drip that would convince new customers to take those actions right away.

Our Head of Customer Success created a set of masterclass videos to visually teach new users how to take those first actions.

Meanwhile, we got together as a team to redesign our entire onboarding experience.

The actual nature of the objectives will differ per product team, as they are usually tied to the product itself. (For SaaS metrics, get this cheat sheet from Chartmogul.)

But the principle remains the same – if you want to keep everyone aligned around your product, set goals that are tightly wrapped around your product.

3. Effective teams give company-wide access to customer feedback and support tickets

Slack gets all my love for this one.

We’ve set up a Slack channel to send us incoming Zendesk tickets so that all of us are in on them.

In companies where customer support is considered a separate function, everyone else misses out on the stream of raw customer feedback, comments, and questions.

As far as I’m concerned, this is as good as gold.

Our Head of Customer Success also ropes all of us into doing customer support when she needs us. Rather than pinging us separately, asking how to answer, and answering the ticket herself), she assigns us the tickets that we’re better positioned to answer.

We also use our own Slack-ProdPad integration to send all our customer feedback into our backlog. Rather than make an informal comment over lunch like “X customer just told me she hates our new phased rollout,” we collect them in ProdPad.

Here, they become a formal part of our product process. So long as we put our notes back into ProdPad, they will be seen, and tagged, and they will be considered when the time comes to address that issue.

The alternative is that the customer feedback we field while we’re on the road meeting customers, at conferences, and so on just disappears into thin air.

4. Effective teams invest in making users feel badass

People use products that make them feel badass, and they invest time and energy in products that make them feel badass.

That’s developer evangelist Kathy Sierra’s message to product teams and companies: make your users feel awesome, badass, and good at what they do.

Sometimes, this means thinking beyond the product itself.

We take our cues from companies like Unbounce, a company whose marketing strategy is to create and give away the most useful digital marketing knowledge possible. Their resources are so well produced, thorough, and genuinely useful that they hardly qualify as marketing in the traditional sense. 

I see it as effectively a companion product to its landing page tool – a growing library of webinars, courses, e-books, and posts that help users become really confident marketers.

This collaboration of marketing and product, which don’t always cooperate as they should, is a clear victory for the company.

Where are customers struggling? What do they want to learn more about? What would make them more confident at work or in life?

There’s your sweet spot.

Similarly, our own marketing revolves around helping our users become better product managers.

For example, when we saw one of our blogs, How to Build a Product Roadmap Everyone Understands, start to attract significant traffic, we doubled down the topic. Now, our free, in-depth e-course on the same topic has become the go-to resource for building a simple and agile product roadmap.

Is it marketing? Is it customer success? Based on my experience, just say no to labels and do whatever makes your users feel smart and ready to take on the world.

5. Effective product teams put the final decision and/or veto power in the hands of a single product manager.  

Sure, there are risks to giving one person the power to decide what stays or goes but the alternative is death by committee – and it’s hard to recover from a culture like that.

Product decisions made by committee result in compromise, and compromise is how Windows 8 happened.

Leave the back-and-forth shuffling and the mealy-mouthed product decisions to a less imaginative product company. It takes a single bold product leader who has the power to insist to catapult products into first place. There is one caveat: before making that final call, Product Managers should ask their colleagues what they think. 

One of our customers Ajay Dawar, VP of Product Management & Design at Everstring, does this in a really interesting way.

First, he talks to the CEO and exec team about what they believe the product direction should be. Then, he poses the following question to each team leader:

“Over the next 90 days, what’s the most important thing for us to do?”

Based on those discussions, he curates a set of ideas from an otherwise long product backlog for them to stack rank. Stank ranking effectively forces his colleagues to assign their priorities a numbered list – no ties allowed.

A committee might be tempted to say: “Can we squeeze in both?” But he has the full support of the company to make the final decision.

Speaking of final decisions, the other caveat is this: No decision has to be final. Any good product team is always testing, learning, and iterating based on the results.

Every product decision should be subject to change.

