Here’s how it works

1. Create your personas

Personas are fictional representations of your users that help your team to understand who they’re building for.

Building user personas allows you to do product management grounded in user needs, without getting bogged down in the detail of specific customers and all their anomalies. A great user persona is realistic, easy to visualize, and tied into your day-to-day decisions and processes.

When creating a persona in ProdPad, you will find a template you can use to add some key information, such as Description, Behaviors, Goals, and Frustrations & Limitations. These help you create a comprehensive outline of the user.

You can also add an image, give your persona a name, and add any additional files which may help with scoping out the user in more detail.

2. Segmenting your data by persona type

As you add items to ProdPad, you will have the option to link that item to a persona. Whether it is an idea, a piece of feedback or a contact – you can create the relationship between your data and your user segments.

3. Filter by persona type

Once you have attributed the items to a particular persona, you can use the filtering options to help you sift through your data. Powerful filtering combined with our priority chart means you can focus on building the right stuff for the right users.

4. Bonus: Saved filters for continuous monitoring

To easily keep track of changing trends, you can create a saved filter for quick access and continuous monitoring of your personas. Saved filters can be made up of a combination of products, tags, personas and even whether an item is on the roadmap or not.

Presto, magic!

The post Power up your Data with User Persona Segmentation appeared first on ProdPad.

What is a user persona?

User personas are a fictional representation of your users that help your teams understand who they’re building for.

A good user persona is realistic, easy to visualize, and tied into your day-to-day decisions and processes.

Each one is like a composite sketch of what you know about many individual customers, what jobs they want to get done and what problems they’re having along the way.

How to create a user persona

There are a ton of great resources online on building user personas. It’s up to you to decide how you want to approach it, depending on the time, data and resources you have on hand.

As you can see here, you can pull in a lot of different sources of input to help you define each persona. You don’t have to stick to any single “methodology” (there isn’t one).

Lean Personas (UXPin)
Not every company needs to build complex personas, says Jerry Cao of UXPin. This guide to lean personas from UXPin is super handy if you need to validate quickly to get your product out the door.

Data-Driven Personas (ConversionXL)
Want to put user persona development through a more rigorous process? This guide from ConversionXL shows you how to segment users based on data, survey results and includes both data analysis examples and advice from experienced marketers.

Marketing Personas (Buffer)
Buffer’s advice for developing marketing personas includes studying online traffic, including social media data, Google analytics and qualitative surveys.

Buyer Personas (Hubspot)
This guide from Hubspot includes a handful of ways to customize buyer personas for sales and marketing teams. It also includes the concept of a “negative persona” – a representation of who you don’t want as a customer.

Bonus: For a handy list of questions to ask during interviews, head to Usability.gov, which designs for not a couple thousand, or a couple million, but the entire population of the United Kingdom. They know a thing or two

User personas help you be user-centric

I’ve seen many teams bring in pricey consultants to help develop user personas and then leave it in some obscure folder in Google Drive. Don’t let this happen to you! User personas help you be user-centric, if you put them to work.

Build a business case for product ideas

User personas can help you nail the business case for a product idea. Bringing in user personas allows you to ground those ideas within the bigger context of your business. What kind of users is this idea meant to help and how valuable does that make it?

A user persona gives you a centerpiece around which to focus your discussions. For example, you can see that the following idea is specifically meant to benefit “Larry Landlord.” Not just anyone.

That’s useful context as you validate the idea further and decide whether to move it forward in the workflow.

Understand what user personas need

There’s a really cool feature in ProdPad that you can use to pull up a list of customer feedback by user persona. This gives you an aggregate view of what your customers want from you, where they’re struggling, what kind of functionality they’d like, and so on.

This is monumentally important for product managers. Why? Because sorting through individual feedback gives you a limited perspective on what you think is important to customers. A handful of standout comments can pretty effectively cloud your judgment.

In contrast, reviewing a list of feedback by persona helps you make decisions that benefit an entire segment of users.

