productboard

Vorteile: I wanted to save this for last, but I'd hate myself if people didn't read it because of my lengthy post. productboard is beautiful, simple and extremely powerful! As our products matured, and our customer base grew, there was never a shortage of customer feedback and ideas on how to improve (or introduce new) features. Our backlog (in Jira) was growing, and processing feedback (categorising, evaluating, prioritising) was becoming a cumbersome (if not impossible) task. It was hard to collate feedback on the same feature and/or trace it back to the customers who requested it. As we were seeking to embrace a Dual-Track Agile approach to how we do product development, we needed a tool that powers our Discovery stage. We found it in productboard. It allows us to easily assign new ideas/feedback to the respective feature. productboard generates a user score based on frequency and importance. You can also map the features to different customer segments, strategic drivers and any other custom fields you need. Map your features to releases and voila, productboard generates a stylish, digestible roadmap. Even better - two clicks on the roadmap view, and you can drill down to the original feedback. No more 'Oh, where did this come from?' Brilliant! Very importantly, productboard works well with your ecosystem. We kept our existing feedback forms (Google Form) and use Zapier to sync them with productboard. We also use the Jira and Slack integrations. They work awesome!

Nachteile: At some stage we'd like to drop our Google Form, and start collecting feedback in-app. And while product board already makes it convenient to collect feedback from Intercom conversations, it might make it easier for some customers if they had a simple, embeddable form. Another challenge product board needs to think about is related to closing the feedback loop, i.e. feeding information back to the original requestors. Whether it's via a portal, or an integration with a customer engagement product (like Intercom), that would be a powerful addition. That said, these are currently nice-to-haves for our business.

Vorteile: Beautifully designed. Easy to get started and learn, yet lot's of depth to the features. So hard to single out things I like the most because almost everything is top notch and a delight. One very useful thing is how it maintains a link between features and the customer input/feedback linked to those features so the team can look back at the genesis of an idea and understand the full context. A superb little touch is a one click export of email addresses for everyone whose input is linked to a feature so you can reach out to them quickly to ask for more input, or let them know that their requested feature is available.

Nachteile: There are a couple of tweaks I'd love to make to help with workflow: allow contributors to add/suggest tags and changes to fields like Effort, and allow them to adjust/customize their own views of the feature board. I don't want to make them full-fledged editors, because I don't want them to be able to edit other fields. An alternative would be to grant more granular access control to editors so that you can prevent them from making certain changes; or at least to require the product manager's approval after suggesting changes.