Every individual has a unique way they perceive and interact with the world around them. Recent reports claim that diverse organizations outperform their competitors by 35%, according to a recent report by McKinsey & Company. The report also concluded that gender-diverse organizations outperform their nearest competitor by 15%. McKinsey & Company’s report proves that product managers need to create an equitable user experience for their customers. Throughout life, we bring our preconceptions, biases, fluencies, capabilities to the table. As a consumer, that’s usually not a huge problem. We find ourselves judging our own experiences, purchases, and solutions. If a product doesn’t meet our needs, we can find something more suitable for our needs. Of course, not all individuals have the freedom of choice. When your boss requests that you use the new ERP system, workplace etiquette requires you to follow up on the request. When the bus or subway, or train pulls up to the stop, we can’t request a different model that’s a better fit. We must do our jobs and get to our destinations. So what happens when that ERP system uses terminology employees don’t understand? And what if the bus doesn’t have a lift for our wheelchair? Unfortunately, users may find themselves in a precarious situation due to decisions made by a product team. Software that remains intuitive and self-explanatory to novice users remains the most accessible. Product managers who do not account for these may get left behind by a market inclined to buy a product from a fair organization. What Is an Equitable User Experience? You can’t expect to make everyone happy all of the time. Product managers know this self-evident truth quite well. That’s why we define our target markets and user personas. Product managers understand that building a product that satisfies everyone remains impossible. Chasing after all those edge cases leads to ballooning costs and lengthy delays for increasingly diminishing returns. Why is an equitable user experience important? Our ability to dismiss different cohorts can drive us to whittle down our total addressable market. An effective manager who utilizes a product roadmapping tool to strategize with their product team maintains a viable product. Product managers ensure that the product supports the financial stability of the organization. Moreover, they rule out unlikely use cases and vertical markets that don’t align with our strategy. As product managers, we have to make choices that narrow the usability of our products. These choices don’t end with unusual applications. A product manager’s decision can increase the degree of difficulty for usersProduct teams rarely set out to create a product for a small subsection of the population. Instead, we would like to provide our customers with the best product possible. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); Why should you broaden the scope of your product? Understanding the scope of your product influences the downstream decisions. As product managers, we understand the importance of thinking about who out there could use our product. When we do not broaden our market share, we isolate many subsections of society. We often don’t realize how limiting those decisions might be. When we look around at our peers, our friends, our neighborhoods, and our families, we only see a sliver of the full population. We design for the “average consumer, ”which remains a flawed concept. Product teams need to develop products for a range of physical, cognitive, sensory, cultural, and socioeconomic variances. Furthermore, your product should create a fair user experience. Oftentimes product teams fail to solve use cases or accommodate everyone. A product’s financial viability may also cause issues. As a product manager, you might determine that costs limit your ability to create a full user-friendly experience. Developing a More Equitable and Inclusive Product Experience Brittany Edwards—digital product manager and co-founder of Incorp[​HER]ated—believes product teams must think beyond the types of people they see in the office. Some of this comes with who we choose to hire into our product teams, to begin with. “If you don’t have a diverse organization and you’re not sure about what you don’t know or aren’t ready to acknowledge it, then the research you do is where you’re comfortable,” Edwards said in a recent webinar on Product Management Trends. Companies need to break free of this unintentional-yet-ingrained limited perspective. Product teams must make a concerted effort to venture beyond their comfort zones. “It’s all about identifying who your customer base truly is,” Edwards said, “Really push the boundaries of your definition of your customer.” Product teams set out to understand what their users find difficult within the context of the product experience. That means talking to people, conducting usability sessions, and adopting best practices. If you search for opportunities to improve, things can always get better. Of course, this inclusiveness can only go so far while still being practical. “It’s okay to be somewhat exclusive,” Edwards continued. “But acknowledge that and the risks that are associated with it.” Potential roadblocks towards inclusiveness. With so many avenues to increase inclusivity, there’s no shame in using an ROI as part of your analysis. If you can increase your target market by a few percentage points, you don’t have to worry if it’s fair. Instead, view every effort as a net positive. You need to expand your potential market by doing the right thing. You should work to ensure your “starting point” remains unbiased. Challenging assumptions and remaining thoughtful in the design process. Yet this only happens when there is time, space, and permission given to think about these unconscious defaults. As a product manager, you need to unpack the processes that lead to exclusion in the first place. Accommodations Get Used in Unexpected Ways The American Disabilities Act has been shaping public life since 1990. Federal and state regulations mandate that buildings provide ease of access for those with disabilities. These sets of regulations make life easier for those suffering from a wide range of physical and mental limitations. They’re not the only ones who benefit. Parents with strollers also use those ramps, as well as shoppers with arms full of groceries. ADA-driven changes provide value to everyone who uses them. They’re also an important reminder that product decisions made to accommodate one part of the market can end up benefiting many more people. Some product managers may view the inclusion-driven activity as a costly exercise. Yet, it can enhance the user experience for much broader swaths of customers. Providing an option to increase the text size can attract older users, as well as those who have vision problems. Expand Your Product’s Horizons Your inclusive design can sometimes cause more problems and slow down innovation. For example, your product team may have to add in speech-to-text interfaces or develop a VR system that has accessibility features for individuals with a disability. However, every step taken to make your product more accessible increases its utility for a broader set of users, creating organic growth opportunities for your product. Consumers will continue purchasing from you if they feel that the product provides accessibility, as well as functionality. By innovating the accessibility of your products, you have the opportunity to push your competitors towards producing an equitable product. Over time, inclusive design becomes routine. “What about this?” and “what about that?” become welcome questions during ideation, design, and development. Take the next steps toward creating an equitable user experience by: Hiring more diverse teams Talking to a wider variety of customers and potential users Creating space and time to hear about a broader set of concerns and issues Ensuring usability tests include different ages, races, shapes, sizes, genders, sexualities, geographies, educational levels, income ranges, and physical and cognitive capabilities Asking your teams what else can we do to make things simpler, more accessible, and friendlier to as many constituencies as possible Inclusivity and equity are about more than paying lip service to vocal minorities or being politically correct. There are a billion people with disabilities. The LGBTQ community has $3.6 trillion in buying power. The U.S. population is more than 30% Black and Hispanic. Lastly, it’s simply good business to broaden your target market, and the brands doing so are seeing positive returns on their commitments to this practice. Don’t be caught on the wrong side of history with a product designed to serve only a small array of society rather than a universal equitable user experience.

Henry Schein, Inc. is the world’s largest provider of health care products and services to dental, animal health and medical practitioners. Teams at Henry Schein rely on LIKE.TG for strategic planning and roadmap communication. We chatted with product manager Dan Larsen about how he’s using LIKE.TG: What are you using LIKE.TG for? “We share a live version of the roadmap with teams in remote offices. We also use the Planning Board to conduct benefit versus cost weighting.” How has LIKE.TG helped you? “We’ve saved a huge chunk of time. LIKE.TG has helped us improve the business by giving us back our time to think strategically about the business, and not tactically about how to share information.” What is your favorite feature? “What I immediately liked about LIKE.TG is that it was super simple to start using. One of the first times I had one of those ‘Oh wow, this is cool’ moments was when I started using the Planning Board for scoring.” Read the full Henry Schein customer story. Read more about teams doing great things with LIKE.TG.

Orion Health develops software solutions for healthcare organizations worldwide, helping to improve the care of 35 million patients. Founded in New Zealand in 1993, Orion Health now has 27 offices in nearly every region of the world. Orion Health uses LIKE.TG to create roadmaps that easily communicate vision and strategy to stakeholders across the company’s many teams and regions. We chatted with Mark Robertson, Strategic Project Manager, to learn more. Here are some highlights from the conversation. What do you like most about LIKE.TG? Mark: “Most tools claiming to do roadmaps were cumbersome, hard to set up, and complicated to manage. I knew we’d end up not using them. But LIKE.TG was a clean, visual roadmap tool — and it was so intuitive that you could start using it in minutes.” What are you using LIKE.TG for? Mark: “The product roadmaps we’ve created with LIKE.TG make it so much easier to quickly communicate information across teams. LIKE.TG gives any of us in the company — no matter what team or part of the world — a common place to start a conversation about a project.” How has LIKE.TG saved you time? Mark: “We were using highly detailed tools like JIRA, Excel® and an internal wiki to track everything. Sure, if a salesperson in the US or an executive in New Zealand knew exactly where to look, they could figure out what was going on. But otherwise, we really had no way of quickly communicating the high-level view of our ongoing projects” How has LIKE.TG helped your organization? Mark: “Here’s an example of what we were up against our old approach. Our security team wanted to propose a new process, and we needed management buy-in. So they built a 12-column Excel spreadsheet to present the idea. When the steering committee saw it, their eyes glazed over, and they assumed we had no plan — because we weren’t visually depicting it for them. This time, [with LIKE.TG], the stakeholders got it right away. We haven’t gone back to our old Excel model since!” Read the Full Orion Health Customer Story: Visual Product Roadmaps Improve Communication

