For software businesses, a public product roadmap is one of the best ways to bring different stakeholders on the same page. It encourages transparency, interaction and builds trust with the customers.
Having a public roadmap can also help drive sales. In a recent study, up to 84% of IT purchasers indicated they need to trust a brand before making a purchase.
Public roadmaps help you reduce the redundant conversations. They communicate to everyone the direction of your product development. All stakeholders are always looking at the single source of truth & thus there is less room for inefficiency.
For many small teams, Trello is their go to tool for lots of processes. And naturally, they even try to use it for public roadmaps. But since Trello is not purpose built for public roadmaps, it inherently throws a few challenges. Some of them listed below:
Difficulty Adding Stakeholders
Collaboration is the key to an effective public roadmap. Which means adding stakeholders to the board should be one of the easiest if not the easiest task.
Net of stakeholders casts wide and includes internal people like the CEO, developers and external entities like customers. A public roadmap needs to make the integration of both the internal and external entities simple and straight forward.
With Trello, stakeholders can subscribe to a card, which is excellent. However, it’s almost impossible for people not to use Trello to have access to that same card.
Trello employs a username system instead of emails for subscribers, which makes it hard to look at the number of subscribers on your Trello board, reach out to them privately, or even assess the different types of feedback and isolate what is valuable from the chatter.
Engaging Stakeholders is Not Easy
Engaging with the right users about the product during different stages of creation is one of the most significant determinants of whether the product will succeed.
Trello provides an excellent platform for users that want to stay in the loop and follow the development.
However, there are a few challenges that make interaction a pain on Trello.
For instance:
- You must have a Trello account to subscribe to any board.
- You cannot subscribe on behalf of someone else.
The features on the Trello public roadmap are also shorthanded. While users get notified on any changes to the board, the notifications are only high-level, like when cards move to a new column.
Additional features, like user interviews and surveys, are non-existent. The only practical way to engage stakeholders on the platform is via comments, which is insufficient.
While comments encourage transparent engagement, they are not the ideal method of holding meaningful conversations and collecting valuable data that can impact product creation positively.
Need to Sync Multiple Boards Manually
The beauty of a roadmap is that various stakeholders can align themselves with the product through the different stages of creation.
Customers are more interested in how the final product will impact their lives. While their responses and input are valuable, technical aspects and creation stages are best left to the experts. That means you have to create different public roadmaps for different teams in various steps of product development.
This is where the problem with Trello begins. Once you have the different boards set up, you have to sync the changes and information in every board manually. This takes up valuable time and dramatically up-scales the effort of trying to keep all the teams updated with the right information.
No Reports or Milestones
You can use the powerful search and filtering tools on Trello to get to the relevant information quickly. But that is where the fun ends.
The board makes it hard to appreciate the effort and milestones achieved during development, which is critical in improving morale. Some of the vital features conspicuously missing on Trello include:
- Time management to help you identify teams that are working the hardest.
- Keeping track of your objectives and identifying problem areas that are lagging behind
- Matching revenues to different feature requests
- Milestone tracking
On Trello, the administrator of the board and the users all have access to the same data, which means you require additional tools to keep up with progress reports and other background processes.
Trello is Hard to Share!
What if you wanted to bring your social media users up to speed with the product development progress? All you have to do is share your Trello board. Wrong!
Trello doesn’t give you a friendly format when you attempt to share your public roadmap on social media. It robs businesses and developers of a vital tool that could ensure users who are not on Trello can easily follow the progress through social media updates without too much work from the administrator.
Is There a Possible Solution?
An excellent public roadmap solution should make it easier for you to achieve your business vision and improve communication keeping it basic and effective among the stakeholders.
Trello makes a good attempt at providing viable solution for public roadmap. However, it is not stakeholder or customer-centric, and that is where the problems begin.
Roadmap Portal for Jira Service desk is a flexible, agile, and stakeholder centric public roadmap portal with vital features that make communication and progress reporting a breeze.
Using the portal, you can manage, organize, and publish customer feedback in an organized, collaborative, and easily accessible way. Most important, it is built on top of Jira service desk. If your team is already reliant on Atlassian tools, then you can get started in minutes.
The public roadmap portal is designed to support the basic tenets of public roadmap building which are engagement and transparency. Some of the handy features that make public road-mapping a breeze include:
- Flexibility – The public portal is powered by JQL. This allows it to remain extremely flexible to keep up with the demands of different processes that varied teams use.
- Simplicity — A public roadmap shouldn’t be a new task in product development. It should be a tool to keep everyone in the loop and collect valuable data and feedback. By adding a relevant sub-domain and turning on a switch, your public roadmap goes live.
- Diversity — You can have as many tabs and columns as necessary, depending on your teams, layout, and progress. The tabs and columns are easy and don’t require substantial amounts of time to update.
Final Thoughts
A poorly structured roadmap shouldn’t frustrate your efforts in running a transparent business with the help of your customers and other stakeholders.
Roadmap Portal for Jira Service Desk app gives you a practical, efficient and straightforward alternative that unlocks the full potential of public roadmapping.
