Introducing…🥁🥁🥁…our new presence on Productboard!
If you joined us for our ‘We’re All Ears’ session, you might have heard us mention the new service we are working with known as productboard. Internally, our employees have been using the productboard service daily for a while now. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Let’s back up, and I will explain what the productboard is.
The productboard is a third-party solution built on an idea from product management systems to help organizations get the right products to market faster. Implementing productboard into Bicom Systems will help our team with:
- Product discovery
- Provide a better understanding of our partner’s needs
- Help our developers prioritize what to build
- Rally everyone together around one road map
- And so much more!
Using the productboard, Product Owners at Bicom Systems will create an infrastructure that drives the process of owning the product and gathering all the input from our current partners. Once collected, the Product Owners will analyze and prioritize the feedback.
Why now? 🤔
We are aware of how vital the insights from our partners are. They are the ones who are working the front line, competing with other resellers, and selling directly to the end-user! The only way to gain deep, genuine insights into a user’s needs is to listen to our partners with empathy and encourage daily contribution. Specific observations can improve the design or decision-making of products that will emerge as a greater result!
The engagement from partners will ensure that at least the initial calculation of priority takes multiple factors and interests into account. Once the priority is considered, the development team can then define the commitment to the sprint, focusing on the highest priority tasks in the backlog that align with the Sprint Goal.
How will it work?🧐
Partners will be added to the productboard as viewers. Viewers can access the portal, see the roadmaps shared with them, and be tagged in comment sections. Once a partner is tagged in a comment, they can share their insights on feature requests and their importance.
The product owners can ask partners to provide feedback by a specific date to better plan for sprints. Once the insights are shared, product owners will gather the input and create a list of features for partners to vote on! Voting criteria are based on the scores for ‘User Impact’ and ‘Prioritization.’ The highest-ranked features will move to the top of the feature request list, per product category.
Our product owners will regularly review the portal and changes that are happening. Once there is enough feedback, features will be presented in the following “Spring Brainstorming” session. Implementing the features into sprint planning is the last step before production. It is also the step that syncs departments to be informed of the features our partners and employees found to be most important.
How can our partners help?😏
We encourage our partners to actively participate in using the productboard and try to be as concise as possible when providing details. Submit product ideas, feature requests, and feedback to the product owners regularly when they are still fresh in your mind! Do not forget to use the vote option to emphasize the wants and needs of ideas being shared.
It is essential to include context around why a user is requesting something or what need that feature would help them address. Additional information will help our team ensure we build the best possible solution, which may be better than what the user thought to request!
By utilizing productboard, we hope it will create transparency amongst departments on what the product teams are working on. Furthermore, it will give other employees the ability to see and contribute their own ideas outside of product makers.
We hope that once the productboard is fully embraced, it will open an additional communication channel between product development and market needs. Utilizing the productboard will help us make decisions based on actual data while taking into account different perspectives.
Learn more about this new service by contacting our Business Success team via email business-success@bicomsystems.com.
