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Why ProdPad?

Why ProdPad?

If you’ve landed here, you’re probably wondering why you should be considering using ProdPad.

Perhaps you were looking for a roadmap template that’s going to make you look kick-ass at next week’s board meeting, or perhaps you’re looking for a shred of peace from your beast of a backlog. Or perhaps, like our co-founder Janna was feeling when she was first inspired to build ProdPad, you’re looking to clear the air about what actually goes on in product management so that you get the best ideas out of your team and customers, and are ensuring that you’re working on the right things.

You’ve come to the right place.

The reality is, building awesome products is really hard work.

You need to have a vision and clear objectives. Your team needs to work together to test and experiment, and to gather feedback and insights, and then prioritize amongst all the things you could do to execute on the right things in order to build a viable business.

While a lot of that seems really strategic, so much gets lost in the little tactical annoyances. Too much time spent shuffling tickets around in your backlog, writing specs that no one ever seems to read, or defending your roadmap from becoming this list of promised dates while still keeping folks informed.

There’s a reason that Product Management is considered one of the most stressful jobs out there! But it doesn’t have to be that way. ProdPad is here to bring so much sense to your working life.

A better way to do idea management

A better way to do idea management

The ProdPad Idea Priority Chart
Surface key ideas with the Idea Priority Chart.

With ProdPad, you can capture ideas and feedback from wherever you interact with your team and customers, whether Zendesk, Intercom, Twitter or directly in your app.

We even have the slickest Slack integration on the market, which means your team can see and chat about ideas in your backlog without ditching their usual habits.

ProdPad does more than just gather your ideas. It actively helps you understand what’s in your backlog and prioritize the right things to be built.

Your ProdPad product backlog will help you answer questions like ‘Which ideas are most wanted by our customers?’ or ‘Which suggestions will have the biggest impact on our revenue?’

It allows you to take a step back and look at the unique Priority Chart view of your backlog, which groups ideas by impact and effort, highlighting where your quick wins are, or where you’re wasting time. Combine this view with a mix of filters and you’ll be on the path to making smarter product decisions.

“ProdPad does more than just gather your ideas. It actively helps you understand what’s in your backlog and prioritize the right things to be built.”

It helps you write better specs, too. The old way of doing product management was very much centered around gathering all the requirements up front into a big, heavy PRD. Using ProdPad means you don’t need to do this! It guides your team on gathering just the right amount of information, and highlights when ideas need more detail before going to development. With integrations for Google Drive, Dropbox, Invision, Figma, Sketch and lots of other tools, you don’t need to drastically change how you capture the finer details of each idea – ProdPad just makes sure that nothing gets lost along the way.

And with DotBot, our friendly AI helper, your backlog will stay tidy and well maintained. DotBot spots ideas and feedback that are likely linked and flags them up to you to link together or deduplicate on the spot. ProdPad is the only backlog tool where ideas don’t go to die!

Dot bot

Ideas are cheap, unless you know exactly what problem they are solving. That’s why ProdPad isn’t your everyday idea management tool. It’s the only tool that links ideas to the customer feedback that supports it and to the problems each will solve on the roadmap.

The original guide to better product management

The little book that’s made a big difference for thousands of product people

Be the best at managing customer feedback

Be the best at managing customer feedback

The ProdPad customer feedback table
See all your feedback from every source in a single view, and then link to relevant ideas to highlight demand

A bad habit that a lot of companies have is to work on something because ‘a bunch’ of customers have asked for it… but when pressed, tracking down who asked for what is really difficult. The information lives in someone’s inbox, or a messy CRM, but rarely somewhere that’s actually useful to the product development team.

Think about all the places you’re having conversations with your customers, whether in communities or by email or in support tickets or wherever. ProdPad can capture your customer feedback from anywhere.

Pull in your feedback from community sources like UserVoice, Slack or Twitter, or from your support and CRM tools like Salesforce, Zendesk and Intercom. Or you can style it up with our completely customizable Customer Feedback Portal, which gives you a standalone page for showing off ideas and collecting feedback along with a widget that can live in your app or web page.

Once in ProdPad, we’ll help you link it to relevant ideas, track your progress, and keep your customers in the loop with what you’ve been up to.

“ProdPad can capture your customer feedback from anywhere.”

After all, there’s nothing quite as magic as being able to follow up with a customer who gave you feedback and let them know that you really listened to them!

Build a kick-ass workflow with integrations

Build a kick-ass workflow with integrations

The ProdPad workflow view
See the synced development status of your Ideas with the ProdPad Workflow

ProdPad is the only product management tool that keeps the rest of your team happy because it links with the tools they already use, like Slack, Jira, Trello, GitHub and more.

One of the biggest fears that teams have is the fear of “yet another tool”. It takes so much effort to set up a new tool, only to find it doesn’t work with your current workflow, and the team just drops it. ProdPad is different because it was built from the ground up to work with other tools and to fit with existing workflows.

If you’ve got a messy backlog in a development tool like Jira, ProdPad will make a huge difference for your team. ProdPad creates a window into Jira, Trello, and other tools, so the developers can focus on building it right, while you focus on making sure you’re building the right things.

