4 Themes to Take Away From Mind the Product 2018
Mind the Product has certainly established itself as a premier event for product people to connect, share, and learn from their peers. For 6 years now, the conference has drawn product people together from all corners of the globe. Last year, we were thrilled to attend, and published a recap blog post of what we learned (10 Takeaways from Mind the Product 2017). Unsurprisingly, this year did not disappoint, as we were once again reminded what we love about the product management community. There were plenty of nuggets of wisdom shared throughout the day. Topics ranged from the product management career path, to improving customer interview questions, to product launch best practices. After digesting the rich diversity of insight shared, we thought we’d share our own list of four themes that really stood out at Mind the Product 2018. 1. Product Managers are generalists in a world of specialists. Martin Erikkson kicked off the day with a brief but humbling perspective on our roles as product managers. He admitted that he often feels the effects of Imposter Syndrome. As product people, we’re surrounded by brilliant engineers, creative designers, and motivated marketers. Amidst the brilliance, it can be hard to feel like you belong. That feeling, or awkwardness as Martin called it, is important, and product managers should embrace it. As he said, “In order to be innovative, we have to end our addiction to always being right”. You can’t solve everything, and often times you will be wrong, but with the support of a team (your specialists) you can turn those failures into opportunities. Building on that notion, the next speaker, Christina Wodke, suggested that as a product manager, you have 3 jobs: You’re a business owner, a vision holder, and a team coordinator. We all know there’s no set path to product management – we come from diverse backgrounds and experiences. For example, Christina was managing a restaurant before she became a product manager. This experience taught her valuable lessons that transferred over to product management. For example, she realized that any effective team must have: Mutual accountability A common purpose Performance goals Complementary skills You’ll often depend on other departments (and more importantly, other people) to help you achieve your goals as a product manager. Teams should be collaborative and they should work to help each other. After all, we make products to make people’s lives better. People are at the heart of our products, and should be at the heart of how we work, too. 2. Data, data, and more data Leisa Reichelt, Head of Research and Insights at Atlassian, started off her presentation with a simple question: Is bad research better than no research? Product managers love data. After all, who doesn’t love a good graph? But as Leisa astutely reminded us, “Just because you can put information on a graph, that doesn’t make it science.” She said we should be more critical of what data we trust, and what we don’t. We rely on data to define our successes—and our failures. So shouldn’t we make sure it’s as useful as possible? As an example, Leisa examined how to conduct better customer interviews. She pointed out that the answers you get depend on the questions you ask. When interviewing, she advised: Start with a wide context. Be user (not product or feature) centered. Invest in analysis. Treat this like research. Preceding Leisa’s talk, we heard from Cindy Alvarez, an expert in customer research. Cindy offered great, tactical suggestions for how to reframe your interview questions to avoid confirmation bias. As she mentioned, “Any yes or no questions will have an obvious socially preferable answer.” Instead of simply asking “Do you want this specific feature?” rephrase your question to maximize its utility. For example, “Tell me about a feature that would improve your experience”. But Cindy also pointed out that before you can ask the right questions, you have to ask the right people. A sobering point she made is that “we look for evidence that proves us right, and we avoid or ignore evidence that contradicts our beliefs.” Cindy dubbed this the “Happy Customer Bias”. What we should be doing, she suggested, is talking to our churned customers, customers with low usage, and those who use our competitors’ products. From this we are reminded that the context and source of your data is just as important as the data itself. Focus on a data set that tells the whole story. Fail to do so and you’ll never know where opportunities might exist. 3. We have a responsibility to our customers – and the world! It’s a little telling that two different speakers independently chose to include the same quote in their presentations: “With great power, comes great responsibility.” Dan Olsen delivered an interesting perspective with this quote. He pointed out that while product managers might not feel like they hold great power, they certainly hold great responsibility. Dan conceptualized the product development process by breaking it into two categories: the problem space, and the solution space. As he advised, “Don’t jump to solutions. Start in the problem space”. Doing this helps remind us that the products we build are meant to serve people’s needs. We should provide solutions to real problems—not create problems for which we reactively offer solutions. Once we understand the problem, we can take steps to address it. Dan referenced the Kano Model as a useful framework for linking potential solutions to the problems they address: Touching on the importance of ethics in developing products, Mariah Hay spoke about the potential ramifications of the products we build. Her philosophy is “First do no harm”. Mariah reminded us that we are serving people, and that “focusing on human-centered ethics will pay dividends”. As she said, “Product managers are problem finders and solvers. But if we’re not careful, we’ll be problem creators.” She cited companies like Volkswagen and Cambridge Analytica. Clearly, the decisions we make in building products can have dire effects on our communities and our society. 4. Successful products do not require divine intervention Not every company is going to be successful. In fact, most of them will fail. So what is the secret to building a product that prevails? A few speakers tackled this topic from different angles. One was Nir Eyal, who delivered an energetic and insightful talk questioning how we handle distractions. Why are we distracted? Nir considered that we are trying to escape from discomfort, and he challenged us to acknowledge our own distractions. He even recommended time management products like Forest (a mobile app that encourages less smartphone usage) and SelfControl (a web app that helps you avoid distracting websites). To be “indistractable” is today’s ultimate superpower, he said. Avoiding distractions helps create a better work space. And according to Tom Coates, the final speaker of the day, the best ideas we have require work. Innovation doesn’t strike from the divine. Rather, it comes from hard work and perseverance—sometimes over the span of many years. In his presentation, “How to find the product”, Tom recognized that everyone is capable of having good ideas if they’re willing to put in the work. One thing that may help build better products, according to C. Todd Lombardo, is reconsidering how to utilize a roadmap. Todd was preaching to the choir for us LIKE.TG folks in attendance. As he said, “A roadmap is not a list of features or a detailed release plan.” Roadmaps are strategic, and they may look different for everyone. His recipe for an effective roadmap has 5 parts: Product vision Business objectives Timeframes (long term, or short term) Themes A Disclaimer (a way to manage your audience’s expectations) Sarah Tavel further added to the discussion on what makes a successful product. We know that eliminating distractions and building a clear roadmap is key. But Sarah also gave us a way to measure our success. As she explained,“What matters is not growth of users. It’s growth of users completing the core action.” Her point was that the best products are the ones where, if they no longer existed, we would have the most to lose—products like Instagram and Pinterest that create a library of memories and interests. If these disappeared, we’d be devastated to lose all the energy we’ve put into them. Successful products are the ones in which people find continued value. And no, it doesn’t require divine insight to build them—we just have to be willing to put in the work. Final Words on Mind The Product 2018 Much like last year’s conference, Mind the Product 2018 focused a lot on the human elements of product management. The speakers satisfied our desire to learn with actionable advice and compelling data. But more importantly, they inspired us with their personal stories and experiences. We may all build unique products for a variety of people, but at the end of the day, product people are people too. We can all learn something from the motto at Slack HQ: “Work hard and go home.” As product managers, it can be easy to forget to take some time for ourselves. And who knows, maybe your next big feature idea will come from focusing a bit more on your own life and the ways in which you personally interact with products!
4 Useful Real-Life Customer Interview Email Templates
Communication is a vital skill for product managers. We spend lots of time thinking about the best way to deliver our product roadmaps, give presentations, run effective meetings, and create stakeholder alignment. But in reality, the communication tool we use far more often is email. Even if internal communication has shifted to collaboration platforms such as Slack or Microsoft Teams, email is still the universal communication method for interacting with customers. And there may be no more valuable type of email than a customer interview email that solicits customer feedback. Product managers can’t effectively do their jobs without understanding customer needs and gauging their satisfaction with the current offering. And while in a perfect world we’d get to sit down and chat with every user about their experience, that’s not a particularly scalable model. But by reaching out to customers via email during specific moments in the customer journey, product managers can tap into what users feel while the experience is still fresh in their minds. These emails are important because customer feedback is the lifeblood of any customer-centric organization, revealing exciting opportunities and painful realizations. But if the emails you’re sending don’t spark a response, you’ll never know what you’re missing. Download My Customer Interview Tool Box ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '7f735619-2494-4c81-b86b-cf6e764a20c3', {}); 4 Key Ingredients of an Effective Customer Feedback Request Email Your customers didn’t ask you to ask for their feedback, so you must make it worth their while. By including each of the following in your email template, you’ll increase your response rate and the quality of what you hear back. 1. Lead with intention Being clear and concise is the key here. Tell them why you’re reaching out—you just tried a feature, haven’t used the product in a while, etc. That way, they don’t think it is just a blanket spam email sent to every user. 2. Tell them what you want An open-ended request for feedback might seem the least intrusive and limiting, but that can seem daunting to a user not in the habit of offering input and might swamp you with all kinds of irrelevant comments. Be specific without being too leading in your request (think “we want to hear about your experience” and not “tell us what we should do better”). 3. Ask for availability while respecting their time If your email asks the customer to participate in a call, web conference, or follow-up meeting, be upfront with exactly how much time you’re asking for. Less is more, in this case, so design your feedback session to be efficient, limiting the focus so you can squeeze it into as narrow a window as possible. Telling them you only need, for example, 15 minutes of their time, should increase response rates and be less of a burden on both of your schedules. Watch our webinar on scaling customer-centricity to see how to strike the balance: 4. Be genuine Remember, you are asking them for a favor, and they owe you nothing! Use natural language and don’t come across as too pushy or demanding. The more human and organic it feels, the more likely they’ll want to respond. 4 Customer Feedback Request Email Templates Here are some basic templates for four different types of requests to help you along your journey in crafting useful emails. Use these as starting points, customizing them based on your product’s nature, what you know about the customer and the specific context of “the ask.” These templates are specifically requesting a phone call or meeting. They could just as easily prompt the user to complete a survey or provide feedback directly via an emailed response. Remember, anything you can do to make this seem like a person-to-person interaction and not an automated, system-generated message will improve the odds of a positive response. 1. The Feature Feedback Request “Hello [the customer’s first name], I see you tried [X feature] recently. I’m very interested to hear about your experience on [feature-specific topic]. Do you have some time in the next week or so for a short, 30-minute conversation? Thank you, and I look forward to hearing from you, [Your name] [Your title at/@ your company]” 2. The Discovery Session “Hello [the customer’s first name], Thank you for recently purchasing [Y enterprise product]. We’re curious to understand more about your decision process to buy it, and how your experience has been so far— specifically how you’re finding [topic B]. Do you have some time in the next week or so for an informal 15-minute conversation? Thank you, and I look forward to hearing from you, [Your name] [Your title at/@ your company]” 3. The Feature Validation Session “Hello [the customer’s first name], I see you run [ABC, are using a particular product feature, or are a particular user]. Based on that experience, I would be very interested in getting your feedback on a potential new feature we’re considering. Do you have some time in the next week for a conversation? It would be great to spend 45 minutes to an hour exploring this with you. Thank you, and I look forward to hearing from you, [Your name] [Your title at/@ your company]” 4. The Support Experience Review “Hello [the customer’s first name], I saw you recently contacted customer support regarding an issue you were having with [topic Z]. I would be very interested in hearing your feedback on your customer support experience, and making sure your issue was entirely resolved. Do you have some time in the next week or for a conversation? It should be a quick 15-minute conversation if you’re open to it. Thank you, and I look forward to hearing from you, [Your name] [Your title at/@ your company]” Prepare for the Response By relying on templates, automated workflows, and routine, product managers can create a continuous feedback loop by prompting customers for their input. As the goal is for customers to respond and set up a time to talk, be sure your calendar is relatively open before firing these emails off. You don’t want to spoil your first interaction with them by delaying the actual phone call until their experience is no longer fresh. So don’t be too overly aggressive in sending out more requests than you can reasonably handle. What product managers hear back from these feedback sessions may be startling insights, painful realizations, or helpful, constructive criticism, thanks to asking great questions before sitting back and listening. But without asking, there’s no way to know what’s truly on the mind of real users. The more perspectives we receive, the more informed and grounded our decisions will be. To avoid overreacting to any lone nugget of feedback, product teams need a defined system for capturing, organizing, validating, and summarizing what they hear. You should contextualize and socialize these results to key stakeholders. They can learn from what’s really happening in the marketplace, adjusting their plans and strategy accordingly. Customer Interview Email Takeaways On a final note, don’t forget to close the loop with customers who give their time and provide feedback. Follow up when their requests are being acted on or are now available, as well as when you decide they won’t be in the cards. It’s the least you can do to acknowledge their participation in the process. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'd16e75f0-0601-4ef3-909a-e2b4f61f0c9a', {});
5 Hidden Prioritization Pitfalls That Product Managers Should Avoid
I was asked by LIKE.TG to create a journey map that maps out their customers’ experience during the 30 day free trial. In this post I am sharing the process I used to create the journey map for ProductPlan. As discussed in our previous article, How Journey Maps Can Help Product Managers Build Better Products, a customer journey map is a graphic or narrative representation of the customer’s relationship with a company, product or service. It shows the customer’s interactions with the business over time and across service channels. Based on the customer’s perspective, it shows the meeting points between the customer’s expectations and the requirements of the business. Like most designers, I’ve had to wear two hats — one hat as the designer who knows the application inside and out looking for pitfalls and pain points to help identify how to make the product better, and the other hat as the customer who is reviewing the product for the first time and wants to see if it fits their organization’s needs. This article is a peek into my process of creating a journey map and the insights gained while evaluating the first time product experience of a LIKE.TG customer. Along with this post, I’ve included the customer journey map my team and I created so you can use the final deliverable as a reference when and if you choose to create your own organization’s customer journey map. In our original blog post on this topic, we discussed how journey maps can perform three important functions: uncover problems, show gaps in service, and help align members of the company to company goals. My focus therefore was to create a journey map that would identify the pain points for LIKE.TG’s customers, analyze how the customer touch points could be refined and make recommendations resulting in better customer interactions. Tweet This: “Journey maps uncover problems, show gaps in service, and help align members of the company to company goals.” Creation Process To create the customer journey map, the team got together to set our objectives and decided that the journey map had to: Identify ways to get customers more engaged with the product from the beginning Uncover problems that might be turning customers away Increase the number of customers who move from using the free trial to purchasing a plan To move forward, we first needed to pull together all our existing research findings. The information that would tell us about customers’ experiences with the product came from customer surveys, interviews, and in-app feedback. From looking at the many great journey map examples out there, it’s clear that there is no universally correct way to make one, and it can be overwhelming to decide the right elements to include. This is the phase where “analysis by paralysis” can kick in and one must be diligent in deciding what to include and, just as important, what to leave out. To avoid that problem, the team and I decided to narrow our focus on three aspects of the customer experience: customer actions, pain points and opportunities for improvement. Understanding the Customer’s Journey Customers come to LIKE.TG because they need a roadmapping solution that visually communicates the progress of their company’s goals, highlights opportunities, and prioritizes initiatives. When potential customers become aware of LIKE.TG, their first stop is the LIKE.TG website. The home page provides a high level overview, while subsequent pages dive into details on how the product actually works. As customers review the LIKE.TG website and its competitors’ websites, we imagined typical questions that come up and included them in the journey map: There are several roadmapping products out there. Which one is best? I don’t have time to research every solution and read details. How will LIKE.TG integrate with existing project management tools within my organization? After signing up, customers are invited to take the product tour, participate in a webinar, and watch our video tutorials. In addition, we message them in the support chat to let them know we’re here if they have any questions. After that, users are on their own to explore the product. Employees at LIKE.TG who regularly chat with customers share that users report having different needs when getting started. While some users are ready to dive in by starting from scratch, many new customers often ask for templates or samples to get a sense for how a roadmap could be used for their particular situation. Other customers want an easy way to import their data from third party project management tools like JIRA or Pivotal Tracker. Our team thought, “Why not provide roadmap samples and make importing data accessible to users from day one during the onboarding process?” From the large number of team accounts, we know that users don’t typically create roadmaps in silos, but often do so in collaboration with their team. Looking through our customer database, we found a lot current free trial users who work at the same company and are evaluating LIKE.TG separately. In addition to analyzing our customer database, we looked at key usage metrics and discovered that a large percentage of users who purchase LIKE.TG frequently share roadmaps with others. We hypothesized that facilitating collaboration during the signup process by allowing users to invite colleagues would increase total customer engagement and awareness of LIKE.TG while getting increased buy-in from their team to justify the purchase. During our research for this project, the LIKE.TG team conducted tests on usertesting.com and ran participants through the entire sign-up flow, allowing them to explore the various areas of the product. After each test, we surveyed them and asked, “What onboarding formats do you like best in order to get started with a new software application?” The multiple choice answers included: Video Tutorials Contextual Tool Tips Educational Emails Live Chat I prefer no onboarding process The majority of users chose video tutorials and contextual tool tips. We also got usage data that the videos we send through the support chat don’t get a lot of attention. The team realized that embedding the videos in the product tour could potentially improve the customer’s learning while at the same time encouraging them to explore the interface. From surveying several hundred customers who didn’t purchase a paid plan after their free trial expired, we discovered that a large percentage of users who didn’t purchase LIKE.TG said it was because they felt they didn’t have enough time to evaluate the product. Today, we don’t do a good job of making it clear to customers how many days are left in their free trial and we don’t present an obvious way to upgrade to a paid account. We hypothesized that users’ free trials were expiring without them realizing it and decided to experiment with different approaches to this problem. Making the Customer Journey Map Actionable In my experience, stakeholders often look at a customer journey map and say, “This a great visual, but how am I supposed to use this?” That’s a great question. In our case, as soon as the LIKE.TG customer journey map was complete, the team took the insights we gathered and added them to our “First Time User Experience” roadmap. Putting the opportunities into the Planning Board helped us weigh the benefits and costs of each item. We defined our benefit categories as “Faster customer success in app” with a weight of 30 and “Increase engagement” with a weight of 20. We then defined our cost categories as “Dev team involvement” with a weight of 35 and “Other team involvement” with a weight of 15 giving us a total score of 100. Once we added our opportunities to the Planning Board and defined our cost and benefit categories, we scored the costs and benefits of each item on a scale of 1-5. We then prioritized each item according to its total score. (Tip: we regularly use Google Hangouts for our meetings and discovered an easy way to vote on the ranking for each item by simultaneously entering our scores into the Google Hangouts chat box.) After scoring each item, we moved the top 4 items to the roadmap and set about adding these items to our product backlog for future experimentation. Reflections on the Customer’s Journey LIKE.TG offers lots of flexibility to customers, but customers still need some targeted guidance based on their unique needs when they’re first getting started. With some tweaks to the process of guiding customers on day one, I believe LIKE.TG can improve overall user engagement and ultimately increase its conversion rate of free trial users to purchased plan customers. In summary, here are a few of the opportunities we discovered from the journey mapping process: Include FAQs on the sign up page Allow users to invite team members during sign up Embed video tutorials in the product tour Provide sample roadmaps from the outset Allow users to import their data right after signing up Add a friendly “Subscribe Now” button in the interface Display an indicator of how many days are left in the free trial Final Thoughts on the Journey Mapping Process There is no one correct way to create a journey map. It depends on variables such as the stakeholders involved, the UX expert facilitating the process, and of course, the business’s product or service that is being mapped. Tweet This: “As designers and product managers, we must walk a fine line between educating users while not overwhelming them.” How your customers use your product is rarely straightforward. As designers and product managers, we must walk a fine line between educating first time users while not overwhelming them with too much information. Getting people through the process from signing up to try your product all the way to becoming a paying customer doesn’t always happen smoothly. But, spending time to learn as much as you can about your users’ goals and how they’re using (or not using) your product makes for happy customers and better business. When used correctly, customer journey maps can be an effective tool in facilitating that process.