Developing an effective product roadmap requires more than a product manager’s intuition and vision, although those elements are crucial. But equally important for an effective roadmap will be evidence, real-world data, and a scientific approach to analyzing that data. In this post, I’d like to share with you some ideas for identifying, tracking, and leveraging the right metrics to help shape your product strategy. These are some of the ideas that I shared in a recent webinar that we co-hosted with Pendo, called “Building Data-Driven Product Roadmaps”. Not All Data Are Equally Valuable (Beware of the Vanity Metric) Before we discuss how to leverage data in prioritizing your product roadmap, I want to caution you upfront that not all data is equally useful. Some data, in fact, is a distraction at best, and a source of misleading information at worst. In particular, I want to warn you against focusing too heavily on “vanity metrics.” Vanity metrics are stats that look great in a press release but don’t necessarily translate in any meaningful way to business results. Examples include the number of Twitter followers or how many people have watched a clever video your company posted on YouTube. In reality, these numbers give product management very little insight into how the product will resonate with customers or how much revenue it will generate. Tweet This: “Not all data are equally valuable (beware of the vanity metric).” Worse, when you rely on these sorts of metrics — which can be tempting because they suggest interest and engagement with your company — you risk developing a very skewed view of the actual level of interest in your products. People watch YouTube videos and follow companies on Twitter for lots of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with an interest in those companies’ products or services. Download Product Success Metrics ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '18f5a8aa-393b-4397-9fd4-f7758c1edf55', {}); Limit and Prioritize the Metrics You Use in Your Roadmap Decisions Another important point to keep in mind is that with services like Google Analytics, it’s possible to track many different types of data. And that’s great. But trying to make sense of an overwhelming amount of data can also lead to confusion. You probably have a firehose of information available to you right now, so you should first try to figure out what the most important metrics for your product are. This includes the data that will lead to the most valuable and actionable insights into what’s working with your product, what isn’t resonating with users, and how you can continually improve your offering. The ideal number of metrics to track will vary from company to company, of course, but a good rule of thumb is to focus on roughly five metrics that you can monitor over time and discuss regularly with your executive stakeholders. Assuming you’ve identified the five most revealing and strategically advantageous metrics to concentrate on, the data you compile from these metrics over time should give you valuable intelligence into how to proceed with your product and what to prioritize on your roadmap. First, you have to set your product’s strategic goals. Before you can begin sifting through all of the noise and determine which handful of strategically useful metrics to focus on, you need to define your product’s strategic goals. Then, when you’ve set those goals, you can start looking for the right mix of metrics to track and analyze, the metrics that will help you achieve those goals. Next, start compiling data — here are some great places to look. If you already have a product on the market, with an installed base of users, you can choose from a wide range of real-world metrics to track, which will help you take a more scientific approach to decide where to focus your resources. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); Customer-Oriented Metrics A great way to start is to use the data being generated every day by your prospects and user base to learn what’s working with your product or your efforts to promote it, and what you need to change. These types of metrics might include: Product usage or adoption Percentage of prospects or leads who take a specific action in response to your marketing campaigns (e.g., sign up for a trial, download a white paper, etc.) Percentage of users who take specific action in the product itself (e.g., use a given feature) Customer retention or churn rate Quality (e.g., the number of bugs reported by users, and whether those numbers are going up or down over time) Business-Oriented Metrics You can also track and analyze important high-level business data relating to your product to help you shape and improve your strategy. These business-oriented metrics will come not from how your customers interact with your product but rather how their actions affect your product’s bottom line. These types of metrics could include: Cost to acquire a new customer (CAC) Customer lifetime value (LTV) Monthly recurring revenue generated by your product (MRR) The average revenue per user Conversion (e.g., the percentage who convert from free-trial users to customers) To use my own company as an example, at LIKE.TG we pay close attention to a handful of these metrics all the time, and they are extremely helpful in guiding how we pursue and adjust our strategy. One of the great things about offering a SaaS-based product, which we do with our product roadmap software, is that because you are continually tracking everything in the cloud, you can view and analyze an incredible amount of detail about how your customers are interacting with your product. Even though we don’t have access to our customer’s roadmaps for security and privacy reasons, we are aware, for example, of how many product managers using our software to share their roadmaps with others across their organizations. This helps us to determine whether our tool is encouraging communication across the company and whether there are things we need to do to make the process easier or more intuitive for our customers. And if there is a common point in the roadmap development process where customers tend to reduce their interaction with our product, that gives a signal that we might need to revisit that part of the user experience and streamline or refine it. Where to Find Useful Metrics for Your Roadmap Before You Have a Product The examples of metrics that I listed above work well when you already have a product out there, generating data that you can track. But what if you don’t yet have a product on the market? What if you are in the strategy stage, just preparing to build your product? Where can you look for the metrics that will inform your strategic decisions? Here are three useful sources of information: Experts in Your Industry These could include industry experts, or the widely read columnists and commentators who write and speak about trends in your industry and review your competitors’ products. Industry Analysts The researchers who cover your industry are an excellent source of information about which metrics offer the most significant clues as to what will constitute a successful product. These are the people, after all, who spend their days listening to briefings from your competitors about the things they’re finding resonate with their customers, and who then write detailed reports about which products are enjoying the most success in your industry, and why. Your Competitors Unless you’re planning to create an entirely new category with your product, chances are you have competitors with products already on the market. And chances are those competitors have done a lot of the research into the most strategically useful metrics relating to their products and their customers, and may have public information available, especially if they are a publicly-traded company. You can leverage this information in developing your own set of metrics to focus on. You can find your competitors’ discussions of what they deem important data points in their press releases, on their earnings call with analysts (assuming they’re publicly traded) and even in their own business filings online. Download Product Success Metrics ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '18f5a8aa-393b-4397-9fd4-f7758c1edf55', {}); How to Communicate Your Metrics-Driven Strategic Goals To this point, I’ve been discussing the importance of using a small set of key metrics as a way to help you shape your product strategy. But another important reason to track and analyze these metrics — equally important in helping you successfully bring your product to market — is that they will give you a set of concrete evidence to share with your executive stakeholders over time, to help them understand and support your strategic decisions for your product. One of the most effective ways to communicate your product strategy with your stakeholders, and to share with them the evidence that supports your strategy, is with a visual, intuitive product roadmap. As you can see from the screenshot below, depicting a roadmap developed using LIKE.TG, when you use the right roadmapping tool you can visually articulate your product’s strategic goals and then build into the roadmap the data points that support your decision to pursue each of those goals. Conclusion: The 6 Steps to Data-Driven Roadmaps So, to recap, my advice would be to always build your product strategy, and to develop your roadmap, based on key metrics that support your strategic decisions. And to accomplish this I suggest the following steps: 1. First, establish your product’s strategic goals. (You can always adjust these goals in light of the evidence you’ll be gathering.) 2. Next, make a list of possible strategically advantageous and illuminating data points to track — such as customer-oriented metrics like product usage, and business-focused metrics like customer acquisition cost. 3. If you don’t have a product already on the market (or even if you do), you might also want to research your industry for strategically important metrics to focus on. To find these metrics, check in on what your industry’s luminaries, media, analysts, and competitors are focused on. 4. Now it’s time to limit your metrics to a handful or so that you determine will give you the most strategic insights for the time and energy you’ll invest in tracking and analyzing them. (Too many data points can lead to confusion and can dilute whatever strategic insights you might uncover.) Tweet This: “Tie metrics to strategic goals, and if the data shows you need to adjust your strategy, do it.” 5. Next, tie these metrics to specific strategic goals you established in step 1. (And if your data points lead you to adjust your strategy, now is the time to do that.) 6. Now you can build this strategy (including the data points supporting it) into your product roadmap, which you can then share with your executive stakeholders — demonstrating to them that you’ve brought evidence, and not just your intuition, to these strategic decisions. At the point, I’d typically wish you luck with your product’s success. But now you’ve got evidence backing your strategy — so you won’t need luck. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '80219c5a-32c2-4135-9575-4b84ed7bd4a4', {});

