idea voting Archives | ProdPad

Now You See Me! Feedback to Quick Win in Less Than a Day

Andrea Saez — Thu, 20 Jul 2017 11:20:02 +0000

Everyone knows how traffic lights work. Red means stop, green means go. But we forget that even if every color in the traffic light were suddenly, say, purple, the one at the top would still mean stop and the one at the bottom would still mean go.

Without additional context, colors lose meaning.

This is how one of our users, Daniel Stanton, explained it to me in a conversation in the Mind the Product Slack community the other day.

He was talking about the new color scheme we had introduced to our idea voting system. We’d recently done a small overhaul to make it more fun and easy to use, complete with a thumbs up, down and out icon set paired with a red, green and yellow color scheme.

For clarity, we added simple tooltips on hover to indicate that these meant Like, Dislike and Unsure.

For clarity, we added tooltips to indicate that these meant Like, Dislike and Unsure – but that wasn’t enough.

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:

What people without color-blindness see.

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.

What people with deuteranomaly (a form of color-blindness) see.

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.

How to Open Product Management to Your Sales Team

Janna Bastow — Fri, 20 Jun 2014 09:00:00 +0000

Product Management sits at the intersection of customer, technology and business. The product manager’s role is a continual balancing act between each of these areas, which means involving the right people, in the right ways, at the right times.

In this post, we take you through how to open up product management to a sales team in the right way, using good processes and ProdPad tools.

Source valuable feedback from the field

Your sales or business development people are your commercial ears on the ground – they have daily conversations with prospects about what would encourage them to buy. Ideas and suggestions often come thick and fast from sales teams, so it’s important to be able to validate the ones of real value. ProdPad distinguishes user feedback from the ideas list so that every valuable piece of information can be captured while reserving the product backlog for specific suggestions and ideas. Sales teams can use tools that fit into their own daily jobs to share those suggestions, from email to Google Chrome.

Get commercial input to decisions

Collaboration doesn’t stop as soon as an idea is marked out as having potential. Defining user requirements and a business case for development can often rely heavily on the input of your commercial team. ProdPad’s in-tool communication allows your sales team to share comments on any idea canvas, and product managers can reach out for specific information directly through @mentions. A simple voting mechanism for idea canvases means that opinions for and against different features can be measured and business development teams can be assured their input is heard.

Help keep prospects and customers in the loop

Your sales team is not only a mouthpiece for customer opinion, but can be an important link back to users and prospects to keep them informed about upcoming product changes. ProdPad roadmaps focus on current, near-team and future developments, allowing you and your sales team to give safe projections for what’s in the pipeline. Cards can be made public or private to prepare your sales team with a roadmap that’s appropriate to share externally via PNG or PDF exports or even a live site embed.

Individual salespeople can follow ideas to remain updated on feature progress all the way through to implementation. And when ProdPad is integrated with project management tools, these updates are completely automated, meaning your sales team need to do nothing more than await the latest email notifications.

Catch up on how to involve executives in product management decisions here, and stay tuned for the next instalment where we take you through how to involve marketing in product planning.

If you’d like to see how ProdPad can help you to open up product management to Sales, you can sign up for a free 14 day trial here.

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How ProdPad Fits In: Sharing Ideas

Janna Bastow — Wed, 18 Jun 2014 09:00:00 +0000

When done right, product management is probably the business function that integrates with more people and processes than any other. So it’s essential that a product management system fits into this complex intersection between customers, colleagues and technology. And without too much disruption. This week, we take you through how ProdPad fits in when propagating potential product ideas to colleagues and customers.

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.

@Mention colleagues to get their attention on any idea

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.

Get the entire team to weigh in on ideas by adding their vote.

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.

Share your roadmap with your team members and others

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.

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Introducing a New and Improved API for Product Management, Your Way

Simon Cast — Wed, 28 May 2014 13:00:00 +0000

At ProdPad we’re all about making Product Managers’ lives easier – and that means fitting into your way of working. Today we’re launching a new and improved ProdPad API, designed for you to better integrate product management throughout your business.