5 Product Marketing Lessons I Learned at INBOUND 2018
Last week, I had the pleasure of attending HubSpot’s INBOUND conference in Boston. The conference marked my first trip to Boston (go Sox!) and was a delightful mix of education, networking, and hot buttered lobster rolls. All three were immensely satisfying. INBOUND 2018’s theme, “Grow Better,” was thoughtfully incorporated into every track of the event. Many talks focused on empowering marketing, sales and customer success teams to help their respective companies scale up and grow their customer bases. As modern marketers, we have the tools available to deliver personalization at scale, and it’s our responsibility to create a customer-centric growth strategy and deliver value to our users with every touchpoint. As a product marketer myself, I believe that product marketing plays an important role in acquiring and retaining customers. INBOUND 2018 left me feeling inspired and ready to create a better experience for visitors and customers. In the spirit of paying it forward when you’re gifted useful knowledge, here are 5 key takeaways for product marketers. 1. Marketing deserves a seat at the product table (but sometimes it needs to fight for it). In my first breakout session (and one of my favorites from the entire week), Matt Hodges from Intercom shared advice from his experience surviving as a marketer at a product-centric company (slides here). Matt was the first marketing hire at Intercom, a high growth SaaS company that focuses on customer messaging. He shared his experience building out a product marketing team at a company with a product that the founders believed “sold itself.” One of Matt’s main points was that marketing leadership deserves a voice in discussions about product. It’s easy for product managers at a product-centric company to think they have everything figured out. And it can be extremely difficult for marketers to gain respect and prove value in that environment. Matt shared three solid tips for earning respect from product management: Know your product better than anyone at the company. Know who you sell to and who you’re up against (customers, current competitors, future competitors). Know how your product team works. Embed yourself in their process when you can. The fact of the matter is, product teams that don’t take advantage of talking with marketing are missing out on extremely valuable front-line product feedback. But it is largely up to marketing to prove their value and earn the right to share their feedback. Suggestion: If you are a marketer at a product-centric company, don’t just expect clout from the outset. Put together a tangible plan for proving value, gaining respect, and making your voice heard. 2. Customer Success is part of the product (and should be part of your launch strategy). A major theme discussed at INBOUND 2018 was the continuous shift from a more traditional funnel-centric mindset to HubSpot’s concept of the growth flywheel. The flywheel is essentially a continuous circle where the customer is at the center and sales, marketing, and customer success work in tandem to grow and support that customer base. I personally see a few challenges with HubSpot’s idea of the flywheel. One being that it forces you to lose the concept of an input, and that there’s no easy way to visualize the customer journey. But, I like seeing customer success finally receive the respect it deserves. Not only is customer success an important component of the product (as Peter Merholz famously noted, “the experience is the product”), but also, it plays a vital role in growing MRR and therefore should be included in your overall growth strategy. Alison Elworthy, VP of Customer Success at HubSpot, spoke about this in her talk, “How to Evolve Your Customer Success Strategy to Fuel Your Company’s Growth” (slides here). One section of her talk especially resonated with me: using customers as a go-to-market lever. As customer acquisition costs (CAC) rises—CAC has risen 50% in the last 5 years across all industries—-and buying behaviors change—customers don’t trust businesses anymore, they trust their networks—customer success teams play a massive role in growing a company’s customer base and increasing customer lifetime value (LTV). At HubSpot, net promoter score (NPS) is a key business metric. which continuously gets measured at various stages in the customer journey. As results are measured, they’re shared across the organization (HubSpot, like LIKE.TG, has a designated Slack channel for NPS responses). But the team at HubSpot knows that customer delight is not solely the responsibility of the customer success department. It is a team sport influenced by a wide variety of levers. HubSpot took specific steps to ensure this is the case, including: Creating a dedicated customer marketing team. Tying sales commissions to customer performance (commissions are taken back if a customer churns too early) and promoting sales team members based on them bringing in *successful* customers as opposed to just gross volume. Making NPS a performance metric for product teams in addition to product line-specific revenue. The end result was a customer success team that not only prevented churn but created a contingent of successful customers that expanded their usage and served as important reference customers. Suggestion: Make sure your marketing goals are tied to long-term customer success. Try measuring campaigns against the lifetime value they generate for the business as opposed to just looking at lead volume or customer count. 3. Don’t overthink it. In a refreshing talk on the viral side of B2B marketing, Nathan Rawlins (CMO at Lucidchart) shared his experience creating and publishing a series of viral videos showcasing Lucidchart’s product in an accessible fashion (slide here). First off, his videos are fantastic and should serve as inspiration for any creative B2B marketer trying to figure out how to make their product relevant to a wide target market. Here’s their most popular video to get you started: Second, I loved one of Nathan’s key takeaways from his experience: don’t overthink it. Lucidchart’s most successful video took two days to create. One of their biggest flops, however, involved a significant amount of resources to create and launch. Part of the “don’t overthink it” mantra is creating an environment where experimentation is welcome and failure is accepted as part of the game. Nathan’s team never imagined their video series would be as popular as it was. But if it wasn’t for the culture of experimentation at Lucidchart, they might have never created the first video. Suggestion: If you lead a marketing team, make sure everyone feels comfortable experimenting and making mistakes. Build experimentation into your DNA. Better yet, write it down and make it a part of your company values. 4. Marketing is becoming more and more conversational. Whatever your opinion might be about chatbots, there is no denying that marketing has trended more towards conversations over the last 5 to 10 years, and this includes product marketing. In his talk, “Introduction to Conversation Growth Strategy,” Brian Bagdasarian, Senior Conversational Strategist and Inbound Professor at HubSpot, talked about the evolving role of chatbots and conversations in the customer journey (slides here). One of the most important takeaways from Brian’s talk was the importance of context, especially when it comes to live chat. He outlined a number of don’ts to consider when rolling out chatbots: Don’t have a chatbot suggest a visitor to view a webpage that they are already on. Don’t use a bot for tasks that are highly custom and require a human touch. Don’t have a bot lie about whether it’s a human or not. The end goal is creating a conversational touchpoint that delivers the right message at the right time. While chatbots and live chat can be useful, one main challenge is figuring out when to use them (as opposed to a different medium, such as email or one-way messaging). At LIKE.TG, we have a simple cheat sheet for determining what medium to use and when. Live chat for a message that is likely to elicit a response and spark a conversation (we use Intercom). A slide-in or pop-over with a short form for a message promoting an asset or content offer (we use Hubspot). A formless tooltip or pop-up for messages serving to educate or quickly share new features (we use Pendo). We have seen great success with launching new features via live chat messages. These feature launches serve to re-engage leads or inactive conversations, and the ensuing conversations often result in an increased number of conversions or (at the very least) important feedback on the feature that is being launched. Suggestion: Experiment with using live chat in appropriate situations. Decide ahead of time what the goals of your experiment will be and make sure they are tied to creating a great experience for your user. 5. Your marketing strategy needs to by in sync with your sales process. Prospects today expect a custom, tailored approach when it comes to marketing and sales outreach. But one of the challenges of creating this personalized customer journey is maintaining that personalization as your company scales. It’s easy to chat live with customers when your customers number in the hundred. But what happens when you have 100,000 customers? In their session at INBOUND, Jamie Sloan, Director of Marketing Operations and Automation at InVision, and Francis Brero, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at Madkudu, shared their experience moving the marketing and sales teams at InVision to an account-based model as opposed to a traditional MQL-type model (slides here). InVision’s smarketing (Sales + Marketing) model is actually quite similar to ours at LIKE.TG: they are a SaaS tool with a portion of free users, a portion of self-service customers, and a portion of enterprise customers. The challenge InVision faced was building a marketing and sales process that worked for their enterprise leads. Because the purchase journey was so different, the traditional model of scoring individual contacts and assigning them to sales just didn’t work. InVision ended up working with Madkudu to implement an account-based model of marketing and sales that worked. I think there are two very important takeaways from Jamie and Francis’s experience: First, you need to find a smarketing process that works for both sales and marketing. And they need to stay in sync. And you can’t be afraid to change them as your company grows. Second, you need to find a smarketing process that works for your customers. Individual contributors don’t want to get calls from sales trying to sell them on a company-wide enterprise deal. Marketing messaging to c-level executives should be different from the messaging aimed at one-person-shop designers. Suggestion: Evaluate your current smarketing strategy and see if an account-based approach might help address the challenges you’re facing. Inbound 2018: Some Final Thoughts There were of course plenty more takeaways from INBOUND 2018, but these were the 5 which I found most useful as a product marketer. Periods of growth are always exciting times for marketers and product people, but they tend to come with their own sets of unique challenges—growing pains, if you will. During these times it’s always useful to hear stories and advice from people who have made similar journeys themselves. But at the same time, it’s important to remember that every team is different and what works for others might not be the best solution for you.
5 Things That Can Ruin Your Roadmap
Most product managers know the product roadmap can be your best friend, or your worst nightmare. When used in the right way, the roadmap can help explain how you’ll achieve your vision. And when used in the wrong way, the roadmap can sink you with endless PowerPoint updates, meaningless features, and commitments that can never be delivered. At a recent meetup, I sat with a diverse group of product managers, to get to the heart of the roadmap issue. The folks in the room came from corporate and startup and had a range of experience. Most were working locally in Sydney, Australia, but we were also joined by an expat who was on sabbatical from Silicon Valley. In two hours, five key insights emerged around the problems that can make roadmaps ineffective and troublesome. 1. Your Organization Has Too Many Priorities One participant shared with us that his startup had seven KPIs they were tracking, essentially seven priorities… as you can imagine, this was making his job as product manager incredibly difficult. How can you prioritize development when you’re trying to move the dial on seven things at once? In situations like these, it can be easy to fall into the trap of building a little bit of everything, to somewhat satisfy each of the KPIs. But it’s also easy to fall short on every single one of those priorities and create a Frankenstein product in the process. The hard road is to push back and work with the team to identify a single clear priority, whether that be revenue, user acquisition, learning goals, or something else. This is a potentially confrontational discussion to have, but one that will pay off in terms of being able to get traction on that single goal. 2. Your Roadmap Isn’t Visually Attractive This one may cause some debate. One of our participants recounted that his CPO claimed he’d never known an ugly roadmap to be successful. Roadmaps are communication tools, so if good design results in the roadmap being easy to understand, that’s obviously an essential requirement. But of course aesthetics can go much further than that, and represent real beauty, design and style. There’s a strong argument that aesthetics lend credibility. They give your document the sense of being crafted with care and attention. They suggest to the audience that you’re a professional who can be trusted to deliver on the vision. When the audience has that level of faith in you and the roadmap, it helps drive their future behavior to support those outcomes. The keyword, of course, is audience. It’s common to create different versions of a roadmap for different audiences – a practice often focused on the content of the roadmap, but sometimes design too. Some personalities will value aesthetics, while others won’t. A product manager can deduce the preferences of the audience and consider the context to hit the right note on visual appeal. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); 3. Your Roadmap Was Created in a Vacuum Stakeholder management is the bread and butter of product management. And I have a theory that the skill of being a universal translator is what lands many people in the product management field. (That means I think you’re pretty good at it already). But sometimes, the need to own the roadmap drives product managers to produce it alone, or without the input of some parts of the wider organization. This mistake is avoided with a balance of ego and humility. Product managers have to be humble enough to recognize the best ideas, even when they aren’t their own. They also have to be strong enough to push back on ideas that have no links to strategic objectives or the target customers. By walking this balance, product managers can own the roadmap, while keeping stakeholders involved in the process. Ultimately this provides the foundation for the organization to deliver on the roadmap together. Alignment like that is a powerful force. 4. Your Roadmap Lacks Links to The Product Vision A roadmap should describe how the product is going to move the product toward the vision. I hear this mantra a lot and our meetup group spent some time discussing this concept. It’s not that product managers disagree with this one, it’s just sometimes hard to bring to life in the roadmap document. Some say we never see good examples from real companies, while others aren’t sure links to strategic goals can be concisely communicated. Think of it this way. Your roadmap is not a list of features and functionality and it’s not a project plan. It’s the document that shows how your organization will get from where you are today to the product objective. Tell your product story in a compelling way. This story will include people (your users), the journey the product is going on (the roadmap), and why it’s important (the link to the vision). hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '5894a003-79ce-4ea3-9804-dae280a96106', {}); 5. Your Roadmap Changes Every Other Week One of our meetup participants shared that his roadmap was changing on a fairly regular basis. This creates a lot of busy-work to keep the roadmap up-to-date, but more importantly, when the roadmap changes constantly it’s unlikely you’re getting any closer to those strategic goals. Roadmaps can change, in fact they should change, in response to learning, shifts in the market, and sometimes competitor activities. But too many changes suggest indecision. They suggest the organization isn’t sure how to achieve its strategic goals. If that’s the case, then it’s time to take action around that indecision. Dig into what’s driving it and set learning goals designed to reduce risks and doubts. Ruined Roadmaps Saved… There is no magic wand. Like our products, we need to iterate ourselves, constantly observing our successes and failures to improve the roadmaps we present. Many of the senior product professionals I meet say their on the job experience provides the most powerful learning opportunity, but talking with peers about the challenges they face also figures strongly in the way they build their capabilities. Meetups – or getting the perspective of another product manager – can provide an alternate view on the roadmap, which just might help reveal you’ve fallen into one of these traps. We’ve all done at least one of these at some point in our careers (Yep, I admit to it!) And we’d probably like to avoid making the same mistake again. About the Guest Author: Jen Marshall is CEO at Brainmates, the Australian Product Management Training and Consulting company that organizes the Leading the Product conference in Sydney and Melbourne. In her spare time, Jen practices Vinyasa Yoga, dabbles in philosophy and listens to crime and mystery audiobooks.