Is it Time to Declare Roadmap Bankruptcy? Whether your product finds a market or falls flat, your team needs to understand why this outcome occurred. That way, you’ll know if your strategic plan is working and your roadmap is on the right track, or if it’s time to declare roadmap bankruptcy. In my years as a product manager and product leader, I’ve seen many product teams draw the wrong conclusions from both failures and successes. Even a product that’s earning money and pulling in new customers can be enjoying that success for reasons that have little or nothing to do with what the product team is prioritizing at the time. In fact, those can be the costliest misjudgments. They could lead the team to misallocate resources away from work that could build on its successes and focus on things that don’t move the needle at all. In this post, I’d like to share with you what I’ve learned about when you might need to make major adjustments specifically to your product roadmap—whether your product is falling short of expectations or exceeding them. Then I’ll suggest a few steps you can take to build your roadmap in such a way that you won’t have to declare it bankrupt in the first place. If you’re curious, I’ve also written my thoughts on when it’s time to declare backlog bankruptcy. 3 Signs that Declaring Roadmap Bankruptcy is a Fit 1. Fundamental realities have changed since you last updated it. For this example, we’ll use LIKE.TG ourselves as a case study. Throughout the 2020 COVID crisis, we closely monitored customers’ usage data around the world using our product roadmap platform. Based on those data trends, we found that product teams are shifting their behaviors and priorities according to new realities brought on by the pandemic. Our product team has updated our own strategic plans and priorities on our roadmap with this new information. No, LIKE.TG didn’t need to declare roadmap bankruptcy. We needed only to move certain initiatives higher on our priority list and shift others to our backlog. But if we were not paying close attention to how our customers were using our product, we might eventually have found that our existing plans—now based on a changing paradigm—no longer supported our business objectives. Another example: If fundamental realities change for a product’s key persona or industry, those changes could render the existing roadmap no longer viable. At that point, the product team might need to find a way to pivot its product or focus on a new solution. My take: The pandemic and the lockdowns led to such serious disruptions across so many industries that any company’s pre-COVID product roadmap will benefit from a fresh look in light of the new realities. Declaring such a roadmap ready for an overhaul might not be nearly as harmful to your business as insisting on continuing with a product strategy that fails to account for the major shift we all just experienced. 2. Your work on the product is not contributing to your KPIs. Whenever you build a new product or update an existing one, your team might set any number of key performance indicators (KPIs), or success metrics, for it. For example, you might be hoping the product will: Grow your market share relative to a key competitor Win over a new type of user or buyer persona Help your company earn customers in a new market Increase monthly recurring revenue (MRR) from an existing market Increase free-trial signups You might be releasing new product features and enhancements regularly. You might be aggressively advertising to your target markets. But if all of those efforts are not translating to a boost in the specific success metrics you’ve established, you might be misallocating your resources. While product metrics are not an exact science when all signs point to a downward trend, it may be time to declare roadmap bankruptcy. At a minimum, it might be time to review your strategic priorities in light of this. If most or all of your initiatives fail to achieve the objectives you’ve set for them, it might be time to declare roadmap bankruptcy. Note: As you might have noticed, this type of warning signal can be present even for a product that succeeds in the market.Maybe you’ve released a new version of your product, and it receives a lot of free-trial signups. But if the roadmap initiatives your team completed for this release had nothing to do with that KPI, there is a disconnect between your roadmap and the market’s priorities. For example, if your team prioritized bug fixes and eliminating technical debt in the product. In this situation, you can’t simply declare success because you saw a spike in trials. You’ll need to review all of your company’s efforts to figure out what led to the spike in signups. This includes efforts across all teams—marketing, advertising, sales, or social media activity. You’ll also want to review your roadmap to determine if your team is working on the wrong things. Download Product Success Metrics ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '18f5a8aa-393b-4397-9fd4-f7758c1edf55', {}); 3. Your product team is falling for the “post hoc” fallacy. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc is a Latin phrase meaning: After the thing, therefore because of the thing. It’s a logical fallacy that confuses sequence with causation. To use a silly example: I took a different route home this evening, and it rained overnight. Therefore, when I deviate from my normal drive home, it rains. You can find examples of the post hoc fallacy everywhere, and falling for its subtler versions is easier than you might think. Let’s say your company releases a new version of your product. Let’s also assume your team packed this update with cool new features. Six months later, the overall revenue from the product is up. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc? Not necessarily. What if… The spike in revenue had nothing to do with the new release? Your sales team hit on an effective new strategy for presenting the product to customers in demos? Your marketing team created a brilliant piece of social media content that went viral? A persona in an industry you weren’t even targeting somehow discovered your product? Word got out in that industry, and the orders flooded in. Word got out in that industry, and the orders flooded in. If you’re not monitoring these details carefully, you might make this pervasive post hoc error: We did a lot of work on the product and released it to the market. Product revenue increased. Therefore, our work on the product led to an increase in revenue. By the way, the post hoc fallacy works for the opposite outcome as well. Your team might just as easily attribute a product failure to a poor sales presentation or a badly designed eCommerce experience. But those things had nothing to do with why your solution failed to find a product-market fit. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'ad657ba8-be75-4be1-a163-e71ff5498018', {}); 3 Steps to Developing a Bankruptcy-Resistant Product Roadmap As I pointed out above, sometimes a roadmap becomes bankrupt, not due to anything the product team does but simply because external realities demand a new approach. For many companies today, the fallout from COVID might have caused such a shift. I bring this up again to note that no matter how carefully you build your product roadmap, you might need to declare it bankrupt in the future because of the ground shifts beneath you. In other words, you can’t create a roadmap that is truly bankruptcy-proof. But the following steps should help you develop a roadmap that’s at least bankruptcy-resistant. 1. First, make sure you’re actually solving a real market problem. You should never begin developing a product roadmap until you’ve determined—based on evidence—that the product idea addresses a market problem worth solving. Here’s the easiest way to find yourself in roadmap bankruptcy. Start with a product idea your team is excited about but that you haven’t also vetted with a ready, eager market. Now, even if you have vetted your idea, your team can still fall short in executing the details. But if you don’t first make sure you’re building a product that solves a real problem for real people—one they’re willing to pay to solve—your roadmap won’t stand much of a chance of success. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '9754e937-d766-41b6-acef-85c0aefaaa24', {}); hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '8d90fe78-17c8-4e9d-b664-8a5e4e8a2afb', {}); 2. Set specific success metrics for each initiative. Okay, let’s assume you’ve compiled data supporting the case that your product idea is worth pursuing. Your next step will be to start building the roadmap itself. For each theme, epic, and other strategic initiatives you add to the roadmap, you’ll want to make a note of the key reasons it belongs there. As well as the success metrics you’ll be monitoring to determine if it’s serving its purpose. This is one of many reasons to use native roadmap software instead of spreadsheets or slideshows to build and maintain your roadmap. You’ll find it much easier to attach a strategic note to each item on the roadmap with a click than by having to create your own color-coded legends and tags. In this screenshot of LIKE.TG’s roadmap app, you can see how easy it is to add a strategic goal to each container or bar you drop into your roadmap. You can also review each initiative’s goals and share them with your team, with a single click as well. Remember, specificity is the key to gaining the only business insight that matters. Is this project we’ve prioritized on our roadmap moving the needle the way we hoped? If so, then it’s worth the continued effort and resources. If not, it might be time to scrap this initiative, or at least shelve it for later, and shift those resources to another project with a better chance of meeting your goals. 3. Check on your data regularly.Assigning success metrics to each item on your product roadmap is the best practice. But those metrics can guide your team as to the effectiveness of your roadmap only to the extent that you look at them—and often. Remember, the ground can shift under your plans for any reason, at any time. As you release a new version of your product, for example, you should have a specific set of KPIs for anything you’ve added. This includes new functionality, product enhancements, an additional pricing option, etc. Then, you’ll want to check in at some point after the launch, review all relevant data, and check those data against the KPIs you’ve set. Is the new functionality leading to the added trial downloads as you’d hoped? Great! Are the enhancements helping to slow your churn rate? Also great! But if you’re not analyzing your data with this level of granularity, you can’t expect to know which initiatives warrant continued resources and which don’t. You also won’t know if, for whatever reason, it’s time to declare your roadmap bankrupt. Sign up for our email courses or watch our roadmap webinar “Common Roadmap Communication Challenges” for additional support in creating your product strategy. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '56aa459c-cbe7-403b-b3aa-96d107286b55', {}); 点击播放声音 @keyframes VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } @keyframes VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } .volume__small-wave { animation: VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite; opacity: 0; } .volume__large-wave { animation: VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite .3s; opacity: 0; } 6:28 #wistia_chrome_41 #wistia_grid_75_wrapper .w-css-reset{font-size:14px;} #wistia_chrome_41 #wistia_grid_75_wrapper 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Is it Time to Declare Roadmap Bankruptcy? Whether your product finds a market or falls flat, your team needs to understand why this outcome occurred. That way, you’ll know if your strategic plan is working and your roadmap is on the right track, or if it’s time to declare roadmap bankruptcy. In my years as a product manager and product leader, I’ve seen many product teams draw the wrong conclusions from both failures and successes. Even a product that’s earning money and pulling in new customers can be enjoying that success for reasons that have little or nothing to do with what the product team is prioritizing at the time. In fact, those can be the costliest misjudgments. They could lead the team to misallocate resources away from work that could build on its successes and focus on things that don’t move the needle at all. In this post, I’d like to share with you what I’ve learned about when you might need to make major adjustments specifically to your product roadmap—whether your product is falling short of expectations or exceeding them. Then I’ll suggest a few steps you can take to build your roadmap in such a way that you won’t have to declare it bankrupt in the first place. If you’re curious, I’ve also written my thoughts on when it’s time to declare backlog bankruptcy. 3 Signs that Declaring Roadmap Bankruptcy is a Fit 1. Fundamental realities have changed since you last updated it. For this example, we’ll use LIKE.TG ourselves as a case study. Throughout the 2020 COVID crisis, we closely monitored customers’ usage data around the world using our product roadmap platform. Based on those data trends, we found that product teams are shifting their behaviors and priorities according to new realities brought on by the pandemic. Our product team has updated our own strategic plans and priorities on our roadmap with this new information. No, LIKE.TG didn’t need to declare roadmap bankruptcy. We needed only to move certain initiatives higher on our priority list and shift others to our backlog. But if we were not paying close attention to how our customers were using our product, we might eventually have found that our existing plans—now based on a changing paradigm—no longer supported our business objectives. Another example: If fundamental realities change for a product’s key persona or industry, those changes could render the existing roadmap no longer viable. At that point, the product team might need to find a way to pivot its product or focus on a new solution. My take: The pandemic and the lockdowns led to such serious disruptions across so many industries that any company’s pre-COVID product roadmap will benefit from a fresh look in light of the new realities. Declaring such a roadmap ready for an overhaul might not be nearly as harmful to your business as insisting on continuing with a product strategy that fails to account for the major shift we all just experienced. 2. Your work on the product is not contributing to your KPIs. Whenever you build a new product or update an existing one, your team might set any number of key performance indicators (KPIs), or success metrics, for it. For example, you might be hoping the product will: Grow your market share relative to a key competitor Win over a new type of user or buyer persona Help your company earn customers in a new market Increase monthly recurring revenue (MRR) from an existing market Increase free-trial signups You might be releasing new product features and enhancements regularly. You might be aggressively advertising to your target markets. But if all of those efforts are not translating to a boost in the specific success metrics you’ve established, you might be misallocating your resources. While product metrics are not an exact science when all signs point to a downward trend, it may be time to declare roadmap bankruptcy. At a minimum, it might be time to review your strategic priorities in light of this. If most or all of your initiatives fail to achieve the objectives you’ve set for them, it might be time to declare roadmap bankruptcy. Note: As you might have noticed, this type of warning signal can be present even for a product that succeeds in the market.Maybe you’ve released a new version of your product, and it receives a lot of free-trial signups. But if the roadmap initiatives your team completed for this release had nothing to do with that KPI, there is a disconnect between your roadmap and the market’s priorities. For example, if your team prioritized bug fixes and eliminating technical debt in the product. In this situation, you can’t simply declare success because you saw a spike in trials. You’ll need to review all of your company’s efforts to figure out what led to the spike in signups. This includes efforts across all teams—marketing, advertising, sales, or social media activity. You’ll also want to review your roadmap to determine if your team is working on the wrong things. Download Product Success Metrics ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '18f5a8aa-393b-4397-9fd4-f7758c1edf55', {}); 3. Your product team is falling for the “post hoc” fallacy. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc is a Latin phrase meaning: After the thing, therefore because of the thing. It’s a logical fallacy that confuses sequence with causation. To use a silly example: I took a different route home this evening, and it rained overnight. Therefore, when I deviate from my normal drive home, it rains. You can find examples of the post hoc fallacy everywhere, and falling for its subtler versions is easier than you might think. Let’s say your company releases a new version of your product. Let’s also assume your team packed this update with cool new features. Six months later, the overall revenue from the product is up. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc? Not necessarily. What if… The spike in revenue had nothing to do with the new release? Your sales team hit on an effective new strategy for presenting the product to customers in demos? Your marketing team created a brilliant piece of social media content that went viral? A persona in an industry you weren’t even targeting somehow discovered your product? Word got out in that industry, and the orders flooded in. Word got out in that industry, and the orders flooded in. If you’re not monitoring these details carefully, you might make this pervasive post hoc error: We did a lot of work on the product and released it to the market. Product revenue increased. Therefore, our work on the product led to an increase in revenue. By the way, the post hoc fallacy works for the opposite outcome as well. Your team might just as easily attribute a product failure to a poor sales presentation or a badly designed eCommerce experience. But those things had nothing to do with why your solution failed to find a product-market fit. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'ad657ba8-be75-4be1-a163-e71ff5498018', {}); 3 Steps to Developing a Bankruptcy-Resistant Product Roadmap As I pointed out above, sometimes a roadmap becomes bankrupt, not due to anything the product team does but simply because external realities demand a new approach. For many companies today, the fallout from COVID might have caused such a shift. I bring this up again to note that no matter how carefully you build your product roadmap, you might need to declare it bankrupt in the future because of the ground shifts beneath you. In other words, you can’t create a roadmap that is truly bankruptcy-proof. But the following steps should help you develop a roadmap that’s at least bankruptcy-resistant. 1. First, make sure you’re actually solving a real market problem. You should never begin developing a product roadmap until you’ve determined—based on evidence—that the product idea addresses a market problem worth solving. Here’s the easiest way to find yourself in roadmap bankruptcy. Start with a product idea your team is excited about but that you haven’t also vetted with a ready, eager market. Now, even if you have vetted your idea, your team can still fall short in executing the details. But if you don’t first make sure you’re building a product that solves a real problem for real people—one they’re willing to pay to solve—your roadmap won’t stand much of a chance of success. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '9754e937-d766-41b6-acef-85c0aefaaa24', {}); hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '8d90fe78-17c8-4e9d-b664-8a5e4e8a2afb', {}); 2. Set specific success metrics for each initiative. Okay, let’s assume you’ve compiled data supporting the case that your product idea is worth pursuing. Your next step will be to start building the roadmap itself. For each theme, epic, and other strategic initiatives you add to the roadmap, you’ll want to make a note of the key reasons it belongs there. As well as the success metrics you’ll be monitoring to determine if it’s serving its purpose. This is one of many reasons to use native roadmap software instead of spreadsheets or slideshows to build and maintain your roadmap. You’ll find it much easier to attach a strategic note to each item on the roadmap with a click than by having to create your own color-coded legends and tags. In this screenshot of LIKE.TG’s roadmap app, you can see how easy it is to add a strategic goal to each container or bar you drop into your roadmap. You can also review each initiative’s goals and share them with your team, with a single click as well. Remember, specificity is the key to gaining the only business insight that matters. Is this project we’ve prioritized on our roadmap moving the needle the way we hoped? If so, then it’s worth the continued effort and resources. If not, it might be time to scrap this initiative, or at least shelve it for later, and shift those resources to another project with a better chance of meeting your goals. 3. Check on your data regularly.Assigning success metrics to each item on your product roadmap is the best practice. But those metrics can guide your team as to the effectiveness of your roadmap only to the extent that you look at them—and often. Remember, the ground can shift under your plans for any reason, at any time. As you release a new version of your product, for example, you should have a specific set of KPIs for anything you’ve added. This includes new functionality, product enhancements, an additional pricing option, etc. Then, you’ll want to check in at some point after the launch, review all relevant data, and check those data against the KPIs you’ve set. Is the new functionality leading to the added trial downloads as you’d hoped? Great! Are the enhancements helping to slow your churn rate? Also great! But if you’re not analyzing your data with this level of granularity, you can’t expect to know which initiatives warrant continued resources and which don’t. You also won’t know if, for whatever reason, it’s time to declare your roadmap bankrupt. Sign up for our email courses or watch our roadmap webinar “Common Roadmap Communication Challenges” for additional support in creating your product strategy. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '56aa459c-cbe7-403b-b3aa-96d107286b55', {}); 点击播放声音 @keyframes VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } @keyframes VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } .volume__small-wave { animation: VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite; opacity: 0; } .volume__large-wave { animation: VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite .3s; opacity: 0; } 6:28 #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_75_wrapper .w-css-reset{font-size:14px;} #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_75_wrapper 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Many companies provide a single career path up the proverbial corporate ladder where the only way to get ahead is by moving up in the title, rung by rung. In product management, this usually takes the form of something like this: For most of my career, I worked at startups that had single-track product management career paths like this. Luckily, most of these companies were small enough that I was able to manage small teams while being hands-on, defining products, and collaborating with designers and engineers to bring those products to life. On two different occasions, though, I was faced with choosing between being a manager or an individual contributor (often referred to as an IC). Both took place at different times in my career, so depending on what stage you are at, my hope is that you find my experience useful. From Individual Contributor to Director of Product➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '9110b373-1b93-491b-8f83-5fc4b63b4b89', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Spinner I joined Spinner, the world’s first streaming music service, in 1998 as one of a dozen or so employees. This was my first job as a product manager, and I was thrilled to have finally made the transition from marketing to product management. We were a small but mighty team that grew the business and the company rapidly. Within a year, we had grown to over one hundred employees. I managed a team of product managers, designers, and front-end developers. It was an exciting time leading a collaborative team, as we created numerous versions of our music player that was branded for a variety of partnerships. AOL In 1999, American Online acquired the company. As part of the transition process, AOL brought in a few executives whose job was to evaluate their newly acquired staff in an attempt to integrate Spinner into their organization. I vividly remember the day I was called into a conference room with one of these individuals who asked a few questions about my role and responsibilities. At one point, she said, “Ah, you see, at AOL, you’re either an IC or a people manager. You can’t be both. You have to choose.” I felt like I was in the movie The Matrix, choosing between the red pill or the blue pill. I knew once I made my decision, there would be no turning back. Based on what I had seen so far of the AOL culture, I did not think I was cut out for the politics that seemed to dominate daily corporate life. Although I loved finding and hiring talented people to join my team, the work I enjoyed the most was creating something from scratch. Creating a vision, solving problems, and building products that people loved—is what drove me each and every day. I chose to give up my reins as a manager and spent the remainder of my career at AOL as an individual contributor. Looking back, I think the decision was easy because I was fairly new to product management at that time. Frankly, I wasn’t sure what the career path of a product manager even looked like back then. What I did know is that I wanted to have a direct impact on products that would be used by millions of people. Musicmatch I was eventually recruited away from AOL to join another music start-up called Musicmatch. Musicmatch was another pioneer in the digital music space with its CD ripping and burning software called the Musicmatch Jukebox. Similar to my experience at Spinner, I managed a small team while being hands-on with the product development process. One of the highlights from there was creating an in-house usability testing facility and hiring a UX researcher to help us better understand how customers were using our products and how we could make them better. Sonos Shortly after leaving Musicmatch, I was asked to join another digital music start-up called Sonos. When I joined in 2005, I was the only software product manager. The team at Sonos sought me out because of my experience with streaming music services. I had a strong network built from my days at Spinner/AOL and was able to leverage those relationships to establish new partnerships for Sonos. I also had experience developing software for hardware, which was an uncommon thing back then, before there were smartphones and IoT products. I jumped right in, wearing a number of hats. One moment I would wear a business development hat, negotiating with Pandora. Another minute, I would be working with a designer, sketching design ideas for our remote control software. The minute after that, I would be working with our acoustics team to figure out how we could tweak the EQ settings of our speakers to deliver the optimum sound quality. When I look back on those days, I’m honestly not sure how I did it all, but I loved every minute of it. At some point, however, it became clear that I was spreading myself too thin, and we needed to expand the team. To organize the work, my boss and I decided to split music service integrations into its own workstream. I hired and managed two additional people—one who would be responsible for the music service partnerships and the other who would be responsible for our 3rd party developer APIs and website. In addition to managing those new employees, I was the hands-on product manager for all other aspects of Sonos software. Again, I reached a breaking point where I was not being the best manager I could be to my staff, nor was I doing my best work as the PM for the Sonos software. I remember the CEO of Sonos telling me that one of the worst possible outcomes in promoting a great software engineer to being a manager is that you gain a mediocre manager and lose a talented engineer. The same could be said for product managers. My boss was extremely supportive and gave me a few weeks to do some much-needed soul searching to figure out what the best path forward would be for me. Tweet This: “I remember the CEO of Sonos telling me that one of the worst possible outcomes in promoting a great software engineer to being a manager is that you gain a mediocre manager and lose a talented engineer.” I am a deeply introspective person, to begin with. Having the time and space to reflect on where I was at this particular stage of my career was such good fortune. I figured out the right path to take by asking myself one simple question: What are you working on that gets you out of bed? Looking back, I realized that I was focusing my energy on redesigning our apps and defining new features. Thinking about our customer needs, collaborating with designers and engineers, and launching new products—these were the things that got me out of bed in the morning. At the same time, I was not spending enough time filling the open positions on my team. I would block out a few hours each week for phone screens and the occasional interview and then wonder why it was taking months to fill the position. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '8bd83652-2868-48a8-9b9c-ebb8e0b9c945', {}); Again, I was faced with choosing between management and individual contribution. Even though I had made this decision once before, this time it wasn’t as easy. For one thing, Sonos didn’t have a 2-track career path for product managers at the time. They did offer a dual-career path for engineers, however. Another reason this was a difficult decision was my ego. At this point in my career, I had worked as a product manager for more than ten years and had some preconceived notions about my future that were based on the continuous climb up that invisible ladder. For me, this had less to do with power and more to do with money. The loftier the title, the higher the compensation. Ultimately, I knew that money wouldn’t make me happy. What made me happy was thinking, “How can I help people listen to more music every day?” Deciding to be an individual contributor (again!) was the best decision for me because I was happiest having the most direct impact on the product. It was also the best decision for the company because they didn’t have to worry about further developing my management skills and, instead, they could unleash me on special projects, such as creating a ground-breaking retail experience for the flagship Sonos store in New York City. As Shakespeare wrote, “To thine own self be true.” In order to know which path you should take, you need to be honest with yourself. Set aside a few days for some deep introspection. Grab a journal and a pen and ask yourself these three key questions: 1) What are your strengths as well as your blind spots? Be open to the feedback you’ve been given, the good and the bad. Take a co-worker out for coffee and ask them for feedback. Review those performance reviews again. If you already manage people, provide them with a way to give feedback. 2) What do you enjoy doing the most? Ask yourself what gets you out of bed every day. Is it thinking about how to help your newest team member grow? Or do you thrive when brainstorming ideas for helping your customers use your product more easily? 3) Where do you want to be in 5 years? 10 years? Do you have dreams of becoming a CEO or starting your own company? If so, the manager track might be best for you. Perhaps you’d rather be a subject matter expert in a particular field, speaking at conferences and being sought after for your brilliant insights. Whether you decide to focus on managing or would rather be an individual contributor, I encourage you to champion a dual-track path at your company if it doesn’t already offer it. Here’s what dual-track paths might look like based on my experience: Having a track that rewards senior individual contributors helps retain a critical aspect of your company’s brain trust while ensuring people becoming managers are doing so because they want to. In my particular case, Sonos did eventually develop a dual-track path for product managers, and I was the archetype for the Principal Product Manager role. It was gratifying to be recognized and rewarded for my contributions as the most senior product manager at the company in terms of tenure and experience. After leaving Sonos, I decided to pursue yet another career path by leveraging my extensive experience to start a consulting business. Being my own boss while having a direct impact on the success of my business offers me the best of both worlds. Does your company offer different tracks for product managers? Have you ever faced the challenge of deciding if becoming a manager is right for you? What do you think?

