FAQ
Categories
Product Management
What are the advantages of Product Management software?
A dedicated product management platform consolidates all the elements in your product planning process, giving you the confidence to make better, more informed product management decisions. With every feature connected across the platform, and direct integration with your dev team’s task management software, you’ll always have all the product data you need at your fingertips.
What’s the best way to plan your product?
To be a successful product manager it is essential to be fully aware of all the features you are working on right now and what you’ve got in the pipeline. A custom-built product management tool like craft.io can be integrated directly with your dev team’s task management software, significantly improving the level of collaboration while giving you the confidence to stay on top of your product planning.
Why is customer feedback important for product management?
We all like to think we know best when it comes to adapting our products and adding new features. But in reality, there is only so much we can know without checking in with the people that matter most: the customers who use the products on a regular basis. If you want to create successful user-centric products you need to go and find out what the customers like and don’t like and what they really want.
What is a dynamic product roadmap?
A dynamic product roadmap is an interactive product timeline, built using an integrated product management platform like craft.io. Having your backlog, list of upcoming features, feedback and dev tasks all directly linked to the roadmap streamlines the planning process and supercharges the presentation experience. And the option to share a live version that is always updated ensures the roadmap remains relevant long after you’ve presented it and emailed it to everyone in the room.
What are the advantages of an online Product Roadmap Tool?
Flexibility, connectivity, simplicity and the ability to live share are some of the biggest advantages of using a dedicated product management platform like Craft to create your product roadmap. Rather than using a classic documentation tool like a spreadsheet, an online roadmap tool has a simple user interface designed specifically for product managers and allows you to change any element on the fly, even after it has been shared.
What is the difference between a strategic roadmap and a timeline roadmap?
A timeline roadmap is all about the specific features - it essentially takes your list of features and shows them in a view which makes it clear when you expect each feature to be developed. A strategic roadmap allows you to take a step back and show the overarching goals you have for the product and the initiatives you are planning to implement to achieve those goals. With Craft you can create both types of roadmap and link your features to the strategic roadmap in a couple of clicks.
Can you link your feature backlog to a dynamic roadmap?
One major benefit of a product roadmap tool like Craft’s is that it is fully integrated into the product management platform. That means that it is easy to connect any item in your feature backlog directly with the goals and initiatives that are displayed in your roadmap, creating a 360 degree view of your product management strategy.
How can you share a strategic roadmap?
The key to a great roadmap lies in its connectivity, accessibility and longevity. A dynamic roadmap provides all three of these elements, ensuring a far smoother process throughout its preparation, presentation and maintenance. Instead of emailing a static version of the roadmap to everyone in the presentation meeting, you can send them a live link that will always be kept up to date.
Agile Product Management
What is agile product management?
Agile product management is an iterative approach that involves building product functionality in smaller chunks, releasing that functionality to the market, and incorporating user feedback to continually improve the product. To make this process as effective as possible, you’ll need a way to gather and analyze user feedback, prioritize items efficiently, and plan and track development sprints. Book a demo to see how craft.io can help your team manage this entire process in one place.
Is agile product management better than the traditional approach?
We sure think so. With the conventional product management method, called waterfall, Product Managers work in isolation, writing long requirements documents, and then flinging them over to the development team. The agile methodology is better in that product and development work together from the start, so the company gets the benefit of these different viewpoints throughout the process. Agile companies also benefit from getting early and frequent feedback from users as well as earning revenue sooner.
What’s the best data presentation framework for agile teams?
The best way to present your data will depend on which information you need to highlight and review with stakeholders. You might want to view your product work in swimlanes, on a timeline, or as a Kanban board displaying all tasks under each upcoming sprint. With craft.io’s Guru views, you can easily move among these and other views and display your data across three dimensions. Book a demo to see craft.io’s data visualization capabilities.
Does craft.io support agile product management workflows?