5 Things Your Product Leader Doesn’t Want to See on Your Roadmap
Product managers can find inspiration for their products everywhere, and that’s great. But those inspired ideas can’t go straight onto the roadmap. A product manager first needs to subject a new concept to a process that involves making the case. For example, they can do this through research and weighing the idea against other items already on the roadmap. And perhaps most importantly, before you add or remove anything, you should gain leadership consensus. As someone who has worked for years as both a product manager and a product leader, I can tell you this from firsthand experience (some of it learned the hard way). Do not let your product leader see any of the following on your roadmap. 1. Surprises Don’t make your product leader ask, “What’s this?” Let’s say you’re working on a mobile app, and someone in your office mentions that connecting more deeply with Facebook would increase app engagement with specific segments of your user base. That sounds like a great idea. And we all know how thrilling a product manager can find discovering an excellent idea for their product. (It’s one of the best things about this job.) Also, let’s assume you trust the judgment of the person who suggested it—a sales manager or a product manager who handles a different suite of apps. So, you immediately add “Implement Facebook Integrations” to the roadmap. Then your product leader sees it and says, “Huh?” It would have helped to discuss this with your team, including your product leader before the integration epic appeared on your roadmap. Worse, you didn’t subject the idea to the full vetting before adding it to the strategic timeline. When your product leader asked about it, you weren’t ready with the answers to all the necessary follow-up questions, such as: Which persona will these integrations resonate with, and why? What will the anticipated increases in engagement do for the bottom line? How are we going to measure success with this initiative? A great idea alone can’t earn a spot on a product roadmap. Only great, vetted, and agreed-upon ideas can. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '527dc6af-8860-436f-9ca6-ae2b71b0cc99', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); 2. Items that raise more questions than they answer Don’t make your product leader ask, “How is this going to work?” Now imagine that for a different item you’re adding to the roadmap, you’ve cleared the first hurdle above. You shared the idea with your product leader and the rest of the team, and it won’t take them entirely by surprise when they see it on the roadmap. Heck, the team may even agree in principle that the idea had merit. And now you’re thinking: Everyone sounded enthusiastic about this idea. Why not give it a slot on the roadmap right away? So, that’s what you do. Then your product leader sees the initiative on the roadmap and says, “Wait. Did we all agree on this? Does our development team have the expertise to build it? Have they agreed to the timeline I see here? Did we get the budget?” Again, you’ve created friction with your team by short-circuiting the process of building alignment. You’ve also undermined your product leader’s trust in your judgment and your ability to guide the team successfully through development. If I saw an initiative suddenly appear on one of my product managers’ roadmaps—and it raised more questions than it answered—here’s what I would be thinking: If I can’t count on you to gain team alignment around a new item before you slap it on the product roadmap, what else should I be concerned about? 3. Items that have disappeared without explanation Don’t make your product leader ask, “Where’d that epic go?” Assume your product leader and other executives will notice any change you make to your roadmap. If you decide to shelve an initiative that your team had been expecting to build, you first need to complete two strategic steps: Step 1: Build and document your case When you drop a feature or epic from your roadmap, your product leader will need to know why. They might have shared the item with the rest of the executive team or discussed it with sales and marketing. You don’t want to pull the rug out from under everyone now, and not without good reason. Your development team, which may have already begun breaking down the initiative into stories and tasks, will also expect to know why it’s off the roadmap. If they have spent time and resources delegating tasks and creating a schedule, you owe them an explanation for why you’ve decided to change plans. Step 2: Have the conversations It would help to let your team know about your plans to table the initiative. Your first call (or Zoom or Slack or drop-in) should be with your product leader, and you’ll want to share your reasoning and then seek agreement. If your product leader agrees, it’s time to update the rest of the team. That means having the conversation with development, sales, marketing, customer success, and any other people who could be affected. Even if you don’t need their approval or agreement, you still want to offer everyone on your team a thoughtful explanation about why you’re making this change. It can ease the frustration of anyone who has already started working on the now-tabled initiative. It will also show that you respect your coworkers and believe that they have a right to know not just what’s happening but why. That will help you strengthen these meaningful relationships with your cross-functional team. Purpose-built roadmap app By the way, this is reason number 7,329 to use a purpose-built roadmap app, rather than trying to maintain your product roadmap in a static file like a spreadsheet or slideshow. A native web app will let you make changes like this on your roadmap much more quickly and easily. For example, with the LIKE.TG app, you can easily switch any initiative from Planned (where you publish in-flight items on the main roadmap view) over to Parked with just a click. Also, you can—and should—add a comment beside the Parked item to explain why you’ve chosen to park it. If your product leader or other execs open your roadmap and notice something missing, they can easily find it in the Parked section, along with a brief explanation of why you moved it. Better still: Before removing any strategic initiative from the roadmap, have that conversation with your product leader. 4. Technical details that fail to tell a story Don’t make your product leader ask, “Why should we care about that?” Your roadmap isn’t the place for technical specs, and it’s there to tell the compelling story behind your product. Let’s say you’ve prioritized making your enterprise software more secure to meet customers’ regulatory needs in industries like healthcare and financial services. One project that came out of your research is to beef up your apps from 32-bit to 64-bit encryption. Offering that level of security will stop your software from getting eliminated from these customers’ searches. Solid plan. But then, when you add that epic to your roadmap, it looks like this: “Upgrade enterprise apps to 64-bit encryption.” And your product leader says, “Why should we care about that?” Fair question. The encryption enhancement itself isn’t the goal, just a step toward achieving that goal. The epic should read: “Enhance app security to acquire more healthcare/FinServ customers.” That tells a story! With LIKE.TG’s app, you can even add a blurb explaining your reasoning, which you can hide in the epic and make available by clicking on it. That description might read this like: “Our research suggests health/financial markets are choosing our competitors because their regulators demand higher levels of encryption than we offer. Remember, your roadmap should communicate your strategy and plans. Any technical details that fail to advance your big-picture story will only slow your readers down and make them ask, “Who cares?” 5. Lack of clarity about where the product stands now Don’t make your product leader ask, “Where are we today?” Anyone who opens your roadmap should be able to quickly figure out what strategic initiatives you’re working on now, the status of those items, and what projects are up next. But with the tools that most product managers use for roadmaps—spreadsheets, slideshows—conveying this information is difficult. It would be best to keep that in mind when you build and share your roadmap. The roadmap should clarify and illuminate the details of your progress—not confuse your audience. When your executives review the epics on your roadmap, how will they know whether each one is complete, in process, or not started? One simple solution—and reason number 7,330 to use a purpose-built roadmap app—is to create your roadmap using software that lets you update the percent complete of any item on the roadmap. The right roadmap software will also integrate with your project management apps. That way, you can sync the progress of each roadmap item with the relevant tasks your team is working on and tracking in their project management app. In the LIKE.TG app, that looks like the screen below. Those with access to the roadmap can click into a theme or epic, allowing them to see how much progress the team has made. The key takeaway here is when you present your roadmap, or if you publish it live and invite the company to review it anytime, you always want to be able to answer—clearly and with data—the question, “Where are we today?” Successful Roadmapping Always Comes Down to Communication The common thread among all the pitfalls I’ve discussed in this post is lack of communication. When it comes to creating and maintaining a product roadmap that will benefit your company, the key is communicating with the relevant people every step of the way. When you present the roadmap to your product leader or when people in other departments log in to your roadmap online to see where things stand, you want them all to find it clear, compelling, and consistent with their expectations. You don’t want to give anyone a reason to say, “Huh?” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});
5 Ways LIKE.TG Helps Standardize Your Roadmaps
Sometimes you don’t know you have a problem until something breaks. Young companies are often scrappy by design. Their product teams are small and agile. Perhaps the team consists of a few product managers. These professionals can easily communicate, stay aligned, and present a cohesive product strategy to the team. Many teams fail to understand the importance of a roadmap. They fail to understand how it can help standardize and align their team. The scrappy methods that worked in the past can lead to inconsistency and disorganization as the company scales. There are more features to build, more roadmaps to maintain, and more stakeholders to satisfy. Without standardized processes to maintain uniformity, tiny inconsistencies in how each product manager approaches their work are magnified over time. This results in miscommunication, redundant work, and errors. Whether you’re a product manager or a product operations person for a large enterprise organization, we want to help you. Our roadmap software can help you create streamlined processes that scale along with your company. Our roadmaps can improve efficiency, reduce redundant work, and establish best practices. Here are five ways LIKE.TG helps you and your product team standardize roadmaps. Create a Roadmapping Process that Grows as You Grow Adopting roadmapping software alone goes a long way toward establishing the organization-wide processes that allow your team to scale. Without a tool built for roadmapping specifically, many product managers rely on square-peg, round-hole solutions. For example, spreadsheets and slide decks, neither of which make it easy to maintain uniformity. Product roadmaps should be consistent in the way they present information. They can be pretty complex, packing tons of data into a visual format that spans months. Moreover, roadmaps illustrate various work across teams. To make sense of this information, a viewer needs to know where to look. They need to know what the colors on the roadmap mean and how roadmap lanes get organized. They also need to know that the roadmap they’re viewing isn’t outdated. Get Your Free Roadmap Template Guide ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'aade5d3d-4c0b-4409-b1c0-31d727a356aa', {"region":"na1"}); Choosing the right tool Tools like Excel and Powerpoint open the door for too much variability when creating a roadmap. These tools fail to build effective roadmaps, so product managers must customize them to work for their needs. It’s a minefield of possibility that’s difficult to reign in as your organization grows. The style and structure of your roadmaps evolve organically in different directions and become challenging to comprehend and combine. Coupled with the lack of version control, and your roadmap process becomes a roadmap mess. Using native roadmap software, like LIKE.TG, provides immediate structure to how your team roadmaps. Think of a roadmapping tool as a pre-built foundation and frame. The frame gives your roadmaps reliability and strength while also still leaving room for customization and creativity. By adopting a roadmapping tool, your roadmaps will all live in a single space. They will follow a consistent style and structure. Standardize the Style and Structure of Your Roadmaps Roadmap legends help you visually communicate strategic goals. With just a pop of color, you can organize your roadmap by initiatives that increase customer satisfaction. You can create more revenue opportunities or enhance your product’s performance. It can be difficult to keep these legends uniform when you have a team of product managers who each create and maintain their own roadmaps. If every roadmap uses a different visual vocabulary for communicating the same information, the result is a set of roadmaps that require time and energy to learn to read, and worse, can’t be compared or combined into a high-level portfolio view without a lot of work to remedy inconsistencies. Many of our customers have felt this pain firsthand. It’s why we built Shared Legends, a way for you to standardize the style and structure of your roadmaps. With Shared Legends, you can create a centrally managed legend that can apply to any existing roadmap with just a few clicks. Rather than developing legends themselves, your product team can easily follow best practices and use the legends agreed upon by your organization. Even better, you only need to update your shared legend once to cascade that update to every other roadmap using that legend. Instead of hounding your product team to make the same update countless times, you can rest assured that everyone on the team is following best practices and using the same legend. Standardize the Information Included in Your Roadmap Details You don’t want to create consistency in the style and structure of your roadmaps. You also want to predict the kinds of information people can expect to find when they go to your roadmap with questions. Within the details of every roadmap bar, we provide a space for you to include additional information to help roadmap viewers understand “what” the product team is building and why they’re building it, who they’re building it for, and other essential information. If left to their own devices, product managers will likely provide the information they deem most relevant. They perceive this through the information they care about the most. On the other hand, they can determine by asking themselves the questions they’ve most often received from others. Either way, it’s unlikely that the information provided within each initiative will be the same across your team. Product managers need to find a way to properly align expectations. Custom Fields With LIKE.TG’s custom fields, you can designate a space for the information you want your product team to include on every roadmap bar. Maybe your team needs to keep track of the success metrics tied to each initiative. Or perhaps your senior leaders want to see the budget allocated for each priority. Rather than answer these questions individually over and over, you can direct team members to your roadmap and allow it to speak for you. Over time, team members will build a habit of checking the roadmap first rather than interrupting work. The assurance will provide you and your team with more time to focus on strategic initiatives, speaking with customers, launching new products, exploring new market opportunities. The freed-up time will allow product managers to work on addressing things that need quick prioritization. Standardize How Your Team Decides What to Build Next Prioritization can be a painstaking process. There are so many inputs to consider, from a mountain of customer feedback to features that your executive team believes will drive the business forward to your ideas around what innovations could attract entire markets of new customers. Without an agreed-upon way to decide what to build next, it’s easy to fall into the trap of reacting to what others ask for rather than what your product strategy dictates. It’s even easier for each product manager on your team to prioritize something different based on their assessment of what’s essential and what’s not. We want to help you bring standardization to how you prioritize roadmap initiatives. The LIKE.TG prioritization board allows your team to objectively score opportunities based on a customizable set of benefit and cost categories. Maybe your company has a business goal to increase revenue from a particular segment of customers. With the prioritization board, you can easily include that consideration as a benefit. You can then customize how to compare to other initiatives and consider how they might factor into deprioritization. For example, operational costs or the amount of development work required can also add to your prioritization framework as a cost. The prioritization board helps your product managers stay laser-focused on your company’s most important priorities. It also provides new product managers on your team with an accessible template for learning what should be top-of-mind considerations when deciding what to build next. Standardize Your Roadmap to Communicate with Different Audiences LIKE.TG’s tags are an easy way to categorize and filter your roadmap based on custom information. Indeed, not every initiative on a roadmap will be relevant to every kind of audience. Tags aren’t helpful if they aren’t implemented consistently across your various roadmaps. Tags highlight particular stories about your product strategy. For example, your customer success team might want to know which features support a specific set of customers. Your marketing team may need a release overview for August so they can plan their go-to-market strategy. Tags add these additional details to your roadmap and then filter your roadmaps by this information. Unfortunately, without standardizing how your team uses them, tags can quickly become a source of disorganization and confusion. In an attempt to create an August release overview, your product team might unintentionally create multiple variations of the same tag. Some roadmap items might be tagged with “Aug” while others tagged with “August Release.” Anyone who wants to see an overview of everything releasing in August will need to be aware of these variations. Centralized Tag Manager You should be able to keep your tags organized and avoid redundancy, confusion, and error. If you’re a Professional or Enterprise customer, we provide you with a place to do this. We call our centralized tag manager. With the LIKE.TG tag manager, you can easily manage the tags used to highlight product owners, dependencies, release statuses, and more. The manager defines which tags pertain to which kinds of information, merge similar tags to avoid confusion, and deletes any tag your team shouldn’t use. It may sound obvious, but making it easy for your audience to access the information most relevant to them is critical in keeping your team aligned, delivery schedules on time, and your roadmaps in use. Without a way to readily view this information, many will either rely on inefficient methods of getting the information they need – like asking the same questions of your product team over and over again – or move forward in ignorance. Neither of these outcomes is acceptable, especially as your organization scales. Streamline Your Product Roadmap Ultimately, roadmaps that have a standardized style and structure communicate information in the same way. They use a common vocabulary to express goals, identify priorities, highlight dependencies, and more. When you take the time to create consistent processes for building and maintaining your roadmaps, you reduce the cognitive load these tasks require. The freed-up time allows your team to focus on more important things, like speaking with customers, drilling into market research, and otherwise working on ways to improve your product. It’s important to understand that standardization is an investment. It requires more work upfront to create less work overall over time. Unfortunately, many organizations realize the need for standardization too late, often when existing processes break down as the organization scales. With LIKE.TG’s roadmapping platform, you can create a foundation of guidelines that build consistency and predictability within your organization over time. Our suite of standardization features ensures your roadmaps are produced by the best practices you’ve established, making it easy for your team to stay aligned, work efficiently, and gather the information they need to be better at their jobs. Read the Strategic Roadmap Planning Guide ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '06f68ad8-23a4-4d4e-b15a-e578f0f8adaf', {"region":"na1"});
5 Ways LIKE.TG’s Table Will Make a Product Manager’s Work Easier
TLDR: The Newest Version of LIKE.TG’s Roadmap App, with an Enhanced Table Can Be Your All-in-One Roadmapping Solution With the new and improved table, roadmap owners can reduce their reliance on static spreadsheets and own the data behind their roadmaps. Now they can create, edit, and share ideas, strategic thinking, plans, evidence, and other details right in their roadmap software platform. The Problem: Roadmap Data Lives in Too Many Places It’s a challenge just about every product manager faces. Maintaining and updating roadmap details requires hopping back and forth between various apps and keeping track of several static files. Most product managers use a spreadsheet to capture ideas, feedback, usage data points, and other product details. Then they have to reproduce the high-priority items in a different app—usually PowerPoint—to create a visual roadmap. Whenever priorities change, or they need to add new information, these product managers have to update two static files: the spreadsheet and the slide deck. Even more frustrating, they need to make these updates separately in each file every time. It’s not an ideal workflow. The Solution: LIKE.TG’s Updated Table Creates an All-in-One Roadmapping Platform We created LIKE.TG’s roadmap app to help you simplify the roadmapping process. With our latest release, which includes major enhancements to our table, you now have an all-in-one platform for your roadmapping tasks. If you already use LIKE.TG, our new table will help you finally move your data out of a spreadsheet and into a live tool. Or if you haven’t started using a roadmapping app, you’ll find LIKE.TG creates an easy, intuitive way to manage the data behind your product strategy. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'bcf47ad4-3832-42c0-9ae8-1fd954c6be9c', {"region":"na1"}); We’ve made it easier than ever to create, view, edit, and share your roadmap data right in the LIKE.TG app. Here’s how. 5 Ways Our Updated Table Improves Your Workflows Here are five quality-of-life enhancements in our new and improved table that can streamline your workflows, save you time and frustration, and help your team build better products. 1. See all of the data you need and none that you don’t With the new table, you now have more control over how you view and edit your roadmap data. You can see all of your bar details at once in the table. We’ve also included the ability to add or subtract which information is exposed, by toggling items in the Edit Columns dropdown menu. If you’re used to relying on a spreadsheet to make updates and then manually pulling them into your roadmap, this can save you an enormous amount of time. It can also help you drill down into the information that’s really important—and hide what isn’t. 2. Switch into ‘roadmap update mode’ with ease Sometimes you need to review your roadmap’s details for accuracy and make updates where relevant. Perhaps you need to add a new strategic objective, modify the tags associated with a roadmap item, or change up which team is working on which initiative. You’ll find that all of these details are now housed within your table. By clicking into any field, you can make edits on the fly without needing to bounce back and forth between apps. Make all of the edits you need in one place. 3. Keep your planned and parked items close, but separate The table offers two linked but separate sections: Parked (for your idea backlog) and Planned (for the items up next for development). You can easily move features between Parked and Planned with just a click. You can also add bars or containers directly to the planned section of the table, which is perfect for those instances when a new initiative is accelerated and needs to go directly on the roadmap. 4. Keep features in one place from creation to conclusion Just because an idea evolves into a planned initiative doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to manage it from one interface. The new table makes it easier than ever to create, track, and update each product initiative throughout its entire lifecycle. Whether you add new initiatives to your Planned or Parked lists, you can easily update each item in your table as it moves through development. You can also easily move an item to Prioritization in the score column. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '7c551d2b-ed71-444c-888b-18461bcb6944', {"region":"na1"}); 5. Automatically populate your table updates in the visual roadmap When you update roadmap details in your table, the app will automatically transfer those updates across your roadmap. No need to switch back and forth between views, or manually visualize initiatives in a tool like PowerPoint. Note: For stakeholders who are more comfortable with spreadsheets than a visual roadmap, you can always present your product roadmap in table. This allows you to avoid the hassle of exporting CSV files, and provides control over what you present to who. Simply click the Edit Columns dropdown menu and select which information you would like to share with them. What These Workflow Improvements Look Like in Practice Let’s say you’re a product manager and need to organize and analyze a lot of data. Before prioritizing anything on a roadmap, you have to sort through feature requests, customer feedback, stakeholder priorities, and more. With a more powerful table, you won’t have to constantly move between your spreadsheet and your LIKE.TG roadmap. You can now create, update, and maintain these roadmap details all within the LIKE.TG app. What if you’ve already built out your data in a spreadsheet? No problem. You can easily import your spreadsheet into your table without losing any of your formatting column orders or header names. Seamlessly transition from creating roadmap data to visualizing roadmap data. Takeaway With LIKE.TG’s new and improved table, you now have one unified space to create, update, and maintain your roadmap details. You’ll be able to see everything at-a-glance, edit details inline, and find the information you need. Improve Your Workflows with Our Improved Table Try the Product App Free >