The post Product Teams: What Highly Effective Ones Are Doing Differently appeared first on ProdPad.

1. Ask for a business case with each idea

I love that anyone who submits a new idea in ProdPad has to think about why they’re doing it. The two questions that make up the business case give you some much needed context:

• What problem are you trying to solve?
• What value would it provide to the business or users if it were solved? (think OKRs/KPIs)

That gets your colleagues to think a little more like you do. It also keeps useless one-liners out of your backlog and limits the number of ideas you have to look at every week.

I like to refer to it as ‘the deterrent to bad ideas,’ but in a good way! Long gone are the days of ‘Hey, how about we make that button blue?’ NO.

Some product managers find the business case so useful, they even enforce a rule: No business case, no go.

2. Don’t accept votes – ask for comments

Voting is good. It’s a low-touch way to get your people involved in the product process. But votes don’t tell you much, and some votes are more important than others.

For you, the real value lies in the comments. That’s because some of your colleagues are more invested in or closer to an issue than others. This is their opportunity to flag up concerns you haven’t thought about and open up the floor to new angles you need to consider.

When you hold a team vote, insist on a short summary of the reasoning behind their vote.

Here’s what it looks like in ProdPad:

3. Always give quick, personal feedback

I’ve found that the biggest determining factor behind how active your team will be is acknowledgement – from you, that is.

Add a quick note letting your team know that you are paying attention, that their thoughts do matter, and that you find their input helpful.

As you’re sorting your backlog and either moving an idea forward or archiving it, be sure to leave a quick comment to the creator. Was it a good idea? Tell them! Want to get your team involved? Tell them! Is it missing a business case? ಠ_ಠ … tell them that too!

Remember that people thrive on positive reinforcement. A little acknowledgement will win you more of the insights you’re after.

4. Let them help write product specs

The best way to bridge the gap between teams is to have them help you develop product specs. We implemented assignments to it easier to hand over an idea to a team member for them to work on.

There are three levels of assignments in ProdPad:

• Creator – The team member who submits an idea into ProdPad
• Author – If the creator is submitting an idea on behalf of someone else, they can credit them as the author. (This is helpful when the creator and author work together to help spec out an idea)
• Owner – This is generally the product manager that owns the idea that is attached to a particular product. (You can use this to specify a product manager, if you have several different product teams)

Regardless of user permissions, you can reassign the author and owner as needed to pass the product idea around between team members. That helps them to collaborate and assist you in the ideation process. When the idea is completed, the owner/product manager can then push the idea to development.

The Takeaway

What keeps many of your colleagues away from your product management process is that they don’t know what you do and what you need from them. (Can you blame them? Plenty of CEOs don’t either.)

If you’ve been struggling to get a collaborative culture going at your company, watch how fast that changes when you tell them what you’re looking for.

The post How To Get Brilliant Product Ideas Out Of Non-Product People appeared first on ProdPad.

Flexible roadmaps allow you to be innovative by providing you the ability to adapt to your product plans and the changing market, while keeping all stakeholders up to date. After all, transparency is king in today’s SaaS world, and the more open you are about what your product plans are, the more supportive your community will be.

Last but not least, innovation comes with a process. Not just a thought process, but an evaluation process! Not all ideas come fully formed, and some may have more weight than others. There is a process to refining, developing and identifying the ideas with the most potential. By keeping on top of your backlog and using key metrics such as impact and effort, as well as speccing out the idea with a business case and figuring out ‘what problem you are trying to solve’ – your ideas will take form in no time.

So how do YOU promote innovation?

As a side experiment to this blog post, I decided to ask the Twitter community how they promoted innovation. Here are some awesome thoughtful answers from some super smart people!

The post How Product Managers Promote An Innovative Product Culture appeared first on ProdPad.

@mentions

Mentions allow you to tag anyone to an Idea, Mockup, or Design you are working on. Simply type @+the first letter of their name, and select the user from the dropdown menu. Not only will they receive your mention notification, but they will be added to the item’s ‘follow list,’ ensuring they won’t miss a thing.

