Take advantage of pre-set filters

Needs more detail

These ideas are just one-liners that could be fleshed out further. They probably need a little more detail so the rest of the team understands what was asked. Feel free to @mention colleagues to pull them into the conversation and get their feedback on the beginnings of the idea.

New Ideas Today

These ideas have been submitted in the last 24 hours. They probably need you to have a quick look, add your thoughts, or maybe get it on the roadmap.

Not updated recently

These ideas are at risk of being forgotten. Just have a quick look through at the end of each week. Even if you just add a tag or a comment, or answer something simple like ‘What problem is this idea solving’ in the business case, it’s a good step in grooming your product backlog effectively.

Potential Quick Wins

These ideas have a high impact and low effort. These are the ideas you should consider getting spec’d out and sent to development!

Alternatively, you also have access to create your own filters. If there’s a particular product or trend you want to keep your eyes on, save it as a filter and enter triage mode to decide which items you will be moving forward.

Investing in your product backlog pays off. Not only can you attack this vast repository of ideas with a bit more sanity, but you can shake its reputation as a place where ideas go to die.

At ProdPad we practice what we preach. Great feedback and user stories are at the heart of what we build. Tell us about your routine for taking care of the product backlog in the comments below.

The post Re-Introducing Triage Mode for a Tidier Product Backlog appeared first on ProdPad.

But Daniel had a different point to make: What about the color-blind users?

You see, when someone adds their vote and a comment to an idea, 92% of our audience sees this:

The remaining 8% who are color-blind see something different.

Now, there are a bunch of different types of color-blindness. I ran an example of our current design through a color-blindness simulator.

Here’s what the same positive vote looks like if you’ve got a deuteranomaly form of color-blindness, the most common type that involves a red-green color deficit.

Not so clear it’s a positive vote anymore!

It’s funny that Daniel pointed this out and that we hadn’t thought of it when first designing this voting system. When running demos of ProdPad, I always use color-blindness as an example of a problem to solve!

But here we were, dropping the ball. So we looked at ways to improve the experience, even though we knew we didn’t have a lot of time to put towards it.

I worked with our UX Designer, Kav, and we went through a few potentially quick solutions.

How do we fix this without a lot of time?

Potential Fix #1: What if we added a hover state with context?

This one put too much onus on the user. We didn’t think people would think to hover over a user’s avatar in a discussion thread to see what a color means. Solution thrown out.

Potential Fix #2: What if we changed the luminosity to have a contrast ratio of 4.5:1? 

This one would drastically change our colour palette, and there was no easy way to detect and dynamically adjust luminosity on the fly. It certainly wasn’t the simplest way to solve the problem, and Danielle, our UX Developer, had experience in trying this before that was helpful in steering us away from this time sink. Solution thrown out.

Potential Fix #3: What if we added some context inline, next to the user’s name?

It would provide quick visibility and understanding of the action the user just took, and was simple to execute. Solution accepted!

We created a new idea in ProdPad, wrote up our notes and included some mockups. On our Priority Chart, it fell squarely in our Quick Wins category.

I pushed it along to Trello to be picked up by our development team.

And there we have it, from feedback to quick win solution in a matter of hours. Thanks, Daniel! You just helped make ProdPad that much more awesome.

The post Now You See Me! Feedback to Quick Win in Less Than a Day appeared first on ProdPad.

A product spec is a blueprint that describes what you’re building, who you’re building it for and what the final outcome should be.

A well-written spec is about clarity. The more information you have going into a product spec, the more clarity you give everyone working on the product with you.

We generally include some or all of the following, depending on what is needed to clearly communicate what is needed.

A product spec includes:

• Summary – what is the idea being suggested?
• A business case – what value does this create for the business and/or customer?
• User stories – what is the user trying to accomplish? (we have a quick template here)
• User personas – who is the solution for?
• Designs – what does the solution look like?
• Functional specs – what are the technical details behind the solution?  (Joel Spolsky has written extensively about this.)

If you’re working in a bigger company or large teams, you should err on the side of over-communication: more context and more deeply detailed specs. As a rule of thumb, the more moving parts that are involved, the less you want to leave up to interpretation.

On the other hand, if you’re working closely with a small team, you might be able to get by with simpler, lightweight specs.

