productboard, from the company of the same name in San Francisco, is a product management system designed to help product managers understand what users need, prioritize what to build, and rally everyone around a roadmap.
We use ProdPad to capture notes from our sales team within our CRM and then integrate them into our product roadmap. Our product development team utilizes the application daily to track progress, make comments and notes on new ideas, and to visualize progress.
The best feature of productboard is organized features, it has a very simple structure and can be read and understood by anyone. If your roadmap is very dynamic and the executive team needs to be on top of it, productboard is the best application out there. But if you have a small product and features do not change very often, then maybe you can look at other alternatives since productboard is expensive.
We were just capturing ideas in an Excel workbook, but that forced ownership to a single user for changes and updates and there wasn't any direct integration with project backlog. We actually didn't select ProdPad, a new VP came and brought it with him because it worked so well at his last place. Everybody here jumped on board, though.
I have previously used Aha another product road mapping/ insights driven software. Aha had great features for the userbase of my previous products. They were allowed to create their own suggestions for the products and other users could then like or dislike the suggestion. This created a real reflection on need for product enhancements. productboard handles this slightly differently. Each user creates their own suggestions and doesn't necessarily have visibility on other users suggestions. The product/ R&D team can then tag suggestions together into the same overall suggestion. This requires more input from product/R&D with productboard. I would however, suggest that productboard is better than Aha. Aha is great for an external user point of view; however, there may be case for users to not have visibility on wider user requirements. productboard keeps more of this element hidden and would perhaps stir up less negative correlation to seeing a system requirement/suggest having had a lot of traffic and no action, compared to a more closed system that would individually update each user on the enhancement progress.
Using ProdPad has helped our Product team avoid becoming a black hole for feedback and feature requests. This tool helps us be responsive and communicative about the data flowing into the product.
