Productboard Reviews

Alas! We found our product management solution

Comments: Over the past two years, we've tried about every product management solution under the sun. While many have been good, we hadn't found the best solution for *us* (a small team, 3 product people, 5 engineers). This is the first solution that's been adopted by the entire team, a big part due to the easy shared inbox for customer insights.

Pros:

In order of benefit, here's what I like most so far about Productboard: (1) Aggregating product insights / customer requirements across all of our inboxes + Slack into one place (2) Ability to build a quarterly roadmap w/ existing tickets in Jira + w/ ability to write new features back to Jira as tickets (3) Ability to outline all of the components of our platform w/ features under each component - something we've never had before.

Cons:

Some small nit-picks around interactions (eg. bulk selecting rows), but so far customer support has responded instantly to guide me in right direction.

A simple yet powerful tool for managing and communicating the product roadmap

Comments: Productboard did enable us to create a manageable, customer value driven product roadmap that is in alignment with our corporate objectives and product vision. The communication of our product roadmap to different stakeholders is much easier now thanks to the customizable and stunning views.

Pros:

Productboard has a very easy to use user interface, but still manages to provide you the functionality of customizable views with its powerful aggregations, filters, tags and view options. With the insights feature of productboard, it is very easy to parse the ideas and requirements of customers to product features and keep track of the customer demand for each feature in detail. The beautiful roadmap views which you can export for presentations are also a real timesaver.

Cons:

An internal file viewer for common file formats (e.g. pdf, doc, xls) is needed for attachments. It would be preferred if the internal insights could be seperated from customer insights when calculating the user impact score which we utilize to measure the customer demand of features.

Terrible Search, Terrible UI, Unstructured Data

Comments: Migrated from Canny to Productboard. Canny is far and above an easier to use, more pleasant, effective solution for feedback management

Pros:

- Logging in with SSO integration was easy.- You can use it to capture product feedback, even though there are much better tools out there.- Integrates with Zendesk

Cons:

Where to begin???- 3 different search boxes, no unified search.There's one search for views, one search for notes, and another for topics that notes are about.This makes it slow, and difficult to know what search to use at what time.- Data is unstructuredAs far as I can tell, notes don't seem to have ability to have custom fields. Leads to ton of unstructured and poorly searchable data.- The user interfaceThere's no hierarchy to data. The UI/views are overwhelming, and feel disorganized. It's like the worst email inbox or notes app imaginable for complex feedback + data.- Votes on product feedback populate as distinct notes Makes the already bad search even harder to use

Fills a major hole in most product development toolbelts

Comments: Most product and project management tools focus on 3 views: roadmap of what's ahead, kanban view of what's currently in motion, and backlog of all the things you could possibly do. What's majorly lacking in almost all of these tools is the toolset to effectively prioritize the items that go into each of those views. What you're left with is a giant list of things to do and a lot of supplemental tools (xls files, gannt tools, etc.) to try and do prioritization work. The whole point of product development is to figure out what the highest value things could be getting worked on and when/why, and thus, by focusing on "here's what is being worked on" over "here's what we should be working on and why", many other tools largely miss the mark. ProductBoard's tools are custom built to solve the prioritization problem - you can choose company objectives, track customer segments & customers, score features by value/effort, and then slice & dice these things all sorts of different ways in order to best determine the right work to focus on when. At its core, it feels like software that was designed by and for product managers, which is refreshing when compared to other tools in the space that feel like they were designed for the abstract goal of "getting things done".

Pros:

* At it's core, it's just a well designed & enjoyable piece of software to use every day. * Its prioritization toolset allows you to effectively sort/filter/schedule features along all sorts of different dimensions in a way that no other tool I've seen allows for. * Its "insights" inbox allows you to way more effectively manage the influx of requests/feedback than other tools.

Cons:

* Though the tool is easy to use, getting started can be tricky because of needing to figure out how best to map your product to the very flexible data model that ProductBoard allows for. * I wish it had more integrations and/or a public api for syncing engineering tasks - it connects to the big ones (Jira/Pivotal/Trello) really nicely, but many folks use other tools.

It's simply a joy to use every single day!

Comments: ProductBoard helps our multiple teams stay aligned. We have visibility of what each team is working on and can quickly see where there are overlaps. It helps us keep feedback all in one place and not lost across endless Google Docs/Sheets

Pros:

The design and UX of the app makes using ProductBoard on a daily basis super easy and enjoyable. Creating custom views that you can call up when you need to is great. But the most powerful part of ProductBoard is being able to highlight specific parts of a users feedback and easily attaching it to the relevant feature idea, while still being able to jump to the full feedback if you need more context. On top of that the Portal view for customers is beautiful and we've found that this really encourages users to provide more detailed feedback, instead of some other solutions out there that just relies on voting

Cons:

Not much! There's only a small number of features that would help improve things. Critically the ability to hook up to something like Segment to push more live customer data across. Also being able to have conversations directly to customers would help smooth out those times when you need that extra bit of detail on their insight to truly understand their pain.

