Dragonboat

Flexible Roadmapping Tool for the Agile Product Manager

Comments: I used Dragonboat primarily for creating a roadmap that was reasonable to achieve based on resource capacity.

Pros:

Dragonboat is a very flexible tool which allows different product owners to manage their roadmaps how they prefer to, yet still make it possible to roll-up what is important at the enterprise level, such as resource needs. The tool is super flexible to organize the backlog of Epics by timeframe, initiatives, sub-roadmaps, OKR's, theme, or any number of other fields. Assigning T-shirt size effort is easy with inline editing, similar to excel. The Portfolio List, which allows quick changes to the view and further provides capability to group and summarize effort, ended up being my easiest part of planning. The dashboard view makes it super easy to visualize the roadmap without overwhelming the audience you are sharing it with.

Cons:

For those teams that have many increases/decreases throughout the quarters, resource capacity was not as robust. I would have like more refinement of when resources started. For those with more of a constant size team, it would not be an issue.

Great product

Comments: I like Dragonboat a lot and will recommend it to my peers depending on their need. It is excellent for roadmap generation and prioritization but the tool is still a work in progress in some respects.

Pros:

Excellent tool that helps with building out a roadmap and easy to see what your priorities are. The Jira integration comes in very handy.

Cons:

The solution has been buggy but I do also know we purchased the tool during the growth phase.

Great one-stop product for OKR cascade across the product-led business

Comments: Holistic view of the business and product operations across the company. What strategic goals are we focusing on? How do we measure the success with OKRs? What tracks/initiatives/features/ideas, etc. will help us get there? How far are we?

Pros:

The features I like the most is the quarterly planning with OKR cascade in the Timeline view. Once I set up strategic goals and OKRs for the quarter it's very easy to link tracks, features, and ideas. I like that I can easily see the high-level picture in one view and can drill down if needed.

Cons:

I would love to have more comprehensive Allocation Report. At the end of the quarter I generate shareholder report by resource allocation. Would be great to have the same OKR cascade that's on the Timeline view (strategic goals, OKRs, features, ideas, etc.) and coupled with time allocation by discipline. To have as an outcome the following pie chart as an example: in Q2 we spent X% resources by time on strategic goal Y as measured by OKR1.

Great Strategy Tool

Pros:

Integration offerings matched a lot of other enterprise tools we used, which was a key factor in deciding on a Product tool. Also impressed with the level of onboarding support we were provided with - thank you!

Cons:

Initial hiccups with setup that were quickly resolved with an attentive and hands-on client success manager.

Dragonboat has been a game changer for my team

Comments: It's been a great overall experience. The platform is quickly iterating on exciting new features (faster than we can leverage them) and their team is fantastic to work with.

Pros:

Dragonboat has made it easy to have a central source of truth for the road mapping for dozens of products. I appreciate how PMs can easily manage their upcoming work and collaborate on larger projects by leveraging higher level initiatives. They have great filter and dashboard features so it's easy to quickly see different views of the product portfolio.

Cons:

I would like it to be a little easier to share Dragonboat views outside of Product Management at scale. They have the basics where you can publish public views and publish views for individuals. I'd love to have groups of external users (so I could share a version of the roadmap with the sales team).

Continuous strategic planning and alignment with Dragonboat

Comments: Before using Dragonboat, we had different teams planning in spreadsheets and misalignment of allocation of resources to core business objectives that leadership was trying to achieve. When it comes to strategic planning, we’re starting to focus on how the business OKRs align to the allocation of the organization. Dragonboat is something we’ve been able to leverage to push our strategic planning capability, both annually and continuously, throughout the organization. We've changed our strategic mindset to really focus on where growth lies and focus the product organization on the proposed growth objectives and we’re starting to see the results of that.

Pros:

By using Dragonboat we are able to better plan our product development process. We now can work with engineering and product managers from a bottom-up perspective and my executive leadership team from a top-down perspective. We can see what we are trying to achieve, where we are trying to go, what are the major initiatives and projects that we need to do, how do resources tie to features that tie to business objectives, and more. The roll up reporting from Jira to OKRs has really made a huge impact from an insights perspective on what we're doing and what we're going to achieve. Now I can have a good conversation with executives with a known understanding of the data.

Cons:

I don’t have many. The support team is really helpful and has helped us to roll out the tool every step of the way. Whenever there is an issue, they are quick to address it.

All-in-one product planning, roadmapping and tracking tool

Comments: Dragonboat is the planning tool we, as a product organization, were lacking for product roadmapping and quarterly alignment. Long gone are the the days of out-of-date excel spreadsheets and roadmap screenshots. Product, Engineering and Design can all collaborate in one single location for product prioritization, planning and resourcing. In addition, Project/Program Management can easily track progress thanks to the JIRA integration and easily communicate update to all stakeholders via the Dragonboat dashboard.

Pros:

Resource planning, quarterly alignment and roadmapping are the main problems that brought us to Dragonboat. We have been able to increase team collaboration for product prioritization, incorporate quarterly alignment into our processes and increase visibility into our roadmap.

Cons:

Dragonboat is a powerful tool that may require a bit of a learning curve to get properly setup.

Good for Any Size Company or Business

Comments: We're able to work at a faster rate and actually show, from a bottom-line aspect, how we're helping the company grow.

Pros:

Dragonboat is very adaptable to whatever the size of the company/business. ONE of my favorite features is the Dashboard Snapshot. This is the view I use with senior leadership. They like the simplicity of them and they can in an instant know how things are going with any one of the strategic initiatives.

Cons:

Nothing stands out. There has been a hiccup here and there, but their team is fast to respond and releases tons of amazing features quickly.

Best product portfolio management tool for the outcome-driven organization

Comments: Dragonboat clearly knows how to run a great company. It looks modern, beautiful and is our single source of truth connecting everyone from the executive teams to the product and engineering teams, and the rest of the company.

Pros:

What I love about Dragonboat is that it's much more than just a product portfolio management software. It enables a framework for how to run a successful product company. It's insightful and intuitive. Every outcome-focused product org should use it.

Cons:

Not many to report here. It took a bit of time to translate our structure into Dragonboat, but their support team has been very helpful, answering our questions and needs promptly.

Ultimate winner among product portfolio management tools

Comments: We are growing fast and need the right solution for portfolio management to connect roadmaps with OKRs and run our quarterly planning and tracking. After I evaluated 25 tools, I finally found Dragonboat - the only tool that suits all our use cases and is flexible to fit our ways of working, not forcing us to follow the predefined framework. Finally, we can get rid of tons of tools and formats to keep all our product portfolio data transparent and up-to-date.

Pros:

Adaptive for company operating model All necessary features are in place Easy to onboard and get first results

Cons:

Some non-blocker issues happen from time to time UI/UX is a bit outdated but still manageable

Easy and lightweight with no change to our current Jira process

Pros:

We had been using spreadsheets for quarterly planning but it became unmanageable. We found Dragonboat to be easy and lightweight with no change to our current Jira process. I love that it's easy to manage dependencies and resources in a visual way, we're now able to identify bottlenecks way up front.

Cons:

As with any new tool, there was a learning curve when we were getting started, but the team quickly figured it out and integrated it into our overall process.