We’re sharing it with you because it’s a productive way to work out priorities as a team, and it’s a really helpful method for mapping development. Who said product management couldn’t be fun?

One of your biggest jobs as a product manager is to translate and prioritize what feels like a million inputs flying in from across the company into just one cohesive product roadmap. To help you with this, we want to share one of our favorite feature prioritization frameworks with you. 

During this game, everyone gets a chance to bring up the priorities they feel are important for the future of the product. But which priorities will win?

You’ll want to set aside an entire morning or afternoon for this riveting afternoon of discussion, debate, and feature prioritization.

The more people you involve in the process, the better the understanding will be across the board. A good mix of internal stakeholders and active users will provide you with more valuable insights than just getting your product teams together in isolation.

Below you’ll find our easy how-to guide on running your own Product Tree session using this fun visual tool. We’ve also got a brilliant eBook about all of the most important prioritization frameworks for product managers. Just click the banner below to get your copy.

How to run your Product Tree Game session 

What you’ll need:

1. The Product Tree template (download below)
2. Post-it notes (leaf-shaped Post-its are perfect)
3. Sharpies 
4. A whole afternoon 
5. Coffee? Can’t hurt!

Step 1: Print our Product Tree template 

The Product Tree is what you’ll use to run your session. Get our free Product Tree template here, or draw your own out on a big whiteboard.

Each Product Tree consists of four elements:

• The trunk represents the core features already in your products.
• The branches are feature branches. Optionally, you can increase the thickness of single branches that are more important.
• The leaves are individual features that the workshop participants will place on the branches. The closer the leaves are to the trunk, the closer they are to being delivered.
• The roots represent the infrastructure and technical requirements that support your product. As with any tree, the bigger it gets, the more support it needs from its roots – so remember your technology as you expand your feature list.

That said, how you fill out this tree depends on the kind of product you want to build. If you want to focus on one area, your product could be the roots, and the area you’re focusing on would be the trunk.

Or, if you’re running a platform with multiple products, the platform itself could be the trunk, and the main branches would represent each of your products. 

Whatever the scale of your approach, you’ll need to list out the main areas of your product and label the branches of your tree accordingly. If your product areas have chunky bits of functionality or features within them, you could add those to the stubs of the branches. 

Step 2: Prepare your leaves  

Print out all the features you already have in your product, or want to add to your product. Or, write them down on Post-it notes. Also, make sure to have plenty of empty Post-its at hand for adding new ideas!

Don’t worry about adding all your existing features, because if you have a feature-rich product, you’ll be there all day.

Step 3: Get your group together  

Anyone can play this game. The more kinds of stakeholders you involve, the richer the output. It becomes especially interesting if you get customers involved in placing new features on the branches according to which they would most like to see in your product.

If you have more than 10 people joining in, prepare multiple sets of trees and leaves – ideally, you will have 4-10 people working on one single tree. This includes one observer per tree, whose role it is to ask the participants to clarify what they mean if there’s anything ambiguous on the tree. 

Step 4: Put the leaves on the tree 

Ask everyone to write their feature ideas on the (hopefully) leaf-shaped Post-it notes, then get them to place the Post-its onto the tree wherever they think they should go.

The further away from the trunk they are, the more into the future you’re planning. Leaves closer to the trunk are closer to deployment, while the canopy of the tree is more about long-term growth. 

Step 5: Prune your Product Tree 

Now the fun begins – like green-thumbed gardeners, get cracking on pruning the tree!

Pruning in this case doesn’t always mean outright cutting things from your tree, though. Really, ‘pruning the Product Tree’ is more about assessing what you put on your tree, and then collaboratively reorganizing it.

Moving features around or adjusting the thickness of a branch is just as valid as cutting an impractical idea (though you’ll still want to do that – but make sure hang on to them for the review phase). 

