I’ll be honest with you: this is not a good practice. (In fact, it’s #5 on my list of roadmap things to avoid.)

The roadmap is not a list of things that you will do. It’s a list of things that you could do.

More than anything, it’s an experimentation tool – a place to lay out the solutions that you can test, in order to address the most important problems facing your company.

Once you’ve identified the main problems according to the business’ OKRs, then you brainstorm potential solutions. There are usually many, varied paths toward your goal. Each problem could have 5 to 10 potential solutions attached to it. Narrowing them down and selecting the best one requires experimentation.

The product roadmap records what these experiments are, how they’re going, and what’s been learned.

All of your ideas are hypotheses

All of your ideas are hypotheses, and as a PM, your job is actually to invalidate most of them! That said, product ideas don’t pop out of the blue, and your hypotheses aren’t created in a vacuum.

Product ideas are derived from OKRs, top-level objectives that are defined by the business. The product team sets out to solve a problem around churn, retention, revenue, etc. For example, as a PM you can say, “Okay, the problem we’re tackling this month is — we need to get conversion rates up, and the issue is around our sign-in flow area. We need to move people into the purchase flow. How can we do that?”

From there, you might brainstorm three to ten different ideas or potential solutions. Some will succeed and some will fail – that’s a fact. But you don’t know which ones until you test them. And to test them effectively, you need hypotheses.

How to phrase a product hypothesis: If we [try this idea], it could solve [this problem] and it could uplift [this metric] by [N].

Cool, that’s the experiment to run! Then you see how the new feature performs and take steps from there. But while we’re here, a quick note about new features…

What counts as a potential solution? Think wider.

Product solutions aren’t necessarily new features. What about changing a feature – or even removing a feature? Either of these might improve usability or impact other metrics and objectives that you’re working toward.

Some solutions might not involve code at all! The trick could be changing the price or the packaging or the value proposition. Shift how you talk about a benefit on the homepage or rethink how you present certain information to the customer. Adjustments like these can transform the way people interact with your product – which, in turn, could solve some of the problems on your product roadmap.

The point is: experimentation doesn’t always require the development team. Instead, it might require marketing, sales, customer success, and support. PMs should take a step back and think more holistically about what it is they’re actually solving so that the rest of the team can be involved as well.

What counts as a product roadmap experiment? Think leaner.

Again, by “experiment” I don’t necessarily mean build full-on code. Experiments can also be fast litmus tests to check what’s viable or not before devoting any real resources to it. There are many ways to do customer decision discovery, do quick prototypes, and put in place little tests. It could even be a prototype on paper that you test with select customers. 

As you do these tests, you identify the experiment options that you think are going to be easy, the low-effort, high-impact ones, and float those to the top. Work through the list and see how close you come to solving the problem. 80% is close enough. Move on.

Most importantly, record everything.

The product roadmap is a record of learning

As a product team, one of the most important things you can do is log your decisions – for future you and future team members who join. This starts with each of your tests.

Logging experiments in the roadmap

You can use the product roadmap to display how you’re actually progressing with experiments, such as:

• This one is something that we’re still discovering. 
• This one shows promise, and we’re going to do some design prototyping. 
• This one failed.
• This one was successful.

But for any idea that you have, which is to say any experiment that you’ll run, you should also log your target outcomes along with the actual results. This is crucial for understanding the solution’s viability at the moment, and it also helps prevent repeating any work (or mistakes) down the line.

Let’s say there’s a delta between expected and actual outcomes, such as, “We thought Idea X would get us 100 new users each month, but it actually only brought in 20.” Well, obviously you won’t move forward with Idea X right now. And this result is recorded in case the idea comes up again.

How to preserve what you’ve learned

ProdPad is basically a log of all the decisions made and all the lessons learned over time. In addition to your working product roadmap, which is in the Now-Next-Later format, you also have a “completed roadmap.” Any initiatives that you’ve completed are shown, in reverse chronological order, with all the experiments that were attached and how well you did with them.

After all, a product manager’s impact isn’t just features that they’ve built. It’s also the problems they’ve tried to solve and the experiments they’ve tried to run, whether they worked or not. Designers have Behance, developers have Github. What do PMs have? That’s one reason we created Prodpad.

