Between email, CRMs, development tools, team communication, feedback and support, things can easily get out of hand. Sometimes, it can be a struggle to get them all working together.

Here at ProdPad we understand the value of integrations with the help of Zapier we now integrate with over 1,000 different apps, you can choose your favorite tools and have them all work together like a perfectly tuned orchestra.

Thanks to our Zapier integration, we now have over 1,000 apps you can choose from. And the best part? It doesn’t require any code! Zaps will automatically send information from one tool to another, so you’ll spend less time manually transferring data between your business tools and can dedicate more time to building products people love.

Give your productivity a boost with app integration

No matter what other apps you use, chances are you can integrate with them via Zapier. Check out some of the most popular apps that ProdPad users are zapping about!

If you’re loving this as much as we are, don’t waste any more time! Try out some of the Zaps above or view more ways to integrate ProdPad.

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• Two-way integration – Push any idea or user story from ProdPad to VSO, creating a link between the idea and the new ticket.
• Custom status mapping – Map your issue statuses between ProdPad and VSO
• Sync statuses – Enable everyone to keep an eye on development progress. When a status is updated in VSO, it updates automatically in ProdPad too.

Ready to set up your ProdPad-VSO integration? Here are the instructions.

Looking for other ways to plug and play with ProdPad? We have hundreds of integrations available via Zapier, as well as out-of-the-box integrations with JIRA, Trello, PivotalTracker and TFS. Check out our full list of product management integrations.

From strategy to dev: plan your roadmap and specs in ProdPad -> push straight to VSO. Try ProdPad free.

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Zapier will then prompt you to map fields between the two apps.

These are our current settings:

Once you’ve mapped everything, you can go ahead and test the zap to make sure things are being imported correctly. Keep in mind that this test will generate an instance within ProdPad.

If you’re happy with the results, just click ‘Turn on Zap’ and done! All new submissions moving forward will be automatically added to ProdPad’s Customer Feedback module.

My top tip: Log in once a week and tag all feedback and link it to ideas. It’s a great practice to keep your backlog clean and up to date!

Which tools have you hooked up to ProdPad? Let me know in the comments – or if you haven’t seen the power of ProdPad for yourself start your free trial right here, right now!

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This will ensure that the text, along with the source, are tagged and added to your ProdPad account.

Once you’ve mapped everything, you can go ahead and run a test zap to make sure the information is coming in as needed. Keep in mind that this test will generate an instance within ProdPad.

If you’re happy with the results, just click ‘Turn on Zap’ and done!

Which tools have you hooked up to ProdPad? Let me know in the comments – or if you haven’t seen the power of ProdPad for yourself start your free trial right here, right now!

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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. 

The post Product Planning with Product Marketing Teams appeared first on ProdPad.

This integration means that when you change a story’s status in Pivotal Tracker, we’ll automatically update the related idea status in ProdPad. No more duplication of tasks or important updates lost in transmission.

It’s really easy to get set up and start benefiting from the new two-way integration. From the Integrations page, select mapping for Pivotal Tracker and choose which status fields you’d like to sync. These changes will be updated automatically for every other colleague who copied your original integration too.

If you’re a Pivotal Tracker user and would like to find out more about integrating with ProdPad, you can find out more here or get in touch directly with one of the team

The post ProdPad and Pivotal Tracker: Integrating Product Management for Even More Product Teams appeared first on ProdPad.

Flag up relevant ideas

Your product backlog should be an open and transparent environment where ideas go to flourish, not to die. However, not every prospective product spec is relevant for your entire team. ProdPad helps you to flag up ideas to the attention specific colleagues using idea following and @mentions. Daily and weekly email digests mean that your team can remain in the loop on what’s happening with the backlog and follow up should anything pique their interest.

Quick ballot collaboration

At any stage in the idea management process, voting can be a direct and simple way to collect the opinions of your team on whether an idea should be prioritized for development. ‘Yea’s or ‘nay’s should always be qualified by a reason to help product managers make collaborative but informed decisions. ProdPad attaches an easy-to-use voting mechanism to every idea canvas to provide an easy way for your team to give feedback on the product backlog.

Open, easy roadmapping

Once priorities have been set, it’s important that you can share your planned product direction with colleagues and customers alike. A roadmap should be reactive to change and continually up to date, but at the same time accessible to all. In ProdPad you can demonstrate the impact of changes to your roadmap with a drag and drop interface, and export the most recent version to PNG or PDF to send around. You can even embed private and public versions of your roadmaps into any live site. Giving users and team members an instant and dependable location to seek out the most up-to-date plans.

A complete feedback loop

If businesses are ever to coordinate on product changes, it’s important to register who has staked interest in different product ideas.  Tracking the progress of an idea is important all the way through to implementation and ProdPad helps product managers to do this in a number of different ways. Communication with customers is made easier via traceable links from idea canvases to pieces of user feedback, with fields for contact details. The feedback loop can even be automated via two-way integrations between statuses in ProdPad and other systems. With colleagues and customers kept comfortably in the loop, product managers can finally reduce the number of daily requests for new information.

Catch up on how ProdPad fits into building product specs here, and next week read about how ProdPad supports the transition to implementation. 

If you’d like to hear more about how ProdPad can help product managers to better collaborate with team members and customers, get in touch or sign up for a 14 day free trial here. 

The post How ProdPad Fits In: Sharing Ideas appeared first on ProdPad.

Integrating ProdPad with Trello

First of all, it’s now possible to map ProdPad ideas to Trello cards, giving you more control and options about what information is sent to your Trello board.

And on top of that, we’ve developed a two-way integration with Trello that allows you to automatically update an idea’s status in ProdPad when a card moves on your Trello board.

It’s really easy to get set up and start benefiting from these new integration points. From the Integrations page, select mapping from your Trello integration and select which fields you’d like to sync. These changes will be updated automatically for every other colleague who copied your original integration too.

If you’re a Trello user and would like to find out more about integrating with ProdPad, you can find out more here or get in touch directly with one of the team.

The post ProdPad and Trello take it to the next level appeared first on ProdPad.