Our 5-Step Process For Writing Product Specs

For much of its life, a product spec is a work in progress. That’s fine! That’s how it should be. You’ll be getting new information and dealing with potential setbacks  throughout the process.

We follow a process here at ProdPad that mirrors something Einstein once said: “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”

Thinking through the problem that you intend to solve – and sometimes even going back to the drawing board entirely – is not a waste of time. The problem is usually the hardest thing to nail.

So expect that you’ll probably be making a series of changes to make along the way – but also that you’ll end up with a more solid product spec for it.

Writing specs is not a straight shot – but here’s the process that works for us.

Step 1: Turn to customer feedback and data to find the source of the problems

The best place to go looking for problems is in your customer feedback.

Customer feedback comes in many forms: complaints, questions, product suggestions and  feature requests. The most critical thing when evaluating all this is to not take it literally.

What your customers are asking for is not a mandate. When you’re investigating a problem area,  each item of feedback is a data point to help you get down to the root of the problem.

Speaking of data, customer feedback won’t always tell you if something critical like the checkout flow isn’t working. You’ll often need to look at the data!

What’s behind all this feedback in the first place?  What is the underlying issue here? These are the kind of critical questions that help you understand  a) the problem and b) the scope.

Other questions to ask here:

• Are a lot of customers asking for this? How big is customer desire?
• How critical is this problem? Is this going to make it hard for you to win over future customers?
• Is it keeping you from acquiring more users or closing deals?

Step 2: Break the problem down into a bunch of hypotheses

So how big is this problem, actually? In this step, you’ll continue to understand the scope of what you’re dealing with.

Let’s say for example, your customer feedback tells you that you have a big problem on your hands. There’s no quick fix for this one. You need to completely redo your checkout process.

Now you’re probably considering all kinds of ideas and that can quickly start to get overwhelming. What we suggest is that you break these ideas out into three categories:

This way you can still account for the full scope of the problem, but keep your eyes on the ball. Think MVP. The essentials are your top priority. Everything else is going to have to wait its turn.

Step 3: Open up product discussions across your team/company

“Writing a spec is a great way to nail down all those irritating design decisions, large and small, that get covered up if you don’t have a spec. Even small decisions can get nailed down with a spec,” says Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software.

Oof, yes. That sounds familiar. However, those small decisions tend to add up – and it’s in no one’s best interests to start dealing with them when it’s already sitting in your dev backlog.

The mistake I’ve seen made over and over is leaving these discussions until the end when a spec is already in production. You must create a space and a forum for your internal stakeholders to contribute while the idea is still taking shape.

Start inviting colleagues around the company now to help you start getting your idea ready. They know things you don’t and they can tell you from their corner:

1. What works
2. What doesn’t work
3. Argue for a bigger/smaller scope

The opportunity to open up product discussions around what gets done and how is a key trait of effective product teams.

We keep all our product discussions in ProdPad. Each product idea has a discussion section, so we’re able to focus on really specific objections and concerns.

Step 4: Do user testing with your closest customers

Everything you’ve done so far makes sense on paper, but reality bites. Things change when you put a prototype in front of humans! It’s time to see whether your assumptions hold and your customers react the way you’ve imagined they will.

At ProdPad, our designer preps  a series of simple designs – really simple, like wireframes and clickable prototypes – for user testing.

We do our user testing in two ways usually:

1. Slack customer community – We throw designs into our customer community and invite feedback. It’s a public channel, but it’s also where our closest and most engaged customers hang out. We get a lot of insights from the discussions that follow.
2. One-on-one user tests – We set up a dedicated session where we ask our user tester to perform a series of tasks to see how/where they trip up

Can users complete the tasks you ask them to? Are they easily able to find buttons? Do they feel confident about where to look for stuff?

What usually follows is that some of your assumptions were wrong. It’s not as easy to find the buttons, or the flow isn’t as obvious to the user as you thought it was.

There’s a couple other surprises you may find out here:

• edge cases
• surprise requirements
• misunderstood functionality
• widened or changed scope

At this point, we’re also looking at the bigger picture. We also look at how the new solution fits in with the way our users already use the product. What’s the difference between changing nothing and putting something new in place?

But it’s just a prototype and all you have to do is adjust it. Repeat until you’re confident you’ve gotten it right.