Vital to delivering successful products at Clickatell, an effective product roadmap can quell the confusion and missteps that often derail well-meaning product delivery organizations. Roadmaps provide the required context to understand how individual initiatives combine to meet strategic objectives. They also paint a clear picture of how it all comes together. An effective product roadmap lists the many deliverables and deadlines. However, most importantly, it tells a story. The roadmap guides and informs everyone involved with the product from ideation to market. Furthermore, the alignment creates a cohesive organization around the same core objectives. Using Your Product Strategy and Product Vision to Plan Your Roadmap Product strategies must be rooted in the overall vision of the company and product. This ensures organizational alignment and support. When each product initiative advances, the product vision is easy for everyone to be on board. Some product teams may find themselves challenged by the individual whims of sales staff, executives, or even their product managers. The product roadmap then reflects that strategy. It illustrates the product team’s approach to making their product vision a reality. The linkage prevents the product from straying into uncertain territory. An effective product roadmap can provide your team with a mission and vision into actual functionality and deliverables. Anything that doesn’t directly service the overall vision of the product roadmap needs reevaluation. Strategic and effective product roadmaps provide independent product managers and implementation teams time to focus on what really matters. They can then produce their desired outcomes. Teams can then ensure a product-led company arrives at the desired destination. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '527dc6af-8860-436f-9ca6-ae2b71b0cc99', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); The Product Roadmap’s Key Role in the “Triad” Product management, product development, and user experience comprise the “triad.” Moreover, these disciplines are essential to delivering great products. Every organization strives to find the sweet spot for these collaborations. The results are products that delight customers while also solving their problems. [Source for reference of the “triad”] Product roadmaps serve as the golden thread that weaves these three disciplines together. When roadmaps align with the product strategy, all three key disciplines are working off the same plan. The alignment creates a secure buy-in from stakeholders regarding its contents’ viability, feasibility, and desirability. Moreover, it creates a true partnership that can’t reach a common goal without working in sync. The Importance of Storytelling and the Roadmap’s Role Humans respond much better to stories and narratives than bulleted lists of talking points. Positioning your product in terms of stories helps people communicate its value and helps keep all teams on message and consistent. While the specifics may be highly dependent on the product’s and company’s maturity and scale, the logic and sequence of the roadmap’s contents should always make sense. I believe every product strategy needs a storyline and a timeline. Product storyline The storyline explains the “why,” typically presented verbally with a few slides to support the presentation. The timeline denotes the order, with sequences and key milestones best expressed in a visual roadmap created with purpose-built tools like ProductPlan. Storylines introduce concepts and create consistent naming conventions that ensure everyone in the business can associate with. This narrative device provides input to concepts reflected in the roadmap. Storylines help underpin the product’s vision and mission. A solid visual roadmap pulls the story together. It provides documentation of the narrative. The roadmap’s timeline can serve as a preview of how and when that story will expand and get even better over time. 6 Roadmapping Best Practices Roadmap’s key value exists in sharing data in a digestible, consistent format. It serves as the record reference for anyone building, selling, supporting, or using the product. But the best roadmaps have a few key elements that increase their utility. 1.) Know your audience Not every crowd wants or needs the same thing from a roadmap. The storyline and timeline should remain consistent. The level of detail and emphasis get tailored to different sets of stakeholders. So it puts the focus on what’s meaningful to them. Don’t make the rookie mistake of thinking the only audience that matters is product development or the C-suite. 2.) Choose an appropriate tool Visual roadmaps are the best way to convey your product’s story. Don’t rely on tools that lack the flexibility and ease of use required to create a compelling visual roadmap. It will evolve as the product strategy matures and new features and functionality ship. Other teams would never settle for subpar tools, and neither should product management. Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint do many things well, but roadmapping isn’t one of them, and neither do a collaboration or issue tracking tools. Pick a purpose-built roadmapping tool. 3.) Static is for suckers Roadmaps are living resources that demand regular updates. Create a cadence for updating and socializing the latest versions of the roadmap, so stakeholders expect and look forward to their natural evolution. Slide decks and screenshots don’t do roadmaps justice – rather, use a specialized and interactive tool put in the hands of competent roadmap owners to mitigate the danger of outdated documents remaining in circulation. 4.) Consistency is crucial Regardless of how roadmaps get built in your organization, they should always look and read the same. Relying on templates, standard terminology, and consistent visual elements avoids stakeholders’ confusion and prevent product team members from reinventing the wheel. With a roadmap strategy guide, everyone can focus on the substance and less on the format. 5.) Take a portfolio approach No roadmap is an island in organizations with multiple products and product lines. With a consistent approach, it’s easy to roll up various roadmaps for different products into a portfolio or master view. The portfolio approach creates a cohesive roadmap ecosystem, even with diverse global teams working on product strategy and execution. Project managers, developers, testers, sales, and marketing must make sense of each product, how they interact, and any interdependencies. 6.) Build for a remote and distributed world Roadmaps provide a reference regardless of the location or time zone, especially in Agile environments where rapid iterations and learnings are the norms. Since far-flung teams get so few overlapping time slots when they can work together, roadmap consistency allows those meetings to be more productive and efficient, fostering increased collaboration. Get Your Free Roadmap Template Guide ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'aade5d3d-4c0b-4409-b1c0-31d727a356aa', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Make Roadmaps Work for You Humans invented tools to accomplish more, not so they could spend their time fooling around with the tools. Product managers should view roadmaps as a valuable tool. They should invest enough time in them to maximize their benefits. Product managers are the keepers of one of the most important artifacts in the entire company—the product roadmap. Understanding what roadmaps can do and continually improving and updating them makes them more helpful for challenging conversations and negotiations between product teams and stakeholders. Roadmaps do well to limit noise and distractions. They focus on the core of the vision and leave the shiny objects on the sidelines. Consequently, they are the “chaos shield.” We all need to deliver value and delight to our customers while at the same time appeasing our internal stakeholders. Finally, their accuracy creates credibility, which will give them more utility moving forward. Read the Strategic Roadmap Planning Guide ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '06f68ad8-23a4-4d4e-b15a-e578f0f8adaf', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});

What drives product professionals? They are driven with a hyperfocus on doing things that matter. Product professionals talk to customers and stakeholders to understand what’s important to them. They unpack their pain points to get to the root cause. They know the importance of a prioritization strategy and seek out opportunities to improve upon it. We conduct customer research and stakeholder alignment so we can figure out what matters. Then we identify what we can do in our products that make an impact, be it on the lives of our customers, the growth of the user base, or the bottom line of the business. However, we usually have far more ideas and options than bandwidth and resources. Thus, we realize a real need for prioritization, ranking and sorting, and culling the list. We can then choose a few items worthy of making the product roadmap rise to the top. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); The Downsides of Prioritization Frameworks Because a prioritization strategy is of crucial importance to any product’s success, many different methods exist. Dozens upon dozens of frameworks stand ready for product teams looking for a new way to figure out the best ideas to pursue first, from buy-a-feature to MoSCoW analysis. These frameworks aim to maximize windows of opportunity and optimize product development. It’s a testament to just how tricky, and complex a prioritization strategy can be. Not only do these frameworks have lots of different names and acronyms, but they also require varied inputs. Some rely heavily on customer surveys, while others need a well-structured strategy or clear key performance indicators (KPIs). While these tools often help, there’s an inherent risk to them as well. Product managers may feel forced to ignore critical data points due to the limits of the overall framework. Product managers face limits due to the lack of a solid strategy. Their strategy should align stakeholders on a consensus moving forward. That must be in place well before plugging numbers into a framework. How else can you assess the significance of any item on the business making progress toward its goals? IMPACT sets the stage for better prioritization conversations, moving the team past the “why” and focusing on specific trade-offs and expected outcomes. Watch our webinar on IMPACT: Applying an IMPACT Prioritization Strategy As I’ve covered in many other blog posts, webinars, and our free ebook, IMPACT is a mindset for ensuring you’re doing things that matter. And there’s no domain where that matters more than prioritization. So let’s run through the six elements of IMPACT and see how they relate to this essential aspect of product management: Interesting Not all problems are created equal. Framing and Context provide stakeholders with an idea of how pressing the issue is. Product management must act as a storyteller to engage their colleagues instead of just giving a dry recounting of the facts. Folks get excited and influence how things get ranked. At this stage, the solution must take a backseat to the prevalence and significance of the problem. Meaningful The problems you opt to solve must both move the business forward and provide customer value. You can’t do either without an agreed-upon vision and strategy as well as a quantifiable benefit to the customer. People The focus must remain squarely on the customers, in this case, how many benefits and how significant is the improvement, which creates an apples-to-apples comparison and shifts distractions and edge cases to the parking lot. Actionable Prioritization must consider the realistic chances of solving the problem. Putting something impossible at the top of the queue—despite its possible value—wastes everyone’s time. That requires a little homework with engineering to consider feasibility and level of effort to ensure a balance between resource allocation and weight. Clear It’s tough to consider and adequately rank potential development items without a comprehensive understanding of the problem. Don’t prioritize things until the research is complete and the ideal solution is already in hand. Testable How will you validate that each prioritized item worked once it ships? Without a measurable definition of success, no one knows if it was worth it or if similar projects warrant resource allocation in the future. Did you solve the problem? Is the value clear to end-users and prospects? User feedback confirms those assumptions—or sends you back to the drawing board—so the sooner they chime in, the better. Download IMPACT ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '76387af0-7ef4-49da-8b36-28e99e4f5ba3', {"region":"na1"}); An IMPACT Prioritization Strategy in Action For an additional lens incorporating IMPACT into a prioritization strategy, you can rank each item being considered based on the six tenets of IMPACT. For each of those six pillars, the team can rate each item on a five-point scale. When evaluating a potential development item for “People,” for example, it might look like this: 1 – This only helps a minimal number of users in our target market. 3 – This allows lots of users with a particular characteristic/within a specific market segment. 5 – Everyone reaps significant benefits, and it expands the pool of potential customers. Each item’s IMPACT is an objective countermeasure to the inertia that plague prioritization. The goal is to make the most of each development cycle, and the work with the most significant IMPACT is the work worth doing first. To learn more about how IMPACT can influence this and other aspects of product management, download the free ebook today!