Set the stage for product roadmap experimentation in your team

Want to encourage this approach among your colleagues? Shifting to experimentation mode requires changing the language that you use. Here are a couple of ways to help your team embrace experimentation:

1. Continuously reframe conversations that become too feature-focused or committed to one solution. An excellent reframe is to ask: “What problem are we trying to solve?”

Ask these sorts of questions and give them time to think things through. Give them space to talk through how they might solve a problem. This requires vulnerability and some psychological safety among the team, so they can let go of needing to be right. This brings us to…

2. Talk about ideas as “hypotheses” or even “bets.” This invites people to get into that scientific, almost playful mindset.

Failed hypotheses and lost bets don’t really exist in product management, because you’re always learning something from the experiment. Besides, you aren’t trying to prove your idea right. You don’t have the answer, and no one does! You’re trying to find answers as a team.

The post Your Product Roadmap is a Tool for Experimenting appeared first on ProdPad.

Let’s review some of the super speedy ways that you can drop in ideas wherever you are.

Email Dropbox

Forward ideas straight from your inbox into ProdPad! Anyone who’s got a user account in your ProdPad account can add an idea using the Email Dropbox in a flash.

You can use our own @prodpad.com address (yourcompany+idea@prodpad.com), or you can customize an email using your own domain.

Read more about how to set this up here.

Chrome Extension

Have you ever been browsing, when suddenly inspiration strikes? Waste no time going back to the ProdPad app and quickly drop in ideas and feedback using our Chrome Extension!

Read more about it here.

Slack

It is inevitable that a brilliant idea may strike halfway through a Slack conversation. Waste no time and turn it into an idea in a flash using our Slack integration!

Your team can even vote using emoji. After all, it is the language of the future, right?

Read more about our Slack bot here.

Regardless of the method, it’s incredibly easy to get your stakeholders involved with your product team. Whether they’re browsing, on the go or chatting away on Slack, your team won’t miss out on great ideas anymore!

If you’re looking for more ways to add ideas to your account, check out this detailed Help Center document.

The post 3 Quick Ways to Supercharge your Idea Management – How to Add Ideas to ProdPad Like a Pro appeared first on ProdPad.

1. Create your Shortcut
2. Create your Zap
3. Link the Shortcut to Zapier
4. Finish off the Zap
5. Set up Siri

1. Create your Shortcut

If you’ve got iOS12 installed on your iPhone, the first thing you need to do is download the Shortcuts app. Shortcuts allows you to define a workflow that is triggered by a single action, which can be linked to Siri by establishing a key phrase – like “Create an idea”, for example.

1. Open the Shortcuts app and tap “Create Shortcut”
2. Use the search bar to find the “Dictate Text” action – add it to the shortcut by tapping it in the list
3. Use the search bar to find the “URL” action – add it to your shortcut.
4. Use the search bar to find the “Get contents of URL” action – add this one too!

Your shortcut should now look like this:

2. Create your Zap

Now you have a shortcut, you need to create a Zap and link the shortcut to the zap.

• Open up Zapier, create a new Zap and select the Webhook app as the trigger app.

• Select “Catch Hook”, and then “Save + Continue”.
  

• The next step in Zap creation is to Pick off a Child key. This is optional, and not required, so just continue through without making changes.

3. Link the Shortcut to Zapier

• Now we’re getting to the fun part! This is where you get a URL to add to your shortcut. By now, your Zapier page should look like this:
  

• Copy the url and paste it into the URL action in your iOS shortcut:

• Now you need to ensure the URL contents (which will be your dictated note) can make their way to Zapier. Tap “Advanced” in the “Get Contents of URL” action and change the Method to “POST”.
• Set up the Request Body so that the right info makes its way to ProdPad. Under Request Body tap “Add a new field” of type “TEXT”. On the left hand side (titled “Key”) add the word “Notes”. On the right hand side, add the variable “Dictated Text” – you should see it as an option just above the keyboard.

• Give your Shortcut a name (like “Create a new idea”)
  Top Tip – Tap the icon (shown below) on the top right to edit the Shortcut’s attributes.
  