To learn more about how to do this, read about our Contact Profiles feature.

Communicate personas to your teams

User personas aren’t just for you and your product team to hang onto. They have really valuable context that everyone else working with you could use too!

If you’re throwing specs over to your development team, user personas give them the context they need to make judgment calls during build. Personas also help marketing teams understand their audience better so they can set up more effective messaging and targeting.

The key thing to remember is that the user personas you develop become the basic set of assumptions used across your business. Everyone else depends on you, the product manager, to keep their assumptions in check. If your persona evolves, you owe it to your business to update the persona so they can update their assumptions too.

So what’s next?

User personas should be relatable enough that they can be brought up all the time in daily conversations. But to help make them feel really real, you should bring them into product planning as soon as you can.

In ProdPad, you can develop product ideas with user personas, user stories and all the context you want.

The post How To Work With User Personas When You’re A Product Manager appeared first on ProdPad.

Marquee customers VS fluid masses

When you’ve got a B2B customer base, it’s much more likely that you’ll have fewer, high-revenue customers and that these are individually more important to your product decisions. B2C customer bases however are much more high-volume and individuals come and go. Finding the average use case is much more important than responding to specific needs.

Sales insight VS customer surveys

B2B and B2C businesses have different access to customers therefore the feedback that comes with it. Product managers with internal sales team can benefit from (and also have to push back on) feedback and suggestions funnelled internally from direct customer interaction. B2C product managers however must go direct to the customer themselves and use different methods to reach that insight, which are often much more large scale and broader in reach – such as customer surveys, or focus groups.

Predictable and fixed VS vague and variable user goals

When we’re at work we’re in a more structured environment than when we’re relaxing at home or out with friends. Whereas B2C user goals can be hugely diverse when using the same product, B2B user goals are based on prescribed tasks and are therefore easier to predict. However, this means that the product capabilities you have to account for might be more complex. This is one area where our behavior as people notably shifts – we are often more prepared to learn a product at work if it means that all of our needs can be met.

Decision makers VS financial freedom

Finally, who the product manager must take into consideration when setting product vision and roadmap direction is usually very different between B2B and B2C companies. Consumers are, generally speaking, free to make their own purchasing decisions. If something saves them time, reduces headaches, or is just plain fun to use they’re often free to make their own calls. In B2B markets however, management sign-off, budget approval and even legal departments are the norm before any product is chosen. But be careful with this one. If you need buy-in from the CMO, make sure your product’s what and why offers them value. But don’t forget that you aren’t necessarily designing for the CMO when it comes to the how.

If you’re trying to apply product management best practice to your role, or you’re looking to make a switch between B2B and B2C products, keep these differences in mind. However never forget that whatever they’re doing, your users are always people. Keep the differences explained here in mind when it comes to product lifecycles or roadmapping, however never stop striving for a great user experience that relieves your customers’ frustrations and adds value to their day.

The post Aren’t We All Just People? Building Products For B2B And B2C appeared first on ProdPad.

Don’t go overboard on your interview squad

Whenever you’re going into a customer interview, you need to be sure you’re well equipped to make the most of it. But you don’t want to intimidate your customers. Two of you is plenty: one to talk, one to take notes. And for one-on-one interviews, consider recording it instead (if you ask nicely, of course).When you’ve worked so hard on a prototype of a new product idea it’s very exciting. And so it’s very tempting to show it off straight away to your customers in interview. Iif you want to get to the heart of their real problems, attitudes and opinions, save it for the end. Start instead with an open conversation.

Be careful with prompts

It can be difficult to get some people to open up, so try asking simple yes/no questions if open-ended questions don’t get you much of a response. Then follow up by asking “Why?” Prompts such as “tell me about” might also help you to trigger something.