5 Ways Product Teams Can Drive an Exceptional Customer Experience Strategy
I’ve worked exclusively on digital products for over 14 years, primarily in product and design-centric roles. Thinking back, it’s surprising that it was only about five years ago that I had an important epiphany that would alter the trajectory of our company’s product strategy and my career. As the Director of User Experience, our team was tightly partnered with our product management counterparts to ensure we had baked-in practices and habits that enabled all of our development teams to deliver an exceptional product experience effortlessly. And our success was evident in the feedback. Over 20% of customers took the time to praise the product’s ease of use every month in our Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys. Pat on back. But as someone passionate about user feedback, I started noticing a trend in those same NPS responses that kept some customers from being promoters (i.e., 9s or 10s on the scale). There were hints that the onboarding ramp was steep, for example. Or, while most of the customers raved about our support team, others expressed frustration around how long it took to get a response to their support requests. It hit me by surprise but was so incredibly obvious at the same time: The user’s experience does not start and end within the software itself. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '1f74539e-d4fc-4cb3-97c6-fd86de2bf62e', {}); There are other aspects and touchpoints of their experience outside of our product team’s purview or control. This meant that no matter how awesome our UX practices were within the product development organization, we’d never reach our full potential without being more inclusive of other customer-facing roles. In the above examples, that meant, to make more promoters out of our customers, our experience strategy required building stronger partnerships with our onboarding and support teams. The Product Team’s Role in Customer Experience Strategy So, a simple realization kicked off a new era for both the company and my career, eventually leading to the creation of a new role and slightly different title from Director of User Experience to Director of Customer Experience. But I was still a member of the Product leadership team, and the reason for that is relatively simple – we were a product company and, therefore, a product-lead organization. We were the hub by which the rest of the organizational spokes organized and focused their efforts, so it was natural for the product team to kick off the Customer Experience Conversation. To meet the increasing demands of our customers consistently, we needed to develop stronger partnerships and expand our user experience philosophy and practices cross-functionally. What is Customer Experience (CX), and Why Does it Matter? There are widely varying definitions of customer experience. So, for this conversation, I am defining Customer Experience (CX) as how your customers perceive their interactions with your company across the span of their end-to-end journey. These perceptions are important because they inevitably trigger emotions, and emotions drive decision-making. It’s not intuitive for businesses to consider emotions as part of their equation, but make no mistake that your customers are human beings at the end of the day. Strong emotions such as anger and frustration or pleasant surprise and happiness are the fundamental drivers of whether customers will choose your product, whether they will engage with your product, and whether they’ll stay loyal to your business. To further press the urgency of a robust CX strategy in your business, in 2019, Qualtric’s XM Institute published a study to better understand the impact of Customer Experience on business. Their research further validates the bottom-line impact that emotions can have on a business. A highly rated experience correlates to a significant increase in the customer’s willingness to spend more money with a company, trust and recommend them, and try out new features and offerings from the company. Overall, a compelling customer experience strategy adds significant value to the business over time through its impact on revenue, growth, and customer loyalty. The problem is organizational silos While over 80% of businesses report increased investments in improving Customer Experience, they often struggle to deliver truly exceptional results effectively and sustainably. Why? Because the operational models that serve the company well in so many other aspects are the key blockers of CX success. More specifically, the biggest challenge is in the natural tendency of organizations to create separate departments within the business. The division of functional departments inevitably creates organizational silos, a key roadblock to a successful, long-term customer experience strategy. Divided operational oversight By nature of having organizational silos, the business intentionally separates and distributes ownership of all the ingredients required for its ongoing success. Departmentalization has enormous benefits from a business perspective; most importantly, the ability to apply much-needed focus and investment across various efforts. But it also creates an inherent “bubble” from within each department will operate when it comes to designing processes and experiences against the bigger picture. Lack of a broader perspective introduces an increased risk of uncoordinated customer touchpoints and duplicate efforts in different pockets of the organization. Lack of shared goals Each department has its own set of metrics and goals that they are responsible for delivering. But what happens when there’s a separate set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) from one department to the other? Most businesses recognize the value and necessity of cross-functional efforts but fall short of creating shared goals at the executive level. Competing goals decrease the likelihood that departments will get the investment and resources they need cross-functionally to deliver effectively. So, each department’s goals are not met to their full potential, they’re also more likely to blame the other for not helping them hit the right targets. Fragmented technology investments One potentially significant and unintended outcome of silos, especially for software companies, is an uncoordinated suite of customer-facing technology platforms. Adding digital touchpoints is a culmination of not sharing oversight or goals across business functions. When one department is unable to obtain internal investment to solve a particular problem or need, they’ll leverage their budget to seek it out externally. For example, marketing probably has a separate website, and Customer Support probably has a platform for help documentation and service requests. However, if you’re in the business of a technology-based product customers will not differentiate these disparate experiences from the product itself. That puts all the hard efforts your product teams put into building great user experiences at risk of falling short in the bigger picture. 5 Ways for Product Teams to Drive an Exceptional Customer Experience Strategy As I previously mentioned, I’m a firm believer that the product team in a software organization is perhaps the best positioned to help catapult a successful Customer Experience Strategy for their businesses. For starters, product teams are at a strong advantage because their role is already cross-functional. In coordinating their efforts across the organization, the team has critical access to observe the subtle differences in focus and processes that might put their customer’s experience at risk. Additionally, the product team is naturally poised to drive end-to-end experience improvements since user experience is already (or should be) a top priority of their efforts. This unique perspective and experience-driven oversight put the product team on the front line of driving change in various ways. 1. Become Intimately familiar with the customer journey To be successful, this is more than just familiarity, rather, intentional curiosity. How intimately do you understand your customers’ interactions across each phase of their journey with your business and by the different departments in your company? One surefire way to get on the same page is to conduct a cross-functional Journey Mapping Workshop. Journey mapping forces outside-in (customer-centered) thinking by each department, who instinctively design their processes from an inside out (business-centered) perspective. The activity and resulting visual artifact is a powerful tool to promote internal awareness and alignment and to generate actionable insights on key areas of opportunity for the business to rally cross-functionally behind. 2. Share and advocate the journey Understanding the customer’s journey deepens your understanding of user context, it’s critically important to the long-term success of new features and improvements to the product. Share this context diligently with your teams, and paint the picture of the broader perspective as part of your planning and kickoff of new efforts. Sharing context challenges your team to consider aspects of the experience they otherwise may have overlooked and ask essential questions outside of the immediate product purview. For example, what’s the best point along the journey to generate awareness of this new feature to achieve peak adoption? How can the team partner with their CS counterparts to understand the impact the feature may have on current and future support offerings? It can even expose more complicated nuances where upsell and value-added features are involved, like how to craft an experience that doesn’t complicate or create confusion for customers in the way they are billed for your product services. 3. Broaden cross-functional conversations Product Managers notoriously have busy schedules meeting with other functions across the business; most of these are driven by a need to align other departments to the product strategy, goals, and roadmap. As the leader of these meetings, make time in the agenda to ask stakeholders to also share their initiatives. Ask them what challenges they are facing and how you might help. Get curious—better yet, involved—where appropriate. Of course, this may require some additional time investment on the front-end. The investment is minimal compared to the costs a business can incur in the long term due to the dangerous pitfalls of uncoordinated efforts. 4. Approach cross-functional relationships as partners, not inputs It’s all too easy for the product team to become the sounding board for all the other departments vying for their resources; after all, your team owns and sets the product strategy. The endless stream of things a product team could do is why it’s vital for them to constantly develop their skill in the art of saying no. Although your team is ultimately responsible for the product vision, there’s no reason that it needs to be a black hole and can’t be more strategically collaborative. Consider up-leveling conversations that involve people in other departments in setting product strategy. Exposing other departments to the myriad of difficult decisions you face every day not only empowers them to bring more relevant ideas to the table but also provides more understanding (and less disappointment) behind your “no”. 5. Make CX a vital component of your product strategy Successful execution of a businesses’ customer experience strategy requires investment from each functional department, and product strategy is no exception. Partner across the organization to set shared goals and KPIs around CX, for example NPS, support request volume, time-to-value within the product or for engagement of a particular feature, etc. Aligned goals and metrics ensure space can be made on the product roadmap to address product-related issues that drive CX challenges, such as usability improvements. It also ensures continuity with 3rd party systems so the product can remain the single digital customer touchpoint. Takeaways It’s not your product team’s responsibility to deliver features to your customers, rather to craft an exceptional product experience that drives the loyalty that keeps your customers engaged and makes your product an easy sell for future customers. However, in this day and age, that experience is hardly ever isolated within the product itself but spans in purview across the different organizational silos of your company. Getting genuinely curious – and involved – in the company’s customer experience strategy is the best way to succeed in ultimately delivering a truly exceptional product.
5 Ways to Become a Better Product Advocate Within Your Company
I recently did a webinar with Pragmatic Marketing on the topic of thought leadership for product managers. One of the most interesting questions I received from our audience was actually not about thought leadership at all, but about about internal product advocacy. The question was essentially, “How do you win executive buy-in to work on an innovative idea that risks cannibalizing some of your existing product line?” Although a portion of my webinar — called How Thought Leadership Can Elevate Your Products and Career — was about becoming a better internal product advocate, the majority of my focus was on why it’s so valuable for product managers to establish themselves as public thought leaders in their industries. That portion of the webinar unveiled a lot of great questions as well, and a lively discussion. But that attendee’s question got me thinking about what I believe is an important part of product management: Learning how to be an effective internal product advocate. Yet in all of our discussions about the many important roles of product managers — learning about customers, knowing the competitive landscape, communicating with stakeholders and developers, championing their products publicly — I think we often forget just how vital it is to champion those products internally as well, across the entire company. As a product manager, you are your product’s internal champion—whether you realize it or not Another interesting insight that came out of our Pragmatic Marketing webinar was that more than 60% of attendees, whom we polled in real-time, said that it was the product manager who most often promoted the product internally in their organizations. In fact, the next most common internal product advocates — marketing and sales — were cited by just 16% of attendees, while product executives were cited by only 12% of attendees. This tracks with my own experience in product management, where I’ve helped to launch several products. It’s also consistent with what I’ve learned as a founder at LIKE.TG, where I’ve had the chance to work with product managers across dozens of industries. Tweet This: “As a product manager, the responsibility falls on you to be your product’s internal champion.” The bottom line is this: As a product manager, the responsibility will likely fall to you to be your product’s internal champion. Which means if you don’t advocate regularly and persuasively for your products across your organization, your products will likely have no internal champion. Here’s why that can be detrimental for your products and your company. Why your products need an internal advocate Ultimately, being an internal advocate for your products will help you build better products. As a product manager, you are often facing competing agendas within your company, budgetary and resource constraints of your own, and general inertia across your company during the long process of bringing a product to market. By being an ongoing advocate of your product with executives, developers, the marketing and sales departments, the customer success team, your investors, and other relevant groups within your organization, you will create a much better chance that your product will receive the benefit of everyone’s A-game throughout its development. As we’ve asserted in previous posts here at LIKE.TG, like this one, it’s easy for everyone to feel enthusiastic and optimistic during an initial strategy meeting. But that early-stage excitement will inevitably wane, and it will then fall to someone — that means you, the internal product advocate — to maintain the advocacy and cheerleading throughout the development process that keeps everyone pumped for the product’s eventual release. Another reason an internal product advocate is so vital to the product’s success is to help ensure everyone involved stays focused on the big-picture strategic goals — and teams don’t get lost in the tactical details and minutiae. Because you can’t oversee every aspect of your product’s development, you will need to trust your various teams to make some strategic decisions in real time — and the more you are there to advocate internally for your product’s vision and strategic objectives, the more likely those other teams’ decisions will reflect those bigger-picture goals. How to be an effective internal product advocate So how do you pull it off? How can you become an effective product advocate within your company? Here are some suggestions. 1. Share with your company your product’s high-level strategic vision. When you speak with colleagues across your organization about your product in terms of features, you’ll have a hard time generating and maintaining enthusiasm — particularly among those groups who don’t understand all of the details of those features, or your market’s need for them. So instead, try to keep your communications across your organization higher-level — talk about the market problems your products will solve, the value added to your customers, and how the product will earn your company market share, revenue and a leadership role in the industry. Also, if the teams working on your products push back on your objectives or requests, and you can tie those requests back to the product’s larger-picture strategic vision, you’ll have a better chance of bringing those teams over to your side. 2. Tailor your product advocacy specifically to the people and teams you’re talking with. At LIKE.TG, in our conversations about roadmapping with product managers, we often find that executive stakeholders don’t want to hear about a product’s details. That’s just one of many examples of why it’s so important to tailor your conversations about your products to the groups you’re speaking with. You’ll be a much more effective advocate for your products if you advocate for them in a language that resonates with your audience. When you’re talking with sales or marketing, for example, you’ll want to emphasize how your product will help solve problems for the personas they’ll be selling and marketing to. For your executives, on the other hand, your product advocacy should emphasize the product’s eventual revenue to the company, or its ability to bring your company into new markets. This is also why we at LIKE.TG are big advocates of visual, web-based product roadmaps. When you’re speaking with several different audiences — developers, executives, etc. — you don’t want to have only one view of your roadmap. You want to be able to quickly change the focus and the level of detail based on who you’re talking to. Build a Visual Product Roadmap ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'a81908bd-d7dd-4be2-9d7e-cb09f3f90137', {}); 3. Make a habit of weaving product advocacy into everything you do. Becoming an effective internal product advocate means you’re always an internal product advocate — not only when you’re called on to speak. You have to make it a part of your job to be on the lookout for opportunities to champion your product across your company. And you can find these opportunities everywhere. Tweet This: “Make a habit of weaving product advocacy into everything you do as a product manager.” Let’s say you find a blog post or industry research report about the fact that your customer persona is on the rise, or that a problem that your product will ultimately solve is growing. Copy people across your company — your development team, your sales team, your leadership team. Let them know, “Hey, looks like we’re onto something here!” Don’t expect your teams to stay internally motivated from day to day. Life gets in the way of that. So use these pieces of market data wherever you can to help keep your teams’ enthusiasm levels high, and give them the day-to-day incentive they’ll need to keep doing their best work, during the long period between that exciting kickoff meeting… and release day. 4. Spread good product news across your company every chance you get. Another great way to keep your internal teams motivated and enthused about your products is to share good news about those products as often as you can. If your sales team closes a big deal, send that news out to the company. If your product gets an honorable mention in the trade or business media, share that across the company. And if you find a positive comment or quote about your product from an actual user? For goodness sake, jump up on your desk and shout it to everyone within earshot. (Or just email or Slack it to everyone.) Hearing that your product is succeeding out in the marketplace, solving real problems for your market and winning fans among your customer personas, puts a human touch on what otherwise might often feel like abstract work for your teams. Let them know that the work they’re doing is making a positive difference in people’s lives. 5. Hold regular product meetings to keep everyone informed. Often the simple act of bringing everyone together to discuss your product’s progress and to remind them about the big-picture strategic goals can provide a tremendous boost in company enthusiasm for the product. One of the things I encourage product managers to do is to hold regular meetings with the various stakeholder groups, such as marketing, sales, customer support, engineering, etc. These get-togethers are also a great chance to give both progress updates and much-needed context to the work everyone is doing. It’s in these meetings, for example, that you can discuss what you’ve learned from your trips out to talk with customers — what your users like about your product, for example, and what they’d really like to see added to it. Again, what you’re doing here is taking what might otherwise feel like a series of abstract disconnected tasks — adding this feature, changing this screen, fixing these bugs — and turning them into important projects that will be improving the way real customers, real people, will be able to work (or play or do whatever your product lets them). I also recommend that product managers record their sessions with customers. This gives them something to show their internal teams back home, and those videos can really help teams put a human face to the problem they’re being asked to solve with their product development work. The more real-world information you can share with your internal teams, the more they’ll have a chance to see the big picture — and the more enthusiasm they’ll be able to bring to their work. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); Advocate, Advocate, Advocate for Your Products! Bringing a product to market successfully is an incredibly challenging balancing act — weighing priorities, limited resources and pressures against other priorities, limited resources and pressures. The more support you can elicit from across your company, the more your disparate teams are aligned in their mission to bring your strategic goals to reality, and the better your chances of a successful product. But that takes internal product advocacy — ongoing championing of your products every chance you get. So if I had to sum up my advice here in one sentence, it would be this: Always be advocating. Have you found other methods of internal product advocacy that work for you? Please share them below.
