Hi, I’m looking for some product management software to better manage an innovation, experimentation and learning culture. Currently we rely on a lot of Dropbox Paper docs and Trello. I’ve looked at:
Stratgyzer who have the right idea but the tooling seems clunky.
Productboard is very focused on reactivity rather than discovery/proactivity, and would still require us to use Dropbox/Gdrive
Hi @AnaRodriguez! Feel free to check out airfocus.com. You can set up your own workspaces, focus on discovery, and make sure that you’re connecting insights to your decisions.
I’ve used Notion successfully in a UX research and R&D context. I set up a “vault” as a place to capture academic papers and other resources. A second db/table named “insights” was used to capture anything that “bubbles up” from primary user testing or research papers. By categorizing the insights and relating them to OKRs and product roadmap themes, it becomes very easy to create a copy of that table with filters to show what insights are related to which work streams etc.
Why do you think Productboard is focused on reactivity? Our entire product is built around understanding user needs and allows you to take a discovery first approach. Our own team and over 5000+ teams use it in this way — can’t see why you can’t @Ana…
I’ve approached this problem myself by cobbling together solutions using Mural, Notion, Airtable, etc. I’ve decided to “scratch this itch” – I’m experimenting on a product that solves this for Product / Innovation / startup teams.
I’d be happy to show you my MVP and product vision… but I think it would be even more helpful if I could interview you first (before you’ve been biased by seeing the product).
I see your point @JesusRojas - Productboard isn’t supposed to be used in a reactive way. However, I can see that some people could use it that way - the tool doesn’t do good discovery for you after all.
Perhaps you have some case studies of people using it in a discovery-heavy workflow?
Tools don’t do discovery, people do. Productboard can help you identify user needs, who has the need, what that need is, and help you collect all your inputs from your conversations and discovery work in one place to help inform both your prioritization and shaping of the problem and the solution - while keeping the actual users that shared that need involved from start to finish. @NathanEndicott As far as case studies, a few you can check out:
Ultimately, discovery and understanding user needs is one of the key reasons people choose Productboard.
There is a new service that has been built for product managers by product managers called Build Better. It might be just the thing you’re looking for. You can check it out here. Full disclosure: I have not used the service myself yet but know the founder.
Hi @Jesus - don’t want to get your sales team in trouble but that’s the impression I got from them, which I mentioned and they didn’t disabuse me of. I’ve had a browse of the product as well, I fully admit I haven’t done in-depth research though. To be more precise, we do a lot of of our discovery through in-depth interviews. Platforms like condens/dovetail will transcribe a video or take a page of interview notes and make it searchable and organized; productboard will let me organize the next stage, but I’d love for something that does both. From what I saw on productboard I’d have to manually chop each interview into ideas and tag them myself.
“We had so many sources of incoming user feedback that being able to manage it all in a meaningful way was challenging.
-from one of your case studies
We have almost the opposite problem - not enough feedback and we need to go out there and probe for it
Hey @Ana, Thanks for sharing. I still think we’re a fit here. All of our notes are searchable, you can tag (at the note level to help with this or also use our filters) and organize and also attribute as insights to your actual product backlog and hierarchy. The power, and difference, is that you can layer on segmentation to get a complete picture of not only what’s important, but for whom, and why and have that available through the entire software lifecycle.Most of our customers use integrations we have with folks like Gong.io, to auto transcribe calls and bring into Productboard as notes/insights. and use other tool integrations like Fullstory, Gainsight, Slack, Zendesk, etc. or our APIs to gather even more. And not enough feedback is also a common challenge, but one a tool won’t solve — that it, as you said, sometime that you get out and generate. Often as well customers don’t have a place to provide that feedback today — or if they do it gets lots in many other tools vs. being centralized in one location where it is actionable by your product team. It may be that you have that feedback, it’s just making it to the team. Our portal also provides a way to gather this at scale. Let us know if we can help you further. Always available.