Few advancements have sparked as much excitement and potential as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). These groundbreaking technologies are reshaping industries and revolutionizing the way we approach product management. As companies continue to integrate the capabilities of AI and ML into their software, they are reaping substantial rewards. Consequently, how will AI and ML transform the product management space? Let’s take a closer look at how the usage of AI is expected to evolve over time. Furthermore, we’ll dive into the possible consequences for companies that are slow to adopt it or overlook its potential. The Current Impact of AI and ML on Product Management The impact of AI and ML on product management is already yielding remarkable benefits for companies that have embraced their capabilities. For example, these technologies empower product managers to gain valuable insights into customer needs, drive product development, and elevate user experiences. With the aid of AI, product managers can tap into advanced data analytics, enabling them to better understand consumer behavior, preferences, and market trends. Furthermore, this wealth of information empowers them to make informed decisions about product features, pricing strategies, and impactful marketing campaigns. ML algorithms analyze vast datasets, unveiling patterns and predicting future trends, thereby enabling product managers to proactively respond to market demands. Moreover, AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants have revolutionized customer support, offering personalized recommendations and real-time assistance. These intelligent systems streamline interactions, freeing up valuable time for product managers to focus on strategic initiatives. The Evolving Landscape of AI in Product Management As AI and ML continue to evolve, their impact on product management is poised to reach new heights. Here are a few exciting areas where AI is expected to create transformative change: Enhanced Customer Insights: AI algorithms will become even more adept at analyzing complex datasets, granting product managers deeper customer insights and an unprecedented ability to anticipate their needs. This will result in the development of highly tailored products and services that resonate with target audiences. Automated Product Development: AI and ML will facilitate the automation of various aspects of product development, including idea generation, prototyping, and testing. Intelligent algorithms will leverage historical data and user feedback to generate innovative product ideas and optimize design, significantly reducing time-to-market. Hyper-Personalization: With AI, product managers can create hyper-personalized experiences by leveraging individual customer data. By understanding each user’s preferences, behaviors, and context, AI-powered systems can deliver customized product recommendations, personalized marketing messages, and tailored user interfaces. Consequences for Companies Slow to Adopt In this era of rapid technological advancement, companies that hesitate to embrace AI and ML technologies in their product management processes risk falling behind their competitors and missing out on numerous growth opportunities. Here are some potential consequences to consider: Missed Competitive Advantage: AI-driven insights and automation provide a significant competitive advantage in today’s fast-paced business landscape. Companies that fail to adopt these technologies may struggle to meet customer expectations, leading to a loss of market share. Inefficiency in Operations: Without AI-powered automation, product management processes may become inefficient and resource-intensive. Manual data analysis and decision-making can result in delays, errors, and suboptimal outcomes. Overlooking Growth Opportunities: AI and ML uncover hidden market trends, identify untapped customer segments, and generate innovative product ideas. Companies that do not leverage them may miss out on valuable growth opportunities and fail to meet evolving customer demands. Diminished Customer Satisfaction: AI-driven personalization and intelligent support systems enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty. Companies that do not embrace these capabilities may struggle to deliver seamless user experiences, leading to customer dissatisfaction and churn. The Immense Potential AI and ML Product management is undergoing a remarkable transformation, and AI and ML technologies are at the heart of this revolution. This article highlights the immense potential of these technologies to empower companies, drive innovation, and create exceptional user experiences. Embracing AI and ML as integral components of product management strategies will enable businesses to stay at the forefront of innovation and meet the ever-changing needs of their customers. So, let’s embrace the warmth of these technologies and embark on a journey of growth and success together.

What drives product professionals? They are driven with a hyperfocus on doing things that matter. Product professionals talk to customers and stakeholders to understand what’s important to them. They unpack their pain points to get to the root cause. They know the importance of a prioritization strategy and seek out opportunities to improve upon it. We conduct customer research and stakeholder alignment so we can figure out what matters. Then we identify what we can do in our products that make an impact, be it on the lives of our customers, the growth of the user base, or the bottom line of the business. However, we usually have far more ideas and options than bandwidth and resources. Thus, we realize a real need for prioritization, ranking and sorting, and culling the list. We can then choose a few items worthy of making the product roadmap rise to the top. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); The Downsides of Prioritization Frameworks Because a prioritization strategy is of crucial importance to any product’s success, many different methods exist. Dozens upon dozens of frameworks stand ready for product teams looking for a new way to figure out the best ideas to pursue first, from buy-a-feature to MoSCoW analysis. These frameworks aim to maximize windows of opportunity and optimize product development. It’s a testament to just how tricky, and complex a prioritization strategy can be. Not only do these frameworks have lots of different names and acronyms, but they also require varied inputs. Some rely heavily on customer surveys, while others need a well-structured strategy or clear key performance indicators (KPIs). While these tools often help, there’s an inherent risk to them as well. Product managers may feel forced to ignore critical data points due to the limits of the overall framework. Product managers face limits due to the lack of a solid strategy. Their strategy should align stakeholders on a consensus moving forward. That must be in place well before plugging numbers into a framework. How else can you assess the significance of any item on the business making progress toward its goals? IMPACT sets the stage for better prioritization conversations, moving the team past the “why” and focusing on specific trade-offs and expected outcomes. Watch our webinar on IMPACT: Applying an IMPACT Prioritization Strategy As I’ve covered in many other blog posts, webinars, and our free ebook, IMPACT is a mindset for ensuring you’re doing things that matter. And there’s no domain where that matters more than prioritization. So let’s run through the six elements of IMPACT and see how they relate to this essential aspect of product management: Interesting Not all problems are created equal. Framing and Context provide stakeholders with an idea of how pressing the issue is. Product management must act as a storyteller to engage their colleagues instead of just giving a dry recounting of the facts. Folks get excited and influence how things get ranked. At this stage, the solution must take a backseat to the prevalence and significance of the problem. Meaningful The problems you opt to solve must both move the business forward and provide customer value. You can’t do either without an agreed-upon vision and strategy as well as a quantifiable benefit to the customer. People The focus must remain squarely on the customers, in this case, how many benefits and how significant is the improvement, which creates an apples-to-apples comparison and shifts distractions and edge cases to the parking lot. Actionable Prioritization must consider the realistic chances of solving the problem. Putting something impossible at the top of the queue—despite its possible value—wastes everyone’s time. That requires a little homework with engineering to consider feasibility and level of effort to ensure a balance between resource allocation and weight. Clear It’s tough to consider and adequately rank potential development items without a comprehensive understanding of the problem. Don’t prioritize things until the research is complete and the ideal solution is already in hand. Testable How will you validate that each prioritized item worked once it ships? Without a measurable definition of success, no one knows if it was worth it or if similar projects warrant resource allocation in the future. Did you solve the problem? Is the value clear to end-users and prospects? User feedback confirms those assumptions—or sends you back to the drawing board—so the sooner they chime in, the better. Download IMPACT ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '76387af0-7ef4-49da-8b36-28e99e4f5ba3', {"region":"na1"}); An IMPACT Prioritization Strategy in Action For an additional lens incorporating IMPACT into a prioritization strategy, you can rank each item being considered based on the six tenets of IMPACT. For each of those six pillars, the team can rate each item on a five-point scale. When evaluating a potential development item for “People,” for example, it might look like this: 1 – This only helps a minimal number of users in our target market. 3 – This allows lots of users with a particular characteristic/within a specific market segment. 5 – Everyone reaps significant benefits, and it expands the pool of potential customers. Each item’s IMPACT is an objective countermeasure to the inertia that plague prioritization. The goal is to make the most of each development cycle, and the work with the most significant IMPACT is the work worth doing first. To learn more about how IMPACT can influence this and other aspects of product management, download the free ebook today!

If you’re like me, you’re a product champion who loves to chat about integrations and gets excited at the prospect of teaching your cohort about different integration strategies or thinking through how to automate an annoying task. You can only imagine what an exciting moment it was when LIKE.TG, with your valuable input, released our new API v2. I’ll admit I may be a little biased… But even if you aren’t, that’s okay! I’m happy to fill you in on why we’re so excited about this major expansion to our API offerings. The LIKE.TG API provides a powerful tool for accessing and modifying your LIKE.TG data. We’ve designed it to be as user-friendly as possible, empowering you to make LIKE.TG the home for your entire product development lifecycle. Keep reading to learn more about our recent API-related updates. Why did LIKE.TG make this change? We spent a lot of time doing what we love—talking with our customers. Our goal was to fully understand the value a robust API brings to their organizations. It was no surprise to us that our customers are interested in using the API, which needs to help them save time and effort in their work—especially when it comes to repetitive processes and activities. We realize that it can be exhausting to copy and paste material from tool to tool or repeatedly log in on that tab you just closed because you need to cross-reference something. We’re hoping our APIs can help you center the information that matters to you in LIKE.TG so you can focus on making the decisions that count. Our new set of endpoints has created a framework for you to synchronize LIKE.TG with other tools. You can automate tasks, center data, and ensure the accuracy of your key ideas between tools. You could take customer feedback from Salesforce and programmatically create Ideas, sync launch checklist tasks with Asana, or keep the progress on your OKRs up to date. What’s included as a part of the API expansion? Our new API v2 includes endpoints that touch on every major feature section within the LIKE.TG platform, including an updated version of our preexisting Roadmaps and Bars endpoints. A high-level overview of what you can do with our API is as follows: Roadmaps: List your roadmaps Synchronize percentage complete, title, description, and other fields Create, update, or delete bars Strategy: List your objectives and key results Synchronize title, description, other fields, and key result progress Create, update, or delete objectives and key results Connect Opportunities and Objectives Discovery List your ideas and opportunities Synchronize title, description, tags and other fields Create, update, or delete ideas and opportunities Launches List your launches and tasks Organize tasks by sections and update status Create, update, or delete launches, sections, and tasks Other List your teams and users Check application status You can find the complete list of endpoints and official documentation here. What’s next? Our APIs are readily available to build custom integrations. They seamlessly connect to every part of our platform, making accessing and modifying information simple. And our customer success team is ready and excited to help! Coming soon, LIKE.TG will also offer a tool to help create custom integrations based in the cloud. This means if you don’t have the resources today to devote development time to connecting with our APIs, you can still integrate your tools with ProductPlan. Our goal is to empower your team to own your product success, which includes cutting down on time spent on tasks that can be automated, allowing you to focus on what matters most—building better products. If you’re a current LIKE.TG customer on our Professional or Enterprise plan and your team is interested in joining us for beta testing of our new integration capabilities, please contact [email protected] to connect with our product team.