5 Ways to Build Relationships in Product Development Teams
I have been a part of two successful startups and product development teams for the past 17 years. The first was acquired and thrives today with products such as GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar. The second one, AppFolio, went public and also thrives with its software for property management companies and law firms. The key takeaway from watching each of these companies grow from roughly 10 employees to 600+ each is this: It’s all about building relationships. It is just like exercise. If we exercise regularly, a side effect is that our diet typically improves. If we build relationships and really know and care about the people we work with, everything else comes easier. So how can we build relationships on our product development teams and thrive? Here are five ways. 1. Sit Together At my first startup, engineering and product development teams sat separately, and we all had our own individual offices. As our departments grew, we were spread even farther from each other. As a result, informal interactions between different groups went away, or became more challenging. Our communication would primarily take place over email or on the phone. Our engineering and product groups would only meet weekly or biweekly to review progress. We’d attempt to “be on the same page”, and that “page” was typically a schedule expressed in Microsoft Project. We weren’t exactly “strangers” but we really didn’t “know each other”. We learned — when we don’t see the people we work with on a regular basis, we make assumptions and distance grows — “us” and “them”; and “we” and “they” language emerges. Working together becomes harder. Years later at AppFolio, my second startup, we hired Jason, the product manager I worked with closely at the first startup. At that time, our entire company was in one room with an open floor plan. We’d have casual conversations, and share the antics of pranking people’s desks when they went out on vacation. Once when Jason was out we upgraded his computer with the latest hardware from the 80s as shown below! We were all thrilled when our property manager software was fired up on his screen. It was a fun moment for everyone, including Jason. It felt like we were all on “one team” when we were in the same room. Jason returns from vacation to find a “state-of-the-art” computer setup on his desk. I remember reflecting with Jason about being together with our groups in the same space at AppFolio versus being in different wings of a building when we were at the first startup. From there, we made a pact that our groups — engineering and product — would all sit together in the same open space going forward. It’s now about nine years later, and we still work in open areas and are together as cross-functional teams of engineers, QA, UX, product managers, and agile coaches. Example of a cross-functional team area at AppFolio. Sitting together does not come easy if there are remote teams and offices. Workarounds such as Google Hangouts and GoToMeeting are available to help in such situations. We promote the use of video for our remote friends as it helps to level the playing field and bring us closer. View of our satellite office via Google Hangouts at AppFolio headquarters. View of AppFolio headquarters on screen via Google Hangouts from our LA office. 2. Actively get to Know Each Other and Build Trust Doing activities to help get team members to know each other on a personal basis is an incredible strategy for team-building and raising the level of respect on teams. At AppFolio, when we reteam or change up team membership, we have deliberate discussions about how we want to “be together” as a team. We determine what we want it to be like in our physical team spaces. We elicit team members’ preferences regarding communication and interruptions, and vision out the characteristics for our team in order to flourish. This includes understanding how we will operate when things get difficult. Because they “will” get difficult. This raises the positivity in the environment and makes conflict easier to bear. Examples are: team members’ desire to go together for a walk outside if they have a conflict, or to give “alone time” to someone you overheard having a challenging phone call. The book, Creating Intelligent Teams by Anne Rød and Marita Fridjhon, gets into the specifics of designing “team contracts” like mentioned above. We also do many other activities to deliberately enhance the experience of getting to know one another and build trust. One of them is a modified version of the Market of Skills activity from Lyssa Adkins’s book, Coaching Agile Teams. If you walk through AppFolio today you are likely to find one of these Market of Skills posters hanging on a wall or the side of a desk. Team getting to know each other via Market of Skills activity at AppFolio. We also go on short outings together as a cross-functional team. We are fortunate to be located in Santa Barbara, California. I like to take teams out on hikes and combine it with sharing personal stories to bring us all closer. A favorite activity of mine is a “Fulfillment Hike”, an activity inspired by “Co-Active Coaching”. In this activity, we share with each other a “peak experience” in our lives about something that is personally meaningful to us. At the top of the hike, we stand or sit in a circle, and go around sharing the stories we heard from our partners. Together we derive the values from each of our stories and have a discussion about which values we would like to carry over into our daily work. We put up these values on a poster in our team area as a reminder of what we want. Photo of cross-functional team on a hike up Inspiration Point trail in Santa Barbara. By actively getting to know each other, we can empathize well with each other and can build great trust and camaraderie. 3. Share and own Challenges Together During the early years of my first startup, waterfall-style development was the norm. Unable to predict, product development teams would promise a deadline but deliver late. Discussions about this topic were extremely stressful and difficult. The saving grace of this type of thing was to cut back scope (ideally) in order to get as close to the committed date as possible. Conversations about this topic between engineering and product groups couldn’t just happen on the fly. They needed to be “scheduled” due to the distance between our groups. This took time and elevated tensions among our groups. We learned that our practices prevented us from sharing and owning challenges together. We had to fix that. Fast forward to AppFolio… due to physical proximity and actively getting to know one another, product managers and engineers are more open and honest with each other. Product managers get a daily or even hourly understanding of where things are at. Everyone is present together in their work-area and at regular team events. We can even discuss our work challenges during a team hike while going through a physical challenge. The chance of having negative surprises is greatly reduced. Example of product development teams discussing work visualized on a board in their team area. Cross-functional product development teams can also share the challenge of onboarding new team members. When team members share the mentorship of a new employee, the load is lighter. And, the person being mentored gets more attention, and is exposed to different styles of working. This can include cross-group mentoring. For example, experienced engineers can help out in mentoring new and experienced product managers. In summary, we are stronger when we face challenges together — regardless of what group we are in, or what reporting structure we have. Helping each other succeed helps us realize our goal of delighting our customers with our product development roadmap. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '9e6140b2-e382-45fd-ace0-16435228cf7b', {}); 4. Help Each Other Succeed I remember talking to our AppFolio co-founder and CTO Jon Walker about a challenge I was having with a fellow team member. He looked at me and said, “Heidi, how can you make this person successful?” That simple phrase changed everything for me, and I’ve come back to it over and over again as I coach people around me. When we hire people, we want them to thrive and be successful. That’s why we hired them. Helping to educate team members on this simple yet powerful topic can make an incredible impact. When I hear complaints about another person, I even find myself echoing Jon by saying, “How can you help them be successful?” When I mentor people at AppFolio I like to teach them the concept of Net Promoter Score (NPS) applied to us as individuals. We use the concept of NPS with our AppFolio customers on a regular basis. It tells us how likely our customers are to recommend our software to other people, as well as collects qualitative comments that we analyze for improving our products. It comes from the book The Ultimate Question by Fred Reichheld. When applied to people, I encourage people to think about their behavior and actions and how they think others might perceive them in their teams and outside their teams. Are they “creating promoters” for themselves? What are the chances that their behavior will be championed by other people around them? Teaching team members tools and techniques for communication challenges they are experiencing is a great way to support them and to help them grow. In recent days I have been teaching managers techniques to use with people on their team to help prepare them for having what they perceive as “difficult” conversations with others. We do an empathy building exercise based on a modified “3rd entity” activity from Organizational Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC). When you reteam at AppFolio, you have the opportunity to work and learn together with different people. But you might be used to the style of a particular team member and expect that the people on your new team will act in the same manner. This is the type of scenario you face with a fast-growing company like ours. Deliberately promoting the attitude to help one another encourages everyone to be “in it” together. This might mean building more patience and helping fellow team members along the way that are new to their roles. It also might mean putting our named “roles” aside and doing whatever to help the endeavor move forward. 5. Have Outings and Learn Together At the first startup, we had the tradition of having annual retreats where our engineering department would go camping, white water rafting or some other trip typically involving the outdoors. The tradition originated, according to our founder Klaus Schauser from an experience he had with a student group that he was a part of at UC Berkeley. AppFolio was co-founded by Klaus, and when we were a startup we continued this tech retreat tradition, starting with our inaugural retreat white water rafting on the Kern river. Photo of AppFolio as a startup after its inaugural tech retreat rafting on the Kern river. Since we had the pact to always sit together with product and engineering, it seemed fitting to continue that vibe by inviting and having our product development teams go with us on every tech retreat. It’s now almost nine years later and the groups have gotten much larger. Still, all of the people who work on building the products together — engineers, QA, UX and product managers go on this annual trip together. It’s nothing short of epic! We have done camping at the Channel Islands together, white water rafting, high ropes, and have even been to Disneyland. Teams have quarterly budgets to do local events together as celebrations to mark milestones, or they can do them just for the sake of bonding and getting to know each other better. This organizational support has helped us thrive, especially for the years in which our engineering and product teams doubled in size. Often different groups also bond by going to conventions together, where we learn together and get to know each other in a setting apart from the office. We’d also plan and organize extra social events while in the corresponding city. Last year we were in Washington DC together, and we visited several sight seeing locations, and even rode a ferris wheel. In the photo below are two engineering directors, two agile coaches, three product managers, one UX engineer and one QA engineer. Having this shared learning and joyful experience brought us closer together and it was just plain fun. Photo of team members after they rode a large ferris wheel in Washington D.C. Summary Reflecting back on the experiences I have shared at both startups, I can tell you that relationship building is critical. As individuals, we are at our jobs to make money and to survive as independent people in the world. We spend more time at work typically than we do with our families. The time we spend with our co-workers, our friends, can include some of the most memorable and incredible times in our lives. We can work together and create incredible products for our customers, and love every minute of the experience together. If you know and care about the people you work with, everything else comes easier. About the Guest Author: Heidi Helfand has 17 years coaching and influencing cross-functional product development teams at pioneering web software companies. At Expertcity, Inc. (acquired by CitrixOnline) she was on the initial team that built GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar. She is currently Principal Agile Coach at AppFolio, Inc., a SAAS workflow software company with property management and legal practice management software. Prior to that, Heidi consulted for the State Dept. on website development, and has taught ESL at several US Universities. She has an M.A. in teaching from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach (CPCC) and Associate Certified Coach (ACC) through the International Coach Federation (ICF). Follow her on twitter @heidihelfand For more information visit heidihelfand.com Acknowledgements I would like to send out a special thanks to my AppFolio friends Jon Walker, Rahul Sawhney, Regina Rodwell, Jennifer Payne, and Ellie Thomas for their feedback on early drafts of this blog. I’d also like to thank Joshua Kerievsky of Industrial Logic for his thoughtful comments and encouragement. References Rod, Anne & Fridjhon, Marita. “Creating Intelligent Teams” KR Publishing, 2016. Adkins, Lyssa. “Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters and Project Managers in Transition” Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn), 2010. Kimsey-House, Henry; Kimsey-House, Karen, Sandahl, Philip, Whitworth, Laura. “Co-Active Coaching: Changing Business, Transforming Lives.” Nicholas Brealey America, 2011. Reichheld, Fred & Markey, Rob. “The Ultimate Question 2.0: How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World.” Harvard Business Review Press, 2011. CRR Global, Organizational Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC), http://www.crrglobal.com/coach-courses.html
6 Product Leadership Interview Questions and Answers
Every hire is essential, but a new product leader’s impact ranges far beyond their contributions. They’ll have a major influence on their team, which affects the colleagues they interact with the most. While also having a significant impact on corporate goals, priorities, and tactics. Before hiring a product leader, you need to ensure that you understand the most essential product leadership interview questions that can help better inform your hiring decision. It’s like when you hire a new head coach. They bring in some of their assistants, put individual contributors into new roles, and utilize their terminology and playbook, giving them an outsized effect on the entire organization. If you’ve done it right, a new product leader will make you a little uncomfortable. They bring in some diverse opinions and the stature to share and back those up. Additionally, they’ll probably have a skill set that makes you a little insecure about your resume. Though you may feel insecure about a new product leader in the long term, the new hire will contribute to your product team. Ultimately, this uneasiness is what leads to growth and positive change. However, new product leaders do still need to fit in a little bit. Unless you genuinely want to rock the boat and shake things up in a big way. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '57ff7e42-ccfa-4d9e-b5be-8a0f6ba69363', {"region":"na1"}); What Experience to Look for When Interviewing Before you ever hop on the phone or a Zoom or meet in person with a candidate, you’ll already know plenty about their experience. There might be some career rehashing as part of the interviewing process. But they didn’t make it this far if their resume wasn’t a pretty good match for your needs. So instead of fixating on their work history, get a feel for what makes them tick—your candidate’s motivations matter. You want to know what they like most and least about working in product to understand their passions and preferences. “Product” roles vary so much from one company to the next. Make sure their skills and interests align with what your organization needs from them. It’s also crucial that they’re excited about addressing your customer base’s specific challenges and needs. Understand How They’ll Fit with The Team Envision what hiring them would mean for their team. Does the candidate address the underlying needs, and will they help the team grow? Soft skills are the other area that can’t be explored by simply looking at their LinkedIn profile. You can teach some product management fundamentals and train them on tools and processes—but you can’t teach curiosity and passion. You’re looking for examples of how they’ve used their passion for a product to get things done in challenging environments, built consensus, and delighted customers. You want specifics about how they’ve overcome obstacles and expanded their knowledge. Learning about the meaningful impacts on the lives of their users are the “juicy bits” you’re looking to extract from your time together. Not Every Product Manager Should Be (or Wants to Be) a People Manager. Good salespeople often make terrible sales managers because the skills that help you close a deal are entirely different from those that help you motivate your staff. While there’s a little more overlap on the product side, the same dynamic is also in play. Someone who loves immersing themselves in the details of their specific domain may not have the mental and emotional skills to add value across multiple products and product staff at a higher level. With this in mind, it’s important to remember that people can climb the corporate ladder without necessarily taking on people management duties. Paying attention to how candidates answer some of your questions can help you steer them into the more appropriate track. Download Developing a Product Team Checklist ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'd8abf101-87a4-49aa-b909-2dcb3743fb8b', {"region":"na1"}); Some people thrive on identifying problems, connecting with customers, and getting into the weeds to find new opportunities. These folks are best suited for individual contributor roles. They will likely find people management responsibilities unfulfilling even if they think that’s the job they need to advance their career. Others thrive on amplifying their impact. While they’re still passionate about solving customer problems, they’re interested in building out skills and processes for the whole team. They’re able to trust others and delegate so they can focus on the big picture. 