Together as a team, you’ll need to talk through the placement of each leaf, and work on refining where they sit on the tree as a whole. This means that you need to identify and remove branches, leaves, or even roots that are hindering long-term growth or putting roadblocks in the path of your solutions.

Once your team has put together their tree, they need to assess each leaf’s importance. How much value does it adds for your customers? How does it align with your product vision? And how much effort it would take to implement or to maintain? These are some of the questions you’ll want to throw out about each idea.

Consider the importance and impact to the customer, the relevance to your product vision, the effort required to bring it to market, and the impact on your business goals and product strategy.

Tips for having a successful Product Tree workshop

Here are some pointers on how to have a productive and fun Product Tree pruning session: 

• Personalize the tree to stimulate creativity. For instance, participants can add their own little markers to their ideas, or draw hearts around the features they really love. 
• Remember the significance of where leaves are placed. The closer the leaves are to the trunk, the more near-term they are. Leaves closest to the trunk are existing features, while leaves on the outer edges of your canopy represent the long-term future. 
• Don’t hesitate to use lines to show links or dependencies between features. Though try not to end up looking like Charlie in It’s Always Sunny.
• Don’t worry too much if the tree becomes unbalanced. Usually, the group participants or the observer will bring this up naturally. 
• Take pictures of the development of the tree(s) – this is useful for the review process. 

Step 6: Present and review internally 

At the end of the session, present your tree (or multiple trees if you worked in groups). Encourage everyone to ask questions and discuss. Often, more ideas will come up during this process, or leaves will be shuffled around.

Once you’re all packed up, take your product tree and the pictures you took and compare them against your current product roadmap. Useful questions to ask are: 

• Which “prepared features” got pruned? Especially if you’re working directly with customers, you might find that a much-loved feature is actually dispensable in the eyes of the user. 
• Do the trees retain their general shape? If you’re seeing an obvious imbalance – such as lots of leaves on one branch – this could be a signal that your users aren’t aware of (perception problem) or interested in (product/market fit problem) a whole feature set in your product. 
• Are you growing your product fast enough? If there are a lot of leaves close to the trunk, you may not be releasing new features fast enough; whereas lots of leaves on the outside shows that they’re looking for great things in the future. 
• What does your root system need to look like? If your customers are changing aspects of your infrastructure, it’s likely of critical significance to them to establish trust in the longevity of your product. 

At ProdPad we find the Product Tree game is a great way to dig into feature prioritization. Don’t forget to check out our free prioritization framework eBook, and if you need even more detail on the best way to run a Product Tree session, take a look at our free manual here. They’re both fantastic resources to help you with creating your lean product roadmap.

The post The Product Tree Game: Our Favorite Way To Prioritize Features appeared first on ProdPad.

Product Management Problems Solved

From our Slack Community to our publicly available customer feedback portal, we’ve listened to your feedback and solved the following problems for you in 2020.

1) Measuring Outcomes by Tracking Objectives & Key Results

While we previously offered the ability to link initiatives to objectives, this year we stepped up our OKR tracking game. 

The first change came with the separation of portfolio and product objectives, meaning teams can add more definition to their objectives, particularly for those product managers with larger portfolios. 

We also introduced key result tracking, giving teams more powerful visibility over how their initiatives are having an impact on their outcomes. With the ability to link initiatives to both objectives and key results, you can keep track of status changes as well as final success outcomes. Absolute game-changer.

2) Getting Teams Involved via Slack

Great ideas can crop up anywhere, and it’s likely your Slack workspace has been busier than ever. So you never miss out on a conversation, our beloved Slack bot is all grown up and repackaged as a new Slack App, providing extensive functionality and interactions all from your Slack workspace. 

In addition to submitting ideas and feedback directly from Slack, teams can also now respond and keep track of threads that sync to ProdPad automatically. With dedicated channel notifications and backlog search, our Slack App is a great solution for solving this classic product management problem.

For information and details on all functionality, please refer to our Slack set up guide.

