“We don’t need a tool,” you think. We don’t need them and don’t use them, it’s a waste of budget and they are overly complex!

In many regards this is true. You don’t need a tool. You’re right, you don’t. Not really… But that is like saying teams don’t need a CRM for sales or a help desk for support. In the strictest sense, you don’t need a tool to do anything, but it sure does help.

Tools are optional until they are mandatory

You don’t need a product management tool to do your job, but there are several benefits to introducing a tool that are worth considering. Even if you are happy with your set up as it is, the right tool can streamline your product management workflow and even shape the company’s culture.

Tools are but an augmentation of the human condition.

Using a tool is about being more effective and efficient about the goals we are trying to reach. It is about opening new possibilities that are hard if not impossible to do without tools. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it most certainly was built with precise engineering and the most modern technology for its time.

“But we’ve never used a tool before and that’s the way we’ve always done it! It worked for us!” That sentiment is a great way to be left in the dust. Just because something has worked before doesn’t mean it can’t be done better – and to be better, you need a tool.

How to think about product management tools the right way

The decision to get a new tool should stretch far beyond the walls of the product team – after all, your product IS your business.

You’re deciding what and how you’ll communicate with the rest of your company and how they communicate with you. You’re deciding what kind of product habits you’ll instil across your company and the rhythm at which your business moves.

Your product management setup is really a decision around what kind of product culture you want to bring to your business.

“Having a product culture is about having the product, the very thing that you’re building, at the heart of the business, a core aspect that’s granted the attention it needs. This means that everyone in the company is an advocate for what you’re building and how you’re building it.

The most successful product-centric companies include a team that considers a solid product to be the top priority, and in my experience, the quality of work done by a team who’s collectively bought in and invested in the product vastly outperforms one who doesn’t.”

Janna Bastow, Co-Founder and CEO, ProdPad

“But we’ve got Excel, post-it notes and whiteboards!” Indeed. We all do. All of which are fine and useful but that is not the same as having a dedicated tool that improves your skill set.

So whatever you’re looking at now – whether it’s a homemade setup of spreadsheets and Google or the hottest new tools on the market – be sure you’re accounting for the future of the team you want to work in.

Will what you have today work tomorrow? Will it hold up to the needs of a growing company? Here’s what you should think about to help you make the right call.

Take a look at your existing set

The three most important elements of product management are customer feedback, the product backlog and the product roadmap. If you can consolidate them into a single tool, you should.

The more there’s on your plate to manage, the harder it is for you to map out and understand important relationships in your data.

The constant stream of data flowing into any company needs validation, if you don’t know how to map it to something tangible, you end up drowning in it. If you can understand what pieces of feedback are important to your customers, they become the basis for your ideas. Once you do that it’s not difficult to pivot your roadmap based on validated important ideas. How can you understand what ideas are important to your customers if you can’t connect them? How do you know where to pivot your roadmap if you can’t see what’s important to your customers?

Leaving them in silos not only makes it more difficult for you to drum up new insights, it also makes it difficult for people on your team to flag up important issues.

For example, if you want is to make a case for a new experiment, you should be able to pull up the data and reasoning to support it.

Just because it worked early on, doesn’t mean it will scale

The reality is that you’ll lean on different tools/processes at different points of growth. That being said, now is still the time to plan and budget for the future because changing down the line will be disruptive.

I see so many product managers using spreadsheets when they first start off. Now we love spreadsheets, they’re useful, easy to use, and get to the point. There’s a reason Excel is still one of the most widely-used tools in any industry.

But if you’re using spreadsheets today, you’ll need to start thinking about how it will scale as your team and product grows.

How do you plan to accommodate a growing team and more user data?

Regularly, using a spreadsheet as a backlog tool results in a vertigo-inducing stack of requirements with a mishmash of columns, half of which are assorted footnotes, mixed anachronisms and colour coding.

Another popular use of spreadsheets is to use it to communicate a roadmap

Spreadsheets, however, are not known for their visual design, being leant upon for visually communicating your entire product strategy. It may have started off feeling like a good idea, but you’re mostly spending your time fighting with it these days. (Especially when Excel is so editable – team members might make “tweaks” to make it “clearer” – which as we all know means it’s a convoluted mess that gives you a headache.)

Same goes if you’re using multiple tools: you need to start considering now how you will consolidate these tools in the future.

Whether it’s a matter of multiple tools or processes, making changes to the product management process is uniquely disruptive since it affects the pace of product releases.

Good tools vs great product management tools

There is a reason why our ancestors relentlessly iterated and improve their tools from stone and bone, to bronze, to iron. Each tool improvement made people better at their tasks and opened up new horizons.

Product management as a discipline and a craft is no different. While you can do it without tools and rely solely on the latest and greatest fad framework, you will do better with tools.

Good tools allow you to do your job. Great product management tools help you become better at your job by nudging you towards best practices and philosophies.

So how do you know what to go for?

Here’s a real world example:

When we first started building ProdPad, we used one of the best tools in the market: JIRA.

The tool itself was inherited from our development team, which was initially outsourced. JIRA in itself is a fantastic tool and has a great name behind it, so we didn’t really question using it.

