How ProdPad Fits In: Sharing Ideas

When done right, product management is probably the business function that integrates with more people and processes than any other. So it’s essential that a product management system fits into this complex intersection between customers, colleagues and technology. And without too much disruption. This week, we take you through how ProdPad fits in when propagating potential product ideas to colleagues and customers.

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.