Invite colleagues to contribute research, requests, and feedback
Many-to-one
In the typical organization, the number of people who interface directly with customers outnumber product managers 20 to 1. Support agents, sales reps, customer success… they all have valuable input to share.
But with so many customer surrogates eager to provide feedback, all PMs can relate to the feeling of being cornered in the elevator, interrupted at their desks, or stopped on the way to a meeting by an overzealous colleague:
Customer X is demanding we build Y. They’ve been saying this for the past year! What’s the hold up!?
In most cases, there’s nothing wrong with such requests. But given their frequency, as well as the difficulty of remembering relevant details, understanding the underlying user needs, and finding time to document them, it’s understandable why so many PMs begin skipping the elevator for the fire escape stairwell.
The contributor user role
With productboard’s new contributor user role, product managers can invite colleagues from across the organization to help input valuable information into productboard. Notes from a customer call, top feature requests, most common prospect asks — contributors can add it all straight to the Research board.
Contributors can do any of the following:
- Create, tag, and process new research notes
- Create research notes via the productboard extension for Chrome
- Review (but not edit) data on Features/Releases/Roadmap boards
- Comment on research notes and feature ideas
Product managers benefit from additional information as well as the extra help in documenting and processing it all. That way it’s ready for analysis when the time comes to prioritize and build new features.
Meanwhile, contributors from across the organization get to play a role in the product prioritization process. They see firsthand the sheer amount of information flooding the product management team, and catch wind of the needs of other types of users they don’t typically interact with. Even if their favored features don’t get prioritized, they’re prepared to buy in to product management’s plans because they know their voice has been heard. They’ve seen there’s a system in place for reviewing all inputs and making difficult tradeoffs.
Galvanize customer-facing colleagues from across the organization while saving time and energy. Contributors can be added to projects at no added cost, so invite one (or twenty) into your project today!
New to productboard? Get started for free in under 2 minutes.
