Open Communication

Good idea management requires communication input from many different sources. With departments like legal and compliance this might be irregular or limited to specific details, but the specialist information they hold could seal the fate of new product ideas. Using ProdPad you can extend collaboration to absolutely anyone in your organisation without having to integrate them as a fully fledged user. Tools like Google Single Sign-On and email integration mean that it’s easy to call on colleagues for advice whenever it’s relevant, using @mentions. Comments can be dropped directly onto idea canvases and design mockups, so that pertinent information to an idea is accessible to everyone in your team.

Product Compliance: Impact vs Effort

Judging whether a new product idea is feasible is dependent on the big picture. Value brought to the business needs to be set against the effort or risk involved across the entire product process, not just development resources. Taking what you’ve learnt from conversations with compliance and legal, you can make an educated guess of anticipated effort to take a new product idea through to launch and set that against the business case and estimated value. ProdPad allows you to do this for every new idea using various scales including an adjusted Fibonacci scale, all of which is plotted on a visualized priorities chart.

Specs from every angle

Build product specs that take every factor into account. An important part of preparing requirements that are 100% ready for engineers and designers is to note any compliance concerns. Providing this information from the start will help you to avoid do-overs further down the line. ProdPad idea canvases provide a comprehensive template for the data your development team needs, including technical specifications. And with two-way integrations between ProdPad and project management tools, your developers can follow links to get all details of legal and compliant regulations shared directly by these teams.

Fully Audited Processes

Some regulations require that product processes are completely audited. When you manage all conversations, user feedback and design iterations in one centralized platform no details are lost, keeping your compliance and legal teams happy without any extra workload.

If you’d like to chat to us about how you can make product management processes more compliant using ProdPad, get in touch here. 

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

The post How Product Managers Can Keep Product Compliance and Legal Happy appeared first on ProdPad.

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. 

The post How to Open Product Management to Your Sales Team 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.

Channel and qualify new ideas transparently

Your executive team is the focal point of your product vision and the source of many important ideas for the future evolution of your products. But no matter how high they come from, ideas need to be properly validated before you know whether they should be built. Channeling all that executive inspiration into a proper idea management process, where progress can be easily tracked is key. Ideas in ProdPad can even be given an alternative idea ‘owner’ to their author so that your executives know exactly what’s happening with their most important suggestions.

Build a business case for development work

If you’re to commit to a new product or iteration, it’s important that you can prove its worth to your executives – particularly for anything that requires significant resources. ProdPad idea canvases allow you to document business case and user requirements for every potential idea. An adapted Fibonacci scale allows you to plot expected impact versus effort for a new development, to combine qualitative reasoning with real statistics when deciding whether ideas should be built.

Make roadmapping visible and realistic

A roadmap is your most important tool when it comes to communicating product strategy with your executive team. At ProdPad we have a new approach to roadmapping that abandons unachievable dates in favour of current, near-term and future developments. A simple drag and drop interface allows you to demonstrate interactively the impact of any changes to development priorities. From high-level master roadmaps to individual product roadmaps, these dynamic tools allow you to show how you’re going to meet the product vision without getting bogged down in the detail. Roadmaps can be shared directly with executives via a ProdPad login, exported into your next board meeting presentation, or embedded in a live site to be referred to at any time.

If you’d like to find out more about using ProdPad tools to involve your executive team effectively in product management decisions, get in touch with us here.

If you missed the last article, catch up on using ProdPad across several different product teams, and stay tuned next for how to open up product management to sales.

The post How to Involve Executives in Product Management Decisions appeared first on ProdPad.