3) Advanced Security Features for Larger Organizations

ProdPad is Enterprise-ready and prepared to help organizations with complex security and compliance regulations. 

Our SAML configuration is ready to provide access to ProdPad through your favorite identity provider, and we’ve expanded safety measures to allow you to manage inactivity timers and logging in to multiple accounts.

We also increased security through the introduction of data classification labels. 

These allow admins to highlight levels of sensitive information within their accounts, and ensure everyone in the team is made aware of the sensitivity of the information that is being worked on.

This is your IT team’s dream come true.

4) Publishing Roadmaps Anytime, Anywhere, for Anyone

With collaboration and transparency in mind, we recently revamped our roadmap publishing feature to give you greater management control. We understand that a common product management problem is the need to share and create roadmaps for multiple target audiences, as well as ensuring that your roadmaps are always secure wherever you share them.

• The ability to create and track an unlimited number of roadmaps with different views. From your executive board to your development team, create multiple roadmaps based on your master version. All updates are pushed automatically, so you never have to worry about them being out of date.
• Extended administration over created shares, including the ability to expire URLs and embed codes as needed. 
• Added password protection to roadmaps, providing more safety over roadmaps you share.

5) Improved Stakeholder Management for your Atlassian Products

Our support for Atlassian products was also expanded in 2020 with a brand new Confluence plugin.

Available in the Atlassian Marketplace, our plugin allows you to embed roadmaps, feedback forms and portals directly into any Confluence page. Combined with our Trello and JIRA integrations, you can now introduce ProdPad as a complement to your product development workflows, and make sure you’re keeping your stakeholders up to date with every step of the process. 

And what’s more? It’s available for both Server and Cloud versions.

6) Improving Your Day to Day Activities

This year we focused on making ProdPad easier to use for everyone. We introduced new and improved navigation, as well as the ability to favorite products and product lines. Product managers who oversee large portfolios can now cut through the noise of the products they’re not working on and focus on those that are part of their remit.

Our improvements didn’t stop there, of course. We also improved our search capabilities in the app. Finding those important ideas in your backlog can be majorly time-consuming. But now you can search through actual idea content – including files, designs and your archive. This is perfect if you can’t quite remember the name of an idea but know the gist of what’s in there.

7) Integrating ProdPad With Other Tools 

We understand the importance in having an app that is flexible and can easily be integrated with your existing tools. While there are plenty of integrations you can use, we still want *you* to have the ease to plug ProdPad into anything. 

As such, we’ve moved our API documentation over to Swagger.

Swagger allows the easy specification of the API methods using a standard. By adding your ProdPad API key to Swagger, you can actually test the calls directly from the platform, making it easy to get started and integrate with our API.

• Find all our API documentation in a single place
• Test API methods live
• You can create SDKs in various languages
• API is specified using OAS making for easier adoption

8) Supporting your Product Journey

This year we committed ourselves to ensuring you have all the necessary resources and information to make the right decision for your and your team. Introducing a new tool, after all, is never an easy feat. Whether you’re still getting to know us, just about to purchase or are already on ProdPad, we’re ready to support you on your journey to better product management. 

Sandbox

If you want to see what a good setup looks like, or what product management problems ProdPad might solve for you, our brand new Sandbox is the place to be. We’ve set up a free account for you to play with. How cool is that? Play in our Sandbox right now.

ProdPad Glossary

We understand it can be difficult moving to a new tool, particularly if you aren’t familiar with some of the lingo. Luckily, we’ve set up a glossary of terms ready for you to hit the ground running. Check out our Glossary to learn more about ProdPad’s product lingo.

How ProdPad Fits

Every organization is unique – you have your own structure, ways of working and existing frameworks. Find out how ProdPad fits with your processes and methodology of choice (with many more coming soon). Find out how ProdPad fits.

Training and Sales Support

You know you need a product tool, but how can you convince everyone else investing in one is the way forward? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered with our new Considering ProdPad resource.