6 Product Leadership Interview Questions to Ask In my experience, these are six of the most common questions that get asked. I’m also pointing out what you should pay attention to when they answer. Question 1: Tell me a story. The best way to prove someone’s storytelling chops is to ask them to tell you one. Crafting a compelling narrative is an essential tool in generating consensus and enthusiasm for ideas. Thus, you’ll want to see how they do. I prefer a story describing an end-to-end production process and its results. So I’m looking for a few critical elements in their response: Verb selection: Did they “direct” or “collaborate”? Were they echoing the voice of the customer or just writing up product requirements? Is there some heart and emotion in their retelling? Or is it a simple regurgitation of the facts and events that transpired? Data: Do you think this was the right project for your team? How did they measure success? Product managers can’t always measure the success of a product. Many companies are lacking in this area, so I don’t blame them if it’s lacking. But I want to see at least some awareness of the value of using metrics and how they considered implementing them. Plus, I want to make sure they’re not just quoting proxy metrics with no apparent correlation to the customer or business goals, as that’s a warning sign as well. Expansiveness and inclusiveness: How insular are they? Are they considering other stakeholders, departments, and customers in their processes? Product leadership is about more than bossing around your direct reports. You must also establish and value strong relationships with folks across the organization. Question 2: Which products do you love? This question provides you a little peek behind the shiny veneer candidates who are cloaking themselves in during the interview process. An exact answer will reveal something about what matters to them and what draws their attention. Keep in mind that something vanilla and obvious signals a lack of depth and creativity. Besides just getting to know them as a person, it’s also a glimpse of what they appreciate as product professionals. Do they gravitate to generic products they use every day? Or are they more enthusiastic for brilliant technical or design solutions to tough challenges? Their mentioned solutions truly energize the ideal candidate. Saying products that ingeniously yet quickly improve the lives of their customers while boasting a solid business model is critical. You have another opportunity to evaluate their storytelling skills. Question 3: A question about your product. They’ve seen the solution (the product they’re interviewing to work on), and now you want to know if they can identify the customer problem it’s solving. It’s time to flip the script and let them show off their product management skills. It’s also a chance to see if they’ve done their homework and understand what you’re trying to do. I want to know that they not only understand the concept but that they get the actual application. If they weren’t curious enough to dig into the job they’re interviewing for, will the candidate go the extra mile to communicate with the team effectively? Your product is a solution designed to address a customer challenge. How much of that customer problem could they intuit from the website or checking out the product itself? We have an unfair advantage at LIKE.TG since product managers are our actual customers. So there’s no excuse here if a candidate isn’t familiar with the customer problems we’re trying to solve. I’ll often ask them more pointed questions given that familiarity, such as probing into what additional value we could provide their product management team or what other opportunities and challenges lie ahead for us given their intimate understanding of the space. Learn how to grow a successful product team: Question 4: Describe your ideal workflow/relationship with User Experience and Engineering. Though there are no correct answers, you may find that there are also many wrong ones. Instead, this question puts a spotlight on their penchant for collaboration. Everyone comes to the table with their strengths—product understands the customer problem, UX lives to delight customers and creates frictionless user experiences. Engineering knows the technical boundaries and opportunities at hand. I want product leaders who recognize our collective strength lies in the sum of these parts. They’ll check their ego in the interest of jointly creating customer value. I honestly don’t care which processes candidates bring up, as long as they are logical workflows that incorporate stakeholder alignment and goal-driven outcomes. Making everyone feel like they’re an essential partner in the process is in many ways more vital than the process itself. What matters most here is breaking down silos, playing to people’s strengths to help them grow, and the flexibility to adapt to the situation at hand. Question 5: How do you prioritize? There are dozens and dozens of ways to tackle this task, and once again, I’m not seeking any particular framework or methodology. I’m using it as a lens to see how they process information from various sources and turn that into a coherent vision. In particular, I’m always wary of candidates coming from places where it was a top-down, CEO-calls-all-the-shots vibe. That type of environment limits a PM to just executing things. I’m also not interested in someone when they’ve just bounced around priorities based on whatever their most extensive and newest customers demanded. I’m looking for stakeholder alignment, rapid assessment of new developments, and (obviously) leaning on a solid roadmap to pull it all together. An objective element in the prioritization process (scoring, weighting, etc.) is also a big plus in their favor. Question 6 – Show me your superpowers. I rarely present an offer letter to a candidate that hasn’t illustrated how they work. While “test projects” have fallen out of favor, I still want to see their capabilities. To achieve this, I create scenarios to evaluate better how they’ll operate if they land the job. Time-box these so they don’t spin out into a lengthy assignment. For example, I had a candidate with all the correct answers, yet they seemed more concerned about their own opinion than the necessary collaboration great products require. I created a scenario intentionally missing critical information. I was looking to see whether they asked questions or requested help instead of just barreling ahead without essential details. Don’t be afraid to throw a curveball. Throwing in a new piece of information halfway through a scenario is another excellent test of their mental agility. Product managers must deal with competitors launching out of the blue, unexpected customer requests, technical hurdles, and unanticipated market changes. How they adapt is a fantastic peek at their ability to remain strategic while remaining flexible in high-pressure situations. Given the increasing number of remote teams—including our engineering team—not to mention the many companies that will remain remote until the last embers of COVID-19 die down, communication skills are at a premium. Navigating the communication styles and utilizing a product roadmap to ease communication amongst teams matters much more when everyone isn’t in the same room. One scenario to test this is picking a near-term roadmap initiative and asking them to summarize who needs to be involved, when, and to what degree. A good barometer asks the potential new hire to pen a press release and an internal email. While not everyone will be thrilled about any of these “tests,” you can explain that these exercises significantly shorten interview times. It would help if you let them do some of it asynchronously. And, if they have work samples that would convey the same aspects of their work style and output, you should welcome them. Quality Over Quantity Whether you incorporate all, some, or none of the above questions into your product leader interviewing process, I urge you to concentrate on fewer, higher-quality questions over a barrage of smaller ones. You’ll get more meaningful data on which to base your decision. Candidates will also get a better sense of the environment they would be entering if hired.
6 Product Leadership Interview Questions and Answers
On behalf of the LIKE.TG team, we are excited and honored to share some exciting news. Along with the honor of getting certified as a Great Place to Work (May 2021—May 2022), we earned the recognition of Fortune’s 2021 Best (Small or Medium) Workplaces. Although one of our team’s values is humility, I wanted to take a moment to say, “heck yeah!” Thank you to the entirety of the team for your efforts navigating this past year. What Did This Year Look like for LIKE.TG? Like many companies, we practically learned overnight how to manage our business differently with the onset of the pandemic. The process of placing our operating practices and guiding principles under a microscope allowed us to solidify what was working well and what we needed to improve. In particular, we saw the need to be more intentional about how we build a great culture. LIKE.TG believes how employees act when nobody is looking defines company culture. We felt alignment become even more critical in a world where our team is all working remotely. We also know people want to work alongside people they trust. Strong values alignment becomes even more critical as a company scales and growth accelerates. In the past year alone, our business doubled in size. We released several key product enhancements. Product organizations utilized these enhancements to help simplify the shipment of products. What’s Our Secret Sauce? So how did we win Fortune’s 2021 Best (Small or Medium) Workplaces over the ten thousand contending companies? We believe a key was really clarifying and subsequently living by those values that bind us. LIKE.TG’s core values assist in recognition as one of Fortune’s great places to work. Hustle: We’re passionate about what we’re doing. But we hustle to preserve time with our friends and family. We empower employees to own the outcome. We encourage them to want to win because it means we are making an impact as a whole. Humility: We listen first and ask questions when we don’t have the answers. We approach interactions and problems with curiosity and adjust our course when needed. Heart: We want our work to have meaning, and we care deeply for our team, our customers, and our society at large. We embrace the visible and invisible differences to create a place where people feel safe speaking plainly and being the best version of themselves. “I’m really proud of how the team exemplifies Hustle, Humility, and Heart every day. We help our colleagues’ career paths grow and develop. I’ve loved getting to see team members get the chance to move into different teams and get promoted into new roles from a manager of customer success, becoming a product manager to a customer success manager, becoming a sales engineer. Seeing folks get the chance to spread their wings, try something new, and move forward is core to what I think Hustle, Humility, and Heart mean in our workplace.” – Diana Ciontea – Finance “We work with real people. We’re not just numbers and jobs to be done. The team gets to know each other and spends time caring about each other’s interests, and there’s trust built there. I trust that my colleagues are putting in their heart, with humility and they’re hustling in everything they do that helps us remember that we’re all people behind the job.” – Nick Fields – Product management [VIDEO on Heart Humility and Hustle] Fostering Connection at LIKE.TG After the Black Lives Matter protests, we came together as a company to openly share how people were feeling. It was particularly moving to hear people speak plainly about what this topic meant to them while also serving as a time to catalog our practices. These conversations inspired the creation of our diversity and inclusion task force. This cross-functional collaboration has spawned various initiatives, including mental health days, a fundraiser for disadvantaged children, and a fresh look at the hiring process. LIKE.TG’s biannual “Fest.” Another critical moment for our team was launching our first, all remote, teamwide gathering we call Fest. In the past, Fest represented a biannual event where in-office and remote coworkers would convene for social and educational activities. Activities included presentations from customers to lightning talks where employees volunteer to present on a topic of passion and trivia at a local brewery, to name a few. This event represented a great way to cultivate strong team alignment, especially since most of our team lives outside Santa Barbara. As we all know, large in-person gatherings weren’t on the agenda this past year, so we had to improvise. The process of building a weeklong schedule to support a 100% remote Fest helped flesh out many of the lingering habits ingrained from in-office work that didn’t support remote workers. While we all look forward to a face-to-face Fest again, we believe the emphasis on learning how to do remote work well sets us up for longer-term success. Inspired by feedback from our team, we have since launched a mentorship program and a Culture, Collaboration, and Connection (CCC) monthly meetup. At CCC, in a small group setting, we tackle various topics ranging from the company’s long-term strategy to learning more about each other’s interests outside of work. Trust and Strategy at LIKE.TG Some of us may have worked in lower trust or what some may call ‘political’ environments. People often expend unnecessary energy in the wrong areas. Also, those environments tend to stifle open communication among teams. We believe that the best ideas can come from anywhere. Consequently, it is incumbent upon our organization to ensure processes amplify and encourage the sharing of information. A great example is how information our team gathers from customers finds its way into our product prioritization process. The bulk of our team is talking with our customers every day. Harnessing insights from these conversations is foundational to our strategy especially given how quickly the product management space evolves. Trust, or a lack thereof, is something we know product managers often grapple with internally. Often, they feel frustrated conveying to stakeholders how and why things need prioritization. Ultimately, we see our role at LIKE.TG as helping our customers instill greater trust within their own organization. “It feels like my input is valued here. We work hard, but we love the work we’re doing because we know it’s positively impacting on ourselves, our customers, and the world.” – Sierra Newell – Marketing “I know when I come in, I can be my authentic self. I’m welcomed and valued for that. I can walk in the door and don’t have to be a different person. I can be who I am, and everyone respects and values me at ProductPlan. I can flourish and be happy and fulfilled because I can be myself at the end of the day. – Damon Navo – Customer Success Final Thoughts on Fortune’s Great Places to Work Being recognized as one of Fortune’s great places to work is a tremendous honor, especially in light of the challenges brought about over the past year. We also believe much of our success is still in front of us. We’re excited to continue our journey to help product organizations simplify the product life cycle and build organizational trust. Check out our Careers Page if you are interested in a role at ProductPlan. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '4bc8dfae-deb7-4eb4-b82f-7f20e14b8f2f', {"region":"na1"});
6 Rules of Product Design According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
As a product manager at LIKE.TG, I’m particularly proud of our new integration with Zapier because of the impact I know it can make. My appreciation of Zapier’s capabilities started years ago when I worked in Customer Success here at LIKE.TG. Back then, we used Zapier to automate how we shared NPS feedback across the company. It was empowering to reduce the time I spent in spreadsheets, and I felt a connection with our customers who had similar pain points. I remember thinking how much time they could save by integrating Zapier’s app with LIKE.TG’s roadmap platform.The Challenge With SpreadsheetsSpreadsheets are a natural part of my and many product managers’ workflows. Yet, the manual work they require can be at the detriment of my more strategic work.During my research and customer interviews, I continuously heard conversations like the following, “I have 40 product managers in ProductPlan. I need to quickly and reasonably see what everyone is doing entirely in ProductPlan. Yet, a lot is still happening in Google Sheets and requires a manual transfer, which is time-consuming.”This type of scenario is where setting up the Zapier integration fits seamlessly. The automatic updates will support the workflow of product managers much more cohesively (including my own). So the choice becomes: do you spend the afternoon populating a spreadsheet or unshackling your roadmap data and syncing it effortlessly across your organization?Moving roadmap data automatically with Zapier feels I have my own personal product management assistant.Before I geek out further on the benefits of having Zapier automatically working with my roadmap, I want to be clear; it’s not an end all be all ‘magic solution.’ You still have to make intelligent decisions for Zapier to connect all the data dots into your roadmap effectively.Do the work properly, and with the help of Zapier, you will stress less about how you’re going to organize your work.4 Ways Zapier Can Improve Your Work1. Less manual effort, more time and energy.The number of product stack apps is growing every day. Getting your data moving from one place, like a project management tool, to your roadmap can be a lot of manual effort. You can export and import using spreadsheets, but that involves much data reformatting and room for error with each manual input. If both tools in question have an API, you could use that to keep data in sync, but that will usually require engineering resources.Despite your best efforts, data in your roadmap becomes static. I could spend my time manually updating and reimporting regularly—but that’s counterintuitive to the nature of roadmaps.I know from speaking with my peers, this manual workflow left us unsure that the version we were sharing with our key audience was, in fact, the latest and greatest. There’s always the looming question, “What if changes are being made elsewhere and not reflected in LIKE.TG?”The time and energy I spent on remedial tasks felt so ingrained in my work but ultimately took away from the time and energy doing more important tasks, like talking to our customers.2. Confidently manage a standardized, single source of truth.I’m constantly plagued by the feeling that as a PM, there can be a constant influx of information from various sources, all organized differently—Slacks, emails, research, talking to customers coming from everywhere. Sure, I can track it all in a notebook or my head, but to get it into a presentable format, I need to organize it manually. With the Zapier integration, standardizing your input sources is much easier to maintain. Inputs from Slack and email are funneled through Zapier into the LIKE.TG roadmap and repository format: ideas, descriptions, sources, and where those ideas are coming from all in the same formatting. Zapier, the dubbed product management assistant, has it all done for you in one central place automatically.I can export and import, prioritize, and share my roadmap. Then, the Zapier integration spits it out in a format that’s easy to manage. What are the critical decisions I can make because of this information? Previously, standardizing my work would take me an hour or two on a Friday afternoon. The beauty is you have Zapier, an execution tool, efficiently collaborating with, LIKE.TG, a more high-level tool.3. Rethink how you execute things.Take a moment to ask yourself, what are the time-consuming or frustrating tasks that you can offload? The Zapier to LIKE.TG integration helped me rethink my work in many ways, but here are two examples.We use Pendo to track NPS. I used to export the feedback into a spreadsheet every week. I’d read through all of the input. Not anymore. Zapier automatically culls through keywords and pulls out the scores I’m looking for.We started using Zapier for our Sales “Deals Closed” announcement to unify the team and foster excitement and celebration when deals were closed. Slack’s post included how each deal closed, with a summary paragraph that mentions the feature or product use case that won the deal.Here’s another example that I heard from customers. They have a Google Form on their website for requests. Once a week, they would export, review, and then manually transcribe it into the roadmap—spending about an hour every week doing this.Zapier and LIKE.TG’s integration automatically combs through the requests. It reformats them in a way you want. Hop in the roadmap, see who sent the form, what plan they are on, and who they are. All that information is in real-time on your table.I am executing the action of data entry. That time spent thinking about those feature requests and prioritizing those requests was manual overhead.hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '4077b305-9bcc-4a5a-a982-aad75ee06c23', {"region":"na1"});4. Support collaboration with your broader team.Last but not least, this integration empowers me. I’m not a technical person. I can’t build something with an API. Yet, with Zapier, I can skip the phase of sheepishly asking one of my developers for help to build an API. This opens up so many possibilities.At larger companies, it can take forever to get things done. Some of the work I’ve done in Zapier would take months to get done at a larger company. From securing engineering resources to actually building the sync, you could easily spend a quarter just trying to get the data you need instead of focusing on your core responsibilities. If a bunch of processes bogs you down, then you can’t achieve the job you’re actually trying to do. Do the thing instead of waiting.Any product manager can set this Zapier to LIKE.TG integration in a matter of minutes and not dedicate all your resources. That way, you have a quickie proof of concept with Zapier, and you’re not pulling engineers off of something more substantial.When I develop a plan with the rest of my team, Zapier will help me execute that plan with the tools that other teams, like marketing and sales, are using. This opens up possibilities for folks outside of the product. When we have feature requests, it can automatically pull these into our table view and comments through Slack, bringing visibility to anyone. It’s picking things up for me from all of my apps while working on my roadmap.TakeawaysZapier is a productivity tool. It’s a means to an end, but not a solution itself. Before, there was a disconnect between the ever-revolving cast of tools and our roadmap platform. Zapier integrating with LIKE.TG won’t make you a better product manager; you still have to make good decisions. What it did for me was change how I think about where I’m spending my time. Whether you use Zapier or not, I hope these examples help people think about how they can automate tedious processes or think about how they can be more efficient in their day-to-day tasks.
