Using Custom Columns in Productboard

It would take us years to anticipate every type of data you might use to prioritize and plan your feature ideas so we’ve introduced custom fields to help you create some of your own. Here’s how you might get started putting them to use.

Custom text columns in Productboard

1. URL: Add links to specs, mock-ups, videos, marketing collateral, or any other resources straight to your board. Users won’t even have to open up a feature’s details to find the link, turning two clicks into one.

2. Designer, Developer, or Marketer

You can now use the member custom field to assign features to a colleague who is a member of your Productboard workspace.

This could be useful for keeping track of who is responsible for a feature with regard to design, development, documentation, marketing, or product management (though this will typically be signified using the native owner field).

3. Dev team: Display which team will be working on each feature.

Note: You can now define teams in Productboard, assign them product objectives, share certain saved views with them, and easily @mention the entire team.

Custom number columns in Productboard

4. Projected revenue: Depending on the nature of your business, projected revenue for proposed products/features can be a helpful way to gauge what prioritization decisions would contribute most to the bottom line. You can then quickly filter feature ideas based on a numerical range.

5. Reach: Re-popularized by RICE prioritization, reach represents the number of customers likely to be impacted by a feature. Reach encourages PMs to consider more than just how badly the feature is needed by a few loud customers.

6. Fibonacci complexity estimate: Fibonacci numbers (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…) have a funny way of turning up all over the place. For many, they seem a natural fit for performing high-level feature complexity estimates.

7. Custom prioritization score: Teams with elaborate systems for calculating feature prioritization scores will rejoice in being able to add these values to their boards. Spoiler alert: In the future we’ll allow you to calculate these scores right from within Productboard.

Custom dropdowns columns in Productboard

8. T-shirt sizing: Custom dropdown columns support any emoji! That means you can easily represent something like t-shirt size complexity estimates graphically.

9. MVP flag: When bringing a new product to life, it’s critical to identify the MVP functionality that is a must-have for the first version of the product to add just enough value that users will begin using it and you can begin collecting feedback to inform v2. Use a binary MVP flag to indicate which features are must-haves/tablestakes/dealbreakers. Then you can use the column as a filter when you want to zero in on just those critical features.

10. Marketing tier: Will a feature require updates to the documentation? Website? Sales enablement? Marketing collateral? Will it require a full press release? Or a brief mention in the release notes? Grouping your marketing release activities into 3 or 4 tiers and assigning upcoming features to a tier is an effective way to inform the launch team what kind of commitment will be required for each feature.

Get started with custom columns in the Misc. column category on the Features and Releases boards:

If you’re not using Productboard, sign up for a free trial to see how custom columns can help you prioritize!