If you’re already purchased ProdPad and need help with training, support and additional services, we’ve also got resources for you. Never fear, ProdPad is here.

Help, Improved

We’ve made big changes to our support system, now offering improved self-service and a more unified and robust setup. Improvements include:

• Contextual documentation as you navigate through ProdPad
• Documentation search from the support widget
• Email and chat support via the support widget, setting proper expectations for available support hours
• A brand new Help Center

Product Management Problems We’re Solving in 2021

While we can’t give you exact release dates or specifics on features (see what we did there?), we’re looking ahead at the new year and exploring the possibilities of solving more problems for our customers. We’ve mentioned a few highlights below, but do check out our public product roadmap to get the full picture for 2021. 

• How to help new users acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviors in order to become effective ProdPad users.
• How can we make it easier for the wider team to contribute to and reduce the barrier to entry for them to enable and support wider team contribution and engagement.
• Can we utilize the power of automation and intelligence to help reduce the burden on our users?
• How can we improve and expand our integrations to support cross team collaboration and make ProdPad the hub for all product knowledge.
• Enhancing existing features and infrastructure so ProdPad can continue to help large teams with lots of data solve the right customer problems.

If you’d like to know more, jump over to our portal and give us some feedback. Or if you now want a slice of the ProdPad action for your own product management teams and want to see how it can solve your product management problems, sign up for a free trial. 

The post Eight Product Management Problems ProdPad Solved in 2020 appeared first on ProdPad.

“Product teams and customer success teams align around the voice of the customer. With good processes and communication in place, both teams can help each other work efficiently and effectively in their own roles. Whether that’s making sure you’re building the right things for customers or making sure your customers are set up for success.” Emma Hill, Customer Success Manager. 

ProdPad has introduced Company Profiles to help product and success teams work together. This handy feature allows data from companies to be grouped in one place. This paints a more holistic view of what specific organizations think and feel about your product. By clicking into a company profile, teams will immediately see all contacts in that group as well as all ideas and feedback related to that company.

“Having Company Profiles in ProdPad makes it super easy to see and understand feedback from your customers. Grouping the feedback in one place lets you see the ideas connected to the feedback, and their progress. For example, is it in discovery, in development or ready for release? This is so important for communication with customers and keeping them updated on what’s happened as a result of their feedback.”

Emma Hill, Customer Success Manager.

Power up your customer intelligence

Building up a collection of company profiles allows your teams to gather important insights from your customer base. You might be able to draw conclusions and build hypotheses based on what particular companies in particular sectors are saying about your product. This level of intelligence is like gold dust to product teams, particularly in the discovery stages as they look ahead to their next cycle.

The basics of customer tracking

• Name, location and logo help you identify the company quickly
• Size and value help you identify the company’s potential for growth

For more detailed information, you can add a link to the company’s profile on your preferred CRM. This bridges the gap further between your product management and customer-facing software, creating that important company transparency we should all be striving for.

Segment by location

Segmenting by geographical location easily provides your team with some fascinating insights on product usage within specific regions or countries.

Segment by company size and value

It’s always important to understand the revenue value of the companies you’re working with. Use this information to help identify any potential growth opportunities.

Segment by tags

Tags help you organize companies based on your own, pre-planned criteria. Grouping customers and feedback by tags allows you to easily identify potential themes and problems that need solving. This approach is perfect for prioritizing ideas and making sure your work supports the wider strategy.

Want to see more? Check out our Sandbox playground and have a play yourself. Fancy a chat with one of our product experts? Book yourself in for a free demo and we can go from there. 

The post Empower your Customer Success Teams with Company Tracking appeared first on ProdPad.

Our Idea Backlog functionality includes prioritization charts, idea triaging, and in-app conversations. Product managers can decide on the right stuff to build, before pushing specs over to their development team. This reduces risk, minimizes tech debt, and ensures that the right problems are always solved.