• Click “Done” – your shortcut should now be in the list. Tap it, and you should be prompted to dictate some text – you can use this to test your Zap in the upcoming steps!

4. Finish off the Zap

Finally, you need to ensure the data is getting through to Zapier and then into ProdPad.

• Go back to your Zap, and click “Ok, I did this”. Zapier will attempt to pull sample data from your Shortcut (i.e. the note you just dictated). When the data is pulled through, the screen will look like this:

• Click Continue to start the Idea creation step. Click the link to add an Action step.
  

• You’ll be prompted to select an Action App – choose ProdPad!
  

• Define the action you want to take in ProdPad – in this example, we’ll create an Idea from the dictated text, but you could set up another shortcut to add feedback! Once you’ve selected which action to take, click “Save + Continue”.
  

• When you click “Save + Continue”, you’ll be prompted to select the right account. If you haven’t already done it, you will need to connect to ProdPad, and will need to grab your API key!

• Once you’ve connected it, you’ll see it in the list – select it and click “Test” to create your first idea! Once you see the success message, you can click Continue.
  

• Now you need to tell Zapier which data to put into ProdPad. This is pretty simple – your dictated text needs to go into the Idea’s description.

• Top Tip – Use the lookup icon at the right hand side of the Description field (shown below) to identify and select the “Note” header.
  
• Navigate to the “Continue” button at the bottom of the field list, and click it to test the Zap. You will see this success message.
  

• Click “Finish” and then turn on your Zap.

5. Set up Siri

• Open up your Shortcut, and navigate to its attributes using the icon on the top right of the screen. Tap “Add to Siri”.
  

• You’ll be prompted to teach Siri what to listen for. Tap the red button and record the phrase you want to use (probably “create a new idea” or something similar”).

And that’s it, you’re all done. From now on, whenever you open Siri and trigger the shortcut you created, you’ll be able to dictate a new idea and see it appear in your Unsorted Ideas. To make life even easier, make sure you have “Hey Siri” set up too – that way, you can create ideas in ProdPad entirely by voice control.

Get that creativity flowing!

The post Feature Friday: Hey Siri – Turn my Voice Notes into Ideas in ProdPad appeared first on ProdPad.

When adding feedback, if the suggestions match the customer feedback you have entered, you will be provided with the option to link to the suggested ideas.

How are the Related Ideas matched?

The Related Ideas search uses what is typed in the Quick-add idea title field to find matches against existing Idea titles.

Feedback uses the Quick-add Feedback details field to compare against the Idea description in existing ideas or, if it the existing ideas do not have a description, the Idea title will be used instead.

A percentage match will be shown next to the available options, allowing you to select the right one.

This is the first step in testing both the algorithm and UI to see if this is something you will find useful in ProdPad.

The post Introducing the future of product management AI! appeared first on ProdPad.

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.

“What tools can I use to keep track of feature requests?”

That question got me thinking about the implications of product managers tracking feature requests as if they were a growing to-do list. Here’s how I responded on Quora:

“Don’t consider them feature requests, consider them customer feedback. Customer feedback can be good or bad – but regardless, it is still useful to understand your target, along with their frustrations, limitations, wants, needs, and ways to improve your product.

You can then use this feedback to better prioritize your backlog. This backlog will include ideas from your team, customers, management, and stakeholders. Of course, you can do much more than just sort by what we call “customer desire” – you can add impact and effort, sort by roadmap, product, tags, and much more – allowing you to prioritize your roadmap and keep focus on your product vision.”

Feature requests often come from a genuinely helpful place, but what are they really? It’s just someone telling you they’d like for you to change something that isn’t working for them. You don’t have to legitimize each and every one. The request is valuable as feedback, but you don’t have to bump it up to the front of the line because it came in as a feature request. 

Customer Feedback

What happens if you simply consider a feature request as customer feedback? I can think of at least a couple of things:

• Empower yourself to choose what gets built – Hey product managers, this is where I want you to get up, raise your arms, and scream ‘yaaaaas!!!’ because this power is exactly what you need to do a better job as a product manager.
• Investigate why they suggested it in the first place – You can take the time to dig into the underlying reasons that a customer sent in a request, and look into whether other users have sent in similar feedback. You can then prioritize feedback as it comes in without over-promising, under-delivering or upsetting anyone.
• Keep the feedback flowing – I never said the customer wouldn’t be able to still influence what you do. When customers realize that you consider all their feedback to help you decide what’s next for your product, you’ll get more of it.  

