Productboard

At Megaport, I use Productboard to build a roadmap of all the initiatives, projects, and features the team is working on. This includes the front end of the roadmap showing what is in the backlog and all the things that could potentially be worked on by the development and product team, then the actual roadmap, and timelines on delivery.

Productboard has a feature that I love where you can create tiles that serve as summaries. In this case, I created a summary of potential markets that Megaport was going to enter, including Stockholm, Miami, Copenhagen, and São Paulo. The valuable aspect of Productboard is that you can share these tiles with customers and ask them to vote on them and comment on them. This was invaluable in determining where Megaport should launch next. We decided to go into Stockholm and Miami because the customer feedback was overwhelming for those two markets.

I built the roadmap of all the initiatives in flight, including all project initiatives and features that the development team and product leaders were working on. For each initiative, I developed a summary describing what we were trying to do, the business value, and how this would impact customers. This roadmap was available and used by all internal stakeholders across engineering, product, and sales, serving as the definitive source for what was in flight and when it would be coming. Productboard is really good for this purpose.

The ability to expose potential work through tiles and share those ideas with customers to get their feedback is a valuable feature. I also appreciate Productboard's roadmap capability where you can build the roadmap and tag different items such as projects, initiatives, and features with different criteria. You can sort them by due date, by what market segments they are impacting, whether they affect service providers, enterprises, or retail customers. There are different ways to filter the initiatives being displayed on the roadmap and quickly understand how it will impact timelines and customers.

Creating that transparency and keeping everyone—engineering, product, and sales—on the same page was beneficial. These stakeholders could log into Productboard and see what was being worked on and when it would be deployed. Everyone in the company remained on the same page.

I am a huge fan and believe Productboard was a good partner for Megaport during my time at the company. I have no complaints about the product itself. My only consideration involves the fact that Megaport is a small company with about 250 people. We originally purchased a 15 seat license agreement, and about a year after we made that deal, it became apparent that we really only needed two, three, or four seats. Productboard was not as quick as one would hope to adjust our contract to align with our actual needs, which was a challenge for a very small company with limited finances.

Licensing flexibility is the main area for improvement. The features, functionality, and how we used Productboard was really good. The lack of flexibility around licensing was the only challenge for us as a small company.

When I arrived, the agreement had already been set up where we had 15 licenses, and after being there for a year, we quickly realized we only needed two to three licenses because there were not many content creators, though there were about 100 content viewers. When we asked to scale back our licenses, we encountered considerable friction. This was the primary issue we faced.

I experienced no issues with lag or downtime. I should note that Megaport is a small company, so at most we would have probably 20 to 30 users visiting my roadmap or the customer tiles. We were not a big enterprise with thousands of people using the application.

I encountered no scalability issues, though I should caveat this by noting that we were growing from a user base of about 5 to 10 to 50 to 100, not from 500 to 1,000 to 10,000. This is an order of magnitude smaller, but Productboard worked perfectly fine for our needs.

I would give Productboard a 10 on customer service. It is very easy to get into and start playing around with it because it is very user-friendly. You learn by doing, but it is very easy to figure out how things work.

When I arrived at Megaport, they had already purchased and had an agreement with Productboard. I simply took that on, and we remained fans of Productboard. The only challenge was backing off the 15 user seat license agreement and getting it down to something more manageable, such as two to three seats.

When I arrived, we were already using Productboard. From what I recall, the company went with Productboard straight out. It was very stable during my time there.

Productboard is really good at enabling stakeholders to use it effectively. For example, a salesperson meeting with a customer could go into Productboard and see the features that the development team or product leaders were working on and tell the customer that these three features would likely be available in Q3 of next year, or that this project and feature would help them be more efficient and the project would be available in the coming month with the feature being prioritized for one quarter out. This had a really positive effect with customers, bringing them closer together and creating stickiness with Megaport and our development team.