Watch our Idea Backlog tutorial

Who better to explain this feature than our CEO and Co-founder, Janna Bastow? Oh yes, after the success of our Objectives and Key Results tutorial we asked Janna to talk through our Idea Backlog, too. We hope you find it useful.

Book yourself in for a free demo with one of our product experts for more information. They’ll answer your questions and tell you how ProdPad can support your product strategy.

The post Video: Let’s Learn More About ProdPad’s Idea Backlog appeared first on ProdPad.

Our Confluence plugin bridges the gap between product managers and other teams. This is done by linking ProdPad to the collaborative workspaces in Confluence.

Why do I need the Confluence plugin for ProdPad?

Communication and collaboration are key to building great products. A product manager must have a clear view on what other teams are working on. For example, they may have gathered feedback, made discoveries, or have suggestions that could help a product manager decide what to build next.

A product manager should be making their work visible, too. The development team needs to know what to work on next, the marketing team might want to start planning product launches, and the sales team might want to tease future releases. 

With these points in mind, here’s exactly what the plugin can do:

Share your product roadmap

Create and share multiple roadmap views for different stakeholders. Just embed them directly into Confluence for your different teams to see.

Gather feedback

Collect feedback from your internal teams directly from Confluence with a simple form or customized feedback portal.

Be transparent

Your Confluence teams can stay up to date with the problems you’re solving. This can be done without having to leave the Confluence workspace.

How does this Plugin work?

The Confluence integration is available for both Atlassian Cloud and Server (7.x and above). Once installed, it will become available under the macros section on any given page.

In the macro options, you will be asked to enter the item’s UUID, which you can find in the relevant ProdPad embed slide-out.

Once published, the page will display the embedded item. As with all embeds, any updates that you make internally in your ProdPad account will reflect in real time, keeping your teams up to date without delay.

Why not sign up for a ProdPad demo? Our team of experts will be able to answer all your questions around our Confluence plugin. They’ll also be able to chat with you about ProdPad and other product management topics.

The post Bridging The Gap With Our Confluence Plugin appeared first on ProdPad.

With collaboration and transparency in mind, we recently revamped our roadmap publishing feature to give you greater flexibility. Product managers can now easily create customized roadmaps in ProdPad and share them anywhere. 

What’s new about roadmap publishing in ProdPad?

Create unlimited published roadmaps with views for various stakeholders and target audiences

We understand that not all the information on a roadmap is relevant to every target audience. You can now build different views as you need them. Whether you want to share your entire portfolio, product lines, or individual products, you can now choose exactly what you want to share.

Select what you want to show

Here’s a type of roadmap that could be used to keep customer-facing teams up to date. You can use ProdPad’s internal and public visibility settings to decide which initiatives can be shared.

Need something for your executive team? No worries, you can create that too. You can show top-level information to stakeholders, informing them how their investment is working, and that the business is moving in the right direction. Sharing your portfolio roadmap is perfect for this – it shows growth across multiple products at the same time.

More display options, including card owners and impact & effort scoring

Not everyone needs to know the impact and effort of a card, or even the tags that may be linked for advanced filtering. But if you need to show this, you can.

Our multiple display options let you provide the right level of information to your target audience. For example, your executive board is probably just interested in high-level objectives and initiative information, whereas your development team might want to see ideas, impact and effort, and initiative leads.

Create, expire, and track published roadmaps across your account

With ProdPad, you can keep track of these multiple versions as you create them. If you need to update them at any time, you can do so with the click of a button – without needing to reshare links or embed codes.

All roadmaps can be published via ProdPad hosted links. Teams can post their roadmaps on branded company-hosted sites using an embed code so that additional information can be added. You can even place a published roadmap behind a private site. Similarly, if you need to securely expire the links, then account admins can now do so without any fuss.

Looking for a little more info?

There’s no limit on the number of roadmaps you can publish on our paid plans. That’s right, there are absolutely no limits when it comes to transparency and collaboration.