But as the team grew and our process became from refined, we started clashing with JIRA. We weren’t getting the team visibility we wanted, it was overly complex, and we were falling behind on releases.

That’s when we decided to switch to Trello. As a tool, Trello fit our process, allowed us to be agile, and it increased our productivity and visibility throughout. We now release twice a week, have sprint meetings once a week, and have a seamless integration with ProdPad.

In this situation, we learned what tool is great for us as a company and a team, and in our case, that meant making a switch to something else! Lesson learned.

Takeaway

There are good products and there are great products – and that will change from company to company and team to team. Ensure you set the right tone and process for your team by selecting a tool that will help you become better at what you do, and improves your overall productivity.

Remember:

• Whiteboards, post-it notes and spreadsheets don’t scale.
• The days of product managers being whiteboard jockeys are long gone.
• Frameworks are guides and suggestions – they’re not tools. They often become about the dogma and not the process.
• Starting your search through best-of-lists is a great jumping off point, but ensuring you keep what you want to end up with, top of mind is key to success.
• A great tool is a tool that is right for you. Sometimes it’s not the market leader if its premise is contradictory to how your team operates.
• The addition of a dedicated product management tool will allow you to do your job better.
• The addition of a dedicated product management tool will improve your skills and help you become a leader.

The post Product Management Tools – Are They Worth The Hype? appeared first on ProdPad.

“When is an idea too small?”

The bug reports. The minor tweaks. Are the little things important enough to count as an idea?

I will answer that question with another question: Is the proposed change up for debate?

If it is, you should count it as an idea and send it into ProdPad.

If something just needs to be done and is dev-ready, it doesn’t need to be logged as an idea. It’s not a suggested improvement, it’s a necessary fix. For example, bugs are typically considered a development ‘to do’ item. When you’re simply looking at a broken piece of software that needs to be fixed, this should go straight into the development backlog and be scheduled accordingly.

But when you get into the realm of other “little things”, the question gets a little more complicated. A “little thing” might be a UX fix for something that’s confusing customers, a detail your team realizes really should have been included in a previous release.

Use the following to help you decide whether you should add an idea or just push it straight to development:

• Is there a chance this change will spark a debate as to whether it’s a good idea or not?
• Are you able to provide JIRA with enough information right away for a developer to pick up this task without any further support?
• Can this change realistically be delivered in the next few sprints?

Keep in mind these decisions ultimately come down to how you communicate and how you draw the line between ProdPad and project management tools like JIRA. Questions like these can help you establish a set of guidelines, so important fixes don’t end up waiting for approval in ProdPad.

If you have any insight you can share on the ins and outs of how you manage a workflow between ProdPad and your development tools, drop a comment below!

The post How Small Is Too Small For Idea Management? 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.

This integration means that when you change a story’s status in Pivotal Tracker, we’ll automatically update the related idea status in ProdPad. No more duplication of tasks or important updates lost in transmission.

It’s really easy to get set up and start benefiting from the new two-way integration. From the Integrations page, select mapping for Pivotal Tracker and choose which status fields you’d like to sync. These changes will be updated automatically for every other colleague who copied your original integration too.

If you’re a Pivotal Tracker user and would like to find out more about integrating with ProdPad, you can find out more here or get in touch directly with one of the team

The post ProdPad and Pivotal Tracker: Integrating Product Management for Even More Product Teams 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.

Integrating ProdPad with Trello

First of all, it’s now possible to map ProdPad ideas to Trello cards, giving you more control and options about what information is sent to your Trello board.

And on top of that, we’ve developed a two-way integration with Trello that allows you to automatically update an idea’s status in ProdPad when a card moves on your Trello board.

It’s really easy to get set up and start benefiting from these new integration points. From the Integrations page, select mapping from your Trello integration and select which fields you’d like to sync. These changes will be updated automatically for every other colleague who copied your original integration too.

If you’re a Trello user and would like to find out more about integrating with ProdPad, you can find out more here or get in touch directly with one of the team.

The post ProdPad and Trello take it to the next level appeared first on ProdPad.

What are the advantages of syncing ProdPad with other systems?

ProdPad is a home for Product Managers to live and breathe new product ideas. Collaboration is a hugely important part of this process and so the involvement of other colleagues in idea management through ProdPad is key to success. But other teams use their own tools and processes to carry out their daily jobs, and different people need access to different levels of information.

A completely syndicated relationship between ProdPad and your development tools, CRM or support system means data is consistent no matter where you look without forcing changes to people’s workflows.

How do custom integrations work in ProdPad?

Creating custom webhooks allows you to push ideas from ProdPad into third party applications, while the API allows you to automate updates to ProdPad when the status of these ideas change in those third party applications.

Setting up these two components creates an effective two-way integration.

1. Creating a custom webhook for the URL you’d like to share ideas with will provide you with a custom option under ‘Push idea to…’ on your idea page
2. Using the statuses endpoint of the ProdPad API, you can create a mechanism to integrate with your 3^rd party application
3. Mapping statuses between ProdPad and your application directly from the ProdPad UI will complete your data sync

You can read more on this process in this How-To Guide.

To find out more about using ProdPad alongside your existing systems, you can get in touch with us here.

The post Custom Two-Way Integrations for Product Management, Your Way appeared first on ProdPad.