Confluence whiteboards for product managers: Setting your team up for success
The foundation for a successful product launch is understanding and defining the problem or opportunity the product aims to address. According to most product teams, this also happens to be the most difficult part of the process.
A recent Duo Loop survey found that product managers say planning and prioritizing initiatives are their biggest challenges. They also seek better tools for this process. A study by Product Management Festival found that 51% of product managers desired more sophisticated tools for visualizing and strategizing their work.
Confluence is a familiar ally for product managers. Product Focus’s 2023 survey found that product managers consider Confluence a top-five essential tool (Alongside Jira). And with the introduction of virtual whiteboards, Confluence has become an even better place for product ideation, discussion, and planning.
Brainstorm virtually with whiteboards
Some advantages of virtual whiteboards are apparent. You don’t have to clean them, you won’t get marker stains on your fingers, and your sticky notes won’t blow away if someone opens a window. Did you know that, according to studies, virtual brainstorming is more productive than in-person sessions?
One study found that the number of novel ideas presented per person increases as a virtual brainstorming group grows, while the opposite occurs with expanding in-person teams. The research noted that virtual brainstorming often yields better results because it levels the playing field. Whereas extroverts and high-ranking team members might dominate an in-person session, virtual brainstorming allows less outgoing team members to participate equally.
A brainstorming session should be loose. It should be considered a safe space where team members can freely add ideas without worrying about approval. Brainstorming with virtual whiteboards offers the best of both worlds—a place to get creative without inhibitions and a tool to help you structure a collection of ideas into a new initiative or project.
You can use Confluence whiteboards to create connections between ideas by using lines and shapes to create diagrams just like you would at a real whiteboard, minus the constant erasing and cleaning. Confluence has virtual versions of everything regular whiteboards use, including sticky notes and stamps.
You can also quickly leave comments on the whiteboard to help spark conversation. Still trying to figure out where to start? There are whiteboard brainstorming templates available as well. Brainwriting is one of them.
In brainwriting, your team members write answers to prompts, usually created by the product manager. A typical brainwriting template would start with an introduction that defines the purpose and guidelines of the exercise.
Team members are then given time to generate ideas, which they add to a sticky note. The sticky note is then passed around to every team member, urging them to further develop the ideas and potentially improve on them.
Once the idea stickies have made their rounds, the team reviews and discusses every generated idea. The template even allows you to vote using our stamp functionality and choose the best ideas.
Remember when we said whiteboards can be used to create structured ideas out of freeform ideation? You can turn elements like sticky notes into actionable Jira tasks from whiteboards or import Jira issues onto a whiteboard itself.. To see just how easy it is, check out this resource.
Prioritize your ideation
Prioritization is a challenge. PMs need to consider new feature requests, bug fixes, and more. What high-impact moves do we need to make right away to satisfy customers and improve their experience, and what can wait? Prioritization is all about aligning with everyone—product, engineering, marketing, and sales—and deciding on what to move forward on and which fires to put out first.
Thankfully, Confluence whiteboards give you great templates for some of the most popular prioritization methods. The RICE template, for example, helps you prioritize tasks based on how many users will be impacted (reach), the significance of the benefits (impact), how sure your team is of the reach and impact of these tasks (confidence), and how much time and effort it will take to complete these tasks (effort).
You can also use the 2x2 prioritization method template in Confluence whiteboards, which helps prioritize tasks based on their importance and urgency.
Much like the Brainwriting ideation template, you can add tasks as sticky notes to your whiteboard and have team members vote on which tasks should be prioritized first.
But what makes whiteboards truly great for product management is that they’re interconnected with all the other Atlassian tools your product and engineering team are using.
For example, you can import issues from Jira Product Discovery, bringing task-related context into your whiteboard to help you prioritize tasks without having to constantly bounce between Jira and your whiteboard.
For further context, you can directly embed Smart Links from Jira into your whiteboard to pull in important data like team goals, long-term company priorities, and customer feedback relevant to the tasks at hand.
Plan your prioritized projects and tasks
Once your prioritization is completed, the best way to start planning your work is through story points. These points dictate how long tasks will take to complete, which teams or teammates own each task, and what dependencies each task carries with it.
To kick off planning, you can once again convert any sticky notes from your prioritization sessions into Jira issues or import your relevant Jira issues right to the whiteboard. You can learn how to do this here
The best way to integrate the ideation and prioritization you’ve done on whiteboards is to use smart sections and smart connectors. Smart sections allow you to quickly and easily update Jira issues after planning sessions. By creating a smart section on your whiteboard and dragging Jira issues into it, changes to fields (like assignee, story points and labels) are updated from the whiteboard in real time and immediately reflected in Jira, facilitating a smooth transition from planning to execution.
Additionally, smart connectors enable you to draw lines between Jira issues on your whiteboard, visualizing relationships and dependencies. These connectors transform lines into issue links, automatically updating Jira's “Linked issues” field.
Additionally, smart connectors enable you to create relationships between Jira issues on your whiteboard, which are then reflected in Jira. Simply draw a line to connect issues visually, then select "Link issues" to transform them into smart connectors. Now, you can change or update any linked Jira issues directly in your whiteboard during your planning session.
Confluence whiteboards also have templates that can help with planning. The timeline workflow template, for example, makes planning easy by visualizing the entire project timeline and facilitating open discussions with the use of whiteboard elements like sticky notes, stamps, and votes.
The swimlane process template helps clarify your planning, mapping out complex processes to make them easy to follow and understand. Flow charts allow you to visually represent the steps involved in every task or product development process. You can use them to map out dependencies and ensure your planning aligns with your strategic goals.
Easily involve everyone in retrospectives
After each iteration of work, it’s important to hold retrospectives—a common process in agile software development in which teams review each project to see what went well and what didn’t.
Confluence whiteboards can aid in this process as well. Once again, there are plenty of whiteboard retrospective templates to choose from.
You can use the simple retrospective template to gauge team opinions on what each team member thought was good about recent product development processes and what they felt could be improved.
The template also gives team members the opportunity to suggest actions that they believe will help future prioritization and planning sessions.
You can also use the four Ls retrospective for similar results. The template is very straightforward, allowing team members to say what they loved, loathed, learned, and longed for throughout a project.
There’s also the sailboat retrospective template. This template allows team members to provide their input on what slowed down the project and what could have sped it up by placing sticky notes on relevant sections of the template. The front of the sailboat houses the issues that obstruct progress, while the wind in the sails represents ideas that could have sped up processes.
Whiteboard templates offer a variety of approaches that can help prevent your retrospective processes from stagnating and becoming dull.
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