As a wise woman once told me, “You are not your market.”

Use this opportunity to understand your audience, learn from them, and make actionable changes that improve both your product and keep your clients happy. (And by “wise woman” I am really referring to our CEO Janna Bastow.)  

So what should you do with customer feedback?

So what do you do with your feedback once it comes in?

1. Tag each item that comes in so later you can filter
2. Sort through them to see how many popular an idea is
3. Determine how much effort it would require and how it might affect the product’s popularity.

Once you’ve weighed these factors against one another, you can start prioritizing all this feedback. If there’s a particular piece of feedback that’s just so good you decide you absolutely must consider it in your backlog, upgrade it to an idea. 

From here, you can start developing it into an actionable task. 

Contact the customer(s) that sent that feedback through and find out what led them to leave that feedback, and what their circumstances were, so you can build the business case for the idea with real customer data. (Customers love it when you contact them about their feedback, by the way.) 

Then start spec’ing it out. Convert it into something you could possibly work on and start discussing it with your team. What do they think? What do they want to see reflected in the business case? How much effort do they think it will require? 

Once you’ve completed the spec, add it to your roadmap. 

Final thoughts: Don’t put feature requests on a pedestal

By starting from your pool of customer feedback, you actually end up giving more power and consideration to your customers.

You listen, understand, investigate, and deliver on feedback they gave you – and then you actually follow up on it. There’s nothing as satisfying for a user than when they feel like they’ve had a positive impact on what you do. 

Your customers will feel like you are actually listening to them and that their feedback really is a part of how you improve your product. 

The post Try Not To Be A Slave To Feature Requests appeared first on ProdPad.

Review your product backlog

The best way to minimize your product backlog is by keeping an eye out for new ideas. I recommend you schedule some time for this – maybe once a week when you have some quiet time. Be sure to make this a regular part of your routine so ideas don’t pile up and the workload becomes unmanageable. ProdPad makes this task easier by providing you with a dashboard that tells you which ideas are new, which are your ‘quick wins’, and which need a bit more attention.

Add a business case

Ideas can stem from anywhere – some are good, some are bad, and others are just a bit random! The only thing separating an exceptional idea from the rest is whether it provides actual value to the product. We make that thought process easier by asking anyone submitting an idea to answer two simple questions: What problem are you trying to solve? and What value would it provide if it were solved? Of course, the more detailed the better, but as long as there’s a conscious effort to answer those two questions, all ideas will start to have more value and help shape their design.

Team Collaboration

The best way to make decisions is to ask the the people behind the curtains – your team! Ask your team for feedback and have them vote on ideas. By involving your team not only will you recognize key areas that need improvement within the product backlog, but your team will feel valued. Communication is a must, whether your team is big or small.

Assign impact and effort

As your ideas take form, a great way to decide which ones you could be working on is by assigning impact and effort. This is part of the prioritization process. Prioritization is an actionable interpretation of your roadmap. It’s the process of deciding what should be built when, based on what will bring most value to the user and the product right now.

ProdPad helps you prioritize your product backlog by plotting out all of your ideas based on impact and effort scores, as well as how fleshed out the idea is. The size of the dot determines how detailed the idea is – it’s essentially a rough guide to show you the difference between a one-liner and an idea that has a bunch of comments, mockups, user stories, and so on.  It’s more visual than it is scientific, but being able to see ideas charted alongside each other provides you with a useful, top-level overview. The color of the idea determines ‘popularity’, ranging from bright red for ideas that have been recently interacted with, to a plain grey for those that have been ignored for a while. Again, you should treat the colors as a rough guide, but on the whole these will help you identify and organize those popular and ignored ideas.

We even let you visualize the plot map based on tags and custom filters, and whether or not an idea is currently on the roadmap.

