How ProdPad Fits with Product Operations

What is Product Operations?

Product operations (or product ops) teams provide tools, data and processes to help product managers focus on what they do best. With the right tools and processes in place, product managers can use their time to discover solutions that are valuable, usable, feasible, and viable.

Product ops teams bring together a suite of tools around product roadmaps, product analytics, customer feedback, backlog management, and research. 

ProdPad can go a long way towards providing structure and encouraging the kinds of best practices that help product managers be successful.

Portfolio Management and OKRs

It’s hard for teams to stay aligned when the company’s priorities aren’t clear. To ensure everyone’s on the same page, ProdPad’s Canvases ensure that everyone has access to the same information about the business model, vision, mission, and strategy. Added to that, Objectives and Key Results ensure that the immediate focus is clear, and everyone can align around what’s important.

Lean Roadmap

Group together ideas around problems to solve. It’s easier to prioritize ideas for discovery and ensure that upcoming sprints are focused on solving the most valuable market problems. Use lean experimentation to find the best solutions.

Using a lean roadmap also encourages iteration and continuous discovery, ensuring that the team avoids being a “Feature Factory”. Everyone has greater visibility into the big picture so they understand how their work fits into the wider strategy.

Idea Backlog

Separate the product backlog from the development backlog and identify the right solutions to user problems. Filters and impact/effort scoring help product managers to identify which ideas are the most important. By linking them to the roadmap, it’s easy to manage prioritization at the problem level.

ProdPad’s smart AI assistant, DotBot, helps to identify duplicates and links reducing the amount of time needed for backlog management.

Configurable Workflows

It’s easy to funnel ideas through ideation with ProdPad’s configurable workflows. Instead of a large, messy, homogeneous backlog, workflow makes it easy to spot which ideas require discovery and specification and highlights opportunities in the backlog in a standardized way.

Prioritize ideas based on their readiness for development so that everyone understands what’s important when it’s time for sprint planning.

Development Integrations

Delivery is best handled in a project management tool like Jira, Azure DevOps or Trello. Thankfully, ProdPad’s two-way development integrations mean that developers can continue to use the tools they like, while business stakeholders can get a window into progress.

Once ideas are synced with development, ProdPad’s stays up-to-date on progress. Business stakeholders see a simplified version of the development process and can drill down into the detail.

Customer Feedback

The primary goal of all product teams is to solve problems for their customers! By integrating sources of feedback with ProdPad’s customer feedback module, the product team will have easy access to the insights that come from end-user comments and requests. Using these insights helps the product team understand which problems are the most important to solve, and how those problems affect the customer. By reading the customer’s own words, the product team is more likely to solve the problem in a way that is acceptable to the customer. Not only that, ProdPad’s Smart AI Assistant, DotBot, helps the product manager identify where customer feedback supports an idea in the product backlog, reducing the amount of time spent on data analysis.

Team Collaboration

Product managers don’t have all the answers, but they do ask the best questions. ProdPad uses a variety of team collaboration tools to help the rest of the team get involved in understanding problems and identifying solutions.

Increased visibility into decision-making makes it easier for everyone to understand what’s happening, and why, along with the reduced risk that comes from a shared approach to problem-solving. To make life even easier, ProdPad’s Slack and email integrations, plus ambient notifications, means that everyone can keep up to date using the tools they access daily. 

This is part of our “How ProdPad Fits” pages. See our other “How ProdPad Fits” pages.