For City & Guilds, ProdPad is a game-changer for giving teams visibility of common goals

City & Guilds is a charity we’ve been around for over 140 years, and we’re all about giving people and organizations skills to develop in society. We often talk about getting people into a job, giving them the skills they need for their job, and then helping them progress on to their next job.

We use ProdPad as a sort of hub if you like for all of our product management activities. So we capture new ideas. We capture feedback from centers and learners, feedback from support teams. We share roadmaps, we vote on ideas. We prioritize tickets through ProdPad.

It gives us an opportunity to capture all of the ideas in one place and share them both internally with development teams, and externally to our customers as well. So they know what we’re working on, what we’re planning to release, and I think that visibility for development teams of not just the ‘what’ we’re working on, but the ‘why’ we’re working on it is really valuable.

ProdPad has been a real game changer actually for the way teams have visibility of a kind of common goal. So development teams can see why we’re working on this thing. They’re not just locked in a darkened room, working on some code. They really understand the value of that feature. Who’s going to use it and the difference it will make.

And I think that that’s driven a real improvement in our deliverables as well.

Being able to pull in insight that we capture in ProdPad has been really valuable. So instead of it being me saying we should build something. I’m able to say this customer at this center has asked us to work on this feature for this reason and the so much more power in that than just me saying, this is my opinion that we should do something.

So I’ve loved ProdPad from the minute I got my hands on it. And luckily every other product manager in the business that I’ve shown it to has wanted to come on board with it as well. So I think the fact that we’ve got a common tool set within the business has been really useful.

I think the biggest change ProdPad has brought to the company is us getting much better at capturing insight from our customers and the end users. And after all, if we’re not developing new features for them, who are we developing for? So I think just in terms of bringing the outside in, I would say that’s probably the biggest benefit.