a blog on prototyping by pidoco°

Wireframe embedded in Planio wiki

Pidoco has had a partnership with Planio for years. It’s a tool we use every day for our product management needs and we absolutely love how intuitive it is! Planio is a Redmine hosting company, which takes the hassle out of managing your projects.

On top of its task management features, Planio can also be used to embed Pidoco prototypes into wiki pages to share concepts with others in product management and development. We love that with Planio you can continue to develop your concepts in a collaborative environment, where you can also keep track of the progress of your development.

Planio has written a detailed guide, which shows you how to configure Pidoco and Planio using the Pidoco API key and how to integrate your wireframes into your Planio projects. The guide includes lots of helpful screenshots, so you’ll be sure not to miss a step.

If you are using Redmine, you can also find our API Documentation on our support page. If you have any questions about the Pidoco integration with Planio, check out the Planio website or email us at support@pidoco.com and we’ll be happy to answer your questions!

Being a project manager can be tough. You’re the person who needs to know about all aspects of the product, from its conception and development to sales and customer support. Last week I went to a talk given by Karsten Rieke – former product manager at Xing. From his presentation and the discussion afterwards, I want to share some tips with you for being a successful product manager.

Respect your team
Trust and respect goes a long way. Appreciate that you have a talented team who are experts in their fields and be prepared to listen to what they have to say.

Know your stuff
If you want respect from your colleagues, you will also have to learn how to speak their language- this means knowing your numbers or some key programming concepts. This will help communication and get people to take your suggestions seriously.

Know how others like to work
The slides from the presentation categorize how people in different departments behave and what their work styles are. Not everyone will fit into these stereotypes, but it is worth thinking about how your colleagues work best and how you can fit around that.

Get your team to communicate
At Pidoco we have scrum meetings every day across all of our departments, so that the marketing team knows what the programmers are working on. We also encourage everyone to ask questions, which creates an open atmosphere. It also helps us to see how our individual tasks make up the bigger picture in moving our product forward.

Go outside for inspiration
As product manager, you should be pushing for your product to move forward. Meet with current customers to see how they use your product and how they would be affected by the improvements you have planned. Other people in your industry can also inspire you to try out new things.

Thanks to IxDA Berlin for organizing this event and click on the link below to access the slides.

You can find out more about Karsten Rieke on Xing.

Have you checked out our new folder system yet? At Pidoco, you can now use folders to organize your pages, stencils and layers. This is a great way to help you keep track of your work, especially if you’re working on a big wireframe project. You can organize your work thematically, or according to the navigation of your site. You can also create subfolders, which is great if you have lots of content in your project. Some people create different pages in Pidoco to show the different states of a wireframe, such as when a popup is used. With Pidoco’s new folder system, you can then group your pages in the same folder or subfolder to help you keep on top of your work. The new breadcrumb navigation system shows you which folder you are currently in just like when you use your computer’s file system. This makes it easy to see exactly where you are in your prototype and move to other folders and pages.

Selecting prototype folder via the new breadcrumb navigation

Using folders with Pidoco is easy. To create a new folder, simply click on the plus sign next to the “Folders” label in the Prototype View. This will take you straight into your new folder. From here you can add new pages, subfolders and other elements. You can name folders and add existing pages to your folder by clicking on the context menu of your page and selecting a folder in the parent folder category. You can select multiple pages by holding the ctrl key and clicking the pages you want to organize in the folders.

In the example below, you can see that I have created a folder called “Home” in my Social Network project. I can now organize my page into the folder “Home” or into one of its subfolders (shown by the ‘/’ symbol).

Organizing pages into folders using the context menu of a page

We hope our new folder system will save you time and make your prototyping even quicker than before by helping you organize your projects. Watch this space for more information about new features. Happy prototyping!