“If you’ve got a messy backlog in a development tool like Jira, ProdPad will make a huge difference for your team”

Your developers will still use Jira for their day-to-day work, but it’ll no longer be stuffed full of tickets that obscure the important, prioritized work to be done. They’ll thank you for creating clarity in their workflow, while your non-tech team will be equally thrilled at being able to see what’s going on in product management.

The only tool with Lean, objective-based product roadmaps

The only tool with Lean, objective-based product roadmaps

The ProdPad Lean Roadmap
The Lean Roadmap utilises time horizons rather than deadlines to create a realistic strategy

Building amazing products isn’t just about managing a backlog of ideas and feedback. You’ve got to be strategic. That’s why ProdPad is the only tool that connects robust idea and feedback management and helps you build a lean roadmap.

The best product managers look at the bigger picture, which is why ProdPad starts you with our portfolio and product canvases, helping you to ask the big questions about your product vision, your strategy, your purpose, and putting it in one place so you can make sure your team is on board.

It’s also the only tool that fully supports Objectives and Key Results that are linked directly to your roadmap initiatives. This is designed for high performance teams to keep track of their goals and track their progress through to completion.

Your roadmap in ProdPad tells the bigger story of your product strategy. Each card in your ProdPad roadmap represents a problem to be solved, connected to your objectives and the experiments you’re running to meet each.

And instead of trapping you in a feature factory, like a deadline-driven timeline roadmap will, the ProdPad roadmap helps your team connect your completed releases to real, measurable changes in your metrics.

“The ProdPad roadmap helps your team connect your completed releases to real, measurable changes in your metrics”

Historically, product teams have reported into areas of the business whose job it was to manage costs. This is why progress is so often measured in output focused metrics, like story points and velocity! But everyone knows that good product management isn’t about building the most features…. It’s about solving the right problems. ProdPad keeps your team focused on understanding and solving those right problems, and tracking the outcomes so that the lessons can be learned and shared among the team.

Ready to start your trial yet?

With all of this said, you’re probably ready to start building amazing products! ProdPad offers an unlimited free trial that automatically extends as long as you’re using the product. We know the role of a product person is busy, so we won’t cut your time off unnecessarily while you’re getting set up. And our team is on hand to help you out as you get your team on board.

Have we met?

Speaking of our team, that’s one big reason why you’re going to love having ProdPad in your life. ProdPad was founded by product people, and in fact, co-founders Janna Bastow and Simon Cast were also founders of the world’s largest community of product people, Mind the Product.

Since founding ProdPad in 2012, many other product people have joined the team to fill roles in our product, design, support, success, and other teams. Pretty much any time you hear from a ProdPadder, you’re talking to a product person who’s lived and breathed the same struggles you have. We get it. And we’re here to help.

ProdPad has been thoughtfully designed and is delightful to use. Ask any of our 1000s of customers, or check out some of our customer stories.

We’re also a 100% customer-funded business. This means that we have zero reliance on external funding or investors, no messy ‘cap table’, and no fears of going out of business. We’re profitable and in this for the long-run.

ProdPad is for your team, big or small

ProdPad wasn’t just designed with product managers in mind.

As a product person, it’s not your job to have all the answers. It’s your job to ask the best questions, and to surround yourself with the experts in your team who can help surface the best information. This is why ProdPad is built to be the most compatible with large teams.

ProdPad scales to support 1000s of team members working in conjunction, with affordances for large portfolios, enhanced user access controls, user provisioning from your SSO tools, and even customizable roll-out plans for everyone in your extra large organizations.

You want robust? We’ll give you robust!

We know you’re putting a lot of trust in ProdPad. After all, it’s your whole product strategy and all your best ideas (and lots of your worst ones too!) That’s why we don’t kid ourselves when it comes to building a robust tool that you can trust.

We’re not going to brag about it all here, as we’ve written down everything your InfoSec team could possibly want to know in our Security pages, so pull up a chair and grab a hot drink to read about our world class security if that’s your thing.

Just as important as security, but something that you won’t see anywhere else, is the care and attention we pay to taking care of your data as you input it. Most apps simply don’t scale well, and as you get lots of people entering and editing data on the same pages, things just get… lost. Not on ProdPad! We’ve built in protections for you, including a slick conflict detection and management system that will make sure you and a colleague never overwrite each other’s work, revision history and the ability to undo yours and others’ changes, and a full-blown audit log so you can sleuth out exactly what changed have been made and when.

You’ll only find that with ProdPad.

Try ProdPad for free, for as long as you need

Get started with your free trial today and join the thousands of companies building amazing products with ProdPad!

A dot having a demo

There’s a load more reasons why you should get going with ProdPad! If you’re still not sure, why not set up a 1-to-1 demo with one of our product people so you can have a closer look and ask all your burning questions. We’d love to chat with you!

A dot in a sandbox

Not one of the talkative types? That’s okay, we get that. You might just want to try out our Sandbox environment, a pre-loaded ProdPad setup, where you can see ProdPad in action, at your own pace.