Heck yeah! craft.io was built specifically to help agile product organizations succeed. Our end-to-end product management platform helps with every aspect of agile product feedback collection, ideation, planning & prioritization, and delivery. You can use craft.io to build and prioritize your backlog, collect and analyze feedback, build your roadmaps, and plan your capacity to make sure you’re allocating resources strategically. Book a demo to see why the world’s most successful agile product teams use craft.io.
What agile product management frameworks does craft.io include?
craft.io is loaded with many of the most popular agile frameworks. You’ll be able to organize, view, and present your product content in ways designed specifically for agile teams — with Kanban boards, release & sprint planning panels, a feedback portal, dynamic roadmapping capability, and prioritization frameworks like RICE and MoSCoW. Book a demo to see craft.io’s agile product management frameworks in action.
Prioritization
How does prioritization help with product planning?
Because you’ll always have more ideas for features than the resources to build them, you need a process for deciding which functionality to build and when. That’s where an effective prioritization framework comes in — and you’ll find many built into craft.io’s Guru layer. Just click a few buttons to begin scoring items on your backlog using well-tested formulas such as RICE prioritization, MoSCoW, and Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF). Book a demo to see how it works.
How do you know which prioritization framework to use?
Different situations call for different types of prioritization. For example, if you want to know which features are likely to delight customers, you’ll use the Kano model. But if you’re looking for a broader scoring method — to determine each item’s reach, impact, and effort required — you might choose RICE prioritization. The great news is that with craft.io, you can easily apply multiple prioritization frameworks to your backlog items or even add your own custom formula. Book a demo to see this in action.
What can you prioritize in craft.io?
You can apply craft.io’s many built-in Guru prioritization frameworks — or customize and use your own formula — to prioritize any list of items, anywhere in the platform. Prioritize your entire product backlog, conduct separate prioritization exercises for specific teams, and use the feedback you’ve collected in craft.io’s feedback portal to prioritize which items should earn a slot on your roadmap. Book a demo to see how much you can do with our prioritization functionality.
Can you customize fields in an existing prioritization framework?
In craft.io, you sure can! It takes just seconds to add or change custom fields in any prioritization framework. For example, one of our customers wanted to make its RICE scoring more intuitive for stakeholders. So they modified the “Reach” column to a simpler 1-5 scale instead of the larger numbers. Book a demo to see how you can customize your prioritization frameworks.
Do you need to do the math to see the results of your prioritization exercise?
Not in craft.io! The calculations all happen in the background. You just click a button when you’re done with your inputs, and the platform will present your backlog items in priority order. This is just one reason having a dedicated product management solution is better than using spreadsheets. We do the messy calculation work for you, so your team can focus on making strategic decisions. Book a demo to see how it all works.
Capacity Planning
What is capacity planning, exactly?
Capacity planning means determining your company’s resource levels and then making strategic decisions about how to allocate those resources in the ways most likely to achieve your business objectives. In product management, capacity planning includes planning your upcoming releases and adjusting scope based on available resources and the estimated effort of the various items. For a software company, capacity planning typically involves focusing on the best ways to use development teams’ time, skillsets, and tools.
Who owns capacity planning: product management or development?
There’s plenty of debate on this topic, but having worked with product organizations all over the world, our experience strongly suggests capacity planning is most effective as a joint effort between the product management and development departments. Book a demo to see how craft.io’s capacity planning makes it easy for product and development teams to collaborate on capacity planning.
What does intelligent capacity planning look like?
To ensure you’re assigning the right resources to perform the right strategic work at the right time, you’ll need several key inputs. For example, you’ll want to know the effort required for each item, whether the team you’d like to assign an item has the time to complete it, and each item’s strategic importance relative to others on the list. Book a demo to see how craft.io makes this process easy.
Why should you do capacity planning in craft.io?
There are many benefits of conducting your capacity planning in craft.io, but the most significant is that craft.io puts all your product data in one place. Knowing where to allocate resources requires visibility into your prioritized list of backlog items, user feedback, and your Developers’ current and planned workloads. You’ll have all this content in your craft.io workspace, planning your capacity planning based on real data instead of guesses. Book a demo to see how it works.
