Great post! Only recently grabbed productboard myself, and I'm glad I wasn't the only one slightly thrown off by how opinionated some of the features.
I tend to agree on the roadmap front. I've set up two roadmaps
1. Timeline
2. Releases
I only really use the releases roadmap. The timeline one, I use when discussing high-level with my mgmt team. In fact, I also use it at the start of our sprint retro meetings with the dev team. It provides a bit of context to everyone.
I've only been using this for about a month, so opinion might change. I think collaboration could be easier (or cheaper, it's so expensive to bring another 'maker'), but all in all this is a fantastic tool.
I use Slack and email forward, and written notes from my discovery meetings with customers.
Generally found that I can tie most notes to something we already have in the backlog. If it's not there, I create one.
The trickiest part is assign value to those. To customers, everything always sounds 'Critical' (the highest rating you can give an insight). When you dig deeper, which I have now found 100% worth doing every time, you find they often don't care _that_ much.
It's very subjective, so I bank on volume of requests rather than urgency estimated from the requests, if that makes sense.
Thx for the details. That's exactly my thought. How do you "count" the number of requests (i.e., volume) within the tool? Or do you more "gut feel" to track it.
After a year now, any followup feedback? are you gentlemen still using ProductBoard? Any lessons learned? Has the tool improved since your last analysis?
Fun to follow-up about a year later, I should do more of that!
Unfortunately I had to let Productboard go. Not because I didn’t like it (I still think they’re incredible). My startup was acquired and I had to migrate to using our acquirer’s tech stack, which didn’t include Productboard.
As far as lessons learned, I think PB do an incredible job at helping you _track where_ ‘things’ came from. That’s the one feature I’m really missing with my new workflow, an easy way to track who asked for what, how many times, etc. PB make that super simple.
I also now have to do all my product management work in Jira which is where devs also manage their work. Losing the separation of ‘church and state’ I had where PB was for planning, scoping, managing the product and Jira was for devs was a bit loss. I can tell the devs feel more overwhelmed having the backlog visible at all times now.
Hopefully can get back to using PB one day! Hope this helps.
Great post! Only recently grabbed productboard myself, and I'm glad I wasn't the only one slightly thrown off by how opinionated some of the features.
I tend to agree on the roadmap front. I've set up two roadmaps
1. Timeline
2. Releases
I only really use the releases roadmap. The timeline one, I use when discussing high-level with my mgmt team. In fact, I also use it at the start of our sprint retro meetings with the dev team. It provides a bit of context to everyone.
In my post, https://alexdebecker.substack.com/p/008-finding-an-adequate-product-management?r=9b182, I talk about what made me pick Productboard and I think you hit the nail on the head in your 'cool value adds' section. I LOVE the prioritisation (value vs. effort) feature and the insights.
I've only been using this for about a month, so opinion might change. I think collaboration could be easier (or cheaper, it's so expensive to bring another 'maker'), but all in all this is a fantastic tool.
Thx Alex. Love to hear how you actually use the insights feature. Do you integrate various things to pipe in written feedback?
And once you have all that feedback in these emails, how do you organize the information to make sense of it?
I use Slack and email forward, and written notes from my discovery meetings with customers.
Generally found that I can tie most notes to something we already have in the backlog. If it's not there, I create one.
The trickiest part is assign value to those. To customers, everything always sounds 'Critical' (the highest rating you can give an insight). When you dig deeper, which I have now found 100% worth doing every time, you find they often don't care _that_ much.
It's very subjective, so I bank on volume of requests rather than urgency estimated from the requests, if that makes sense.
Thx for the details. That's exactly my thought. How do you "count" the number of requests (i.e., volume) within the tool? Or do you more "gut feel" to track it.
I don't really, I monitor the User Impact score, which you can find in the feature prioritisation view in the features tab 💪
After a year now, any followup feedback? are you gentlemen still using ProductBoard? Any lessons learned? Has the tool improved since your last analysis?
Fun to follow-up about a year later, I should do more of that!
Unfortunately I had to let Productboard go. Not because I didn’t like it (I still think they’re incredible). My startup was acquired and I had to migrate to using our acquirer’s tech stack, which didn’t include Productboard.
As far as lessons learned, I think PB do an incredible job at helping you _track where_ ‘things’ came from. That’s the one feature I’m really missing with my new workflow, an easy way to track who asked for what, how many times, etc. PB make that super simple.
I also now have to do all my product management work in Jira which is where devs also manage their work. Losing the separation of ‘church and state’ I had where PB was for planning, scoping, managing the product and Jira was for devs was a bit loss. I can tell the devs feel more overwhelmed having the backlog visible at all times now.
Hopefully can get back to using PB one day! Hope this helps.