Productboard absolutely helped with customer satisfaction because we also took that product roadmap and displayed it for customers, sharing the customer roadmap with them. Internal operating efficiency also improved because internal communication meant that everyone was on the same page with no miscommunication about what was expected to be delivered when. As part of this process, I met with the development teams and product teams weekly, and every Wednesday afternoon, I would update the roadmap with new additions and whether deliverables were getting delayed or moving up. The roadmap remained current. Internal efficiencies in communication meant that everyone was on the same page.

I did not use training materials at all. Everything was learned by trying things out and figuring them out. I cannot comment on how good those training materials were because we operated in a learn-by-fire environment.

At the time I used it, I thought it was pretty good, but I was not using the integration capabilities very much. I did not test that functionality. I used Productboard more as a communicator and as an evolving whiteboard where we updated the roadmap and made it available for all. There was some integration involved, but not much.

We used Productboard primarily for roadmap and tiles, so it was customizable, but I am not certain we were pushing the envelope on trying to do more customization. It was fairly customizable for how we used it, but we did not push the limits on customization.

Productboard is a great solution and it is probably faster to just go in and try it out and figure things out. If you get stuck, either talk to support or read the documentation, as it is very user-friendly. It is probably more efficient to just dig into it. I would give Productboard a rating of 9 out of 10.

My main use case for Productboard is to understand the user impact of the features that are shipped in 73 Strings. Across a weekend, we received a lot of negative reviews from a customer regarding a particular feature. We went through all the reviews in Productboard, added the PRD, and got very good suggestions that actually helped us make a great impact in our company. Some of the suggestions were so specific that we went for implementation right away and it improved the reviews immediately.

The UI setup is something I really appreciate, particularly the way you can drag and drop and how it gets connected with your chats while keeping everything in one place.

Some of the best features Productboard offers are the AI prompting and planning based on AI. I really like the particular planning that we can do, where you can optimize bandwidth and create a very good product plan based on the items we have in our board. This is something that we can easily implement because the thinking process takes time for creativity, and we can directly get it done by Productboard.

Productboard makes planning easier because previously we had to plan it manually and put calendar invites from Teams. Now we have a whole structure and we can simply replicate the same.

Productboard has impacted our organization positively, saving a lot of people's time, generating some new ideas, and providing optimized planning. Time saved is definitely a metric, and improvement in productivity has been evident. We can spend more time getting insights rather than having team meetings discussing schedules. Now we directly trust AI and get it done, which is a really positive impact that we have experienced.

I would like to see more integrations with other products and tech products like Bitbucket. This would allow us to keep track of what is getting shipped every week and accordingly get answers from Productboard. It would be beneficial if plans could be auto-approved when something gets successful in Bitbucket, and a plan could be automatically set as completed with notifications.

Productboard can be improved through integrations. Currently, we have product integrations and we could integrate it with Jira or Bitbucket so we have a full track of all activities going on. Productboard could then give better suggestions based on that information.

I have been using Productboard for almost one year after I joined 73 Strings.

Productboard is pretty stable, but sometimes we get some bugs around it that can be resolved.

I cannot comment on Productboard's scalability, as the amount of use cases that we have in our organization is sufficed by Productboard. However, if multiple users come up or multiple things come up, I do not understand exactly what architecture Productboard follows.

I cannot comment on Productboard's customer support because I am not a core user or a core member of our team that takes care of that.

I did not previously use a different solution before Productboard.

I was not the exact person who is responsible for pricing, setup costs, and licensing. I believe there is someone from the IM team who must have done that. You can get in touch with them rather than me, as I was just a user of the product.

We have definitely seen a return on investment with Productboard because junior assistant product managers have been replaced by Productboard for planning and everything done by them, and the money is obviously saved by that. Time is also saved by Productboard, and that is definitely true.

Before choosing Productboard, we obviously looked around with Jira and other tools like monday.com. Productboard actually struck us, and the UI attracted us. The demos given by the team were actually interesting, so our team chose Productboard.

I would definitely recommend Productboard to others because it is worth trying, and the features, especially the AI features that it has, are actually worth using. I gave this review a rating of 7 out of 10.