Product Portfolio Management
What is Product Portfolio Management?
Product Portfolio Management is the process of managing a company's portfolio of products to maximize performance and achieve strategic objectives. With craft.io's Product Portfolio Management, you can roll up selected product lines and epics to see work streams grouped together in a bird's-eye view. This allows you to manage key initiatives, visualize cross-team dependencies, track progress, evaluate effort, and make informed decisions based on a holistic view of all products and business objectives.
Book a meeting with a craft.io product executive to discuss how your organization can benefit from it too.
How can I evaluate if my organization can benefit from your Product Portfolio Management solution?
If your product organization lacks a strategic focus of your product portfolio, has scattered data across different teams in siloes, and a disconnect between high-level strategy and tactical execution, leading to decreased transparency and visibility across the business, you could benefit our Product Portfolio Management solution, which is available as part of our Enterprise plan. Book a meeting with a craft.io product executive to discuss how your organization can benefit from it too.
What are the cross-product-line dependencies and capabilities of Product Portfolio Management?
With Product Portfolio Management, you can visualize and create cross-product lines dependencies. Visualizing these dependencies allows you to see the bigger picture, optimize development processes companywide, and improve efficiency. Dependencies can be created between items from the same product line or between items from different product lines, either between initiatives or epics.
Book a meeting with a product executive to see how to plan your Product Portfolio dependencies with craft.io.
Can I create and manage my organization’s key initiatives using Product Portfolio Management?
Yes, product leaders can create and manage key portfolio-wide initiatives and strategic efforts that apply to multiple epics across multiple teams and product lines. Initiatives are valuable for prioritizing work, creating dependencies, and aligning teams on strategic business goals, improving overall communication and collaboration within the organization. Schedule a session with a product executive to discuss how to plan your organization's key initiatives using craft.io.
What is unique about Product Portfolio Management?
Product Portfolio Management gives product leaders a comprehensive view of all product lines and important initiatives, empowering them to plan and execute using a strategic approach. This enables product leaders to consider the bigger picture while the product teams concentrate on the tactical, day-to-day management of individual product lines. Contact us to discuss how your organization can benefit from it too.
Pricing
How does the free trial work? Do I need a credit card to try craft.io?
You can sign up for a free trial, no credit card is required. You will get access to the functionality of the Pro plan for 14 days. Before your trial ends, we will notify you to choose a paid plan to continue using craft.io.
How do I purchase craft.io? What forms of payment do you accept – credit card and/or invoicing?
Using all major credit cards, you can buy our Starter and Pro plan through the payment page within your workspace. To purchase our Pro plan for large-scale teams or our Enterprise plan, please book a demo with our sales team to set up invoicing.
Can I change or cancel my plan later on?
You can change your plan from Starter to Pro, and the billing cycle (monthly/yearly) through the in-app account settings menu. For active subscriptions, cancellation will come into effect at the end of the current billing cycle.
For more information about our pricing, feel free to contact us at support@craft.io or to book a demo with one of our product specialists
How will I be charged for using multiple workspaces?
A user with a paid license will only be charged once, regardless of the number of workspaces they are invited to. Therefore, adding users to multiple workspaces will not result in additional charges.
How does adding and removing users work?
An editor (with team leader permissions and higher) can add or remove users without any limit. For users paying via a credit card, new editors, team leaders or admins added on either monthly or yearly plans, will be automatically billed the prorated amount.
What are the different roles and their associated access? Which roles do I pay for?
We have five different roles:
- Admins (paid) can manage workspace settings, custom fields, workspace view and templates, as well as add additional workspaces.
- Team leaders (paid) can set roles in the workspace and create teams.
- Editors (paid) have full access to all features of each workspace of which they are a member.
- Contributors (free) can view and comment on everything in the workspace.
- Viewers (free) can view different views shared with them.
Security
Application security
Separate Environments
The Testing environment is completely separated from the Production environment. No Customer or Production Data is used in our development or test environments.
Quality Assurance
All code developed at craft.io undergoes strict automatic and manual quality assurance testing, to ensure it is correct, efficient and free of security vulnerabilities.