Simplest way for sophisticated insight consolidation, prioritization, and roadmap management

Comments: We had an alignment and communication problem that we had to solve. Plain and simply, productboard gives us a clear way to communicate and collaborate on our product roadmap. And gives our team insight into how we think about and prioritize initiatives.

Pros:

Consolidating insights from myself, our customers, and our team. I also really like the different views I can create and ways I can prioritize things by release and various scores. The public feedback forum is also really, really nice. Then the beautiful roadmap view is just icing on the cake.

Cons:

Doesn't integrate to Clubhouse, which we are moving to from JIRA. We also didn't use the JIRA integration because we were on New JIRA. Which is why we are now on Clubhouse, which I'll save for another review. Also, I feel there are a couple of elements missing when looking at reporting and ongoing maintenance of tickets... but that's hard, and is probably something they're thinking about.

Helps tell our product story

Comments: This is helping us prioritize our features. A little help on our bandwidth and if we have the pipeline full. This helps us have a clean deliverable to stake holders. Very easy portal feature to better engage company and clients. Helping us manage our large client feedback pool from multiple sources.

Pros:

Very visual. It can handle the large influx of customer feedback and help funnel that to the right part of our product. Helps other departments feel involved in the product evolution and road map. Great way to keep people in the loop to what we have cookin. Love the portal aspect. Very powerful feature set there. Can't wait to engage our client based with a full portal of where we are going, where we are, and where we've been. Easy self on boarding. Great sales process. Great overall.

Cons:

Not too many cons yet. I don't anticipate too many. Not sure how fast they crank out new features yet.

Saved us from accumulating insights and doing nothing with them

Comments: It has helped us move on from the disparate storage of customer insights which we were accumulating but not putting to use. It's now the primarily a tool we use to inform our roadm map and has very strong features to help you align with overall strategy.

Pros:

We can channel Slack messages, support tickets and input from across all our teams to one central location.

Cons:

The reporting is very customisable and you can reach in and grab data quite easily, the only limitation we found is between customer insights and their assigned customer segment, for example, an option to present the priority of feature requests over an entire customer segment isn't readily available.

Great tool for centralising product information

Pros:

A place to put all the feedback where it won't get lost and forgotten since it can be linked to specific features and used to inform planning.

Cons:

Nothing major. There are features we'd appreciate in future like objectives on timelines, user story mapping, etc but they're not vital.

Product roadmap visualized

Comments: Very positive and a great way to share with key stakeholders our brainstorming and product roadmap.

Pros:

Integration with other tools has been a great benefit. However, the collaboration, prioritisation and visualization of the product roadmap is the best and most used features.

Cons:

For smaller teams / startups it could be seen as relatively expensive.

We evaluated a number of products before choosing producboard. One of the best decisions we've made!

Pros:

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!

Cons:

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.

Clear and structured way to track product related activities

Comments: Clear and structured way to track product related activities

Pros:

- Very simple to implement - Help to build transparency across the organisation and customers - Very efficient to track product activities

Cons:

- Miss an integration with Gitlab - Pretty weak on the customer feedback management

Productboard - good "core" for the product management teat

Pros:

- ability to gather, tag and process insights from both clients and internal staff - semi automatic prioritization - ability to create public roadmaps for clients without duplicating the inputs for them (however this is tricky, as it requires from you to keep internal notes very clean and "client ready") - well working integration with jira (two way sync)

Cons:

- To use it properly you must work using objectives, which for some features may be tricky - the features dependencies are limited to "blocks / is blocked", misses quite important one "shall be developed in parallel with" - jira integration is not visible from jira (when I browse jira project I don't know that certain task was linked with productboard)

This is one of my favorite tool.

Pros:

Productboard makes it simple for teams to review and plan improvements to their products in order to achieve the company's goals. It is simple to enter ideas, notes, and plans into the system, allowing teams to grow and move forward rather than simply thinking about what they should do. To begin, teams may just use the most important features of productboard, gradually incorporating more of it into their workflow. It's not difficult to get ideas and backlogs into productboard, and seeing the development may be gratifying.

Cons:

At times, the quantity of customization choices offered might be daunting. It would be beneficial if there was a feature that allowed you to reuse specific processes and features across views. Because there are so many different ways to achieve everything, I frequently wonder if I'm doing it correctly.

Constant feedback and feature management

Pros:

I'm amazed by productboard UX that is totally covering the needs of PMs. And, eventually, the needs of the users. We can easily track all the insights and convert them to features. Amazing customer service btw.

Cons:

Hm..have nothing bad to say about it. I'm using it around a year now and have never experienced any issue.

