Broccoli for Product and Program Managers
Who this is for: the two roles that work across teams they don't manage. They're genuinely different, and picking the wrong one is the most common setup mistake in Broccoli:
| Program Manager | Product Manager | |
|---|---|---|
| Question you answer | Is it on track? | Is it the right work? |
| Home page | Portfolio rollup | Roadmap |
| Cross-team rollup | Yes | No |
| Roadmap editing | Status, priority, start/end date — those four fields only | Full create, edit, delete |
| People data | None | None |
Rule of thumb: if you shepherd delivery across many teams, you're a Program Manager. If you own what goes onto one or a few teams' roadmaps, you're a Product Manager. If you need both, ask for both grants. Neither role can see any team's 1:1 notes, goals or journal — that's not configurable.
Program Manager
You have no data of your own — each manager whose team you cover grants you access. Until then, an empty Portfolio is a missing grant, not a bug.
Your navigation: Portfolio, Roadmap, JIRA Live, Whiteboard, Profile. Portfolio is every granted team's roadmap on one timeline — filter by team, status, priority and quarter, drill into any item for its ticket, points, owner and live JIRA status.
You can edit exactly four fields on any item in a granted team's roadmap: status, priority, start month, end month. You cannot rename, add, delete, or change descriptions, owners or points — you're coordinating delivery, not re-writing someone else's plan. Every change is recorded in the roadmap's history.
You also get a full Roadmap page of your own for program-level roadmaps — cross-team initiatives, launch plans, dependency maps — shareable with managers, directors and other coordinators. Sharing with a Director or Executive is automatically downgraded to view-only.
Product Manager
Each manager grants you access from their team settings. The grant confers edit, not view — once granted, that team's roadmaps appear directly in your Roadmap page, merged with your own. There's no team switcher; they're simply there.
Your navigation: Roadmap, JIRA Live, GitHub Metrics, Developer Insights, Whiteboard, Profile. On any granted roadmap you have full authoring: create, edit, delete, re-categorise, re-schedule, re-prioritise, set story points, link tickets, comment.
Link items to tickets — the highest-leverage thing you can do here. A linked item pulls live status, points, acceptance criteria and assignee from JIRA, appears in the team's health coverage, and gets matched to pull requests that mention the key.
You cannot share a roadmap you were granted — sharing is reserved for the true owner. When you save a granted roadmap, its ownership is preserved automatically; you cannot move another team's roadmap into your own scope, even by accident.
Both roles — what to expect from the data
Live where linked, static where not. Ticket-linked items show real JIRA status; unlinked items show whatever a human last set. Cached — JIRA for 30 minutes, GitHub for 15; on an upstream outage, Broccoli serves the last good data rather than an empty view. Comments work at every access level, including view-only.
Choosing between the roles
| Situation | Role to ask for |
|---|---|
| "I run the launch across six teams and chase slippage" | Program Manager |
| "I own the backlog for this squad and write the roadmap" | Product Manager |
| "I need to see all the teams and author their roadmaps" | Both grants |
| "I just need to watch, and report upward" | Director or Executive |
| "I need cross-team visibility for technical reasons" | Architect |
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