Embrace silence

Perhaps an interviewer’s biggest fear is complete silence. It’s an even higher risk the more customers you have in the room at once. But as long as you’re not the one phased by silence, all will be fine. It might not sound friendly, but let your customers feel the pain of silence until they crack. In fact you can wait an entire minute before you follow up with another prompt

Don’t make customer interviews personal

Your products are your babies, but you want to avoid conveying this to your customers. If they feel like your pride is at stake based on their feedback, they likely won’t be honest. Caveat your hypotheses with the opinions of ‘others’, “people have suggested to me that…. Do you agree.” And be very careful to be light and breezy when asking for feedback. Remember that criticism is your best opportunity to learn, and you want to hear it.

For even more tips on what to do – and what not to do – during a customer interview, watch this great video from the LIFFFT Inc guys.

ProdPad can help you to tag, organize and link your customer feedback to your product roadmap. Sign up for a free trial here

The post How Not To Screw Up Customer Interviews appeared first on ProdPad.

Surface the timeliest feedback

Your customer support team are the first port of call for your users’ frustrations and challenges. Customer feedback of course might come from many different sources, but here your customers’ most pressing pain points (those they are pushed to reach out to you about) can highlight some of the changes you absolutely must make if you are to keep their business. When customer representatives make use of user feedback capture tools in ProdPad, you can be sure that each of these instances are recorded and that no threatening issue is overlooked.

Delight customers

As well as fixing their pain, good customer service is also about delighting users. When customer service teams and product management teams work together effectively, they can identify new opportunities to delight users with quick product wins. At ProdPad, we ourselves use tags such as ‘fun’ on ideas dedicated purely to making customers happy.

Making use of ProdPad’s features and integrations, it’s easy to communicate those changes back to relevant customers too. A complete feedback loop is made simpler by either recording customer contact details directly against feedback and ideas, or by integrating tools such as UserVoice to automate updates to customers when their suggestions have been taken on board.

Build a workable case

When customer service data is shared with product management, problems can be better solved and value more easily created. But how does this work? If you are to avoid the frustration of customer reps who feel their feedback is going ignored, or the stress of product managers who are bombarded by the same enquiries day in and day out, good process is key.

In ProdPad, user feedback is logged separately from fully formed product ideas. This way customer service teams aren’t limited in the number of times they log a piece of feedback, in fact comprehensive coverage of this important information should be encouraged. Yet in linking feedback to a single product idea each time the issue is surfaced, product managers can avoid repetition and keep track on the traction of an idea in a measured way.  Service teams can help to build a workable case for a new idea and champion their customers’ needs, keeping everyone happy.

[Tweet “Any good product manager should put customer needs at the heart of their daily decisions.”]

If you’d like to find out more about how ProdPad can facilitate collaboration between product management and customer support teams, get in touch for a chat or sign up for a free trial

The post How Product Managers Can Work With Customer Support appeared first on ProdPad.

Direct customer involvement

Customer conversations

Whenever they get the opportunity, product managers should be having real conversations with real users. Depending on your business model this might mean picking up the phone or organising to meet with small groups in person. Whether to discuss a particular piece of feedback, an idea on the roadmap or just a check in with core users, it’s important to start talking. These conversations can not only surface fresh product insight, but help us to internalise our customers’ needs, problems and attitudes.

MVP and user testing

An important element of the MVP philosophy is to get products out to customers at the earliest possible stage. You should make only the necessary assumptions about your users’ needs to build minimum viable products that can be taken to customers for feedback. Use wireframes to walk your customers through new products and changes, and share prototypes with customers at different stages of product development to make sure you’re on the right track.

Open roadmap

Sharing your roadmap with customers both keeps them informed and gives you perspective on how effectively you’re moving towards your product vision. However, that doesn’t mean you have to share your entire inner workings with customers. If you have particular projects or developments you aren’t ready to make public, create a customer-friendly version of your roadmap that you’re happy to discuss in full detail.