So think of it this way: User testing is all about minimizing risks. It’s cheaper to repeat this step than go live with a new feature that could blow up in everyone’s faces.

Step 5: If it’s ready, send to development

Remember how I mentioned earlier that product specs are always a work in progress? That’s the case even now, here in this final step.

The, even if development goes flawlessly, QA is a diff story.  Once you start clicking around, you might start to discover little things that you may have missed. It’s okay not to be harsh on yourself – it happens even to us.

We think everything is great and pat ourselves on the back for being so meticulous. But when we’re testing, we think, “Hmm, maybe this button should be on the right because it doesn’t actually make sense in the context of the rest of the app.”

It happens to the best of us. Perfection takes time.

When you feel confident you’ve got something going, add the final touches: final prototypes, technical information, key context, etc.

If you’ve been developing your product spec in ProdPad, now you can simply push to Trello, JIRA or your development tool of choice.

All done! Now take a well-deserved break and when you’re back, go right back to where you started from: customer feedback. The life of a product manager, eh? 

The post How to Write Great Product Specs 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.

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.

The post Introducing a New and Improved API for Product Management, Your Way appeared first on ProdPad.

Our latest feature makes Product Management not only simpler, but more democratic. We’ve added voting to idea management in ProdPad.

Yea, Nay, or Maybe votes from your team

Product Managers can gather feedback on ideas with a fast and effective voting mechanism that simply asks for a ‘Yea’, ‘Maybe’ or ‘Nay’ vote. Any member of your team can vote on any product idea, and every vote must include a short comment so that the Product Managers can qualify responses – perhaps 1 Nay has more weight than 10 Yea votes, simply because of the response given.

ProdPad tallies up the results to give you a snapshot of whether an idea is liked or not. Ultimately, you can use this information to decide whether to build up product specs further, and help you make prioritization decisions.

At ProdPad, we practice what we preach – feedback and informed user stories are an extremely important part of what we build. So share us your experiences of collecting feedback from your team in the comments below!

Try voting today

Voting is available now for all ProdPad customers to try out – just head to an idea and check it out. And if you’d like to find out more about using ProdPad for collaboration and idea management, we’re here to help.

And of course, if you haven’t already created your team account, you can start a completely free trial today.

The post Introducing Voting for Product Ideas appeared first on ProdPad.

Filter your backlog for maximum control

Several different filters can be applied to your product backlog to help you get the most of ProdPad’s idea management features.

• Tags – These are your standard, customizable tags
• Products – Associate each idea to one or many products
• Whether it’s on a roadmap yet or not – Find out what’s planned
• User Personas – Associate ideas to various user segments
• Idea Creator – The person who actually logged the idea
• Idea Owner – The person in charge of taking the idea forward
• Idea Author – The bright person who came up with the idea!
• Status of the idea – Whether it’s in development, done, or anything in between
• Active vs. Archived – You can even dig though the ideas you’ve archived

You can refine your bank of ideas against even as specific criteria as you need by using multiple tags or combining any of these filters. And as always, these filters will work in conjunction with ProdPad’s powerful search. Plus, this razor sharp focus on a particular set of ideas can be applied throughout ProdPad. Your filters remain selected when you want to visualize priority, edit in bulk, or export your ideas. Filters make your backlog more manageable, no matter what you’re doing.

Sort your backlog any way you like

As well as applying granular filters, you can also sort your backlog by a number of relevant factors to bring the ideas you’re looking for to the top of the list.

• Date created
• Effort – This is a quick gauge, out of 100, on how much effort (relatively speaking) it’ll take to pull off the idea
• Impact – Like the Effort field, this measures how much impact the idea will have (top tip: combine with tags to identify what areas of the business will be impacted and improved)
• Popularity – Find out which ideas are most popular (bright red!) versus the ones that are feeling neglected (faded to grey)
• Detail – A rough guide based on whether the idea has comments, a business case or user stories, tags, or other fleshed out parts of the spec.

As always, your feedback is hugely appreciated. If you have any other ideas for how to keep your backlog tidy in ProdPad, just give us a shout at hello@prodpad.com.

If you’re not already a ProdPad user, you can start your free trial today!

The post Supercharged Product Backlog Filters appeared first on ProdPad.