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.

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.

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.

Our earlier versions of the product roadmap tool were designed to help communicate to your team and to other stakeholders what was coming up in the product development pipeline.  It allowed a Product Manager to link their roadmap to their product backlog, mapping their development work to Current, Near term, and Future initiatives.

And while it was easy to use for any Product Manager, allowing them to build a product roadmap and share it with their team, we wanted to make it even better…

The Roadmap that Builds itself

We now take your backlog of ideas, and with highly advanced big data crunching algorithm technology, automagically render a complete and accurate product roadmap.

The predictive technology will set in place an accurate picture of what your development team should be working on now, and in the future, with a higher degree of certainty than ever presented in a product team before.

Our technology finally captures what product managers around the world never thought possible.

Gain buy-in from ALL stakeholders

The Auto-Roadmap Tool not only builds itself, but also covers for the hardest part of the Product Manager’s job: Getting complete buy-in from your team.

Upon completion of the roadmap, ProdPad’s Auto-Roadmap Tool will email each of your important stakeholders, informing them of the important roadmap updates that have been put in place and gently letting them know which of their suggestions and requests have been ignored left out. It does this using advanced natural language processing and AI, processing their initial request, comparing it to the product specs and your company’s product vision, and compiling an automated tailored response to each of your team members, clients, and Board members who’d otherwise question the new roadmap.

We set out to change the face of product management, and to finally build that tool that every product manager was waiting for – something to create their product roadmap and garner buy-in while they worked on the important things… like setting the Product Vision and finding the best flat white in town. – Simon Cast, ProdPad Development Lab

We’re proud to announce this technology today, and will be rolling it out to our users in the coming days. Make yourself an account today, and subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest updates.

Update: As a bunch of people correctly guessed, this is an April Fool’s joke! While the idea of a tool that *automagically* creates a roadmap with no input sounds like it might make everyone’s lived easier, it’s simply not possible…. yet! In the meantime, we’re providing tools to help you understand where your product needs to go, what the relative priorities of various ideas and feature requests are, and put it together in a simple drag and drop product roadmap.

The post Introducing the Auto Roadmap Tool – Product Management Automagic! appeared first on ProdPad.

“The first such truth is that at least half of our ideas are just not going to work.”

“If that’s not bad enough, the second inconvenient truth is that even with the ideas that do prove to be valuable, usable and feasible, it typically takes several iterations to get the implementation of this idea to the point where it actually delivers the expected business value.”

As we’ve mentioned before, our previous version of the product roadmap tool was built with the intention to help organise these ‘old style’ roadmaps, quarter-by-quarter, month-by-month, on a feature-level granularity. We got that all wrong.

Last year, we released a new version of the roadmap that suits us and our users much better. It throws out the notion that your roadmap needs to be so granular, and accepts the uncertainty that will always exist when building a product.

Marty Cagan very accurately sums up those two inconvenient truths and urges product teams to embrace them.

The ProdPad Roadmap Tool is designed with these facts in mind, with the goal of helping you embrace the fact that you don’t know exactly what should be in your long-term product plans.  We want you to remain flexible while still providing your team with a sense of product direction.  As a result, our roadmap software features the following:

• Three columns: Current, Near term, and Future
  You can rename these if you wish, but they are purposely given high-level, non-date-specific titles so as not to imply promises of delivery that just aren’t certain.  However, they still provide your team with the insight they need to keep moving in the right direction.
• Time versus Certainty axes
  A concept for roadmaps we first heard about at a talk at ProductCamp London, organises your roadmap items by time and by the likelyhood that you’ll get to them.  Drag and drop roadmap cards across columns or above and below other cards to build out and update your roadmap.
• High-level ‘Roadmap Cards’ instead of features
  Features are simply too granular and likely to change, and just end up cluttering the roadmap. Rather, with the ProdPad roadmap creation tool, you create Roadmap Cards, which represent high-level chunks of work to be completed. These are less likely to change on a weekly basis, and allow you to associate any number of ideas or features to the cards, giving you that crucial link to your product backlog.

Are you embracing these inconvenient truths and changing your roadmapping habits? We’d love to get your feedback. Get in touch at hello@prodpad.com any time!

The post Embrace the Inconvenient Truths of Product appeared first on ProdPad.