Frequently Asked Questions

Voice-Board is an Austrian all-in-one project management and customer feedback platform. It combines classic project management (Gantt charts, milestones, time tracking, detailed planning) with agile project management (Kanban boards, Scrum sprints, roadmaps) and an integrated customer feedback and voting system.

Voice-Board targets product teams, companies, startups and educational institutions such as technical high schools (HTL) and commercial academies (HAK) in Austria. The platform is fully cloud-based, GDPR-compliant and hosted exclusively in Austria (EU).

Voice-Board solves three common problems in companies and projects:

• Scattered feedback: Customer requests arrive via email, Slack, support tickets and meetings — Voice-Board consolidates everything in one structured board.
• Missing prioritisation: Teams don't know which features matter most — the voting system shows data-driven demand.
• Broken workflow between feedback and delivery: Requirements must be manually transferred between tools — Voice-Board covers the entire cycle from feedback through planning to release in a single platform.

Voice-Board replaces several tools in one platform:

• Canny / UserVoice: Customer feedback & voting only — no project management, no Gantt charts, no time tracking.
• Jira / Linear: Strong issue tracking, but no native customer feedback portal and no public changelog.
• Productboard: Roadmap-focused, but no classic project management and no Gantt.
• Asana / Monday.com: Task management, but no customer feedback loop.

Voice-Board offers all of this in one tool — plus GDPR-compliant hosting in Austria, which is a key requirement for European companies and schools.

Voice-Board is designed for:

• Product teams and SaaS companies that want to systematically collect customer feedback and feed it into their roadmap.
• Agencies and service providers that want to plan projects transparently with clients and process feedback in a structured way.
• Startups that iterate quickly and work closely with early users.
• Educational institutions (HTL, HAK) that want to run project-based learning, diploma theses and junior/senior projects with professional PM tools.
• Mid-size companies looking for an all-in-one solution without tool sprawl.

Voice-Board is in Early Access and will be broadly available in the first half of 2026. Early access users will be notified first and benefit from exclusive launch pricing.

Register now at voice-board.at — both companies and schools are welcome.

A customer feedback tool is software that helps companies systematically collect, organise and prioritise feedback, ideas and feature requests from their customers. Users can submit suggestions, vote on existing ideas and track the status of their requests.

Voice-Board offers such a tool with weighted voting, public and private feedback boards, category filters, status updates (Open → In Progress → Shipped) and automatic notifications via email, Slack and Microsoft Teams.

A feature request board is a digital board where customers or team members can submit new feature requests for a product. Other users can upvote and comment on requests, making it clear to the product team which features are most in demand.

Voice-Board provides feature request boards as a core feature — with customisable categories, status tracking, public and internal views, and direct integration with the project management backlog and roadmap.

With weighted voting, different user groups carry different vote weights. An enterprise customer's vote counts more than a free-tier user's. This prevents features being prioritised simply because many (but less strategically important) users want them, while high-value customer requests get buried.

Voice-Board allows configuring vote weights per user group, making product decisions both customer-driven and strategically sound.

A changelog (also release notes) is a chronological record of all changes, new features and bug fixes in a product. It closes the feedback loop: when a requested feature ships, it appears in the changelog and users are notified automatically.

A well-maintained changelog measurably increases user trust and retention because customers can see their feedback being heard and acted on. Voice-Board integrates a public changelog directly linked to the feedback board.

Requirements engineering covers the systematic elicitation, analysis, documentation and management of requirements for a system or product. It is the foundation of every successful project and prevents costly rework caused by misunderstandings.

Voice-Board supports requirements engineering through structured feedback boards, categorisation, vote-based prioritisation, status tracking and direct conversion of requirements into project tasks and backlog items.

User stories are short, user-perspective requirement descriptions used in agile project management. They typically follow the format: "As a [role] I want [feature] so that [benefit]."

User stories help teams understand requirements from the customer's perspective. In Voice-Board, customer feature requests can be directly converted into user stories in the development backlog, enriched with acceptance criteria and scheduled into sprints.

Voice-Board supports a hybrid project management approach:

• Classic / Waterfall: Gantt charts, milestones, task dependencies, resource planning, Critical Chain method.
• Agile: Kanban boards, Scrum sprints, backlog management, velocity tracking.
• Hybrid: Combine high-level Gantt planning with agile Kanban task execution — the most common pattern in practice.

Project controlling is the systematic monitoring and steering of a project with respect to schedule, cost and scope — the so-called iron triangle of project management (Time – Cost – Scope).

It includes target/actual comparisons, progress reports, risk analyses and countermeasures. In Voice-Board, project controlling is supported through time tracking dashboards, milestone tracking, Kanban status overviews and Gantt progress bars.

The iron triangle (magic triangle) describes the tension between the three core project objectives: Time (deadlines), Cost (budget) and Scope (quality/features). Changing one dimension inevitably impacts at least one of the others.

Voice-Board helps manage all three: time tracking for cost, Gantt scheduling for time, and backlog/feature management for scope.

Milestones are defined intermediate goals in a project that make progress measurable — e.g. "Prototype complete", "Beta release", "Go-live". In Gantt diagrams they appear as diamond shapes on the timeline.

