Eight Product Management Problems ProdPad Solved in 2020

ProdPad is more than just a product management tool. We focus on solving product management problems by allowing teams to collaborate and communicate strategy in a single space, making sure transparency is always at the forefront of every decision. This ensures teams can reduce the risk of business failure, avoid building tech debt, and focus on building amazing products.

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.