As we wrap up another eventful quarter at ProductPlan, we’re delighted to share our latest innovations and give you a glimpse of what’s on the horizon. Our Q3 releases have focused on enhancing strategic alignment, improving integrations and introducing new features to streamline your product management workflow. Let’s dive into the highlights and explore how these updates will transform your product management experience.
Strengthening Strategic Alignment
At the heart of our Q3 releases is a suite of powerful strategy enhancements designed to align your entire organization around key objectives. Cascading OKRs is a cornerstone of this release. It’s a game-changing feature that allows you to connect objectives throughout your organization. This means you can now seamlessly link company-wide goals to team-specific objectives, ensuring every level of your organization is working in harmony towards the same overarching vision.
Complementing this feature, we’ve also introduced the ability to connect roadmap items to multiple objectives in the Strategy module. This enhancement provides a more nuanced and accurate representation of how your team’s work supports various strategic goals. By offering a clearer picture of each work item’s strategic importance, you can better align team efforts with company objectives, leading to more focused and impactful product development.
To tie it all together, we’ve unveiled our new Strategic Portfolio visualization. This comprehensive view brings together objectives, opportunities and roadmap items in a unified timeline. Imagine being able to see your high-level objectives, discovery opportunities and top-level roadmap items all in one place – that’s the power of the Strategic Portfolio. This birds-eye view enhances strategic insights, facilitates better communication of initiatives and helps you quickly identify gaps or risks in your strategic planning.
Customization and Flexibility
We understand that every product team has specific needs, which is why we’ve introduced multi-select custom fields at both the account and team levels. These versatile fields act as a hybrid between custom dropdown fields and tags. The goal here is to support further standardization and organization of information across your roadmaps and portfolios. Whether you’re an Account Admin or a Team Admin, you now have the power to create fields that perfectly fit your workflow and information architecture.
Seamless Integrations and Real-time Updates
In today’s interconnected digital ecosystem, smooth integrations are crucial. That’s why we’ve expanded our integration capabilities in Q3. We now support Microsoft Entra as an authentication method. This allows you to use your existing Entra ID to grant our application access to your Azure DevOps instance. This addition streamlines your workflow and enhances security by leveraging your existing authentication infrastructure.
We’ve also introduced webhooks, opening up new possibilities for real-time communication between ProductPlan and your other platforms. Focused on bar events such as creation, updates and deletions, webhooks allow you to set up multiple subscriptions to keep your systems in perfect sync. This feature is available to our Professional and Enterprise customers, offering unprecedented real-time integration capabilities.
API Enhancements for Power Users
For our power users who leverage our API, we’ve significantly expanded its capabilities. You can now archive Objectives and update their risk status via API endpoints. We’ve also added the ability to park and unpark individual bars on a roadmap; create and delete connections between bars and links, and view detailed counts of child bars, links, connections and comments associated with a bar. You can also assign bars to a parent container, create/delete milestones and create/update lanes via this enhancement. These enhancements give you even more programmatic control over your ProductPlan data, enabling complex integrations and automations.
Looking Ahead to Q4
As we look towards the final quarter of the year, we’re excited about the innovations on the horizon. Our team is hard at work on the next phase of Strategic Portfolio, which will bring even more clarity and insight to your product planning. We’re also preparing for enhanced collaboration features that will make teamwork smoother and more efficient than ever before.
We’re working on idea capture updates, which will help you better manage and prioritize incoming product ideas.
For our enterprise customers, we’re committed to giving you more flexibility in managing different stages of your product development process. And looking further ahead, we’re in the planning stages for an Opportunities Business Case feature, which will help you better evaluate and prioritize new product opportunities.
These upcoming features are designed to further enhance your ability to plan, communicate and execute your product strategy effectively. As always, we’re committed to continually improving ProductPlan to meet your evolving needs, and we eagerly anticipate bringing these enhancements to you in the coming months.
Stay tuned for more updates, and here’s to another quarter of successful product management!
