Making Email Feedback Your Friend in Product Management

Searching, retrieving and collating feedback, ideas and discussions buried deep in months and months of email feedback is one of product management’s less glamorous tasks. We developed ProdPad precisely for that reason; to liberate Product Managers from their inboxes. However there are reasons that your team uses email in the first place that are important not to forget.

It’s normal that you live and breathe your product backlog, and so product management software can naturally become your new home. But others in your team have their own jobs to preoccupy them, and their own set of tools that come with that. Email on the other hand is a universal backbone of workplace communication across every discipline. This makes it a natural route for your colleagues to communicate with you and for you to reach out for their input.

So how to get past email’s poor transparency when it comes to group discussion, and poor organization when it comes to logging feedback? Using ProdPad as your idea management system, you can harness the power of email to direct all that important communication to one centralized location.

How to use email with ProdPad

There are several ways in which of ProdPad integrates with email, allowing your team to interact with new product ideas without even having to use their login.

Email new ideas directly to a custom email dropbox

Set up a custom email address connected to your existing email domain, such as ideas@yourdomain.com to enable your team to add new ideas to ProdPad straight from their inbox.

Set up email alerts for any relevant activity

Keep team members informed about changes to existing products, developments with new ideas and any time they are mentioned in ProdPad with daily or weekly digests

Respond directly to ProdPad emails to contribute ideas and feedback

Encourage interaction with the product backlog by allowing your team to add new ideas and comments to existing ones by replying directly to ProdPad digests.

When email is relied upon for its convenience as a communication method rather than an idea management system, product management can retain control of the product backlog and be confident that nothing is lost. And the rest of the business can feasibly be pulled upon without forcing anyone to change their workflows.

If you haven’t already set up your email dropbox, you can find out more here.

And if you’d like to find out more about how becoming a ProdPad user could help you to better collaborate with your team, sign up for a free trial here.