Productboard Reviews

Pros

Productboard is an excellent tool to help you make sure your roadmap is driven by real user feedback and value to your customers.

Cons

Productboard is a fairly young company and is still building out some "no brainer" features, but they also release fantastic updates often!

Alternatives Considered

Jira, ProductPlan and Aha!

Pros

Very visual. It can handle the large influx of customer feedback and help funnel that to the right part of our product. Helps other departments feel involved in the product evolution and road map. Great way to keep people in the loop to what we have cookin. Love the portal aspect. Very powerful feature set there. Can't wait to engage our client based with a full portal of where we are going, where we are, and where we've been.
Easy self on boarding. Great sales process. Great overall.

Cons

Not too many cons yet. I don't anticipate too many. Not sure how fast they crank out new features yet.

Alternatives Considered

Aha!

Reasons for Choosing Productboard

Needed more functionality, funnel customer feedback, and a better way to communicate the road map.

Switched From

Smartsheet

Reasons for Switching to Productboard

Newer, Fresher, Easier to digest, seems more like our company culture. Growing feature set.

Pros

It is for sure well thought through tool.

Cons

It is not mandatory or sole source ... so charging individual for adding member without any alert or notice that just selecting someone as member from drop down menu automatically apply charging to your card is really awful experience ruining any value for the product

Pros

A place to put all the feedback where it won't get lost and forgotten since it can be linked to specific features and used to inform planning.

Cons

Nothing major. There are features we'd appreciate in future like objectives on timelines, user story mapping, etc but they're not vital.

Alternatives Considered

ProductPlan, Craft.io, airfocus, Hygger, Roadmunk, Aha! and ProdPad

Switched From

Asana

Reasons for Switching to Productboard

It scored highest on our criteria and was better looking than our 2nd highest (Aha!). We prioritised for multiple views for different teams/people, visual prioritisation matrix, having Objectives as a standalone thing, feedback library and various integration needs. AirFocus scored as well on roadmap aspects but had no feedback functionality, the cost of standalone feedback tools ruled this out.

Pros

I receive a lot of different input across many channels. With Product Board, I can use my Chrome extension and send everything there. Once a week a specific time is designated to search across all input and find the most valuable insights.
The flexibility is also a great benefit, I highly use custom tags and split different views based on our needs for prioritization decisions, market reach or competitors gap.
All our product management is around this tool.

Cons

Nothing particular, the team keeps adding great features on new releases.

Alternatives Considered

Jira

Reasons for Switching to Productboard

Product board is more specific to solve our needs.

Pros

Linking user insights to feature development; Making insights available to developers, designers and others that are working on a feature; Communicating the roadmap with users; Collecting insights from portal as well as other channels in one place."

Cons

It still lacks multi-language support (any other language than English) and the ability to directly interact with user insights.

Pros

Ability to create a home for product feedback

Ability to organise feedback against the product's hierarchy, which then completely objectifies what to build next -> productboard is the only product that can do this

Creating a publicly available portal

Cons

You can't automatically link your userbase and their orgs, meaning that you have to manually create a new organisation each time you receive feedback from a new company

The roadmapping section hasn't been great (no gantt view), however, it's about to be released

Pros

There is no better way to record your feedback and, more importantly, link your feedback to a feature that a user has asked for.

Also: the ability to strategically view all features is amazing.

Cons

There is no way to record conversations (actual audio) and save it.

Some of the filters are slightly confusing.

Pros

Productboard has all the features you'd need for product management and those features can even act as a guide as to how you should be managing your product. It is also flexible enough to adjust to your workflow. I also like the ability to share features and get feedback internally and externally. The Gif feature is also really cool.

Cons

I wish there could be limited maker access since I have junior pms and product analyst that supports feature spec'ing but they don't own the process and it would not be a full-time job for them.

Alternatives Considered

Aha!

Reasons for Switching to Productboard

Ease of use, more supportive of agile, seemed to support my current process but had way more capabilities.

Pros

The fact that you can collect ideas directly from users and team members outside of the product team, and organize and follow up with all that feedback. As a B2C company, ideas come from everywhere and people always have ideas for new features and want to make sure they're heard!

Cons

There are SO MANY features and the ability to basically customize any of them, it can be a bit overwhelming to get started. The onboarding tutorial was pretty long in order to cover all the features, and at the end I wasn't quite sure how I needed to configure things to best suit my needs. Once I dove in, it's become essential however!

Alternatives Considered

Jira, Trello and Slack

Reasons for Switching to Productboard

There's really nothing like it as far as I can tell.

Pros

The best part about productboard is how teams can vet and plan improvements to their products based on how much those improvements support and achieve a company's objectives. It's so easy to get things in, annotated, and shaped that you actually do it; you don't just say you will eventually.

To start, you can use just the parts that are the most important to get up and running, and then you can use more of it as your team begins to integrate productboard into their process. And it's not hard work to get your ideas and backlog in and move forward—it's cathartic.

