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.

Well, we went ahead and fired up a new Slack chat. What we found very quickly that Andrea’s argument was correct: Slack did help us establish closer relationships with our customers.

Then as time passed, we started seeing a pattern we really liked: Customers who join our Slack community were not cancelling their ProdPad plans at all.

In fact, 99% of our cancellations were (and still are) coming from customers who weren’t part of our community.

Amazing news for us, obviously. But why was Slack becoming our strongest channel for customer retention?

Not because Slack is magical (sorry guys, we still love you!).

This is all us. We’ve applied the same values that have made us an effective product team to our product community – and it’s worked!

So we’re going to go ahead and take a little credit for this one. These are the 5 reasons why we’ve been able to reduce our customer churn rate through our Slack community.

Reason #1: We’re open and transparent with our customers

Imagine if we had a Slack product community and said stuff like: “We’re not at liberty to say…” or “That’s under wraps at the moment.” How frustrating that would be and a waste of time for our customers too.

But that’s not how we talk to our customers anywhere. Our Slack community is an extension of product-focused values that we follow across all our channels:

• We value all customer feedback: We log all conversations as customer feedback whether it’s good or bad.
• We don’t believe in saying “no”: We work with our customers to get to the heart of the problem instead of rejecting their feedback and opinions.
• We believe in transparency: We’re honest about what we can and can’t do, and what customers can expect from us.

We can have that open dialogue with our customers because we have a public roadmap to help us talk about our plans.

We can handle all kinds of feedback because we engage with it and actively work to find our solutions for our customers.

Live chat forums where customers can potentially yell at you, complain and put you into a corner is a scary prospect. But we have none of that. Our customers know our doors are open and that we’re listening. And they appreciate it!

Reason #2: They get help from us and from each other too

Sure, we do plenty of customer support in our Slack channels. Our customers get quick access to us and our co-founders in Slack.

But we’ve found out that our customers are getting along just fine without us. The percentage of DMs being sent in our community hover somewhere between 47-75%.

What are they up to? We’ve asked!

Some of our users have told us they’ve connected with each other to discuss similar challenges, give each other advice, hitting each other up for help. (Or maybe they’re talking about us behind our backs? We’ll never know.)

In any case, this is great.

Members of our community are connecting with each other on the other side of the world even when snoozing ;). Check and check.

Reason #3: They get to influence our product

When we’re thinking about trying something new, we turn to our Slack community first. Our customers are more than happy to tell us if we’re about to build something awful. And we’re more than happy to receive this feedback before we’ve gone ahead and built it.

There’s a mutual benefit here: We get valuable early customer feedback and in turn, our customers get to influence our product decisions.

Our UX team has REALLY enjoyed taking advantage of this:

• They share mockups and sketches for ideas they’re working on
• They find user testers to participate in research and interviews
• They talk to customers quite openly about what would/would not be helpful to them

This all but ensures that we don’t walk blindly into a big, useless project. We don’t end up wasting design time. We don’t wasting dev time. We don’t kill team morale by investing in a product idea that later goes bust.

We just go with common sense first and ask our customers what they think. In return, they volunteer valuable information back to us.

Hey, we keep it lean and mean. Our customers are our pulse check. We have their back and they have ours.

Reason #4: You get value even if you’re a lurker

Andrea started sending out email roundups because there were interesting discussions happening in there that she didn’t want people to miss out on.

Pretty soon, we spotted another welcome trend: the open rates on these emails are much higher than active users on Slack.

People just seem to love getting these in their inbox. Since we started, the average open rates on these have been consistently in the neighborhood of around 50%. Not bad!

There could be any number of reasons that our customers aren’t actually participating in our chat. Maybe they’re not allowed to use Slack at work. Maybe they don’t have the time to contribute. Maybe they don’t really have anything to say yet.

This tells us that the lurkers in our community are still finding value in passive engagement.

That’s great news for us. They like keeping tabs on discussions, they like seeing our product updates and they like seeing the progress we’re making. These emails remind them that we’re here when they do finally want to reach out.

They can join the party whenever they want, they know that. 

Reason #5: The offline friendshipping perks

Our “brand” is all about being personal, authentic and honest with our customers. But then again, that’s just who we are as a team.