Voice-Board allows any number of milestones per project, links them to tasks and roadmap entries, and sends automatic notifications to all stakeholders when due dates approach.

Stakeholder management is the systematic identification and engagement of all parties who have an interest in a project: clients, customers, users, investors, internal departments.

In Voice-Board, stakeholders are actively involved: they see project status via public roadmaps, can submit requirements through the feedback board, vote on features and track via the changelog when their requests were delivered.

A backlog is a prioritised list of all planned tasks and requirements. In Scrum, the distinction is between the Product Backlog (all known requirements) and the Sprint Backlog (items selected for the current sprint).

Voice-Board allows customer feedback to be converted directly into backlog items, sorted by priority, effort and strategic value, and scheduled into sprints or roadmap phases.

A Gantt chart (named after Henry Gantt, c. 1910) is a visual project plan in which tasks are shown as horizontal bars along a timeline. It displays start and end dates, dependencies between tasks, milestones and progress.

Gantt charts are the most widely used tool in classic project management. Voice-Board provides interactive Gantt charts with drag-and-drop rescheduling, milestone markers, dependency arrows and Critical Chain analysis.

The Critical Path is the longest sequence of dependent tasks in a project that determines the earliest possible completion date. Delays on the critical path directly push back the project end. The Critical Path Method (CPM) identifies these tasks so project managers can focus their attention on time-critical activities.

The Critical Chain Method (CCM) extends the classic Critical Path Method by also accounting for resource availability and uncertainty. Instead of building safety buffers into individual tasks, CCM concentrates them at the end of the chain (project buffer) or at critical handover points (feeding buffers).

The result: more realistic plans, less Parkinson's Law (work expands to fill the time available) and more on-time project completions. Voice-Board supports Critical Chain analysis in its timeline view.

Dependencies describe the order in which tasks must be executed. Common types:

• Finish-to-Start (FS): Task B can only start once Task A is complete.
• Start-to-Start (SS): Task B can only start once Task A has started.
• Finish-to-Finish (FF): Both tasks must end at the same time.

Voice-Board shows dependencies as arrows between task bars in the Gantt chart and automatically reschedules downstream tasks when something shifts.

Both tools visualise project work, but in different ways:

• Gantt chart: Timeline-based, ideal for classic planning with fixed dates, dependencies and milestones. Answers: "When will what be done?"
• Kanban board: Workflow-based, ideal for continuous task delivery. Answers: "What is in which status right now?"

Voice-Board offers both views for the same project — the team picks the right perspective for the context.

Time tracking is the systematic recording of hours worked on tasks, projects or clients. It serves cost control (actual vs. budgeted effort), client billing, resource planning and retrospective improvement of estimates.

Voice-Board integrates time tracking directly into tasks: team members log hours with one click, and project managers see total effort in real-time dashboards and reports.

In school projects (HTL, HAK), time tracking makes contributions transparent and ensures fairness: teachers can see who contributed how much to the project. Students learn a professional practice used in every company.

Time tracking also trains time management: when students compare their logged hours with the original plan, they learn to give more realistic estimates — a key competence in working life.

Effort estimation (Estimated Effort) is the planned time for a task — e.g. "8 hours". Time tracking (Actual Effort) is the time actually spent. Comparing plan vs. actual (variance analysis) is a central tool of project controlling.

If a task consistently takes significantly more time than estimated, this signals a lack of planning experience, unclear requirements or unexpected technical complexity. Voice-Board shows both values side by side in its reports.

A burndown chart shows how much remaining work (e.g. in story points or hours) is being reduced over the course of a sprint or project. The ideal line shows planned progress; the actual line shows real progress. A burndown chart is a visual early warning system: if the actual line is above the ideal line, the sprint is at risk.

A product roadmap is a strategic, visual overview of the planned development of a product over time. It communicates the product vision to internal teams, stakeholders and customers via goals, themes, feature sets or releases on a timeline.

Voice-Board offers both horizon-based roadmaps (Now / Next / Later) and date-based roadmaps with milestones — both directly linked to feedback entries and backlog items.

A public roadmap is visible to everyone — customers and the community can see what is planned, in progress and already shipped. This builds trust and closes the feedback loop.

A private roadmap is only visible to invited team members and is suited for internal strategy planning not yet ready to be communicated. Voice-Board supports both variants and even mixed boards with selective per-feature visibility.

Now / Next / Later is a roadmap format that deliberately avoids fixed dates. It divides planning into three time horizons:

• Now: What is being actively developed right now?
• Next: What comes next (next 1–3 months)?
• Later: What is planned long-term but not yet scheduled?

This format is especially suitable for agile teams and startups as it maintains flexibility without making unrealistic date commitments.

A release plan defines which features and improvements will be included in which product versions and when they will be published. It connects the product strategy (roadmap) with operational sprint planning.

In Voice-Board, releases can be defined as milestones to which individual features and feedback entries are assigned. When a release ships, a changelog entry is automatically created and all relevant users are notified.

Agile project management is an iterative approach in which requirements and solutions are developed in short cycles (sprints or iterations). Unlike the waterfall model, it enables rapid response to change and promotes close collaboration with the customer.