Cons

The biggest thing for me is performance. Sometimes some parts of the UI feel a little sluggish when lots of items are displayed and clicks get delayed. It would also be a little nicer to have the Drivers feature available at the lowest level of pricing.

Pros

Productboard has a lot of built-in features (Objectives & Drivers) and is super simple to customize. It helps one in planning and prioritizing effectively. UI is very intuitive and clean, l personally feel good that they are always updating to the latest features based on users requests.

Cons

They are constantly bringing new features to meet the requirements of the users. However, the integration with the Gitlab has been missing is a setback for my project. Also, the upvoting features are little cumbersome to use.

Alternatives Considered

Jira and Notion

Switched From

monday.com

Pros

Easy to hack and smash without corrupting data. Linkage between other systems that doesn't get in the way. Different views for managing tactical & presenting strategic (using the same set of data). It doesn't look or behave like Jira or Aha! (I feel like your designers must scrutinize everything).

Cons

I'm not sure there's anything bad to say

Pros

Capturing feedback from external sources, prioritisation against company goals & objectives

Cons

Unfortunately, there is almost no reporting available. So although I can prioritise against company objectives, it is nearly impossible to report back on how much time and resource is allocated. I don't know how long features take to get released. Or to move from Long-term to short-term etc. I can't therefore set any metrics around speed of development, and can't report back to the board on where resources are being allocated. This makes the product useful for only half of my role.

Pros

As PMs know, the key is getting lots of insights then filtering down into the ones that bring about actual value. Productboard enables everyone in the company to contribute ideas and insights. Once PMs have done prioritization, they can visualize the plan in multiple dynamic roadmap dashboards. Overall this works well as a product-focused tool which can also integrate with other systems.

Cons

Feature-wise it's still a bit sparse. From an insight perspective, it would be nice to add constraints or templates to help structure the feedback. This would help when pruning the backlog of items.

Pros

The ability to consume many sources of user feedback and the portal is really just icing on the cake. We did not hire this tool for that job but did have a need for one so that was nice.

Cons

Prioritization features are a bit much for our needs.

Alternatives Considered

Canny

Reasons for Switching to Productboard

More features, same cost

Pros

Productboard is a very intuitive tool for our Product Management that allows us to track the features from the insights we gather to the delivery. The shareable roadmap is essential for the communication to other services (R&D, sales, support…) and the UI makes it easy to use and to understand.

Cons

The integration list has to grow to be able to synchronize the items with external project management softwares like Notion. Also, a better version of the Portal to be able to follow the insights would be appreciated.

Pros

It's a very easy to use product while still providing very robust functionality

Cons

There have been some features that we've missed and some integrations that would help a lot with our specific workflow, like with Asana, for example.

Alternatives Considered

Craft.io and Aha!

Pros

Productboard is an amazing tool. It permits our team to stay in touch with the product team and give feedback. It also also allows us to track down where they are at in terms of development of the product itself. Another thing is that, you can link it to external software like Slack to give direct feedback and "push" things to product board. Product team also have a roadmap of important and not so important things they work on, we can based on that give our point of viw and help them set priorities.

Cons

This tool isn't essential for all the tools IF the product team doesn't teach others how to use it. Once everyone understand how valuable of a tool it is, it's hard to use something else.

Pros

Productboard takes the vague notion of “users are asking for it” and translates it to something much more actionable - who exactly asked for it and in what context.

Cons

Productboard has a zapper integration but I still wish they had some more built-in integrations.

Pros

With ProductBoard I am able to organize the team from the product vision down, in a way that is specific to the focus of product leaders. It's not a bottoms-up task organization tool - it's built to help build products.

Cons

I would like a little more hierarchy and better 2-way integration with tools like Jira.

Pros

Easy integration into github/ jira etc and easy way to submit insights via email or chrome plugin. Besides, really great way of gathering feedback and not loosing any customer' feedback for certain features.

Cons

Weak in project management (gantt-charts for managing classic software projects) - but for me this is fine, the tool is for discovery and more for agile projects.

Pros

I love the flexibility of the product. Whenever I have had a need that I think did not quite fit - the team has been able to show me how I can configure the product to meet my request.

The customer service is fantastic! Response time has always been incredible. They also seem to take suggestions for new features and improvements seriously. Sharing their product roadmap with their customers (using their tool to do it) really shows the power of using their tools.

Cons

The only thing I would say is a 'con' so far is that their exports could be improved. This is on their product roadmap though.

Pros

- Sleek UI
- Easy to use features and functionalities
- Like that features export directly to a roadmap
- Portal submission allows internal and external users to easily submit feedback

Cons

- There is some redundancy of the way a feature can be "scored"
- Wish there were more integrations (with Jira, Phabricator, etc)

Pros

The way it helps driving data driven product management, with really easy ways to collect the information and choose what to do ... plus the customer support is just amazing

Cons

Not working well on iPad ... but really that's all. Also a webhook and better zapier integration would help.