Product Management is all about listening. That's why this new Slack app is so powerful ??

As a product manager, it's not your job to have all the answers. It's your job to ask the best questions, and to surround yourself with the people who have expertise in all sorts of areas, from the business, marketing, tech-side, your customers, and more.

There's nothing more dangerous than a product manager who holes themselves up with their backlog and writes specs out of thin air and assumptions. And yet this is a common occurrence in teams who act as silos, squirrelling away their progress and learnings rather than opening up their challenges to the rest of the team to help crack. 

It's no wonder so many non-product people think that product management is where ideas go to die. I balked when I first heard this take, but I get it. A really apt example I use is this: 

?? To a product manager, 6 weeks isn’t a lot of time. It’s probably 3 sprints worth, and maybe a handful of problems tackled in that time. There’s a lot more that you don’t get to as a product person in 6 weeks, than what you actually get to launch. 

?? To a salesperson or support team member, 6 weeks can feel like forever! Sales leads and support queries come and go at a relative break-neck pace compared to what the product and development team are ever able to deliver. And that’s fine - the product team isn’t supposed to be hyper reactive to every request that comes in, and build something just because it’s been requested. But nor should it be a black hole where ideas go in and are never accounted for again.

Transparency FTW

One of the best things any product team can do to ease this feeling is to make the product management space in their company more transparent. Product decisions aren’t made based on spurious magic; they’re made based on balancing outcomes for the business and customers, and this is a process that the whole team can benefit from learning about and providing their input into. 

Product decisions aren’t made based on spurious magic; they’re made based on balancing outcomes for the business and customers, and this is a process that the whole team can benefit from learning about and providing their input into. 

This is exactly the problem I set out to solve when I first started to build ProdPad years ago, and it’s now even easier to do with the new Slack integration.

One of the assumptions we made early on with ProdPad (and I’m glad we did!) is that your team will be hard-pressed to change their habits and tools, and so it was up to us to build the best integrations possible ??

From the very beginning, your team could add ideas by email, with a Chrome extension, or through any number of other integration points. 

When Slack launched, we spotted the potential and were the first product management tool to launch an integration. 

We’re back now, with a massive upgrade, taking advantage of the slick API changes that Slack has opened up ??

Here’s what the new ProdPad+Slack integration does now:

Create ideas from Slack... in 2 ways!

Save time! Create ideas directly from Slack, plus have the ability to include detailed information such as related tags, products, and personas. You can do this with a slash command (eg. /prodpad idea some new idea you just thought of), or by right-clicking on any post in Slack and turning it into an idea.

Search for ideas in Slack

Search your backlog with simple slash commands directly from Slack (eg. /prodpad search some idea you're looking for), to keep your team up to date with what's going on in your product world, and to help avoid duplicates from being created.

Sync your discussions between Slack and ProdPad

This one is my favourite ?? When new ideas are added in ProdPad, they'll appear in your Slack channel (perhaps your #product channel, or similar) and from there, any discussions that happen in either ProdPad or Slack will be synced as a Slack thread / ProdPad discussion in real-time.

This means that your ideas won't fall on deaf ears, but will become part of the daily discussions that you and your team have together, naturally, in the tools you already use.

Our early testers loved it too! It's been said that it's massively helping with team adoption, getting your colleagues involved in the product management process with less effort:

Add reactions from Slack

When a product idea sparks a discussion in Slack, all comments and thoughts are captured and sent to ProdPad. Magic!

Slack Sign-in Option

Invite and onboard your entire team to ProdPad using the Slack SSO option. With unlimited reviewers, you don’t have to be choosy ??

Slack community feedback

If you’re running a Slack community, you can use the integration to gather feedback from your customers directly from Slack, and send it straight into ProdPad for review.

Here's what one of our customers had to share about this particularly useful facet:

Slack ?? ProdPad = Perfect product match

Let’s face it, your team will always be having their conversations in Slack. It’s a brilliant place for team chatter and collaboration. But don’t let those moments of brilliance get lost amongst your plethora of channels. Capture ideas and insights, and use ProdPad to shape them into products that your customers will love.

To celebrate this new release, we've done the ProductHunt thing ??????

?? https://www.producthunt.com/posts/product-collaboration-in-slack

If you're reading this, you're probably a product person or know one (hi everyone! ??) Take a moment to check us out on ProductHunt today and join the conversation. Do you use Slack? Do you have enough visibility into your product management process? Where do your ideas and insights end up?

I look forward to hearing from you all, and seeing how this new Slack integration helps your teams! ??