This blog follows up on a previous post introducing the concept of systems thinking for product managers. Both posts feature a recent conversation between veteran product manager and friend of LIKE.TG, John Cutler, and LIKE.TG’s Director of Product Management, Annie Dunham. Earlier, you both referred to the idea that there’s been a shift in product management, that due to the evolution of technology, the rise of SaaS, and other factors, many product managers are more accurately managing product systems. If you’re a product manager managing a product system, what else changes beyond the “product” itself? John Cutler: Practically, you’ll also see the rise of mission-based teams, rather than the older notion of a project-based team that “completes” a project or product at some point and is “done.” The concept of a product development process that has a beginning, middle, and end is now basically defunct, especially in the context of SaaS. Your product is never complete, and the ongoing user experience associated with it is now part of your product. Annie Dunham: At this point, you have a product team with a shared mission and a shared sense of responsibility. You have a product process that doesn’t end the day you launch a product or feature. This means that everything from the way you think about your product, the way you quantify and measure success, and the way you structure your roles and teams, fundamentally changes. How does this shift change the way you approach your environment? John Cutler: Sensemaking becomes critical. You need to know what your environment is like in order to figure out when you need to let something go or cut your losses. You can think about the product team as being a team that makes bets. The more a team understands their environment, the more likely they are to successfully gauge demand, risk, etc., and make successful bets. There are two ways to think about the broader role of a product team. The first is that product needs to just keep their heads down and work on a product. The second perspective is that product needs to be involved in and understand the bigger product system we’ve been describing. The less isolated the product process is from the broader context, the more room there is for innovation. If you move away from that first feature-focused product development model, and move toward the second option, how does your criteria for success change? You’re describing a state in which there’s no objective endpoint, i.e. ship a product or feature and move on. How do you know what you’re doing is working if your product is an ongoing system? John Cutler: Well, one way to get this wrong is to assume that because a company is doing really well, it somehow means they’ve got the perfect system; they might just be doing well at the time, for now, and could probably do really well for a while, but eventually, at a certain scale or pace, things will start to break down. Don’t mistake current success (revenue, PR buzz, etc.) for the ability to adapt and succeed in the long term. As a product manager, you have to realize that each company is really playing their own game. Tweet This: “Don’t mistake current success (revenue, PR buzz, etc.) for the ability to adapt and succeed in the long term. As a product manager, you have to realize that each company is really playing their own game.” Annie Dunham: Are you a successful product manager if your company made a lot of money but everyone at the company resents the product organization and product development is a miserable process? Or, if you create a completely nimble environment in which everyone is agile and happy and can jump on any project that comes up, but you’re maybe in the wrong market or solving the wrong problems. You need broader, heads-up awareness to create processes that can scale, adapt, and hold up in the long run and align with changing customer demands. The more you’re thinking about your product as a living system that’s addressing an equally evolving market, the more likely you are to adapt gracefully. How does this impact how you think about the role of the individual contributor or the team as a whole? John Cutler: When I was at Pendo and AppFolio, I often found myself aligning around and thinking about engineers. Engineers are often some of the people on the frontlines that feel the pain of decisions made without much situational awareness. Recently, I wrote an article called “12 Signs You’re Working in a Feature Factory” that generated a ton of interest from engineers in particular. It showed me that people genuinely care about the work that they’re doing and don’t just want to show up and keep their heads down. They want to be creative and they want to think about their work in terms of the bigger picture. Annie Dunham: Agile started to really take hold about 10 years ago and people were excited not because it was a perfect solution but because it gave people a starting point to think about working iteratively. Now there’s more of a nebulous answer to how people are thinking about and approaching product development. You might have a situation where one person is great at this methodology, and another person is more familiar with another one, and these 3-4 engineers are used to working as contractors, and so on. How do you make the most of your team? The answer is not necessarily to shove them into a specific framework. You might need a more flexible methodology to balance individual creativity and experience with the broader goals of the team and organization. John Cutler: Some of that flexibility and innovative thinking would be well-applied in operations. There’s a lot of overhead in operations. It’s a commonly misunderstood idea, but Agile is really less about moving quickly, and more about moving frequently. The more rigidity there is in terms of operations, bureaucracy, etc., the less likely an organization is to adapt and remain agile. Annie Dunham: Another way to approach the topic is from an enablement perspective. Are you structuring your product organization in a way that opens the door for novel thinking, organization, activity, etc.? Is product leadership exposing key people directly to what they need to be exposed to? Rather than being the owner of this or the communicator of that, are you opening yourself up to something bigger and cooler? Are you getting more into design thinking, observation, innovation, instead of just saying “Here’s what the customer says, let’s just do that.” It’s important to leave space for the kind of emergent thinking or behavior you see in dynamic systems. That’s how product teams can break into new territory. John Cutler: I think part of the right way to approach individuals and teams working within these new systems is about creating valuable contexts. Set the context in terms of threats and opportunities, and then help people play the game, manage resources, and get work done. The product team doesn’t need to constantly hover and provide micro-prescriptive boundaries but they certainly can provide valuable context and understanding. Systems thinking and sensemaking help you devise and wrap your head around the bigger game we’re all involved in. So what do you tell new product managers entering the field, or veteran folks wondering how to best approach these new shifts? John Cutler: If we’re shifting away from tactical user stories, traditional development processes, etc., and you have a junior person coming into the product world, you’re kind of throwing them into the deep end. We should really be focusing on and teaching the core principles of product management. For new people, I want to help them build first principle skills: can you communicate to customers, can you do awesome interviews with customers, can you map the competitive ecosystem we’re working in, can you help facilitate activities that help with sensemaking, i.e. story-mapping activities? In the long term, these first-principle skills will help them as speed and complexity scales up. Annie Dunham: More than ever, product folks need to understand the “why” of what they’re doing. The basics are definitely still there in the systems context, but helping new product managers develop skills to keep the bigger picture in mind will provide the best type of orientation. Here, “bigger picture” is the broader product system we’ve been discussing: the individual product or feature, the customer challenge, the business case, ongoing updates and support, the feedback process, competition, changing markets, and so on. The core lesson is that none of the work they’re doing will be happening in a vacuum. It can be tempting to have a product manager start with a specific feature or component and work up from there, but that kind of bottom-up approach can be a disservice in the long run. John Cutler: Another takeaway from my time at AppFolio was the notion of the product presentation. Before a product manager started developing a feature, they delivered a presentation. They started with the current state of the product and then presented their desired end state, but they didn’t fill in the middle part. They just presented where they are now and where they planned to end up. If I can teach a younger PM to help facilitate the creation of this kind of presentation, wherein they need to present a compelling case of where they are now, where they’re headed, and why, that skill is going to take them super far. Another useful shift in thinking is the idea of a product manager owning an actor or a set of actor goals in a system, instead of just owning product modules or components. A product manager might be the product person for the customer success team with the goal of helping that team reduce churn through changes to the product. That’s a very different way of defining how you bring people up to speed in product but it’s an effective way to illustrate the idea of the product system and help encourage the kind of sensemaking we discussed earlier. ____ As a field, product management continues to shift and evolve in tandem with the types of products, customers, and markets it engages with. Systems thinking offers one possible framework for making sense of and succeeding in spite of these shifts. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); ____ Have more thoughts on systems thinking in the context of product management? Share them in the comments below and remember to check out Part One of the roundtable discussion.

The only constant is change. We know the saying, but more than that, we live the saying. LIKE.TG has consistently seen changes over the past 12 months, and our very own product roadmap has been a part of that journey. We’ve seen a little bit of everything, and the customer-facing roadmap has been critical during these changes. As annual planning took shape, it became clear the 2022 customer-facing roadmap needed to evolve. Our audience has expectations and we need to meet them (if not exceed them). “Why” and “how” are the main questions we want to cover in the roadmap’s pivot to its current iteration. Five questions to answer For this exercise, we go all the way back to square one. It’s almost (almost) as if the 2022 roadmap doesn’t exist. Thankfully, we have it as a baseline! The product team began by conducting a few internal and customer interviews to gather feedback on the 2022 roadmap. We wanted to know what worked and what could be improved. As we chatted with our respective audiences, the team came up with a framework for how to evolve the roadmap. As shaping continued, the product team revisited the five questions to keep in mind before roadmapping. The first one to discuss focuses on the roadmap’s intended audience. As we keep these questions in mind, we’re also going to look at this evolution through the lens of LIKE.TG features. The overall taxonomy of the roadmap informs and complements these questions. With that said, we’ll focus on lanes, legend, tags and even custom views. When I write the 2024 version of this article, I have a feeling custom dropdown fields will play a major role. Stay tuned until then! Who is our intended audience? Let’s start with the intended audience for the 2023 roadmap. Who was this in 2022, and has it changed for the year ahead? These roadmaps have both primary and secondary audiences. Starting with an external need for our customers and then looking to the internal LIKE.TG team, the roadmap must provide value for people with varying degrees of product familiarity. While there might be new members of the LIKE.TG team and new customers, the overall audience remained consistent from 2022 to 2023. Ultimately, this is a customer-facing product roadmap. The secondary use would come for the product team as we organize our workload and present to the internal LIKE.TG community. With the primary audience, the lanes and legend saw an evolution from 2022 to 2023. We’ll dig into this soon. How will we be sharing our roadmap? Now that we know the audience, how will the roadmaps be shared with these groups? When it comes to the externally-shared roadmap, we exclusively share via video calls. As much as we want the roadmap to speak for itself, we still need to ensure the LIKE.TG team is able to share context as to what’s being worked on and any changes ahead. As for the secondary audience, reviewing the roadmap has become more ad hoc for the internal LIKE.TG team. Meetings are less frequent as we’ve found ways to better document necessary information. Everyone in the company has viewer access, but only the product team has editor access. In monthly roadmap update meetings, the product team presents product updates via the roadmap. These are less frequent than in past years. In addition to the monthly cadence, videos are shared on a more ongoing basis (thanks Vimeo integration)! I review the roadmap at the end of every week. This gives me the ability to track what’s currently being worked on and coming soon. I know things will change as the team and roadmap are dynamic! What are we trying to communicate and answer with the roadmap? Having defined the audience for the year ahead, we then focus on what the roadmap is meant to communicate (and consider whether this changed over the past year)? While the actual features on the roadmap may have changed from 2022 to 2023, the way they are communicated has remained fairly consistent. As the audience for the roadmap, we are presented with a list view by tag. Those tags are “Recently Launched,” “Now,” “Next” and “Future.” This custom view gives us (the audience) a streamlined, simple draft that’s easy to understand. It reduces any extra noise and communicates the broad plan without getting too specific with dates and intricacies. Continuing along this path, what questions do we want the roadmap to answer for the audience? The roadmap remains a high-level, strategic tool. The audience doesn’t need to know exactly how the sausage is made. We just want to know why and when the sausage is going to be delivered! The use of containers became necessary in 2023 as more development and overall work was scheduled to occur. The product team grew and thus the workload expanded. There were more intricacies to manage. The team began employing both bars and containers rather than simply containers as was the practice in 2022. Hierarchy of the customer-facing roadmap The lanes and legend are the two most important elements of the roadmap. Ideally the legend will answer the audience’s most pressing question. Both the 2022 and 2023 roadmaps have LIKE.TG objectives at their core, but there’s an evolution to these objectives. For 2022, the objectives focused more on product development and features. We saw the 2023 evolution take on broader brushstrokes. The prior was focused on Launch Management while early 2023 has seen a focus on Idea and Opportunity Management. Major projects related to integrations and new modules take centerstage. Of course, roadmaps are dynamic and we know this will continue to evolve. Sharing it with customers has been a beneficial way to get feedback and influence that evolution! Lanes underwent a similar transformation. The 2022 lanes were centered on LIKE.TG competencies with the core product, integrations and platform enhancements. As planning was underway, the addition of new product managers meant more content on the roadmap. Lanes were going to be more important than ever. It’s important to note that our customer-facing “roadmap” is a Portfolio made up of each product manager’s roadmap. Their underlying roadmaps are represented as lanes in the Portfolio. This makes it easy for each PM to edit, but also get a consolidated view. It also added an extra layer of organization as we planned for resources and development. Does each product manager have the same workload and resources? The 2023 roadmap gives a better answer to these questions. The 2023 roadmap also saw the addition of more tags. The only tags for 2022 provided the Kanban style view. The tags for 2023 give us more about departments, company goals and product stages. We’re able to drill down into specifics and what each audience member (internal and external) truly wants to see. How far out are we planning? Finally, we ask ourselves how far out are we planning? The roadmap remains consistent with the now, next and future presentation. We know the current quarter has around 80 percent accuracy. As we move further out to the future status, we’re aware the roadmap is going to lose a bit of that specificity and integrity. The way our product team releases their work also changed from 2022 to 2023. In 2022, we released on a two week sprint cycle. That evolved to weekly sprints in early 2023 and now dynamic, potentially daily releases. We’ll see if that brings any additional updates to the roadmap! Stay tuned for whatever changes occur next…we know they’re coming! If you want to take a look at the 2023 roadmap with your customer success manager, please reach out, and we can get that scheduled. We’re also hosting an office hour to chat about the roadmap evolution and answer any questions you may have. If you want to pop by, please reach out to [email protected].