Book yourself in for a free demo with one of our product experts – they’ll be more than happy to answer all your questions and talk you through ProdPad.

The post Take Control of Team Transparency with Flexible Roadmap Publishing appeared first on ProdPad.

OKRs link to individual initiatives on your roadmap, with the functionality to track progress. Objectives help product teams stay outcome-focused and understand what needs to be built. Worthwhile conversations can happen around the ‘progress status’ of a Key Result. And, stakeholders can see why certain items are being worked on to deliver the product strategy.

Let’s look at ProdPad’s Objectives and Key Results feature

Our CEO and Co-founder, Janna Bastow, has taken time out of her busy schedule to give us an exclusive walk-through of this feature. 

Book yourself in for a free demo with one of our product experts for more information. They’ll be able to answer your questions on our Objectives and Key Results feature.

The post Video: Let’s Look at Our Objectives and Key Results Feature appeared first on ProdPad.

You can now reply to threads in ProdPad directly from Slack, create messages through Slack actions, and even vote on ideas. 

Full breakdown of our Slack Integration

With more people working from home, teams need to be able to align with each other remotely, and so straightforward collaboration is vital. All users in your Slack workspace can get involved and communicate effectively between both platforms. This means all teams can remain engaged and stay up to date with ideas, feedback and conversations.

• There are new commands.
• There are new message actions on existing text in Slack. This means you can select an existing message and send it to ProdPad as either an idea or piece of feedback. Message actions and details are now available for all users.

• ProdPad URLs, showing detailed information, now display on Slack. This includes product name, tags, and personas for all ideas and feedback. This provides more detailed context on links pasted.

• There is functionality to reply directly to threads from Slack. This includes pasted ProdPad URLs. You are able to sync discussions directly to ProdPad.
• Users can now be mentioned directly in threads to bring them into the conversation with auto-syncing.

• There is the option to turn on or off voting actions for ideas and feedback. This makes the app options more customizable.
• Users can submit ideas and feedback on a per-product basis.
• Users can send attachments to support ideas and feedback.

Why not sign up for a free trial and see for yourself?

The post Great News, Our Slack Integration Has Leveled Up appeared first on ProdPad.

ProdPad connects directly to Jira Software, and Jira Software connects to Jira Align. This means a direct workflow can be implemented between all three to support product and agile development. 

Oh yes, these three systems can operate together in perfect harmony. The product manager can drive products forward in ProdPad, before pushing them over to Jira for development. Development teams will be able to stay outcome focused by using Jira Align to make sure all products align with the wider strategy.

This three-way integration will bring your business and technology teams together, creating transparency within your entire organization. How else can you be sure that you’re all on the same page?

How do I set this integration up?

We can help you with that. Just follow these three simple steps to set up your integration. Do get in touch if you need any help.

Step 1: Sync between ProdPad and JIRA 

Following the instructions in our JIRA set up guide, map your fields and workflow statuses as needed.

Once you have mapped everything as needed, we will receive the update directly from JIRA, which will then update the status in ProdPad automatically.

Step 2: Sync between JIRA and Align

All data is mapped automatically between both pieces of software during the synchronization process. Below is a diagram of the mapping breakdown between the two modules.

Step 3: Sync ProdPad + JIRA + Align

Once ProdPad is mapped to Jira Software, and Jira is mapped to Align, the status updates will come through seamlessly.

Jira and Align have bidirectional status and data updates, while ProdPad will receive the status update directly from Jira (either on its own, or influenced by updates from Align).

Sign up to our newsletter

Why not sign up to our monthly newsletter, The Outcome and our other marketing communications. By joining the party you will:

• Be in the know about our upcoming webinars and product resources
• Hear about our latest findings, insights and recommendations 
• Receive news straight to your inbox from the product industry
• Learn what the ProdPad team are doing, and which events we’re hoping to attend!

The post Going Enterprise with ProdPad and Jira Align appeared first on ProdPad.