Organising Your Product Space for Clarity, Accountability, and Adaptability
A Chapter From My Product Management Playbook
I'm writing a playbook for Product Managers: those who are new to the role, those who would like a different perspective, or those who are... curious as to how I organise my work.
Quick Intro
As a Product Manager, you live with chaos. In fact, your job is to manage the chaos. Priorities shift, stakeholders bring conflicting “requests” (a.k.a. demands), and development teams work in sprints, often under tight deadlines. Without a well-organised product space, misalignment, lack of transparency, and accountability gaps can (and will) slow down progress, frustrate teams, and ultimately, lead to poor product outcomes. Product Management is as much about structure as it is about strategy.
The Common Frustrations
Before diving into this part of the playbook, let’s acknowledge some common PM pain points:
Lack of visibility into priorities – Teams are often unsure what the focus is for the next sprint or quarter.
Misalignment across stakeholders – Different teams interpret goals differently, leading to miscommunications.
Inefficient backlog management – Overcrowded backlogs with unclear prioritisation cause slowdowns.
Poor documentation practices – Critical decisions get lost in Slack messages or email threads.
Difficulty adapting to change – Unexpected shifts in business priorities create last-minute scrambles.
To solve these issues, you need a structured approach to organising your product space. Here’s my take.
My Framework for Organising the Product Space
Heads Up
My tool of choice is ClickUp, after having used Jira, Trello, and Asana. However, I am sure what I will be describing, can be achieved, to a large extent, with these tools as well.
My Workspace Structure
ClickUp’s organisational structure is built for flexibility, making it an ideal tool for managing work across different teams, projects, and methodologies
Workspaces → The highest level, which can represent a company.
Spaces → Dedicated areas for different teams or departments.
Folders → Group related Lists together (e.g., for different products or product groups).
Lists → Organise tasks by category, such as roadmap items, backlog, or OKRs.
Tasks & Subtasks → The most detailed work items, with checklists, dependencies, and assignees.
“Product Development”: Using ClickUp’s Space, I can represent different teams or departments within my company. This space we’ll be focusing on, is created for all Product Management and Software Engineering teams in my company.
“My Amazing Product”: Using ClickUp’s Folder, I can create spaces for each product (or product group) that my company works on. And using customised permissions, I can provide read/write access to people or teams who need it.
“Features”: Using ClickUp’s List, I can list all of the high level features or epics that my amazing product needs to have. An Epic is a large body of work that spans multiple sprints, releases, or teams. It represents a significant feature, customer problem, or business initiative that needs to be broken down into User Stories and Tasks for execution. Learn how I’ve created by Features list.
“User Stories”: Using ClickUp’s List, I can list all user stories which must be refined and developed. A User Story is a short, simple description of a feature or requirement from the user's perspective. Here’s how I organise this list.
“Bugs”: Using ClickUp’s List, I can create space to track all bugs and issues that arise. A bug is an error, flaw, or unintended behaviour in a software product that causes it to function incorrectly or not as expected.
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“Backlog”: The backlog is where all work items are prioritised and assigned for execution. It’s a list that includes validated bugs, refined user stories, enhancements, and technical work contributed by the engineering team. This is where sprints are typically planned.
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“Releases”: A release is a collection of new features, bug fixes, and improvements that are deployed to users at a specific point in time. Releases represent a significant milestone in product development, ensuring that valuable updates reach customers efficiently. I use this list to represent software versions of the products that are worked on.
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The “Wiki”: A wiki is a centralised knowledge base where Product Managers document, organise, and share critical product information with their teams. It serves as a single source of truth, ensuring that everyone—engineering, design, marketing, support, and leadership—stays aligned and has access to up-to-date information.
Next Steps
The next few articles for this playbook will delve into how each of these spaces are set up in ClickUp. I will cover fields, task statuses, automations, and templates which I use to organise my product spaces.
If you need help setting up on ClickUp, book a call with me, and I’ll walk you through it.
Join The Conversation
I’d love to hear your thoughts! Drop a comment below and let me know what resonated with you, what challenges you’re facing, or what topics you’d like me to cover subsequently. Want even more insider insights, real-time discussions, and exclusive content? Join our private community on X—connect with like-minded Product Managers, share experiences, and stay ahead of the game.
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