I have been fortunate to have joined the LIKE.TG team as the SVP of Product Management in the latter half of 2022. As I experienced the whirlwind of onboarding and meeting my wonderful colleagues, I also spent much time thinking about the future of product management and the space at large. We have seen the rise of product operations, the Great Resignation, a renewed focus on digital transformation, and challenging economic uncertainty. However, throughout this period of monumental change, the product community continued to advance the field with shared knowledge and support, which allowed us to become more connected, even while many of us were still remote. Part of our mission at LIKE.TG is to support the product community with insightful, data-packed content that provides actionable insights and serves as a valuable resource for product leaders and teams alike. So, I am honored to share some highlights from The 2023 State of Product Management Report. How the state of product management report works Our eighth annual report explores significant trends and data-packed findings on the state of our industry. We surveyed over 1,500 product professionals last October. Our largest cohorts of respondents were “product managers,” “product owners,” and “directors of product.” A majority of respondents, 34 percent, had between 2-5 years of experience, with 33 percent reporting that they worked at an organization of 101-1,000 employees. Furthermore, most respondents reported working in “information technology and services,” while “computer software” came in at a close second. This year’s report focuses on how product teams support the entire product lifecycle from ideation to launch. These findings fill me with excitement about the future of product management and the multitude of possibilities to push our field forward. Keep reading to learn key takeaways from the report and how it will impact product management organizations in the year ahead. Cross-functional alignment is one of product management’s most significant challenges for 2023 Across various industries, product leaders often need help aligning their product strategy with organizational goals. Usually, this is the result of communication breakdowns amongst various stakeholders. According to our 2023 State of Product Management Report, 37 percent of those surveyed reported that “getting cross-functional alignment on product direction” was their biggest challenge. Struggling to get stakeholders on the same page is nothing new, but it becomes more challenging as companies look to scale. Ineffective communication can have devastating effects, including lackluster product launches and breaking trust among product teams and executive stakeholders. One way to look at this is as an opportunity to establish better communication strategies with all departments—executive leadership, customer success, marketing, and sales. Influential product leaders engage stakeholders and ensure conversations remain productive and informative. Best practice: use a product roadmap as a single source of truth for communicating with stakeholders A product roadmap is ideal for capturing important initiatives that product managers can share with stakeholders throughout the product lifecycle. The right roadmapping software can provide product teams with the ability to communicate roadmap changes to stakeholders, allowing them to understand changes to the roadmap at different points in time. A quick look back at the challenges product organizations faced has changed since 2022 As we look ahead to the new year, we must reflect on how product management trends have changed. According to our 2022 State of Product Management Report, 22 percent of respondents reported that “planning and prioritizing initiatives” was their most significant challenge. This challenge is likely the result of organizations readjusting after weathering the worst of the pandemic. We also found that 37 percent of respondents reported that they would allocate a significant portion of their budget to hiring product managers. Tightening budgets requires product organizations to scale more efficiently When looking at budgets for 2023 and comparing them to our 2022 report, hiring remains the primary bucket for budget allocation at 22 percent. Despite recent layoffs and the Great Resignation, the product management field continues its upward trajectory regarding new hires. In fact, according to Linkedin, 43 percent of organizations surveyed reported the need to hire more product managers. Though hiring was top-of-mind for our respondents, budget allocation to “change management initiatives” came in at a close second at 20 percent. Product leaders know that to execute change management effectively, they must first gain alignment amongst their team and stakeholders. Best practice: The seven R’s of change management Successful change management requires significant planning, strategy, and communication with all key stakeholders. To start, product leaders must focus on understanding the seven R’s of change management: The REASON for the change The RISKS of changing The RESOURCES required to implement the change Who RAISED the change request What RETURN is necessary for the transition to be considered a success The parties RESPONSIBLE for each aspect of the change The RELATIONSHIP between this particular change and other recent, concurrent, or future changes Product teams are focusing on using product metrics to measure success in addition to business metrics Each product team is uniquely positioned to identify how to measure product success. According to our report, 33 percent of respondents concluded that their team’s primary success metric was product metrics. Last year, our report ascertained that product managers who used “product metrics” as their primary success metric said that product experience had the most significant impact on customer acquisition. Additionally, 32 percent of respondents reported that “business metrics” defined how they measured success. Best practice: product metrics inform the success of the product vision When done correctly, product and business metrics can work together to help product teams understand where they are at accomplishing the product vision. In essence, the product vision serves as a north star that helps the ever-evolving product strategy and tactics remain focused. Everything the product team accomplishes aligns with the product strategy and using the product and business-oriented metrics can inform teams of their impact. Despite the challenges ahead, the future looks bright for product management When product teams align their product strategy with organizational goals, the value they provide their customer grows exponentially. Moreover, when product teams own the product lifecycle, product market success tends to follow, which challenges the efficacy of the top-down approach. I look forward to you reading our 2023 State of Product Management Report. My colleagues and I hope you and your product team benefit from the many insights found within the report. Feel free to share with your colleagues and friends! Download Our 2023 Product Management Report➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3606e408-64b7-428e-92de-d70da69b7d2a', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});

I have been fortunate to have joined the LIKE.TG team as the SVP of Product Management in the latter half of 2022. As I experienced the whirlwind of onboarding and meeting my wonderful colleagues, I also spent much time thinking about the future of product management and the space at large. We have seen the rise of product operations, the Great Resignation, a renewed focus on digital transformation, and challenging economic uncertainty. However, throughout this period of monumental change, the product community continued to advance the field with shared knowledge and support, which allowed us to become more connected, even while many of us were still remote. Part of our mission at LIKE.TG is to support the product community with insightful, data-packed content that provides actionable insights and serves as a valuable resource for product leaders and teams alike. So, I am honored to share some highlights from The 2023 State of Product Management Report. How the state of product management report works Our eighth annual report explores significant trends and data-packed findings on the state of our industry. We surveyed over 1,500 product professionals last October. Our largest cohorts of respondents were “product managers,” “product owners,” and “directors of product.” A majority of respondents, 34 percent, had between 2-5 years of experience, with 33 percent reporting that they worked at an organization of 101-1,000 employees. Furthermore, most respondents reported working in “information technology and services,” while “computer software” came in at a close second. This year’s report focuses on how product teams support the entire product lifecycle from ideation to launch. These findings fill me with excitement about the future of product management and the multitude of possibilities to push our field forward. Keep reading to learn key takeaways from the report and how it will impact product management organizations in the year ahead. Cross-functional alignment is one of product management’s most significant challenges for 2023 Across various industries, product leaders often need help aligning their product strategy with organizational goals. Usually, this is the result of communication breakdowns amongst various stakeholders. According to our 2023 State of Product Management Report, 37 percent of those surveyed reported that “getting cross-functional alignment on product direction” was their biggest challenge. Struggling to get stakeholders on the same page is nothing new, but it becomes more challenging as companies look to scale. Ineffective communication can have devastating effects, including lackluster product launches and breaking trust among product teams and executive stakeholders. One way to look at this is as an opportunity to establish better communication strategies with all departments—executive leadership, customer success, marketing, and sales. Influential product leaders engage stakeholders and ensure conversations remain productive and informative. Best practice: use a product roadmap as a single source of truth for communicating with stakeholders A product roadmap is ideal for capturing important initiatives that product managers can share with stakeholders throughout the product lifecycle. The right roadmapping software can provide product teams with the ability to communicate roadmap changes to stakeholders, allowing them to understand changes to the roadmap at different points in time. A quick look back at the challenges product organizations faced has changed since 2022 As we look ahead to the new year, we must reflect on how product management trends have changed. According to our 2022 State of Product Management Report, 22 percent of respondents reported that “planning and prioritizing initiatives” was their most significant challenge. This challenge is likely the result of organizations readjusting after weathering the worst of the pandemic. We also found that 37 percent of respondents reported that they would allocate a significant portion of their budget to hiring product managers. Tightening budgets requires product organizations to scale more efficiently When looking at budgets for 2023 and comparing them to our 2022 report, hiring remains the primary bucket for budget allocation at 22 percent. Despite recent layoffs and the Great Resignation, the product management field continues its upward trajectory regarding new hires. In fact, according to Linkedin, 43 percent of organizations surveyed reported the need to hire more product managers. Though hiring was top-of-mind for our respondents, budget allocation to “change management initiatives” came in at a close second at 20 percent. Product leaders know that to execute change management effectively, they must first gain alignment amongst their team and stakeholders. Best practice: The seven R’s of change management Successful change management requires significant planning, strategy, and communication with all key stakeholders. To start, product leaders must focus on understanding the seven R’s of change management: The REASON for the change The RISKS of changing The RESOURCES required to implement the change Who RAISED the change request What RETURN is necessary for the transition to be considered a success The parties RESPONSIBLE for each aspect of the change The RELATIONSHIP between this particular change and other recent, concurrent, or future changes Product teams are focusing on using product metrics to measure success in addition to business metrics Each product team is uniquely positioned to identify how to measure product success. According to our report, 33 percent of respondents concluded that their team’s primary success metric was product metrics. Last year, our report ascertained that product managers who used “product metrics” as their primary success metric said that product experience had the most significant impact on customer acquisition. Additionally, 32 percent of respondents reported that “business metrics” defined how they measured success. Best practice: product metrics inform the success of the product vision When done correctly, product and business metrics can work together to help product teams understand where they are at accomplishing the product vision. In essence, the product vision serves as a north star that helps the ever-evolving product strategy and tactics remain focused. Everything the product team accomplishes aligns with the product strategy and using the product and business-oriented metrics can inform teams of their impact. Despite the challenges ahead, the future looks bright for product management When product teams align their product strategy with organizational goals, the value they provide their customer grows exponentially. Moreover, when product teams own the product lifecycle, product market success tends to follow, which challenges the efficacy of the top-down approach. I look forward to you reading our 2023 State of Product Management Report. My colleagues and I hope you and your product team benefit from the many insights found within the report. Feel free to share with your colleagues and friends! Download Our 2023 Product Management Report➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3606e408-64b7-428e-92de-d70da69b7d2a', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});

Today, software development is all about the need for speed. Feature updates, UI changes and bug fixes are all done in near real time, and the frenetic pace is ever-increasing. Users have grown accustomed to constant updates to apps and expect any issues to be fixed immediately. Pushing new features or software fixes has always been fraught with anxiety, but the speed and frequency of today’s release cycles bring even more pressure. As soon as code is released to the public, users can instantly access the feature, leaving many variables out of developers’ control. But, there is a way to take back control and maintain visibility over the release: feature flags. Raising the feature flag At a basic level, feature flags allow development teams to turn features on and off without deploying new code. Think of flags like dials in the cloud. When the dial is attached to any feature in a product–whether a new one or an old one–it controls who sees it, who has access to it and how quickly it is delivered to an entire customer base. Feature flags let organizations break the tyranny of the Thursday night release by breaking it into smaller bits to control exposure and enable a continuous release motion. You might start by “releasing” only to internal users or beta testers so you can test in production (TiP) to make sure nothing has been missed. From there, you might roll out to your customers gradually before going to 100% availability. This controlled exposure approach removes the panic and anxiety around the weekly release schedule. Having the ability to completely turn off features means that feature flags also increase application stability and remove the need for hotfixes. It’s less often necessary to assemble a war room if there is a problem when you can simply turn off the feature in a matter of seconds. By working feature flags into the release process, teams take control of the who, what and when in terms of releases. They can dictate types of users, demographics, locations and scale the release of the new feature. Not another thing to manage Outside of the DevOps team, feature flags can also be really powerful for product managers. Historically, the release of a new feature meant that product managers had to coordinate with cross-functional teams to ensure the release was executed successfully. This coordination involved making sure marketing was ready to publish a blog post about the feature, the sales team knew how to use and sell the new feature, and the product marketing team had documentation prepared for how the feature set works–and this all had to be perfectly synchronized with the engineers’ timeline for releasing the feature. Feature flags give product managers the keys to the kingdom. Product managers can now go into the user interface and turn the feature on for some or all of their customers without waiting for engineers to complete their next deploy. Not having to coordinate that extra piece of the schedule gives a lot of power and time back to the product manager. Feature experimentation: data-driven customer feedback Another aspect of a product manager’s job is collecting feedback. They need answers to questions related to business KPIs, like “How is this feature performing for my customers?”, “Are customers able to do the action the feature is intended to perform?” and “Are we generating more revenue from the feature?” Feature flags can also help in this area. As product managers ramp-up a feature, they are simultaneously shortening the feedback cycle. Since feature flags allow for segmentation, where one customer group sees one set of features and another customer group sees a different set of features, and since key metrics can be captured into separate buckets for each group, product managers can now run controlled experiments as part of a release cycle. Seeing KPIs aligned with the different customer groups helps you understand which features are performing the most successfully. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3fdc3ac9-84a7-4278-9401-1468475b8db9', {}); Let’s escape to the Swiss Alps for an example If you’ve read this far, you probably have a pretty good idea about how this approach could add value to your work as a PM. To really cement your learning, consider reading the brief post my colleague David Martin wrote, “Feature Experimentation: Choosing the Best Route.” In this four-minute read, David puts you in the role of commercial tour planner choosing the best route for families to hike along the Tour Mont Blanc in France, Switzerland and Italy. Feature experimentation teams you up with actual customers to help you find the best path forward. Aligning your entire team to deliver value As product managers embrace usage measurement tied to feature rollouts, entire teams can better align with agile best practices to continuously push out the smallest incremental set of new features. By understanding the performance of every feature, you’ll be better equipped to iterate and refine your ideal product roadmap. Download How Agile Product Managers Can Build Better Products ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'b4eb5c0b-bf4b-4a7e-9b0a-75f92005c127', {});