If you haven’t seen for yourself exactly how easy it is to manage ideas within ProdPad then sign up for a free trial today! If you’re already using ProdPad I’d love to hear what your tips are for keeping your backlog organized, so let me know in the comments.

The post Four Oh-So-Easy Ways to Clear Your Product Backlog appeared first on ProdPad.

Step One: Gather ideas in ProdPad

“We use ProdPad throughout the entire company as a way to gather and suggest new ideas,” says Lucas Cerdan, a Product Innovation Manager working out of PrestaShop’s US office. “Once ideas are submitted the product manager or CPO will go through those ideas, filter them, make sure they don’t already exist, then tag and link them.”

PrestaShop has two designated ProdPad admins who manage ideas, tags, add feedback and monitor votes, with ideas being submitted by everyone in the seven-strong team. And like so many startups, as the company has grown over the past few years, its product management processes have also grown, becoming more mature, more flexible and much smarter.

Ditch the Spreadsheets

Companies of all sizes create ideas, upload designs and mockups, and collaborate within ProdPad. There’s no restrictions on the number of documents you can add to an idea, and all team members can comment on ideas and mockups, allowing seamless collaboration. Using ProdPad, PrestaShop manage ideas and move fast.

“ProdPad is way better than just using spreadsheets for funnelling ideas”, says Lucas. “People tell me they create a spreadsheet that would be shared every morning to put new ideas in, one per line. But using spreadsheets isn’t great as you can’t add documents related to the ideas.”

“Now we just add all the documents and mockups into ProdPad!”

Get the top-level view

When it comes to development processes, no two companies work in the same way. PrestaShop have a finely-tuned product management and development process, using ProdPad along with Github and Jira.

Lucas explains: “ProdPad gives us the higher view into which we can put new ideas – some of which we might never use – then we can choose from these ideas and put them into Jira for our developers to work on.”

“Once the work has been completed we’ll send the code to Github, then we can see how other people are using it and modify on this basis,” explains Lucas. “We can see the whole life of an idea.”

Work their way

Just as no two companies have the same product development process, no two product managers work in the same way. So while ProdPad comes with a range of features to support all aspects of the product management process – from roadmapping to managing your backlog ­– the platform itself is flexible enough to allow you to choose exactly how you use it.

“My favorite feature is the product idea page – you can add documents, discuss things and vote on ideas.”

“We use ProdPad completely internally,” says Lucas, “but we plan on releasing a public roadmap so that the community is always more engaged in what we do together.”

We love sharing how ProdPad is used by companies around the world, working across diverse projects ranging from online dating apps to national public transportation systems.

Already using ProdPad? Comment and tell us what you do differently, or what your favourite feature is. Or if you’ve not signed up yet, start your free trial today!

The post How PrestaShop Uses ProdPad To Make Product Decisions appeared first on ProdPad.

“When is an idea too small?”

The bug reports. The minor tweaks. Are the little things important enough to count as an idea?

I will answer that question with another question: Is the proposed change up for debate?

If it is, you should count it as an idea and send it into ProdPad.

If something just needs to be done and is dev-ready, it doesn’t need to be logged as an idea. It’s not a suggested improvement, it’s a necessary fix. For example, bugs are typically considered a development ‘to do’ item. When you’re simply looking at a broken piece of software that needs to be fixed, this should go straight into the development backlog and be scheduled accordingly.

But when you get into the realm of other “little things”, the question gets a little more complicated. A “little thing” might be a UX fix for something that’s confusing customers, a detail your team realizes really should have been included in a previous release.

Use the following to help you decide whether you should add an idea or just push it straight to development:

• Is there a chance this change will spark a debate as to whether it’s a good idea or not?
• Are you able to provide JIRA with enough information right away for a developer to pick up this task without any further support?
• Can this change realistically be delivered in the next few sprints?

Keep in mind these decisions ultimately come down to how you communicate and how you draw the line between ProdPad and project management tools like JIRA. Questions like these can help you establish a set of guidelines, so important fixes don’t end up waiting for approval in ProdPad.

If you have any insight you can share on the ins and outs of how you manage a workflow between ProdPad and your development tools, drop a comment below!

The post How Small Is Too Small For Idea Management? appeared first on ProdPad.