Productboard

A quick and specific example of how I use Kanban within Productboard in my day-to-day work is that we do all the sprint and backlog work, and by configuring its swimlanes, I can check from status to status where each activity is according to the team's progress across all areas: product, development, QA, all the way through to completion.

Weekly I issue reports to monitor the Kanban part and identify what we can leverage from the team's capacity, looking at some markdowns there to make decisions.

In the dashboards area, I can monitor in a very easy way the team's capacity, which is my main goal and my main focus when looking at the dashboard.

Productboard has had a positive impact on my organization as it was recommended to me and appeared as a platform different from the ones I was using at the time, but it came bringing an ease of monitoring the process.

After adopting Productboard, I have noticed concrete results such as having the dashboards available allowed me to make quick decisions regarding the sprint and things that happened related to deliveries that were going to be late, but ended up working out due to decision-making with the data being displayed there by the platform.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing is that the company paid for it, and I ended up not taking part regarding costs, but I believe it made sense for our current moment.

My main use case for Productboard is using it to build my roadmap and show it to other stakeholders, making sure that all of the Jira tickets that we have are linked to it so that any other product leaders or leaders across the company, the engineering team, or design can take a look at what is currently being worked on as well as what is up next on the roadmap.

For most initiatives and features that I have built using Productboard, it always starts with creating a top-line level Productboard feature, and then from there, if there are any sub-features, I will break those down as well using the sub-feature component of Productboard. This has really helped particularly my engineering manager to see what is going on so that she can allocate work to her engineers.

The best features that Productboard offers include the connection to Jira, which we use the most, the ability to see features both in the timeline view as well as the list view, and being able to switch between the two. Furthermore, being able to look across the organization and link dependencies helps us make sure that we are being transparent and are not stepping on each other's toes.

I find myself relying on the Jira connection all the time. I will either make my tickets directly within Jira or I will make them in Productboard and port them over. Typically, I make them within Jira and then port them over, which helps keep everything in a timeline.

Productboard has impacted our organization positively by helping us become more transparent across all the different departments, particularly when it comes to dependencies that people have on other departments and other product managers. For example, I found that another product manager was building a very similar pricing feature that I was building because of Productboard, and as a result, we were able to collaborate on that and build one system instead of two that would work for both of our products, as well as making sure that there is not any code redundancy.

Regarding how Productboard can be improved, I think what I would want more of is perhaps some more keyboard shortcuts, as I feel sometimes it is a bit difficult to navigate around and I prefer to do things extremely quickly. Typically, Productboard is not where I am ideating; it is where I am putting in things that I already know. I may have already written a PRD and now I need to create a new item or feature on Productboard to indicate that this is now in progress or this is a potential thing on the roadmap. Sometimes I think Productboard really encourages putting all of the information in at one time, but often what I need to do is add a bunch of features and items in rapid succession. I almost feel that something closer to a spreadsheet view, which I know Productboard has, but something that works more in that manner where I can easily click into something and edit it as opposed to having to click into a very specific spot or having to click on something that takes a second for a dropdown to populate could probably be improved.

I would love for a feature in Productboard that alerts you if somebody else adds a similarly titled item so that you know when someone else is working on something. It would also be nice to improve the searching for features, which I feel is a bit difficult in Productboard because of all of the different views and the number of collaborations across the company.

I have been using Productboard for three years and I was one of the first people at my company

to test and adopt it.

I find Productboard to be stable.

Productboard's scalability is good as it allows work across basically every single person in an organization.

Productboard's customer support is really good. We have had a few calls with customer support or customer success at Productboard, probably because we had a specific plan with them, and they were always very helpful in getting us up to speed and learning about all of the different features.

Before using Productboard, we were just using Google Sheets, Google Docs, and PowerPoints to communicate our roadmaps across the company, which really put product managers into silos. Everyone was using different formats as opposed to one format.

My advice for others looking into using Productboard is that it is very important to have a strong setup from the start. Part of what made it a bit difficult to use at first is that we did not have the Jira connection initially, nor the ability to see things in the table view as opposed to just the timeline view. Getting all of those things set up early on would make it really good for people to be able to get used to using it as soon as possible.

I have not seen a return on investment nor can I share relevant metrics as I am not the decision maker for purchasing Productboard. That being said, all of the things that I have mentioned in regards to collaboration definitely have seen notable improvements.

Productboard is a good tool and I would recommend most companies use it, but the things that I have shared would be really helpful to improve. I would rate this product an eight out of ten.