6 Things Product Managers Can Do with Qualitative Research
We are excited to welcome guest writer Carlos González de Villaumbrosia to the LIKE.TG blog. Carlos González de Villaumbrosia has over 10 years of experience building teams and digital products in the US, Europe, and Latin America. Carlos founded Product School in San Francisco in 2014. Today, the company is the global leader in product management training with 20 campuses worldwide and a live online campus. What is Qualitative Research? Qualitative data is sometimes referred to as ‘soft data’ and is usually described as the exact opposite of quantitative data: the numbers. Quantitative includes the hard facts; things like demographics, statistics, and other kinds of ‘hard data.’ This form of user research fills in the gaps that hard data can’t. It tells you about your customer’s opinions, what they’re thinking, and how they feel about your product. Modern product managers are often encouraged to be as data-driven as possible, and may instinctively want to turn to the numbers, but great products require both types. You need to know what feelings your product evokes in users as much as you need that full Google Analytics report. Let’s take a look at what product managers need qualitative data for and how to do it right! Qualitative Research Methods The best qualitative research method for your product depends on a variety of factors. Before you set out choosing your method, look at how much time you can spend on it and how many resources you can afford to use. Surveys and forms: An easy and scalable way to collect data. Customer interviews: A good way to get in-depth feedback, but takes time and resources. Focus groups: More time effective than one-to-ones, but less effective than surveys. More commonly used for physical products. Ethnographic research: Observations of your customer’s environment (demographics, geography, infrastructures, culture, etc.) Useful for breaking into brand new markets. App store reviews: Sometimes the qualitative data comes to you! Smaller startups may only be able to use one or two efficient and cheap methods, whereas massive companies will be able to do much more. If you’re in the former category, don’t spend all of your resources running endless focus groups, but make sure you invest in a proper discovery phase. Finding that balance is a key product manager responsibility! Read the Customer Interview Tool Box ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '7f735619-2494-4c81-b86b-cf6e764a20c3', {}); 6 Things Product Managers Can Do with Qualitative Research 1. Back it up with quantitative data When you’re conducting qualitative research, should you believe every word your customers say? Well, no not really! Sometimes customers don’t know what they want. They may think that, in theory, they’re willing to pay $12.99 per month for a subscription service. But when the time comes to put in their credit card details, many will hesitate. Abandoned carts are a huge challenge to overcome in eCommerce, as everyone is eager to buy…until the point of purchase. Many companies, such at Netflix, find that giving customers what they were begging for, barely increases retention. That’s why you need to cross reference your quantitative and qualitative data. If you’re seeing a trend in the answers to your surveys, then back them up by checking the hard data. The key here is to know which questions to ask. The answer to “do you like this product?” may not be the same as “would you be willing to pay for this product?” 2. Use it to find your ‘Why’ One of your main duties as a product manager is to focus on the ‘why’ of the product. Or rather, making sure that your ‘why’ both solves a real problem and that you’re building the right product for it. There’s no better way of understanding your customer’s problem than to ask them about it. If you see a problem that needs to be solved, ask your target market questions like: What are the main roadblocks in achieving X? What other solutions do you know of/have tried? What do you envision being the solution for X? Would you be willing to pay for a tool that does X? To learn how to build your own data-driven roadmap, watch LIKE.TG’s webinar: hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); 3. Use it to challenge your assumptions On the flip side, if you’re seeing a trend in your data, you can back it up with what customers are telling you in the surveys. Never assume anything in product! Qualitative data is used to challenge your assumptions no matter where you are in the product life cycle. For example, you might be seeing that a lot of your customers are failing to use one of your features. You might assume that’s because they hate the feature and you need to redesign the whole thing. But when you go into your surveys, your customers tell you that they didn’t even realize it was there! That leaves you with a relatively simple UI redesign to do, rather than a huge feature overhaul. 4. Use it with your product marketing manager Marketing needs to be built into your product from the beginning, which means you need to have a close relationship with your product marketing manager. Together, you create a powerhouse of growth for your company, because you can both benefit from qualitative research. It’ll help inform your communication style with your customers, making marketing significantly easier, and help you build feedback loops into your product. 5. Use it to build your minimum viable product A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a great learning tool, and gets you feedback on what users want. But if you can build it based on user feedback you’ll be one step head! If you start gathering data from your target market when you don’t even have a launched product or a user base yet, you’ll have the advantage. This exercise will also be vital for finding your product-market fit. A story we see repeated time and time again, is that someone has an idea, they build what they want, and then see if people like it. Sometimes they hit it out of the park straight away, but more often they have to pivot in a different direction. By using qualitative data to inform how you build your MVP, you’ll save yourself time and resources, making your time to market that much quicker. 6. Use it for post-launch feedback All the best product leaders know that their job isn’t done after your initial product launch! Once you’ve finished popping champagne bottles, it’s time to find out what people think. The most common form of qualitative research done at this point is a user-feedback survey, much like those you may have conducted with your MVP. This will help you figure out how well you listened to, and understood, your customers the first time around. Did your product fix their problem? Is it easy to use? Is there a reason some downloaded and uninstalled it within a day? If you have an app, you’re also likely to collect reviews. Don’t just go off the immediate reviews after launch. Early adopters tend to be quite techy and may have vastly different opinions to users who onboard further down the line. Your reviews are a great source of qualitative information, which you can keep referring back to throughout your product’s lifecycle. Getting Qualitative Research Right Have a plan. Set out what questions you need the answer to (big and small!) and take stock of your resources. Set a time limit. You’ll always think of other things to ask, but eventually you’ll reach the point where you just need to build. When using qualitative research to build your MVP, or at the start of a new feature, set a time limit for your research phase. Don’t just use your favorite customers. You need to have a good mix. It’s a great ego-stroke to interview people who sing our praises, but you need a balanced mix of opinions. Ask open-ended questions. Yes/No questions usually won’t give you the depth you need. Ask detailed questions that give you plenty of information to work with. Here are 10 great questions you should ask customers. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'd16e75f0-0601-4ef3-909a-e2b4f61f0c9a', {});
6 Tips for Building Your First Launch Checklist in LIKE.TG
Launching a product is not for the faint of heart. So many things, both large and small, can go wrong. In 1985 Coca-Cola canceled New Coke because the product team didn’t confirm that Coca-Cola drinkers would accept a change to their favorite soft drink. Samsung had to recall its Note 7 smartphones because they were exploding. And Google Glass suffered from privacy concerns, bugs, low battery life, bans from public spaces, and an inability to live up to the hype all stymied public adoption of the technology. Thankfully, few product launches fail in such spectacular fashion as those examples. More often than not, product launches simply fall flat with the market, and often lack true product-market fit. In my experience in working with product teams, one of the most common reasons for lackluster product launches is ineffective communication throughout the launch process. And I’m not talking about a lack of emails, Slack messages, or meetings. We can all agree that there usually is plenty of communication happening at any given time—especially in a remote work environment. If it’s not a lack of words, what makes communication and organization ineffective during a product launch? More often than not, it’s a lack of listening and intent where cross-functional teams talk at each other rather than collaborating together to achieve an outcome. Is Your Product Launch Cross-Functional Team a Track and Field Team, or a Bobsled Team? Right now, many product folks are running launches like they’re a track and field team in the Olympics. Every department has a separate job; they’re a sprinter, a long jumper, or pole vaulter. The pole vaulter can’t tell the long jumper how to jump farther, and the sprinter is solely focused on their run, so they can’t even help another runner participating in hurdles. They’re all participating in separate events. And while they’re all contributing to the total medal count (Cue: USA chant!), the athletes aren’t actually working together. So, while individual medals sound great, it doesn’t quite work out as well when it comes to product launches. And that’s because product launches are a team sport. What cross-functional teams should strive to be like in product launches is a bobsled team. In this scenario, everyone is doing their job in sync with one another, and it directly impacts the shared outcome—a successful product launch. And there’s no better feeling than when everyone is doing their best. That’s how you get Cool Runnings! If you’re ready for your next product launch to run as smooth as a bobsled on an Olympic ice track, the key is two-way communication. I’ll explain what I mean in this post when I say that product launch communication needs to be a two-way street. I’ll also give you a couple of suggestions for making it happen with your team. Transforming Your Product Launch Communication Into a Two-Way Street First, let me start by breaking down the difference between what I have deemed one-way and two-way street communication. One-way communication is like building a baseball field in the middle of a cornfield in Kansas and expecting people to show up (are you tired of sports movie references yet?). Kevin Costner clearly made it work, but the odds of success in the real world are extremely low. In this case, product folks tell other stakeholders what they are doing, why, and when. When the stakeholders get confused, the solution is to repeat the information. On Zoom meetings, in documents, and on a roadmap. The one-way communication is often mistaken for alignment, but in reality, all you have done is pushed information and hope the right things happen. In contrast, two-way street communication is about presenting your launch plans and asking for feedback. It relies on the product person understanding what the stakeholders are (or aren’t) excited about and what they will need to be able to do their jobs well. It’s also about making sure they understand what they need to do to do their jobs well. The most significant benefit of two-way communication is that everyone becomes invested in the outcome because they feel like a key part of the launch process rather than a passive player in the product person’s plan. To drive home the difference between one-way and two-way street communication, we created this helpful comic: Two-way communication ties back to the idea that product folks need to focus on building relationships with key stakeholders. And as Simon Sinek shared, “Strong relationships are based on trust and communication. But if there is no communication, there can be no trust.” Source: LinkedIn When you focus on two-way communication, you are instilling trust in stakeholders. You show this by welcoming and valuing their input in the launch prep process. What Two-Way Product Launch Communication Looks Like in Practice Achieving two-way communication in product launches takes a concerted effort—especially from the product person leading the charge. 1. You’re speaking with product launch stakeholders early and often. Communicating your product launch strategy is an iterative process requiring you to communicate with stakeholders at every step of the process. A lack of communication destroys any sense of alignment and cross-functional flow. Your product roadmap needs to communicate the product team’s strategic goals and top priorities as they relate to the business’s strategic goals. At the end of the day, what the product and development teams build is to serve the customer after all. Stakeholders may require you to provide them with status updates, while marketing may need information on how to appeal to your target audience. Roadmaps are great resources to communicate the status of initiatives and provide milestones that reflect your strategic goals. Two-way communication in product launches breaks down silos and can help mitigate any bottlenecks throughout the launch process. 2. You’re making yourself available for stakeholder questions and proactively providing guidance throughout the launch-prep stage. As the product professional driving the launch, you are the main point of contact and information for all company stakeholders. The key is to understand what your cross-functional team needs to be successful and use your interactions with them to help them navigate what is often a complicated and long process. It’s important to not drive yourself crazy trying to assume you understand all of your stakeholders’ needs and concerns. The truth is, you are not a mind reader. But you can use your product experience to hone in on questions to ask your stakeholders, like: Do you understand the timeline of the product launch? Is your team prepared for the launch? What can the product team provide you to craft an effective marketing message? Do you feel the product addresses our customer’s concerns? Do you have any insights into how customers may react or any thoughts about the questions customers may ask? Implementing two-way communication allows you to clearly define to stakeholders the goals and objectives of your launch. You can achieve this by setting up 1:1 meetings with stakeholders from various departments. 3. The conversation doesn’t end when the product is launched. A successful product launch doesn’t end once the product hits the market. Keeping an eye on how the market is responding to your product can embolden your team or reveal major gaps in the product launch process. Your team will recognize a successful product launch when end-users engage with your product or service. By providing marketing and sales with enough information, your end-user clearly understands the benefits of your product or service. After the launch, your team should continue engaging with your customers. Customer feedback can provide your team with product insights to assist your team in their product launch. The product launch process is an iterative process. With each launch comes new findings. Go for Gold with Your Next Product Launch Product Launches and Olympic Bobsledding have one thing in common: both are exhilarating. A lack of listening and intent can derail your product launch. Clear communication allows stakeholders to fill in knowledge gaps or provide extra resources to streamline the launch process. Break down those communication silos with better communication. Two-way communication and cross-functional alignment provide your team with the support to launch a successful product. A successful launch gives you the privilege to make the impossible, possible.