Product Management is best conducted through dedicated tools, leaving other teams from Sales to Engineering to work with platforms and processes that best suit their own needs. The key to this is open communication, and effective integration.

In addition to existing integrations available in the original ProdPad API, our latest updates allow you to manage ideas, customer feedback and your roadmaps with even greater flexibility.

Whether posting an idea into ProdPad or fetching a list of feedback from customers, the new API for product management has endpoints (things that can be pushed to or from the app) that allow you to integrate ProdPad with just about any 3rd party application—for example, a CRM or support tool that we haven’t already built a ready-made integration for. It is also now possible to access idea voting via the API, truly opening up the capacity for Product Managers to crowdsource input on what should and shouldn’t be built.

Customization of how your roadmaps are displayed is now possible with new API endpoints for your roadmap data. Whether creating a public roadmap for your customers in a specific format, or displaying a live internal dashboard to keep your team up to date, ProdPad roadmaps can now be viewed just as you like.

If you’d like to find out more about working with the new ProdPad API, you can read our API documentation, or get in touch with us directly.

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

Introducing Voting for Product Ideas

Janna Bastow — Thu, 15 May 2014 08:14:41 +0000

ProdPad is packed with ways to collaborate with your team. Discussing different options and exploring different angles with colleagues is a great way to take your products in the best direction you possibly can.

But sometimes you need a quick gauge on whether a product idea has traction or not – and your team needs an easy way to offer it.

Get the entire team to weigh in on ideas by adding their vote.

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.

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‘Saying No’. Tough Love for Product Managers

Janna Bastow — Mon, 12 May 2014 13:28:42 +0000

As a product manager you’re bombarded with ideas from every possible angle. At the intersection between business, technology and customers, everything from brainwaves to demands makes its way to your desk. These ideas are your friends – many of them will help you to build products that your users will love. But it’s your job to figure out which ideas are better than others.

One of the hardest jobs of the product manager is more often than not saying ‘no’. There are many reasons why you might need to say no to a customer, a colleague and even your boss. Here we take you through how you can make it a little easier at any stage in the product management process.

Round 1: Product vision and KPIs

Before it gets a yea or nay from product management, the first test for every new idea should be the product vision. But the highest-level strategy for your product is not the same as the whims of your CEO. Getting your product vision committed to text and available for everyone in your team to see is the best justification for what makes it to development. KPIs help you to quantify those decisions and are one of your best weapons when turning down an idea that might sound good but just isn’t geared towards your business’s growth.

Round 2: Product backlog

Even if an idea seems to meet your product vision, you can’t be certain based on an initial suggestion alone. It would be great if you could properly interview the mastermind of every promising idea but you just don’t have the time. Instead, your product backlog is an important incubator to figure out whether something really should be built. When you capture ideas in ProdPad, you can pull upon the resources of your entire team to figure out the pros and cons. What’s more, in bringing different people in your company together to discuss the merits of an idea someone else might just say no before you have to.

Round 3: Roadmap

If an idea makes it through your initial qualification tests, the next decision you need to make is how this idea stands up against other epics on your product roadmap. Your roadmap might detail your planned developments for anything from a 12 month to a five-year period, with longer terms plans being much less specific than near term projects. Even if you think an idea is a fit, your roadmap can help you provide a strong justification for why something is a yes or no just now. All product management decisions are relative, and your roadmap is the best way to make this clear to your customers and colleagues.

Round 4: Voting

Another way you can make use of the rest of your team to decide whether a feature should be built is via direct voting. If you want to gauge the reaction of others to a possible new development, just ask! Votes provide a quick and effective way to determine the popularity of an idea, and rationales for or against its development can come from anyone in your team. Democratic decisions are much easier swallowed than product management decrees.

Following good product management processes can help you identify when to say yes and when to say no, and support those decisions both internally and externally. Allowing your colleagues and customers insight into product strategy can help you to say no, without having to say no. When everybody is aligned to the same goals, tough love from product managers is a lot less tough.

If you’d like to find out more about applying best practice, read our comprehensive guide on the 7 pillars of product management process.

And if you’re not already a ProdPad user, you can sign up for a completely free trial today.

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