We like to take our Slack community offline sometimes. We grab drinks with our customers when they’re in town. And sometimes, our customers come down to Brighton to see us!

We grab coffee with them, show them around our office, hang out and talk shop. As our community grows, so does the frequency of customers pinging us to see if they can drop by.

But we travel quite a bit too, so we always ping the community to let them know that we’re coming to a city near them.

All I’m saying is that Slack has helped, but we’re going to take a little credit for this one.

The post Our Slack Customer Community Has Made Our Churn Rate Insanely Low appeared first on ProdPad.

Communicate like a boss

One of the most important aspects of product roadmapping is to communicate what you’re doing as a team, why you’re doing it and how you plan to get there. Since they’re clear, thematic and visual, roadmaps are useful for helping all team members understand what the product is going to do and what the team is meant to be working towards. We’ve found that outlining steps and initiatives is what it takes to effectively communicate your vision for a successful product to everyone involved, all at once.

Don’t include dates!

A successful roadmap doesn’t need any hard and fast dates. It’s important the document be as flexible as possible, as unexpected situations are likely to occur. If a goal cannot be met on a specific date frustration can begin to build. Being able to adapt your product roadmap to changing situations is key for eliminating frustration.

Get historical information

There are certain instances in which historical information can be useful for a product roadmap. That gives you helpful context when you’re building the case to further a new product’s development.

• How long did it take to complete similar tasks in the past?
• What roles were needed in past projects?
• What kind of roadblocks or technical debt hindered the completion of past projects?

Resource planning needs historical information. This provides a way for a product roadmap to show exactly what is needed to finish the product’s creation, while also providing an overview of your current progress.

Get everyone on board

A roadmap can be used to plan for future resources, providing insight to all levels of management of the stage of your product’s development and what is needed from them. Likewise, it informs a company’s investors how it plans to expand and increase revenue in the future. This is also a way to increase a customer base by letting them anticipate what to expect from your product in the future.

If you would like to know more about product roadmapping we can help. Contact us today and learn more – or start a free trial now!

The post How Product Roadmaps Drive New Product Development appeared first on ProdPad.

Why? Because the roadmap is a communication tool. Its purpose is to show your team and stakeholders product vision is and what the high-level initiatives will be to get there. A roadmap is not a development plan. You should not be developing, you should be planning what your team will be developing, and figuring out what you might need to get there.

So as a product manager, what else should you be focusing on?

Managing ideas

Idea management is the process of gathering ideas from your team, as well as encouraging them to submit their own. This leads to eventually speccing out an idea (another one of our points below). With this particular aspect, your job is to go through your backlog, update ideas, request more information if needed, and spec out those ideas that have potential.

Getting your team engaged

Great ideas are everywhere – so why not get your team involved? Ask them to vote, comment, and submit their own original ideas. This is a great way of getting them to talk to you and to each other about how to make the product better.

Spec’ing ideas

Some great ideas may just be a one-liner to begin with. Flesh them out, add more detail, and have them take form. Add a business case by answering two simple questions: What problem are you trying to solve? and What impact would it have if it were to be solved? 

As the idea takes form, add mockups and designs, add user stories if you need them, and assign a rough impact and effort to determine whether it’s a winner or a time sinker.

Prioritizing

Before anything actually gets into a roadmap, you have to go through a prioritization process, which comes after your ideas have been spec’d out. By assigning an estimated impact and effort, you can easily visualize which ideas are quick wins (those you might want to consider working on) and which ideas are just not worth the time or the effort.

You can even filter down your prioritization view by products, tags, and even customer desire, to help you get a better overview of your product requirements.

Gathering Customer Feedback

Last but not least, one of the most important aspects of being a product manager is gathering customer feedback. If you’re not listening to the people using your product, who are you even building it for? Link that feedback to popular ideas, or create new ones as they come in. Once the feature is released, you can reach out to those that contributed to it and give them an update! You’ll be a rockstar, we guarantee it.

ProdPad is a tool for you and your whole team. Sign up for a free trial today!

The post Actually, Product Management Isn’t Really About Roadmaps appeared first on ProdPad.