Code Reviews
All code packages undergo Code Reviews before being allowed to merge into craft.io’s main code branch, thus ensuring a clean, controlled and high-level code base.
Secure Software Development Life Cycle
craft.io’s software is developed using a structured development process, integrating security and privacy-by-design at all stages of the life cycle.
All developers receive annual Secure Development training, covering security architecture, secure coding and OWASP top 10 threats.
Built-in security and reliability
Penetration Tests
craft.io uses third party experts to perform periodic Penetration Tests to its production environment, in order to verify that security is maintained at the highest possible standards. Both Application level and Infrastructure level threats are explored to understand whether new vulnerabilities are applicable and to provide a comprehensive view of craft.io’s protection mechanisms.
Encryption
craft.io encrypts all data in transit using TLS with 256 bit AES encryption. Our server scores “A” on Qualys SSL Labs‘ tests.
Data-at-rest is encrypted using AES-256 encryption
Identification and Authentication
Access to the production environment is limited to a small team of employees, as per their job requirements. Access requires the use of 2-Factor Authentication, which necessitates a robust login process consisting of a strong password and a one-time code provided by Google Authenticator.
Back Up
craft.io data is backed-up to a separate, secure environment for improved Availability and Data Integrity in case of a malfunction scenario.
Auditing and Logging
craft.io maintains logs of all of its systems and services, and audits these logs frequently as a supplementary control to its other security and access control mechanisms.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
craft.io’s service was designed to overcome various disaster scenarios, and utilizes GCP’s cloud resilience as well as efficient internal processes to recover quickly and smoothly.
Logical Access
craft.io allows access to its Production network according to the least-privilege, need-to-work principle. Access is logged and reviewed frequently, to maintain close control of protection and data access.
DDoS Mitigation
craft.io’s use of GCP’s DDOS protection mechanisms, as well as its multi-region and multi-zone capabilities, allows craft.io to provide DDoS-protected services.
Intrusion Detection and Prevention
craft.io uses Intrusion Detection capabilities to monitor and detect security incidents. If and when a suspected intrusion is detected, craft.io operates according to its ISO-27001-compliant Incident Response process.
Physical Security & Data Hosting
craft.io uses Google Cloud Platform data centers in the United States and the EU. GCP’s physical security is known to be the market gold standard, and is audited as part of GCP’s SOC-2 and ISO 27001 certification.
Cloud Security
craft.io’s security and availability architecture is designed according to ISO 27001 and SOC-2 principles, and is implemented based on industry best practices.
IP Whitelisting
craft.io can be configured to only allow access from designated IP address ranges. These restrictions can be applied to all users.
Uptime
craft.io has 99% or higher uptime.
Password and Credential Storage
craft.io enforces a password complexity standard, and encrypts stored passwords.
Role-Based Access Controls
Access to data within the craft.io application is governed by role-based access controls (RBAC). craft.io has various predefined roles : Account Owner, Workspace Owner, Workspace Admin, Team Leader, Editor, Contributor.
SSO
craft.io offers SAML 2.0 Single Sign-on (SSO) to enable seamless integration with your existing identity solutions: OKTA, Google Workspace, Active Directory, Ping Identity, and any SAML 2.0 compatible solution.
Datacenter compliance
PCI-DSS
We use Stripe -- which is PCI-DSS certified -- to process all payments.
craft.io’s system operates on Google Cloud Platform, which is ISO 27001, SOC-2 and FedRamp certified.
ISO 27001:2013
craft.io deploys industry standard security controls and is ISO 27001:2013 certified, we’ve based the platform’s Information Security Management System controls on ISO 27001 and SOC-2 principles.
Operational security
Training
All craft.io employees take part in yearly Security Awareness training sessions and while completing their onboarding process.
Policies
All craft.io employees read and sign its ISO-27001-certified Information Security Policy and Acceptable Use Policy.
Confidentiality
All craft.io employees sign confidentiality agreements as part of their employment contracts.
