“Location, location, location,” is the mantra for successful realtors, just as “communication, communication, communication” is crucially important for successful product management. Every book on superior product delivery includes the importance of communication for product managers faced with the daunting challenge of juggling input from designers, developers, salespeople, marketers and most critically, customers.

Transforming product management

That’s the challenge former product manager, and now Productboard CEO, Hubert Palan began with seven years ago. In response, he founded Productboard to help organizations capture, communicate, and connect to create the right product for the right market at the right time. Companies use Productboard to boost communication and engagement among all stakeholders. It coordinates the complex mix of customer requirements and feedback, company goals, engineering and design expertise, and project development tools, processes, and workflows. I’ve lived through the absence of any systems or any tooling that aligned engineering design, go-to-market teams, and product management with customer requirements,” says Palan. Companies might use Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics 365, for example, where they have a lot of customer data. Then they have engineering task management systems handling the stuff that they’re building. But they need something to bridge those two worlds, link everything to real customer pain points, and make sure tthey’re building the right thing.”

Productboard coordinates input and adds structure and priorities to tasks and workflows. It helps stakeholders gather data on customers, competitors, project status, and sales. And companies use it to orchestrate effort from employees in the field, product marketing, and research and development. “You can build clear alignment across the whole company and share transparently with the entire organization,” Palan explains. “You drive engagement and commitment from all concerned. Each contributor knows the bigger picture, the detailed plan, their role, where they’re headed, and why. And perhaps most importantly, it’s all driven by the voice of the customer and insights from your latest market research, which helps our customers deliver on being more customer-centric in their product strategy and delivery.”

All that data originates in specialized services, favorite apps, and discipline-specific tools. In spreadsheets, customer relationship management systems, requirements and bug databases, project management software, meeting notes, call transcripts. Productboard provides a hub for identifying and retrieving that siloed data, turning it into valuable, actionable information and making it available to stakeholders when and where they need it. Decisions, results, and outcomes can then be fed back into the environment through Productboard to keep everyone updated on tasks and progress. Palan gives an example of the process in action. “A new idea gets created from customer information in Dynamics 365 and appears in a Microsoft Teams product management team chat. It gains traction and becomes a desired feature, then a product manager pushes the request through the Productboard Teams app to developers in Azure DevOps. Progress in Azure DevOps is pushed back through Productboard into channels in Teams to keep relevant stakeholders updated.”

Boosting cross-functional engagement

Billy Robins is Head of Partnerships at Productboard. He notes that, “The world has shifted in the last 10 years from a command-and-control, top-down structure to this more distributed, collaborative, agile, and responsive development environment. And COVID-19 has only accelerated that change and focused attention on the need to adapt to it. What was it Satya Nadella said at the start of the pandemic? We’ve seen two years worth of digital transformation in two months.”

Productboard recognized that it could have even greater impact in today’s environment if it joined Microsoft Teams at the center of that transformation. “So many of those conversations, so much of that collaboration and innovation happens now in Microsoft Teams, and that’s a massive advantage to customers,” Robins says. Palan adds, “Whether you have a question or somebody gives you feedback or wants to convey to you, “Maybe this feature should behave differently because this customer’s need is slightly different, that all happens in Teams.”

Companies use the Productboard Teams app to capture valuable information that might have been lost or remained buried in an old thread. “Teams really boosts communication and collaboration across the organization. But the information river flows and it can be hard to step back into it, so we add a structured way to capture valuable information like who said what and when and the insights that arise sometimes spontaneously during Teams interactions,” says Palan.

Robins adds that using Productboard helps project contributors gather feedback from the broader organization and track the results of their input, too, something that helps increase engagement and ensure that everyone’s effort has been recognized. “With the Productboard Teams app, I can look on a tab and get a snapshot of what’s happened with my feedback. Has it been processed, is it unprocessed, is it moving into feature development? I think go-to-market folks frequently get frustrated when they feel like a product is a black box and they have no idea what happened. But through Teams, Productboard brings transparency and visibility to all stakeholders involved with the product team.”

Working with Microsoft

According to Palan, the decision to work with Microsoft and bring Productboard features into the Microsoft 365 environment was a straightforward one. He says, “Microsoft is such a unique partner. They have a complete Modern Workplace suite with communications and collaboration, business apps and services, and the developer ecosystem. There’s really no other company like that, and it’s a unique value proposition for microservices like ours.”

Robins adds that Fortune 500 customers also served by Microsoft represent some of the best opportunities for Productboard. “We’ve gone up market, we’ve seen a lot more Microsoft in the opportunities, which is exciting. It’s also a great chance for the consulting firms that drive digital transformation through Microsoft Teams to be able to collaborate with Productboard in that market.”

Working with Microsoft to develop the Teams integration has been a great experience for Productboard. Palan advises others to take advantage of the investments Microsoft is making in early-stage startups for both business and technical guidance. “I remember thinking that Microsoft is a huge, complex organization and that it would be very difficult to get anything done,” he says. “But I must say, it was such a positive surprise to see that the Teams product group and Microsoft Startups specialists were proactive and helpful from the outset. They helped us get Productboard right within their ecosystem and build our go-to-market strategy. That’s been critical to our success.”

Looking ahead

Palan and Robins plan to collaborate further with Microsoft, and with Microsoft Teams in particular, as they provide deeper integration for the Productboard platform. “One day, we might be in a situation where you have one centralized software solution that does everything without context switching among tools. That would be Microsoft Teams as the place everyone works, the connecting fabric into which Productboard brings the world of product management,” says Palan. Robins adds, “Companies are rethinking their strategies, reevaluating processes, working out how to move forward in the digital world. Whether B2B or B2C, we find ourselves at the center of those digital transformations along with Microsoft.”