Daily and weekly email digest

If you’re the lead in a team, getting constant updates may become overwhelming. Reduce the amount of emails (or increase them if you want more!) by opting in to daily and weekly email digests to get a round up of what’s been happening in your account.

Team Collaboration and Commenting on mockups

Long gone are the days when you had to scribble changes and edits on so many different post-its you lost track of all your version reviews. By annotating comments directly on your mockup, you can easily guide your team through changes and requests. Read more about this feature in our Feature Friday post!

Voting

Yay, Nay, or Maybe? Let your team voice their opinions by giving an idea a thumbs up or down.

Add ideas anytime, anywhere

We make it easy for team to send in ideas no matter where they’re at. With our Chrome Extension and email dropbox, your team can submit ideas no matter where they are.

What are your favourite tools to improve team collaboration? Let us know in the comments, or start your free trial of ProdPad to see these great features in action!

The post Five Ways To Improve Team Collaboration With ProdPad appeared first on ProdPad.

Open Communication

Good idea management requires communication input from many different sources. With departments like legal and compliance this might be irregular or limited to specific details, but the specialist information they hold could seal the fate of new product ideas. Using ProdPad you can extend collaboration to absolutely anyone in your organisation without having to integrate them as a fully fledged user. Tools like Google Single Sign-On and email integration mean that it’s easy to call on colleagues for advice whenever it’s relevant, using @mentions. Comments can be dropped directly onto idea canvases and design mockups, so that pertinent information to an idea is accessible to everyone in your team.

Product Compliance: Impact vs Effort

Judging whether a new product idea is feasible is dependent on the big picture. Value brought to the business needs to be set against the effort or risk involved across the entire product process, not just development resources. Taking what you’ve learnt from conversations with compliance and legal, you can make an educated guess of anticipated effort to take a new product idea through to launch and set that against the business case and estimated value. ProdPad allows you to do this for every new idea using various scales including an adjusted Fibonacci scale, all of which is plotted on a visualized priorities chart.

Specs from every angle

Build product specs that take every factor into account. An important part of preparing requirements that are 100% ready for engineers and designers is to note any compliance concerns. Providing this information from the start will help you to avoid do-overs further down the line. ProdPad idea canvases provide a comprehensive template for the data your development team needs, including technical specifications. And with two-way integrations between ProdPad and project management tools, your developers can follow links to get all details of legal and compliant regulations shared directly by these teams.

Fully Audited Processes

Some regulations require that product processes are completely audited. When you manage all conversations, user feedback and design iterations in one centralized platform no details are lost, keeping your compliance and legal teams happy without any extra workload.

If you’d like to chat to us about how you can make product management processes more compliant using ProdPad, get in touch here. 

And if you’re new to ProdPad, you can sign up for a free trial here. 

The post How Product Managers Can Keep Product Compliance and Legal Happy appeared first on ProdPad.

Product Managers vs Developers

One way to understand the difference between ProdPad and JIRA is to look at who these tools are used by. Essentially, your developers will live in JIRA while everybody else in your company uses ProdPad. Product Managers require a tool that allows them to capture everything they could do from many different sources. However developers need visibility of every task that will be done, and to follow the operational progress of those tasks. Only tickets that are spec’ed and approved for development have a place in JIRA, the developer’s world. Integrations allow each team to benefit from the information held in each system without having to leave their own sphere of activity.
[bctt tweet= “Only tickets that are spec’ed and approved for development have a place in JIRA – #prodmgmt”]

Finite Tasks vs Fuzzy Backlog

So what qualifies JIRA for development tickets and ProdPad for product ideas? One advantage presents itself as soon as you separate finite, confirmed tasks and a fuzzy backlog. JIRA is designed for task management, and ProdPad for idea management – each of which has a very different working approach. There’s nothing more de-motivating for a developer than to find 500 tickets in their queue, knowing they can barely scratch the surface. JIRA is designed to see tasks through to completion; when you limit the number of tickets in JIRA to only these actionable tasks your development team can work confidently to clear them.