A term popularized by startup writer Eric Ries, a minimum viable product (MVP) is “a development technique in which a new product or website is developed with sufficient features to satisfy early adopters. The final, complete set of features is only designed and developed after considering feedback from the product’s initial user” – according to techopedia.

At the heart of it, the MVP philosophy about doing the least amount of work you can in order to learn the most of something.

When you release a new product, there are a whole lot of potential risks. What if people don’t see the value of your product? What if they just don’t love it? What if it’s not scalable? And what if it’s not financially viable? Or what if it’s not sufficiently differentiated from your competition? Or your market isn’t as big as you thought? Developing a minimal viable product is about reducing that risk so that you can maximize your success. When you push out an MVP as soon as is reasonable, you reduce your overheads, get faster feedback and all the while you’re able to measure your progress.

So how do you do it? How do you know when you’ve reached your MVP, when to stop building, and when to just get your product out there?

Taking a development term like this perhaps makes it seem more complicated a concept than it really is. Instead, you can probably take a look back to your grade 9 approach to science. In this introduction to the scientific method, all you were asked to do was to define a simple hypothesis and test it.

And much like your 9^th grade science experiment, when developing your MVP this can be broken down into a few simple steps:

• Declare your assumptions or business risks
• Organize them into a testable hypothesis
• Answer the question: what’s the smallest thing I can do or make to test this hypothesis
• Do it! (it’s your MVP)

The last thing to figure out is what to do with the data that comes back from your 9^th grade experiment. This is where the MVP philosophy is also about being bold. If your results show you that your hypothesis carries too much risk, you either change direction, or completely pivot, and try again.

A great example of this is Groupon. Before becoming the business we all know today, the Groupon team had created a social media platform focused on bringing people together around a cause, called The Point. When members showed a tendency to focus on saving money, The Point’s founders tested a simple MVP to test the hypothesis that group buying offered a better product/market fit. This took the form of a wordpress blog with PDF coupons. The success of this experiment is well-documented history of one of the fastest growing companies of all time.

Building an MVP isn’t about knocking out something quick and dirty or cutting corners. It’s not about deciding part way through development that you’ve about had enough and you want to give it a shot in the market. It’s about getting down to the very basics of the scientific method, and finding something to test.  The MVP approach to building products is much more than a specific method of development. It’s a mode of business that believes it pays off to invest in learning.

So if you have to, dig out those old excercise books and get back to the basics of experimentation, and you’ll be surprised by what your science teacher really taught you.

If you’d like to find out more on best practice processes, read our 7 pillars of product management

And if you’d like to discover how ProdPad can help you with awesome product management, sign up for a free trial here

The post How building an MVP is just like your 9th grade science experiment appeared first on ProdPad.

A UX specialist saves us time

Both Janna and I knew that we’d lack the time to produce every wireframe and update all the interactions properly. Saving us time has not only freed us up for other aspects of this project, but it has saved everyone time across the entire team. If either or both of us were responsible for UX then the developers could only move as fast as we could get them updates. We wanted to remove ourselves as bottlenecks completely from the ProdPad Regeneration project

Not only would this lack of time have delayed how quickly we could move, but a patchy process of wireframing – executed when we could grab a spare 30 minutes – would have seriously limited the scope of what we could revamp and improve. Hiring a UX expert has helped us to avoid creating a disjointed UX experience; instead we’re developing something that’s focused and cohesive across the whole app.

A UX specialist offers fresh eyes

Like any founders, both Janna and I have been completely immersed in ProdPad for the last few years. We know too much about the logic that went behind any UX decisions, and we’ve adapted to all oddities. We applied as few constraints as possible for Mojca and we made it clear that we were keen for her to question absolutely everything.

We wanted the UX update for ProdPad’s regeneration to be a revolution instead of an evolution. By bringing in fresh eyes and a fresh perspective we opened up the redesign to wider possibilities, that Janna and I were just too close to see.

Which brings me to my last and most important reason

A UX specialist brings us real expertise

While Janna and I can do UX, there is a difference between doing this as product manager versus as a professional. We just don’t have the same knowledge and expertise as someone who’s studied UX in detail and worked on a huge number of projects for a huge variety of applications.

