<aside> Project info:
Shipped an improved view sharing experience and give product managers power over who can edit their views.
Give product managers power over who can edit and share their views. Allow for purchase of more licenses and increase the number of weekly active users.
I led continuous product discovery together with my PM, validating designs during customer interviews and iterating based on feedback. I collaborated with stakeholders and advocated for my vision in the design team. Additionally, I supported engineers throughout delivery.
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Productboard is a B2B SaaS that helps product teams understand customer needs, prioritise what to build next, and align everyone around the roadmap.
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Within Productboard, features are organised into views by a certain context / use case, such as view for new ideas, features in delivery etc.. On a more technical level, view is a set of instructions on how to display certain data. Views are often shared with other team members to promote transparency and foster alignment across the company.
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Currently, when a view (roadmap or a feature board) is shared with makers, they gain full (edit) access to the view. They can change the layout, change filters and save changes, remove access from other people, or even delete the view. As a result, customers complained about their views being changed or deleted by other users. This often happened unintentionally, as users clicked the big blue “save” button.
(Button text changed for entertainment purpose only - it was normally just “Save”)
There is no way to prevent other makers from changing their views once the view is shared with them. This means that you either:
<aside> 🥲
Hide the views (no one can see them)
or…
Give users full access to the view (but risk unwanted editing) </aside>
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Both of these ultimately mean that Productboard has decreased value to the users, which means they are less likely to open it. Thus hurting the north star metric - Weekly Active Users, as well as roadmap views.
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The most common workaround was to educate users on how the editing works and ask them to not hit the “big blue save button”, unless it is their own view.
Or users would not share the view with as wide group of users which limited the transparency across the company and decreased alignment.
Alternatively, users would put 🔒 emojis or [DON’T EDIT] text in front of the views name to let others know they should not edit the view.
All of these decreased the number of edits but were against our philosophy of cross-team transparency and information availability. They were unintuitive and annoying, often creating confusion.
With views not being shared, we are back to slack messages asking for information that could be freely available and always up to date, screenshots, or worse, no messages at all.