Nothing ‘fuzzy’ or undefined should make its way to JIRA, and anything that does should be sent right back to ProdPad. This is the holding place for everything you could do, that helps you decide whether your development team should build it. ProdPad has a low barrier to entry that allows you and your team to capture ideas at their earliest stage, and tools to help you easily review where details need to be fleshed out. There’s no harm in having 700 items in your ProdPad backlog, as with powerful search and filtering, nothing can ever be lost. Work in ProdPad is an ongoing process to surface the next viable ideas for your developers to build.

By keeping your undefined maybe’s in your ProdPad backlog, you’re keeping your development team happy and sane in their own day-to-day lives.

Tech-savvy vs open collaboration

The core design of ProdPad and JIRA makes them differently suited to different people in your team.

Evidently, developers work well with high-tech tools. And given that project management tasks should be ready for execution, there’s not a great need for collaborative features in JIRA itself. In fact, bringing a wider team (ie. your commercial or exec teams) into JIRA will likely only cause confusion and disruption for all parties. However, a product management tool needs to be much more open to company-wide communication. ProdPad has an accessible interface that’s easy for anyone on your team to understand, with collaborative tools throughout that allow you to spark up a conversation on just about anything. 

Systems Talking

A solid integration is of course key to ProdPad and JIRA working together seamlessly. Product Managers can control the synchronization of only ready-to-build ideas from ProdPad to JIRA with the click of a button. Links in each system allow developers to find out more detail when they wish to, without being inundated with unnecessary information. And status syncs between the two tools means that each team can find out everything they need to know from a single location. With the help of an effective technological relationship between ProdPad and JIRA, you can build an effective relationship between product and project management.

You can read more about the ProdPad and JIRA integration here. 

Or if you’d like to see for yourself how ProdPad is designed for better product management, sign up for a 14 day free trial here. 

The post Why JIRA Alone Can’t Help You To Do Better Product Management appeared first on ProdPad.

Share customer insight

Your marketing team holds important customer insight that can be invaluable in understanding both particular product needs and the big picture of your target users.  Alongside the specific prospect feedback you collect from your sales team, your marketers – specifically any colleagues focused on customer or product marketing – have additional information to share from competitive research to customer interviews.

There are a number of ways in which ProdPad allows them to do so easily – from adding customer feedback and new ideas, to commenting on existing suggestions and even directly on user persona pages. Product Managers can call in marketing opinion at any time using @mentions, and marketers can follow ideas of interest to stay involved in their development.

Support the business case 

Once you’ve found a promising idea, there’s still more work to do before you can start to prioritize. Every idea canvas should have a validated business case to help you evaluate whether the new product or change will merit the resources required.  For certain product developments, marketing will be able to help form commercial objectives, such as awareness or new registration numbers. Accessible collaboration tools are key at this stage where defining – and ultimately delivering on – success criteria is dependent on the involvement of team members company-wide. 

Plan coordinated product launches

Although we don’t believe in fixing specific dates to your roadmap, communication is still key to coordinating product and commercial strategies. As your new products move closer and closer to implementation, the marketing team will have plenty of work to do from press to sales materials. When roadmapping you may wish to attach broad timeframes to ‘current’ and ‘near-term’ products and features so that your marketing team can start to plan out launches for these new releases. As ideas make their way into development, make sure that your marketing team is following their progress. With the help of systems integrations and email notifications, there are no unexpected surprises.

Bring consistency to product messaging

Finally, new and updated products can be supported with marketing-approved resources, all centralized in a single location – your ProdPad product pages. Materials can be uploaded so they can be accessed by your entire team, helping product managers to keep product management in one place, and marketing teams to rest assured only on-message content is being shared externally.

If you’d like to find out more about how marketers and product managers can work together using ProdPad, get in touch with us here

Catch up on how to involve your executive team in product management decisions here, and stay tuned next week for how ProdPad can help you to keep compliance and legal happy. 

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