How I use Confluence as a product manager
As a PM, documentation is everything. Keeping all stakeholders in the loop and development plans documented is so important. I would argue in today’s Coronavirus chaos, documentation is more important than ever.
Confluence is a great tool for documentation. It helps me when working on the following.
Industry Research — when considering new features, looking at competitors is always involved. Confluence is a great way to collaborate with others (in real-time, similar to Google Docs!) when researching how customers are getting similar solutions elsewhere.
High Level Project & Feature Overviews — for larger initiatives, Confluence provides great out of the box templates for project outlines. Use Confluence to display stakeholder information and tag colleagues across teams who would find the document valuable. While it can be challenging to get others to answer key questions they are responsible for within Confluence, these overview documents are a great place to encourage others to chime in where necessary (and this is partially your job as a PM in my opinion: creating processes that help people work well together across teams). In these Overview documents, outline KPIs, business goals, open questions and visuals (wireframes, flow charts, etc.) that can help people understand the purpose of the project and all that is involved.
PRDs — while PRDs (Product Requirement Documents) can be combined with Overview documents above (and some would consider the above in and of itself a PRD), I’ve realized that Confluence documents can get quite long (tip: embed a Table of Contents as often as possible — it makes navigating longer documents very easy). The fact is one component of a PRD is of course the actual requirements, but not all individuals in a company need to see these. I think it is best to reserve requirement documents for product, design and engineering. When mapping out requirements, try creating a table that has the following columns: Requirement (JIRA card), Dev Lead, Status, UI / UX Details. Note based on what you are working on other columns may fit better, but I think this gives a good overview for what the release entails, who is responsible on the tech side, what the status of the work is, and what the expected UI outcome is. Finally, embedding a flow chart you’ve created using a software like Miro is a great way to make sure everyone in the development process understands the user flow and intended functionality.
Process Outlines — there are many processes in product and engineering that benefit from strong documentation. Use Confluence to help with documenting new hire onboarding and feature / bug prioritization frameworks. It is also great to encourage an engineering counterpart to take a leading role in more technical documentation, which is often necessary for mapping out release cycles and testing processes.
OKRs — Confluence has been great in managing a weekly OKR document with my manager. Every week, objectives, keys and results are mapped out (as well as any blockers that need to be resolved in order to keep work moving forward). We also use this document to provide brief updates on the progress of any long-term projects. This final use case for Confluence as a PM is a great example of how written documentation keeps people informed, communication transparent, and goals outlined!
I hope this is helpful — Confluence is a robust software with ample features, many of which I probably have not even stumbled upon yet!
Great read. Very informative