TL;DR
ProductPlan integrations help your team extend the value of your roadmapping app. The integrations help you automate the flow of data across your most essential product management tools. This post will show you what some of our key integrations can do for your company.
Your Roadmap Doesn’t Exist in a Vacuum.
We built the ProductPlan roadmapping app to simplify product management. Historically, most product managers—including our founding team—were stuck building and updating their roadmaps in spreadsheets and presentation files. We wanted to give product professionals an easy-to-use web platform to let them build and share visually compelling roadmaps. Customers can easily update those roadmaps with drag-and-drop ease.
But product roadmaps don’t exist in a vacuum. The information on a roadmap is interconnected with data in other apps used by stakeholders across the company. If your roadmap app does not connect with these tools, your product team could perform a lot of manual re-work and app hopping. For example:
- As your development team closes out user stories in Jira, you might need to update the status of your roadmap’s initiatives manually.
- When your product team wants to add backlog items to your Roadmap, you might need to re-enter those items from your original backlog source manually.
- If you want to walk your stakeholders through your Roadmap but can’t get them all together, you might need to explain your Roadmap over and over as each stakeholder becomes available.
- If you want to keep up with the progress of roadmap initiatives, you might need to review these details in your development team’s task management app.
- When you make changes to your Roadmap, you might need to send out the update notifications to stakeholders manually.
Soon after we released the ProductPlan app, we went to work building integrations to connect our customers’ roadmaps with the apps and data sources their stakeholders use every day.
Add Value to Your Roadmap with the Right Integrations
Let’s look at how a few of the many ProductPlan integrations can help streamline your workflows, improve alignment across teams, and help everyone in your company make better product decisions.
The ProductPlan Jira integration: sync the development team’s progress to your product roadmap.
After you’ve communicated the strategic plan for your product, your development team will break those projects into discrete tasks. They will likely assign and track those tasks in another software development tool, such as Jira.
With the ProductPlan Jira integration, you can 2-way sync fields between Jira and your roadmap so updates to your projects in one tool are reflected automatically in the other (and vice versa).
The dev team breaks up an epic into five separate user stories in Jira and assigns an equal number of points to each story. You can associate all five stories with the relevant epic in your Roadmap. And as the developers mark each task complete in Jira, your Roadmap will update the “percent complete” field to reflect the good news. When you click into the epic in your Roadmap, you will see the status of each user story in Jira—either complete or in progress.
Key benefit
You can save time and stay better informed by monitoring the progress of both your dev team’s tasks and your strategic projects—all without leaving your ProductPlan app.
You can also use your bar’s percent complete feature to show the overall status of the epic based on the total story points the dev team has marked complete in Jira.
Note: We also offer an Azure DevOps integration if that’s your jam.
The ProductPlan Confluence integration: make it easy for your stakeholders to stay up-to-date on your product strategy.
The ProductPlan Confluence integration is an example of how our integrations can help you keep stakeholders across your company better informed about your product strategy and progress.
This integration lets you embed a live version of your ProductPlan Roadmap into the Confluence workspace your developers, marketing department, or other teams use to get their work done.
Your developers or marketing team spend most of their time collaborating and working in their Confluence wiki. Perhaps they won’t want to log into your Roadmap each time they need to view the latest version or remind themselves about the objective behind an epic or theme. With this integration, they won’t have to.
You can create a page in Confluence for these teams to view the current version of your Roadmap without having to leave their favorite workspace or even log into ProductPlan.
Your stakeholders can also interact with the Roadmap from their Confluence environment—including adding a comment or question for you.
Key benefit
You can make it easier for stakeholders to check in on your product roadmap, which will increase the chances they refer to it when needed. The result will be that your cross-functional team stays aligned and up to date on your product’s strategy.
Oh, and one more big benefit: Implementing integrations like this, which make life easier for stakeholders across your company, will also help you build a sense of trust, respect, and teamwork among those stakeholders.
The ProductPlan Slack integration: automatically send notifications to stakeholders whenever your roadmap changes
With a simple web link, you can invite stakeholders to view the latest version of your product roadmap anytime. But the ProductPlan Slack integration makes it even easier to keep your stakeholders up to date.
With the apps linked, you can program ProductPlan to send an automated notice to the relevant Slack channel when someone updates your Roadmap.
Imagine you have a Slack channel of stakeholders contributing to your product launch: people from the product team, dev, sales, marketing, customer success, and an executive sponsor. Anytime you add an item to a container, change the timeline of an initiative, or make other updates to the Roadmap, ProductPlan will send a message through that Slack channel.
Also, if a stakeholder adds a comment or question on the Roadmap, ProductPlan will send that exchange to the Slack channel.
Key benefit
By automatically pushing roadmap-update notices through Slack, you accomplish two objectives. First, you increase the chances of stakeholders seeing a notification they need to know about because you won’t be relying on them checking in with the Roadmap. Second, you eliminate a lot of work for your team, sending out update alerts manually anytime something changes on the Roadmap.
Nor are these the only ways this ProductPlan integration can improve team alignment around your Roadmap. Check out our recent article to discover more ideas for communicating your Roadmap with Slack.
Note: We also offer a Microsoft Teams integration if that’s your jam.
ProductPlan Integrations… Thousands of Them
We wanted to make sure ProductPlan integrates with any of the roadmap-adjacent apps and data sources your team uses. That includes tools for task management, DevOps, spreadsheets, team collaboration, analytics, marketing automation, customer relationship management, team chat, etc.
So, in addition to the many native integrations we’ve built, ProductPlan also integrates with Zapier. This integration makes it easy for you to connect your Roadmap to any of the 3,000+ apps in the Zapier library.
Want to integrate your Roadmap with Salesforce, Google Docs, Asana, Zendesk, Dropbox, GitLab, etc.? No problem. Just turn on your ProductPlan Zapier integration—and start extending the value of your Roadmap across your company.