Product-led platform, built for PMs

Pros:

As PMs know, the key is getting lots of insights then filtering down into the ones that bring about actual value. Productboard enables everyone in the company to contribute ideas and insights. Once PMs have done prioritization, they can visualize the plan in multiple dynamic roadmap dashboards. Overall this works well as a product-focused tool which can also integrate with other systems.

Cons:

Feature-wise it's still a bit sparse. From an insight perspective, it would be nice to add constraints or templates to help structure the feedback. This would help when pruning the backlog of items.

Amazing helper for every organization1!

Pros:

- central location for gathering all your product feedback from several locations - easy collaboration with a team (e.g. comments) - data driven decision support (e.g. user impact score, driver impact) - roadmap preparation capabilities

Cons:

There are definitely minor thing to improve, but nothing that would prevent us from using the tool efficiently. Really, we love using Product Board on a daily basis.

A must-have Product Manager teams

Pros:

Productboard is a very intuitive tool for our Product Management that allows us to track the features from the insights we gather to the delivery. The shareable roadmap is essential for the communication to other services (R&D, sales, support…) and the UI makes it easy to use and to understand.

Cons:

The integration list has to grow to be able to synchronize the items with external project management softwares like Notion. Also, a better version of the Portal to be able to follow the insights would be appreciated.

Great tool to collect feedback and help in prioritization and discovery

Comments: It helps me prioritize my development by collecting feedback from the CS team and classifying them into relevant job stories and contact the right user to investigate a specific topic. It is really part of my daily job !

Pros:

Productboard is friendly and easy to use, and really helps me keep track of the feedback our teams and myself collect from the customer. Thanks to the various integration I can never miss feedbacks: - Salesforce integration helps us keep track of lost deals - Slack integration helps us keep track of feedback shared during a conversation between teammates - Intercom integration send us what is collected via the support And then of course our dear CS and Sales team help us by writing notes after talking to our customers!

Cons:

I can spend a lot of time reviewing the insights and assigning them to the right collection ... but I mean better more customer feedback than not so it's not really a problem

Nice tool with questionable subscription policies

Comments: The product itself is quite intuitive and clear.
For roadmapping and objectivation it is useful, while missing many useful features in the so called "pro" license. The following process of negotiation did not work out for us.

Pros:

First of all productboard does have a clear and intuitive UI. Things are arranged clearly and are easily found once the overall concept is clear. Productboard does give different filterable views on a given set of data on timelines and as a list. It does help with priorization by objectivizing mere words into numbers, also collecting ideas and insights.

Cons:

On the downside of the product is the subscription model. The so called "pro" licence does not include basic things like visible dependencies on the roadmap or using the strongly advertised "objectives" on features. Only two of the four plans are available directly, the rest needs to be negotiated. That negotiation revealed that the "scale model" would multiply the price and the contact itself was so unpleasant that the whole product became stale for our team.

A great tool to stay on top of feedback channels

Pros:

Productboard takes the vague notion of “users are asking for it” and translates it to something much more actionable - who exactly asked for it and in what context.

Cons:

Productboard has a zapper integration but I still wish they had some more built-in integrations.

Designed for product leaders

Comments: UX is great. Functionality feels like it was designed just for me. Love it.

Pros:

With ProductBoard I am able to organize the team from the product vision down, in a way that is specific to the focus of product leaders. It's not a bottoms-up task organization tool - it's built to help build products.

Cons:

I would like a little more hierarchy and better 2-way integration with tools like Jira.

Giving Product Managers much needed structure

Pros:

- All the tools you would want as a product manager (user research collection, prioritization, feedback dashboards). - Fantastic UX that's very simple to use. - Great scoring mechanisms - Integrations are getting stronger!

Cons:

I've been a long time user so most of the things I liked least are start to/have been fixed. I can't think of anything off the top of my head that I like the least? Perhaps having more browser based extensions for users to submit feedback? Currently limited to Chrome.

Use it everyday and I love it

Comments: We are using it to sort and manage all of our customer feedback into categories which has been great since we get dozens of feedback a week in all types of categories.

Pros:

It is really easy to use and navigate around. When I was first introduced to this, it took me no time to pick it up and get used to everything on the platform. It's so great at organizing. Would not know what to do without this!

Cons:

I have been using this for 7 months now and I don't have a single thing that I can think of that I don't like about it.

Amazing Flexibility and Customer Service

Comments: I was trying to produce a centralized product backlog and tool for managing the development of requirements through to hand-off to the Dev team.
Additionally, I was looking for a way to communicate the product roadmap to clients. ProductBoard rocked this requirement!

Pros:

I love the flexibility of the product. Whenever I have had a need that I think did not quite fit - the team has been able to show me how I can configure the product to meet my request. The customer service is fantastic! Response time has always been incredible. They also seem to take suggestions for new features and improvements seriously. Sharing their product roadmap with their customers (using their tool to do it) really shows the power of using their tools.

Cons:

The only thing I would say is a 'con' so far is that their exports could be improved. This is on their product roadmap though.