Product discovery "priority by customer" board

Question

Hi,

We're enjoying using Product Discovery for our high level planning process.

We are building a B2B SaaS product and now want to use PD to understand how many of our customers are asking for certain features, and with what local priority. Our PM can then reconcile those to construct our global priority for features.

We basically want a board with "customer" as the columns, and the ability to rank ideas within each column independently.

We've set up a board with columns = Customer (a multi-select field) and ideas can appear in one or more columns depending on the entries in the Customer field. So far so good.

But without explicit sorting, Product Discover seems to use some kind of global internal ranking field to determine the order. In other words, dragging the idea up or down one customer column changes its relative order across all customer columns.

What we want is a per-customer ranking.

Any creative ideas on how to achieve this? I thought about creating a priority field per-customer, but since the sort is global to the board that still won't help.

Thanks,

Andy

Danielle Bonneau · Answer

I am both SO HAPPY to have found this post and SO MAD that I didn't see it 2 years ago!  We were having the exact same challenge with having pages for individual customer's priority rankings - this does exactly what we needed without a bunch of extra fields and workarounds.

The only downside (as far as I can tell) is what you mentioned about not being able to see multiple customer's ranked priorities in a single view, but I can live with that.

Thank you!

Tanguy Crusson · Answer

OK, I think there's an option for you, but I'm not sure it's going to work - here goes:

By default, the rank of ideas is scoped to the project - if you change the rank of an idea in a view, it's reflected across all views, the same way as field values work.

However we've added an option so you can "detach" a view from that project scope, and make the rank of ideas specific to the view instead. (Sort menu > More options - at the bottom of the sidebar).

If you use this option, you'll be able to have one view per customer and show the order of ideas as they matter to that specific customer. But you won't be able to show all customers and ideas in the same view with that info.

Rob Mkrtchian _CAIAT_US_ · Answer

Maybe you should try to create a separate score field per customer. The score formula variables can be the same for simplicity, but score value will be separated for each customer (e.g. score_customer#1; score_customer#2 etc.), then select "group by" customer field to have distinct grouped view for each customer, so that ideas for different customers would not mess with each other and finally use "sort by" score_customer#1, then add on top of previous sort, "sort by" score_customer#2 etc.? Finally, I assume you will use board view, and when it comes to "column" selection, I usually use Sub-type field (e.g. Boulder, Rock, Paddle), not sure what would work for you.