Adopting product management systems
It was the fall of 2013 when Productboard founder and CEO Hubert Palan became convinced there must be a better way to create and share the product roadmap, and not long after that he learned that wasn’t the problem at all.
Sure it was a hassle for product managers to design roadmaps in a PowerPoint, and to keep multiple versions for different audiences up-to-date. But the real problem, he learned, was the much thornier matter of deciding what got on the roadmap in the first place.
To prioritize what they’ll work on next, effective product managers rely on a clear product vision of what needs a product will solve for a given market. But this can only be formed with the help of thousands of inputs — from prospects, customers, churned users, colleagues, and executives, not to mention third-party partners, industry analysts, and investors. Historically these have been scattered across tens of tools in no format that’s actionable for informing prioritization decisions.
And the feature ideas that arise from those insights? Those have been captured in static spreadsheets or project management tools, designed for engineering execution, not prioritizing what to build based on user needs and strategy. But what good is delivering features more efficiently if the team isn’t working on the right thing?