Well-known agile frameworks: Scrum (structured sprints with defined roles), Kanban (continuous flow), SAFe (scaled Agile for large organisations), XP (Extreme Programming). Voice-Board supports Scrum and Kanban natively.

Kanban is a visual work management method originating from Japanese automotive production (Toyota). Tasks are visualised on a board in columns mapping the workflow: typically To Do → In Progress → Review → Done. The goal is to optimise flow, surface bottlenecks and limit work in progress (WIP).

Voice-Board provides flexible Kanban boards with customisable columns, WIP limits, labels and swimlanes, directly linked to customer feedback entries.

Scrum is the most widely used agile framework. It is built on defined roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Development Team), artefacts (Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, Increment) and events (Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective).

Sprints have a fixed length of 1–4 weeks. At the end of each sprint there is a potentially shippable product increment. Voice-Board supports Scrum teams with backlog management, sprint boards, Definition of Done and an integrated customer feedback loop.

The key difference lies in structure:

• Scrum works in fixed time-boxes (sprints), has defined roles and ceremonies and is best suited for product development.
• Kanban is continuous, has no fixed sprints, no prescribed roles and is especially suited for support, maintenance and continuous improvement.

Many teams use Scrumban — a hybrid that combines Scrum's sprint structure with Kanban's flow visualisation.

Story points are a relative unit for effort estimation in agile projects. Instead of estimating hours, the team rates the complexity, effort and uncertainty of a task relative to other tasks, typically on a Fibonacci scale (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21).

Story points enable faster team estimation without false precision. Velocity (average story points per sprint) enables long-term release planning.

Project-based learning (PBL) is a teaching approach in which students work in teams on real or realistic projects rather than receiving frontal instruction alone. PBL develops independent thinking, teamwork, planning skills and the practical application of theoretical knowledge.

In Austria, PBL is widely used at HTL (Höhere Technische Lehranstalt — technical high school) and HAK (Handelsakademie — commercial academy), especially in years 3–5. Voice-Board provides all the PM tools needed for PBL: Kanban, Gantt, time tracking, feedback integration and transparent progress tracking for teachers.

Voice-Board supports the entire diploma thesis process at Austrian HTL and HAK schools:

• Requirements gathering: Clients and supervisors submit requirements directly in the feedback board.
• Project planning: Gantt chart with milestones (concept, prototype, submission, presentation).
• Execution: Kanban board for daily task management in the team.
• Time tracking: Each team member's work effort is documented.
• Communication: Public roadmap for the client, automatic notifications on status updates.

The result is a complete, professional project record that impresses examination committees.

Junior projects (typically year 3 HTL) are shorter, initial team projects that train methodological foundations. Senior projects (years 4/5) are more extensive and often involve external clients.

Voice-Board fully supports both formats — from the first task to the final presentation, including client integration via the feedback board, individual time tracking per team member and a transparent roadmap for the client.

At commercial academies (HAK), Voice-Board bridges business theory directly with hands-on practice:

• Stakeholder management: Structurally collect and communicate external requirements.
• Project controlling: Time tracking and variance analysis in reports.
• Case studies: Work through real scenarios with actual PM tools, not just on paper.
• Business PM: Budget planning, resource planning and Gantt-based scheduling.

Students learn tools used daily in management consulting, product management and business analysis.

Voice-Board supports multi-tenant architecture and is designed for use across entire year groups or schools. A school sets up a central tenant ("school workspace") within which any number of boards can be created for different classes, projects and teams.

Teachers have access to all boards in their classes and can monitor progress and step in when needed. Students see only their own boards. The education package scales from a single class to the whole school.

Voice-Board provides tutorials, exercises and sample projects for educational institutions that can be imported directly as board templates. These materials are based on typical HTL and HAK project scenarios.

Teachers also receive onboarding support, teacher documentation and access to an education community board where best practices are shared.

Yes, Voice-Board is fully GDPR-compliant (General Data Protection Regulation, EU 2016/679). The platform runs exclusively on servers in Austria (EU) — no data transfers to third countries.

For educational institutions this is especially important since personal data of minors is subject to heightened protection. Voice-Board offers role-based access controls, data deletion on request and transparent privacy documentation.

Voice-Board integrates with:

• Email: Automatic notifications for all users.
• Slack: Notifications on new feedback and status updates.
• Microsoft Teams: Webhook integration for team notifications.
• Azure DevOps, Jira, GitHub: Issue and task synchronisation for development teams.
• REST API: For custom integrations into existing system landscapes.

Multi-tenancy means a single software instance serves multiple independent customer organisations ("tenants") with strictly separated data. Tenants share the infrastructure but have completely isolated data spaces.

Voice-Board is built as a multi-tenant platform: each school or company has its own workspace with its own users, boards and settings — with no visibility into other tenants' data.

Voice-Board offers special education pricing for HTL, HAK and other educational institutions, based on actual operating costs — the full feature set at a fraction of the commercial price, including Austrian invoicing.

For detailed pricing and individual school quotes: be.wurm@htl-neufelden.at. All early access users will be notified about pricing and launch offers in advance.