Product Planning with Remote Stakeholders

One of the things I've struggled with over the years is how to get people really engaged in the product planning process.

For software products, this usually means having them prioritize features, or possibly group things into releases or timeframes.

This is hard enough if you've got everyone is the same room, maybe scribbling on a whiteboard, or pushing around sticky notes, but get that much harder when people with important input are in another location, or just too busy to pin down.  In our case, we're a virtual team, so we're almost always in different locations as a matter of course.

To solve this problem, we've tried typical project management tools, spreadsheets, online docs, and other possible solutions, but they've been either too awkward to use, especially remotely, or worse, they don't let you rank things naturally, so we wound up with lots of "top priority" features.  As in "Everything has to be in the first release."  Not helpful.

So years later, I've still got this problem, and it really started to annoy me.  But wait, I've got a software company! So we put something together that would solve our little problem by making it really, really easy for people to provide useful input, and not wind up with an unranked list of things.  Even better, we could actually all participate from wherever we were, with just a web browser, no special software to install.

The idea: an online collaborative "board" split up into columns, with each column representing a release.  We then add feature "cards" to the columns, like "New pricing widget", and can then drag and drop the cards to order them, or move them to different columns to plan the release. 

The big win here though is the real-time interaction - everyone can use a standard web browser to use the board, and see updates within a second or two.  We all get on a conference call, then join the board so we can see what everyone is adding or moving in real time.  It's really simple, useful, and we get much better engagement from everyone than the old way (circulating a spreadsheet to rank things).

There's also some other cool variations on this like tracking task status for a release by using the columns as "To Do", "In Process", "Completed" instead of release names, etc.

So now that I'm pretty happy with that, I couldn't help wondering if anyone else might benefit from this concept.  So we're starting a private beta to see if other product managers or teams that aren't all in the same place could use this to plan and prioritize things more effectively.  If you're interested, you can signup here.