6 Tips for Building Your First Launch Checklist in LIKE.TG
Many of the customers we work with talk about their frustration with how they bring new products and features to the market. For some, launching a new product feels like an afterthought without a defined process. For others, a product launch is tossed over the fence to marketing, and what happens after that is a mystery. We want to help product people create thoughtful and repeatable plans for their next launch. We’ve introduced Launch Management (currently in open beta), a new space in LIKE.TG to plan, track, and share your upcoming launches. One of the key parts of Launch Management is the Launch Checklist, where you can work with your go-to-market team to decide what needs to be done to ensure your launch’s success. But how do you build a Launch Checklist? What should you include? How do you tailor the deliverables for the needs of your product, your audience, and your team? To help you, we’ve developed 6 tips for building your first launch checklist within ProductPlan. Read on to learn more! 1. Start Your First Launch Checklist With a List of Deliverables From a Previous Launch After you create your first launch within LIKE.TG, you’ll see what is perhaps a daunting blank slate of a launch checklist. Eventually, we will help you get started by populating your checklist with several task ideas that you could consider to help you launch your next product. But for now, the checklist remains blank, and you’ll have to build a list of launch tasks on your own. But fear not. Your first launch created in LIKE.TG is likely not the first launch you’ve experienced. If it’s not your first launch, we highly recommend you start your launch checklist by bringing over a list of tasks from a past launch. It doesn’t matter if they live in a spreadsheet, a slide, or even in your head. What matters is you create something that you can see in ProductPlan. Play with it. Begin to build out a list of options for what could go into your next launch. Once you have that, you can share it with your teammates and get feedback. Every launch is different, so there will always be a bit of tweaking based on the launch goal, the product or feature launched, the target audience, and more. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '527dc6af-8860-436f-9ca6-ae2b71b0cc99', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); 2. Start Your Launch List Early and Get Feedback From Your Launch Stakeholders As a product person, you might feel it’s your job to decide everything that should go into your next launch. You are the product expert, after all. But as you know, many launches involve work far beyond the conventional realm of product management. For example, there will be marketing campaigns to create product visibility and adoption, sales campaigns to acquire new customers, and support articles to help current customers understand how to use the latest thing you’ve built. You likely won’t be the expert on every task required to launch a product. So as you begin to build out your launch checklist, we encourage you to add members of your team to collaborate with you. By creating visibility into your launch checklist, you can spark conversations about the appropriate tasks required to ensure success. Field new ideas for training your internal teams on the latest product or find opportunities to communicate changes to new and existing customers. Successfully launching a product is everyone’s responsibility – not just the product team’s. All people involved in the launch should own the quality and completion of their deliverables and the outcomes they aim to achieve. It would help if you also involved your stakeholders early in the process. 3. Launch Deliverables Should Have a Single Owner It’s unlikely that every launch task will only require work from one person, and there will be many instances where an individual task may have multiple contributors. Take, for example, an enablement deck for your sales team. A project like this could involve a sales engineer, product marketing, and even a select group of salespeople for shaping and feedback. Despite this, we’ve found it is best to select one person (not one team) responsible for driving the task forward, reporting on progress, and ensuring it is completed on time. Either the selected person is doing the bulk of the work, or it could be the person who manages the team responsible for the work. Either way, a single owner means you know who to turn to when you need an update, and it also helps you create greater accountability among your go-to-market team. 4. Create a Playbook for Each Kind of Launch You Manage One of the best ways to create a consistent, repeatable, and thoughtful launch process is to create playbooks for each kind of launch you manage. Of course, not all launches are created equal, so they shouldn’t receive the same treatment. Some will require more resources, and others can provide a more significant opportunity for product adoption and engagement. In contrast, others are a footnote only relevant to a specific list of customers. To spend less time planning and more time executing, it helps to come up with a system to categorize your launches. Here are a few recommended ways you can go about it: Categorize your launch into tiers (i.e., Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3, etc.) based on the number of resources and effort required. The tiers are a great way to help you prioritize launches, especially when you have more than one happening around the same time. Categorize your launches based on who they impact the most. Does your launch matter more to your existing customer base? Or does your launch provide you an opportunity to acquire new customers? Answering these questions can help you determine the kinds of launch tasks required. Think about what you’re launching regarding how it helps your business. Does it close a feature gap between you and your competitors? Or does your new product create a competitive advantage? Another way to think about this is whether what you’re launching is something your market expects or finds delightful. Regardless of how you choose to categorize your launches, the important thing is to build a playbook for each. Think about the tasks required for each category of launch and document them. Now, whenever you begin planning the launch of a new product or feature, you can categorize your launch and start running with an already-established playbook. 5. Choose Fully Deliverable Tasks Every launch task will likely require a few subtasks to complete. For example, an in-app onboarding flow might require a series of product images. Which begs the question: what level of tasks should you include in Launch Management? We recommend only including tasks that represent a fully completed deliverable. Because you will be wrangling a wide range of deliverables from different teams and stakeholders, you don’t want to over-clutter your launch checklist. It also gives the person responsible for the tasks the ownership and discernment to determine what is necessary and sufficient for that deliverable to succeed. 6. Create a Cadence to Review the Launch Checklist and “Check-off” What’s Complete Timing is one of the most critical elements of any launch. From the first product development task to the final marketing material, there’s a crucial timeline for when things are assigned and completed. Knowing these tasks need to be managed by various stakeholders requires a release of control and setting expectations. When will you review the checklists as the launch owner and ensure things are running on schedule? Whether your releases come each sprint, quarterly, or annually will determine the right cadence for you. You must regularly check in with the task owner and overall product launch owner. Whether in weekly meetings or managed asynchronously, setting expectations is crucial. You’ll want to ensure stakeholders are checking off tasks promptly. Though you need to ensure they don’t feel the added pressure of managing the minutia of each task. Simply put, building a launch checklist aims to make your life as a product person more manageable. This provides you with a single place to oversee and drill into the details of each launch. It would help if you encouraged other team members to contribute and share ownership. As Launch Management is currently in beta, please share your feedback and best practices you learn as you work on your Checklists! hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'c0e72364-ed4f-4ef2-b88d-490d0ae4946f', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});
6 Tips to Creating Roadmap Accountability with Your Team
rIn our webinar Product Managers: Treat your Strategy as a Product, Hadrien Raffalli discusses the importance of tracking market activity and tweaking plans accordingly. He has experience building products around the world, including stops in South America, Australia, Asia, and is now in Denver working for Pivotal Tracker, part of VMware. Watch the webinar, below! The Importance of Trendspotting Raffalli believes strategy missteps are inevitable if companies aren’t spotting key patterns quickly enough. “Being able to identify the details of how the market is behaving in different populations and different use cases will give you a better chance to anticipate what is likely to happen later.” Continuous monitoring and adjusting to what’s happening in relevant areas is essential for remaining relevant, viable, and competitive. “Consider: how is your market behaving right now?” Raffalli says. “What have been the cycles of adoption to get you where you are? Or, if you’re looking forward, is there a path that has been chartered for other innovations?” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '5894a003-79ce-4ea3-9804-dae280a96106', {}); Also crucial is the ability to gain mindshare when trends and new technologies are still in nascent stages. Companies aren’t always in the mode of having to find and “wow” early adopters, but it’s a key part of growth. So at some point in every product manager’s job, it’s likely to be a challenge that must be met to be successful. At these points in the product’s lifecycle, Raffalli encourages product teams to consider “if there has been a path that has been charted before for other innovations” that can be replicated or informative for your own journey. “What is the order, what are the customer needs, and what is the value chain for this?” What Does a Good Strategy Look Like? Companies don’t start with a product strategy. Instead, it comes on the heels of defining a mission and purpose. However, missions and purposes are often selected well before new companies, or product teams have researched and gotten to know their customers. Because anyone can settle on a mission or purpose without doing any real work, existing on the plane of “ideals.” They’re not rooted in much more than theory and hunches. Product strategy is where things get real. “Strategy is the art of finding and exploiting leverage in the competitive landscape to achieve your purpose,” Raffalli says. To do so, he recommends the following steps: Have a purpose—Why are you doing this, and what are you competing for? Understanding customer needs and how they’re evolving—Customers aren’t standing still, and neither is their environment or options. Understand your value chain and how it is evolving—Are you solving a problem that still exists? Have new wrinkles emerged that you’re neglecting? Determine what change is likely to happen—You’re not psychic, but make an educated guess about what’s probably on the horizon. Define your actions against those changes—How you respond is just as important as recognizing things have transformed. Measure success and failure and course-correct—Hunches and guesses aren’t enough to make intelligent, data-driven decisions. Be sure you’re tracking what works and what doesn’t, then use that information to inform your next move. Notice a common theme? Things keep changing, so you better adjust to those changes. As the famous military truism goes: No plan survives contact with the enemy. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '527dc6af-8860-436f-9ca6-ae2b71b0cc99', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Stories versus Maps For millennia, information was passed on as stories. From drawing on prehistoric cave walls to the tales of Viking warriors, these narratives provided instructions on how to retrace the steps of those who came before them. Raffalli says the flaw with this method for conveying information was the inability to prepare for what those storytellers hadn’t yet seen. If an invading party hadn’t already visited the target in question, they had no idea what to expect. Then came maps. These cartographical marvels enabled generals to assess the situation in advance and plan accordingly. They could seize the high ground and understand climate and topology without having previously visited the area in question. While this transformation of military strategy occurred centuries ago, Raffalli says businesses still operate based on stories. Both those we’ve heard from others, and those we tell ourselves. “We try and convince ourselves of something being right,” he says. But it’s long past due that business strategy is rooted in hard data rather than subjective tales we’ve heard or spun ourselves. “The product KPI is the ultimate expression of your strategy,” Raffalli says, referring to both users completing significant tasks or business metrics being met. “Your strategy KPI, however, are more like underlying fundamentals. So it’s how the market is moving. So it’s going to be customer needs.” Context-Switching for Strategic Planning Most product teams think strategically in terms of their product. But this often spawns convoluted thinking and strained rationales for those decisions. To be truly strategic, decisions be abstracted and purely based on strategy and the market conditions, regardless of the particular product. It can force some hard conclusions that might otherwise never even be considered. Revelations like “we are targeting the wrong market” or “our value proposition no longer exists.” But if this approach is adopted early enough and remains constant, more minor course corrections can potentially avert such drastic conclusions—or at least give companies time to minimize any negative repercussions. During the webinar, Raffalli used the example of a coding school to illustrate this. When you’re in the business of training coders, you must assess which technology people will care about in the future, along with which solutions/platforms/languages will win market share for the long term. “In real life, it’s really hard to step away from those Product KPIs and think about the underlying more important fundamental assumptions that your plan relies on,” Raffalli says. “So, in this game, we abstract away the product piece and only focus on the strategy piece.” The decision of which framework to invest in has major consequences for these firms, from hiring talent to developing curriculums and materials to enrollment. Betting on the first solution to enter the market could backfire, as it may not be the winner. Other players can swiftly follow, producing superior tech that might be faster, more efficient, or possess exciting new attributes. The first mover might initially be the most popular, but ascertaining which one wins long-term requires a deeper look at the trends than just speed to market. Raffalli implored companies and product teams to follow and ride the trends. Pay attention to search traffic, online discussions, tool usage, and other leading indicators far more informative than trailing ones like revenue. Because picking the wrong horse can be fatal, regardless of how well you execute your product. “If you think about your day to day jobs in product and defining your strategy, independently from how great your product is, probably almost half of the companies that are involved in this game, would probably die at some point and reduce the competitive field by a lot,” Raffalli says. “And that’s just by making decisions of which framework to build against.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '527dc6af-8860-436f-9ca6-ae2b71b0cc99', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Product Strategy Doesn’t Work in a Vacuum All too often, once companies assess an opportunity, draft a strategy, find product-market fit, and define a plan, the sole emphasis is on execution. Hitting dates and making progress toward milestones get all the attention. But regardless of how compelling that initial product roadmap might have been original if the team isn’t paying attention to what’s happening outside its echo chamber, they may be in for a rude awakening. Raffalli emphasizes the critical role product management plays in mitigating risk. Asking questions and validating assumptions allows them to add ongoing volume by ensuring they found the plan on a realistic foundation of truth. To participate in Raffalli’s strategy game and unlock even more wisdom, check out the webinar in its entirety. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"});
6 Tips to Creating Roadmap Accountability with Your Team
As a Customer Success Manager at LIKE.TG for the past two years, I’ve worked with hundreds of our customers on establishing their roadmapping processes. Throughout my time with LIKE.TG, one of the most common roadblocks I see inhibiting a successful roadmap process is a lack of accountability on roadmap editors. 6 Ways to Create Roadmap Accountability with Your Team So, you’ve invested in a standardizable roadmapping tool for your team. That’s a great first start, but how do you ensure that they actually update their roadmaps? As you build out your roadmapping process with your team, the tips below will ensure roadmap accountability. 1. Establish a Champion of the process An essential part of creating accountability is establishing one or more persons as responsible for the outcome. This person can be an executive sponsor or a champion of the process appointed by the team. The champion must set expectations, goals, and guidelines for success with the Roadmapping Process. Setting expectations early on in the process is essential. However, without a champion to hold the team accountable, they will be ineffective. The champion can also continuously evaluate whether they’re meeting the goals of the roadmapping process. If so, then champions have fodder to provide the team with ongoing motivation. Whereas if the team is not meeting goals, having a champion to shepherd a change in the process is key. Build a Visual Product Roadmap ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'a81908bd-d7dd-4be2-9d7e-cb09f3f90137', {}); With LIKE.TG, the champion of the account typically has admin rights to the account. It gives the user the ability to see each team member’s last activity as well as a list of roadmaps created by each member of the team. It’s an efficient way to verify editors are meeting expectations and following guidelines. The team’s champion also plays a critical role as the liaison between the software and the team. As a Customer Success Manager, I’ve worked with several teams that lacked a clear and established champion of the tool. These are the most common outcomes I see in response: users don’t end up using the tool in the first place, or they start using it but without direction and not following best practices—which causes frustration and ultimately leads to non-use, as well. More often than not, these accounts end up reverting to whatever the inefficient process was they were trying to move away from and end up back at square one. 2. Start with your “Why?” Realistically, not many people like being told to do something blindly. An essential step for getting any team invested in the roadmapping process is communicating the why behind it. Start at a high level; why does your team need to implement a new process? What challenges are you looking to solve for the team? Then move towards the specifics, why did you choose the tool you’re asking the team to use? If your team evaluated multiple tools, it could be valuable to share the criteria your team was looking for and how the tool you selected stacked up. Switching to a new tool or implementing a new process is always going to require some manual effort, understanding the why behind it is essential to motivate users to put in that effort. Understanding a team’s “why” is also critical for me to help, well, manage a Customer’s success. Every team has different goals they are trying to achieve with their Roadmapping process. Establishing those goals at the beginning of the process gives the team something to work towards and gives both you and your Customer Success Manager something to measure against. If I don’t know what your idea of success is, how can I help you get there, and if your team doesn’t have an idea of what success looks like, how do they know that the work they’re putting in is worth it? 3. Team-wide roadmap sharing One of the most important ways to ensure roadmapping success is to keep the process collaborative. One easy way to do this is to encourage users to share their roadmaps right away. Often a user’s gut reaction is to keep the product roadmap hidden until the final draft. While this might work for a static PowerPoint slide, a live roadmap will never be finalized. Roadmaps are continually evolving, sharing your roadmap from the start will give your audience context to its development. Knowing that your roadmap might be viewed at any time will help foster an environment where Editors update their roadmap on an ongoing basis rather than only before a big presentation. The importance of sharing roadmaps early on clicked with me while working with a group that was entirely new for roadmapping. I scheduled a call with all of the Editors of this group a few weeks after their first training to make sure there weren’t any lingering questions and hear how the roadmapping process was progressing. When we got on the call, my questions were met with an awkward silence because, as it turns out, no one had touched their roadmaps since our last call. When I asked why the users admitted they didn’t know when they were supposed to have their roadmaps ready, so they didn’t work on them. By sharing your roadmap at the beginning, there’s no concept of a roadmap deadline, so updates stay an ongoing habit. Luckily LIKE.TG and most roadmap software include a team-wide sharing functionality that grants roadmap access to your entire team as quickly as one click. As an easy way to ensure roadmaps are being shared throughout the roadmapping process, encourage users to share new roadmaps with the team upon creation. 4. Implement a cadence for roadmap presentation Setting up a recurring roadmap meeting or designating time in a pre-standing meeting for roadmap updates can be an effective way to give users a sense of urgency to update their roadmaps. In an ideal state, roadmap editors are regularly updating as work items progress or change. Unfortunately, though, this is not always the case. Devoting a recurring time to the roadmap presentation will create a baseline cadence for updating. Some of the larger companies I work with establish bi-weekly roadmap forums where the team can get together and go over their roadmaps, talk about what’s working and what isn’t, and discuss updates to the process. One champion mentioned to me that this was the key to establishing standardization in their roadmapping process because it allowed them to quickly identify users who weren’t following the guidelines as they presented their roadmaps. A built-in presentation mode makes pulling your roadmap up during a meeting easy. We recommend sharing your roadmap live during these meetings so that it remains interactive. With a live roadmap, you can present in differing granularity levels, dig deeper into any items you want more detail on, and adapt as necessary. 5. Utilize integrations Keeping editors motivated to update their roadmaps is an easy way to keep editors by making the process as simple as possible. One of the most valuable ways the roadmapping process can be simplified is through the use of integrations. Nobody wants to be doing redundant work, the goal of Roadmap integrations is to make getting information that has already been created elsewhere into your roadmap with ease as well as keep it updated with no manual effort. The more places a user has to update information, the more opportunities arise for something to fall out of date. Why not only worry about updating information once and have that carry over to your roadmap? For example, LIKE.TG integrates with several Project Management Softwares: Jira, Trello, Azure DevOps, and more. Use these integrations to import items directly into your roadmap, making it possible to build an entire roadmap within minutes. Syncing your roadmap automates the process of keeping your roadmap updated. It removes the burden of tedious updates from your editors, leaving them time to focus on the big picture of the roadmap. Integrating your roadmap simplifies the process for editors, but it also helps to establish your roadmap as a source of truth by creating less opportunity for error. 6. Regular account reviews with your Customer Success Manager Okay, I might be a bit biased on this one, but hear me out. It’s your Customer Success Manager liaison’s job to help your team establish and maintain a successful roadmapping process. The best way we can help your team maintain success is through account reviews. These are a way for us to touch base with the champions and perform a pulse check on the account. We’ll ask the team leads to gather feedback from both editors and roadmap viewers; this will tell us where the process is working and also help identify any areas for improvement. We’ll also take an in-depth look at the team’s usage with the champions. We’ll uncover what features to utilize or not and any patterns in team use. Together we’ll analyze the overall account health and compare the current process to the goals. While reviewing guidelines set at the beginning of on boarding, we’ll see where they are being met or falling short. It helps us develop the next steps for training, but it will also equip the champion with concrete usage metrics that they can bring back to the team to foster accountability. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); Takeaways Getting your users to adopt a new roadmapping process isn’t as simple as buying a shiny new tool. However, with the proper structures in place, getting your team to update their Roadmaps doesn’t have to be like pulling teeth. Best of all, with LIKE.TG, you don’t have to do it alone because that’s what I’m here for. Ready to build your own roadmap? Get started with a free trial.
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