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.

Product roadmapping helps the product team and high-level management realize their goals by putting in place a long term plan, which will ascertain what schemes and initiatives need to be put in place for their product to be successful.

As far as product development goals, product roadmapping determines how your product’s design will be changed and altered over time and how you will utilize technology to make this happen. Roadmapping helps to sequence the steps in your business plan, without getting tied into the specific dates and deliverables that might be tackled down the line.

The Product Roadmapping Process

Building a product roadmap is a process that contains many elements and steps for it to be successful. The process of product roadmapping synthesizes information on:

• The new product lines your business will design, develop, and produce.
• The new software and tools you will require to do these developments.
• The timescale (without specific dates) and order of these developments.
• It can even help you decide which technologies to invest in, to get a design that is appropriate for your company.

Roadmapping requires a strategic approach to exploit its uses as much as possible. It cleverly shows which areas of focus will be considered, helping to broadly allocate resources while showing a plan for a product that’s gradually improved and built upon. The top-down approach, of looking at the grander product vision to give a sense of direction, is made so that any proposed projects are relevant and contribute to the image that your company has in mind. Mapping out your results and objectives in a careful and considered manner is the best way to do a strategic roadmap and will help you to achieve your goals.

The Objectives of Roadmapping

The principal aim of roadmapping is to induce an innovative and long term plan for the product, considering what the business needs, what the users and customers want, and what technology needs to be in place to get there. When building and changing your product roadmap, you should have these 3 objectives in mind:

1. Examine the prospects of your company’s future in an unbiased and neutral manner.
2. Progress onto the next stage after assessment to develop responses to anticipated market needs and make sure that you preempt any requirements that your customers may have in the future.
3. Appreciate and align your technology development and implementation plans with the changing nature of the market.

Using ProdPad to Manage your Roadmap

With ProdPad, we make this process of creating and managing your product roadmap a whole lot easier.

Once you capture your product vision in ProdPad, you can put your roadmap together using ideas and user stories already in your backlog, and update it with a simple drag and drop interface. You can then tag and color code your roadmap so it’s easy to understand how each area is related to the next.
The roadmap is managed by broad time horizons: Current, Near Term and Future. This helps manage stakeholder expectations by not recording specific promises on delivery dates that are too far down the line to be exact on, and allows you to outline a plan for delivering your product vision that’s anywhere from 18 to 36 months long, the typical length of a roadmap.
If you’re managing more than one product, you can manage multiple product roadmaps in ProdPad, and view either individual product roadmaps, the roadmap for a specific product line or grouping of products, or a roadmap for your entire product portfolio.
Once your product roadmap is done, you can export it easily. Export the printer friendly version to bring to meetings or stick up on the office walls, or paste a copy into an important presentation like your Board pack, or simply embed it on your site or intranet like we have: https://www.prodpad.com/our-roadmap/

Learn more about product roadmapping or start your free trial today!

Let us know in the comments how you’re using your product roadmap, or get in touch at hello@prodpad.com any time with your feedback or questions.

The post How Today’s Companies are Product Roadmapping to Boost Business appeared first on ProdPad.

We’ve made it simple to group your products into any number of product lines.

Not only does it make it easier to organize your product documentation in ProdPad, but it also allows you to view a high-level view of your roadmap for each distinct product line.

Product Portfolio Roadmaps

Even if your products don’t fit nicely into product lines, we now allow you to view your product portfolio as a whole.

As Steve Johnson describes in his article on Portfolio Roadmaps:

A portfolio roadmap has become the preferred way to show delivery plans over time. It’s not just a desired feature list by month; it’s bigger than that. It describes major blocks of work, not a laundry list of features.

The format of the portfolio roadmap follows the familiar “Current, Near Term, Future” lean product management format that you already use in ProdPad.

And like the regular ‘single product’ roadmaps on ProdPad, you can share the portfolio with your team, or simply use it as a snapshot to get up on the wall or drop into your Board slides at the end of the month.

If you’re managing multiple products, the portfolio management in ProdPad will help you keep a clear overview of what products you have and where they are going.

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

As always, we love getting your feedback! Let us know how you manage your multiple products, and how we can help make you awesome at that using ProdPad. Get in touch at hello@prodpad.com any time.

The post Product Lines and Product Portfolio Roadmaps appeared first on ProdPad.