Indirect customer involvement

Customer feedback

Although customer feedback comes from customers initially, it is a data source that should be analysed alongside other factors rather than taken at face value. Product Managers should base decisions heavily on customer feedback, but individual suggestions shouldn’t guide product evolution or development time. Listening to feedback is about trying to piece together the big picture of customer needs.  Look for trends in customer feedback, and weight ideas differently depending on who they come from – feedback from your target market is the most important of all.

User personas

User personas are virtual representatives of your customers. They have a name, a face and personal details, but they aren’t real people. They are fictional representations, based on the real conversations that helped you to understand your customers inside-out. Building user personas allows you to do product management grounded in user needs, without getting bogged down in the detail of specific customers and all their anomalies. Before you take your new product ideas out to real customers, test your inkling, staff suggestion or piece of feedback against your personas.

[bctt tweet= “What’s the Role of your Customer in Product Management? “]

If you’d like to find out more about how ProdPad helps you to work effectively with customers, get in touch with us here. 

And if you’re new to ProdPad, you can sign up for a free 14 day trial here.

The post What’s the Role Of Your Customer In 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.

Peace of mind

From now on, you can type away happily, knowing your every last word is being caught and saved, whether you’re updating a new feature request, fleshing out your product strategy, or adding some flair to your product roadmap.

Simply put, you won’t lose your work again.

Quicker to edit

An extra bonus for you is that this also makes it faster and easier for you to work. You no longer need to click to get into ‘edit mode’ and the click to save your work. It’s all done in one smooth movement. Click what you want to edit, type away, and as you go, we’ll save every last bit. We’ll even helpfully tell you when everything’s being saved, so you’re never left unsure.

Full coverage

This is more than just one little autosave box we’re talking about. We’ve rolled out these helpful changes through our app, whether you’re triaging new ideas, updating your product canvas, adding user feedback, user personas, or your roadmap.

Check it out in the following pages:

• Ideas Management: Idea title, description, business case, user stories and user acceptance test criteria, functional specs and any additional notes
• Product Canvas: Product name, description, key KPIs, and product vision
• User Personas: Persona name, description, behaviors, goals, and frustrations/limitations
• User Feedback: Any feedback snippet from users
• Product Roadmap: Roadmap card titles and descriptions

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

It’s the little things that make a product delightful to use, and this one is our latest to help you work smoothly and delightfully. We hope it helps! If you have other suggestions on how we can make ProdPad even better to use, get in touch any time at feedback@prodpad.com.

The post Autosave to the rescue! appeared first on ProdPad.

1. You’ve got a backlog of ideas and feature requests that you can now easily sift, sort and search your way through,
2. you’ve recorded a bunch of info about your product, your personas, and even your users’ feedback,
3. and you’re building up a product roadmap that will help you lead the way.

But one important ingredient is still missing: Buy-in from your team, perhaps those up above you.

Getting buy-in on a Product Manager tool

Yes, you can invite your team to your ProdPad account the good old fashioned way, but sometimes what you really want is to capture someone’s attention and get them sold on the idea that they should join you in this new way of managing your products.

This is why we’ve built the Share feature, which allows you to share any of the following with a new or existing team member:

• Idea – about your Idea Canvas
• Product Canvas – about your Product Canvas
• Product Roadmap – about your Product Roadmap
• User Persona – about your User Personas
• Priorities Graph – about your Priorities Graph

Improving your Product Management process

To use it, simply the ‘Share this’ button on any of these pages, and choose who you’d like to send the page to.

The person you share the page with will receive a link directly to that page.  If they are already a user in your ProdPad account, they’ll head straight to the page itself.  If they aren’t yet a user in ProdPad, they’ll get an invitation to join, helping them easily create an account so they can jump in on the discussion you’re starting.

Use the ‘Share this’ button to give anyone on your team a direct link to what you’re working on at that moment.

This should make your product management process even easier!

If you have any feedback or questions, reach us any time at hello@prodpad.com.

The post Sharing from a Product Manager tool appeared first on ProdPad.