The expertise that Mojca has brought to the table has been the key component to allow a revolution for ProdPad’s UX in this project. Her expertise has offered us three key advantages over and above our efforts going it alone

1. Cohesive and comprehensive UX for interactions, right down to the smallest details
2. UX improvements that neither Janna and I would have thought of that push the boundaries of what I thought possible
3. A stronger foundation of intelligent design so that the UX of ProdPad will suit those just starting out and our advanced users alike

The UX improvements we’re going to bring about through the ProdPad Regenerated project certainly isn’t the end, but Mojca’s work has laid a fantastic foundation for us to continue to evolve and improve the UX of ProdPad in the future. We simply could not have done it without her help.
This experience has brought home for me the role that Product Managers play in the centre of tech, business and customer. While you need knowledge in all three areas yourself, knowing when to step back and bring in the expertise and coordinate with the other functions is even more important. Hiring a UX expert has not only helped us to see through this project, but it has made us better product managers.

If you’d like to find out more about how we’re regenerating ProdPad, or even to get onto the beta programme, get in touch with us here or on @prodpad

The post Why did we hire a UX specialist to regenerate ProdPad? 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.

Product Managers vs Developers

One way to understand the difference between ProdPad and JIRA is to look at who these tools are used by. Essentially, your developers will live in JIRA while everybody else in your company uses ProdPad. Product Managers require a tool that allows them to capture everything they could do from many different sources. However developers need visibility of every task that will be done, and to follow the operational progress of those tasks. Only tickets that are spec’ed and approved for development have a place in JIRA, the developer’s world. Integrations allow each team to benefit from the information held in each system without having to leave their own sphere of activity.
[bctt tweet= “Only tickets that are spec’ed and approved for development have a place in JIRA – #prodmgmt”]

Finite Tasks vs Fuzzy Backlog

So what qualifies JIRA for development tickets and ProdPad for product ideas? One advantage presents itself as soon as you separate finite, confirmed tasks and a fuzzy backlog. JIRA is designed for task management, and ProdPad for idea management – each of which has a very different working approach. There’s nothing more de-motivating for a developer than to find 500 tickets in their queue, knowing they can barely scratch the surface. JIRA is designed to see tasks through to completion; when you limit the number of tickets in JIRA to only these actionable tasks your development team can work confidently to clear them.

Nothing ‘fuzzy’ or undefined should make its way to JIRA, and anything that does should be sent right back to ProdPad. This is the holding place for everything you could do, that helps you decide whether your development team should build it. ProdPad has a low barrier to entry that allows you and your team to capture ideas at their earliest stage, and tools to help you easily review where details need to be fleshed out. There’s no harm in having 700 items in your ProdPad backlog, as with powerful search and filtering, nothing can ever be lost. Work in ProdPad is an ongoing process to surface the next viable ideas for your developers to build.

By keeping your undefined maybe’s in your ProdPad backlog, you’re keeping your development team happy and sane in their own day-to-day lives.

Tech-savvy vs open collaboration

The core design of ProdPad and JIRA makes them differently suited to different people in your team.

Evidently, developers work well with high-tech tools. And given that project management tasks should be ready for execution, there’s not a great need for collaborative features in JIRA itself. In fact, bringing a wider team (ie. your commercial or exec teams) into JIRA will likely only cause confusion and disruption for all parties. However, a product management tool needs to be much more open to company-wide communication. ProdPad has an accessible interface that’s easy for anyone on your team to understand, with collaborative tools throughout that allow you to spark up a conversation on just about anything. 

Systems Talking

A solid integration is of course key to ProdPad and JIRA working together seamlessly. Product Managers can control the synchronization of only ready-to-build ideas from ProdPad to JIRA with the click of a button. Links in each system allow developers to find out more detail when they wish to, without being inundated with unnecessary information. And status syncs between the two tools means that each team can find out everything they need to know from a single location. With the help of an effective technological relationship between ProdPad and JIRA, you can build an effective relationship between product and project management.

You can read more about the ProdPad and JIRA integration here. 

Or if you’d like to see for yourself how ProdPad is designed for better product management, sign up for a 14 day free trial here. 

The post Why JIRA Alone Can’t Help You To Do Better 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.