Product professionals get paid to manage products and services. Delighting customers and creating innovative solutions for their problems dictates our priorities. But this single-minded focus on helping others often leads to a lack of focus on ourselves and our career impact in the product field. And, unlike our products, no one’s getting paid to manage our careers on our behalf. Without intentional and thoughtful strategizing, years and decades can roll by, shifting and stalking our career trajectories while we worry about the success of others. Applying the IMPACT mindset to your career can help keep that career impact trajectory on track by ensuring each move you make gets you closer to where you want to go. From Individual Contributor to Director of Product➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '9110b373-1b93-491b-8f83-5fc4b63b4b89', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Being a Selfless Generalist is a Good Thing A selfless approach based on customer empathy and satisfying stakeholders is an asset on the job, but less so for ourselves. We suffer from imposter syndrome and deprecate our value because, as generalists, we don’t command the same respect and awe as our more specialized coworkers. But our selfless generalist approach is a superpower in its own right. Seeing the big-picture vision and possessing versatility enables product managers to impact, even when the spotlight falls on others instead. We check our egos at the door because the job demands it, and we don’t want a blindspot to punish the customers we care about. Though it may not grab as many headlines or turn us into “influencers” in our respective industries, it builds the proper habits and work ethic to succeed in our current roles… and our next ones. Unfortunately, this means a scant opportunity to promote ourselves leads to personal “brands” that seldom extend beyond our companies’ walls (physical or virtual). Thus comes fewer opportunities to be “discovered” or headhunted or recruited as we continue operating backstage and behind the scenes. Variety is the Spice of Life and the Bane of Product Management Careers Anyone in product for a few years quickly notices no fixed definition of product management from one company to another. Some view Product as an equal peer to Marketing, Sales, and Engineering, while others tuck it away under a VP of Product Marketing or a CTO. One organization may crown us “CEO of the Product” while another views us as an annoying check on runaway innovation. There appears to be a lack of shared understanding of what Product has to offer and why it’s so necessary. But the net result is seemingly random locations on organization charts, daily duties that differ significantly from one company to another, and product managers hailing from many walks of life. The diversity presents challenges when attempting to: Identify growth opportunities and spot which areas you must improve upon. Translate a written job description into what it would mean for your career aspirations and how it maps to your current experience. Tailor your resume, cover letter, and personal pitch to fit a particular job opportunity. Download Developing a Product Team Checklist ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'd8abf101-87a4-49aa-b909-2dcb3743fb8b', {"region":"na1"}); Putting IMPACT to work for your career The IMPACT approach can help you optimize your career impact by assessing yourself in order to improve your career prospects and how you position yourself when you’re actually on the hunt for a new gig. Optimize yourself with IMPACT Whether you’re desperate to change companies, are angling for a promotion, or want to be the best you can be, IMPACT provides a structure for identifying your strengths and weaknesses while identifying areas to work on. Interesting Product managers need an exciting story. How you got to your current role, the career path you took, and where you’d like to go are essential to shaping how others view you. Resumes list the jobs, the degrees, and a few details in bullet points but don’t always recount a compelling story. In a vacuum, your resume or LinkedIn profile might leave people with more questions than answers: Why did you leave Microsoft for some startup that failed? Why did you quit your job at a unicorn and throw in with a medium-sized firm? What made you stay at the same company in the same role for six years? How come you were once a Director, but now you’re a Senior PM? Why did you bounce around between product marketing and product management? To you, those moves all make sense, given the full context of your life and career. But job titles alone don’t do your narrative justice, ergo the need for a story that weaves them together. Connect the dots, find themes and common threads, and spin a tale that leaves others wondering what the next chapter holds in store. Meaningful Product managers do a lot of different things, many of them decidedly necessary. Listing out your responsibilities conveys competence with these tasks and obligations but camouflages your most impactful work. Why you did those things and how you prioritized them is far more relevant. What did those accomplishments mean to you? To your company? To your users and customers? When reviewing your experience, the emphasis must be on how they solved pain points and helped the company reach its overall impact goals. People A product manager’s relationships and interactions with coworkers are fundamental to their success. Those soft skills may not be measurable, but they are essential traits of your current future employer’s values. Are you a good teammate that people enjoy working with? Do you make life easier and better for your colleagues? Are you a great mentor or a devoted protégé? Those skills also come into play when interacting with customers. Can you speak in a language they understand and connect with them where they’re at? Can you engage them in deeper conversations to uncover the root issues and not just the surface-level gripes and wish lists? Talent, intelligence, and creativity aren’t enough for a successful run in Product. You need to be a people person, too. Actionable When listing accomplishments, it’s important to deviate from the laundry-list approach and instead emphasize anecdotes or success stories where you either took action or set the stage for stakeholders to do so. You need to explain beyond merely discussing the completion of a task and what you did with the results. You didn’t just “survey users,” you used that survey data to make recommendations, and one of those recommendations improved a KPI or led to a big deal, which better illustrates the meaningful impact of those actions, not that you just took them. Clear Keep things short and sweet while focusing on real-world examples of how your accomplishments made an impact. Showing off your skills and touting what they’ve done for you in the past are both keys to convincing folks you’re worth adding to their team. Did you bridge gaps and build consensus by creating clarity among stakeholders. Have you inspired the masses with your oratorical prowess? Did you slice and dice the data and create dazzling visuals or unignorable metrics that won people over? Testable The dull, repeatable, everyday elements of your job aren’t the best measures of your competency. You need to get uncomfortable in an unfamiliar situation before knowing if you’re up to the challenge. Push yourself to try new things, learn new skills, and dive into new areas of interest. Measure your faculty with this new material and see if you’ve got the resilience to power through when things get tricky. Watch the full webinar below: Putting IMPACT Into Action On a Job Hunt With your elevator pitch nailed, the next part of advancing your career is assessing new opportunities. Once again, IMPACT can help by weeding out postings that won’t be a great fit while zeroing in on the good ones. Job descriptions aren’t just ads; they’re problem statements you’ve yet to unpack. What problem is this company trying to solve? Where can someone add value and make an impact? Are they mentioning customers and data? Which verbs do they use? Are they super specific in what they’re looking for or searching for an athlete to grow into the position and evolve with it over time? Of course, what they say they want isn’t always what they need (or want), but it is a sneak preview of how they view product management today. It might be wrong and negotiable, but it provides a good glimpse of their current mindset. With this as a starting point—and the remainder of the interviewing process as a series of additional opportunities for further digging—you can better ascertain the expectations for the role, your fit for the opportunity, and whether it will provide you with enough chances to make a true career impact. You want a job where you’re motivated to succeed, not just happy to collect the paycheck. A Position with Purpose The product offers us the opportunities to change lives, fuel businesses, and transform organizations. The problems we solve may be trivial or life-changing, but they all have the chance to impact our product’s users and customers. Finding impactful opportunities throughout our career means more than just a job we enjoy or a product we’re passionate about. It gives our entire lives purpose and adds to the story of our career, adding new chapters with every step we take. To learn more about how IMPACT can help with your career and other dimensions of product management, download the free ebook today. Download IMPACT ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '76387af0-7ef4-49da-8b36-28e99e4f5ba3', {"region":"na1"});

Product professionals get paid to manage products and services. Delighting customers and creating innovative solutions for their problems dictates our priorities. But this single-minded focus on helping others often leads to a lack of focus on ourselves and our career impact in the product field. And, unlike our products, no one’s getting paid to manage our careers on our behalf. Without intentional and thoughtful strategizing, years and decades can roll by, shifting and stalking our career trajectories while we worry about the success of others. Applying the IMPACT mindset to your career can help keep that career impact trajectory on track by ensuring each move you make gets you closer to where you want to go. From Individual Contributor to Director of Product➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '9110b373-1b93-491b-8f83-5fc4b63b4b89', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Being a Selfless Generalist is a Good Thing A selfless approach based on customer empathy and satisfying stakeholders is an asset on the job, but less so for ourselves. We suffer from imposter syndrome and deprecate our value because, as generalists, we don’t command the same respect and awe as our more specialized coworkers. But our selfless generalist approach is a superpower in its own right. Seeing the big-picture vision and possessing versatility enables product managers to impact, even when the spotlight falls on others instead. We check our egos at the door because the job demands it, and we don’t want a blindspot to punish the customers we care about. Though it may not grab as many headlines or turn us into “influencers” in our respective industries, it builds the proper habits and work ethic to succeed in our current roles… and our next ones. Unfortunately, this means a scant opportunity to promote ourselves leads to personal “brands” that seldom extend beyond our companies’ walls (physical or virtual). Thus comes fewer opportunities to be “discovered” or headhunted or recruited as we continue operating backstage and behind the scenes. Variety is the Spice of Life and the Bane of Product Management Careers Anyone in product for a few years quickly notices no fixed definition of product management from one company to another. Some view Product as an equal peer to Marketing, Sales, and Engineering, while others tuck it away under a VP of Product Marketing or a CTO. One organization may crown us “CEO of the Product” while another views us as an annoying check on runaway innovation. There appears to be a lack of shared understanding of what Product has to offer and why it’s so necessary. But the net result is seemingly random locations on organization charts, daily duties that differ significantly from one company to another, and product managers hailing from many walks of life. The diversity presents challenges when attempting to: Identify growth opportunities and spot which areas you must improve upon. Translate a written job description into what it would mean for your career aspirations and how it maps to your current experience. Tailor your resume, cover letter, and personal pitch to fit a particular job opportunity. Download Developing a Product Team Checklist ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'd8abf101-87a4-49aa-b909-2dcb3743fb8b', {"region":"na1"}); Putting IMPACT to work for your career The IMPACT approach can help you optimize your career impact by assessing yourself in order to improve your career prospects and how you position yourself when you’re actually on the hunt for a new gig. Optimize yourself with IMPACT Whether you’re desperate to change companies, are angling for a promotion, or want to be the best you can be, IMPACT provides a structure for identifying your strengths and weaknesses while identifying areas to work on. Interesting Product managers need an exciting story. How you got to your current role, the career path you took, and where you’d like to go are essential to shaping how others view you. Resumes list the jobs, the degrees, and a few details in bullet points but don’t always recount a compelling story. In a vacuum, your resume or LinkedIn profile might leave people with more questions than answers: Why did you leave Microsoft for some startup that failed? Why did you quit your job at a unicorn and throw in with a medium-sized firm? What made you stay at the same company in the same role for six years? How come you were once a Director, but now you’re a Senior PM? Why did you bounce around between product marketing and product management? To you, those moves all make sense, given the full context of your life and career. But job titles alone don’t do your narrative justice, ergo the need for a story that weaves them together. Connect the dots, find themes and common threads, and spin a tale that leaves others wondering what the next chapter holds in store. Meaningful Product managers do a lot of different things, many of them decidedly necessary. Listing out your responsibilities conveys competence with these tasks and obligations but camouflages your most impactful work. Why you did those things and how you prioritized them is far more relevant. What did those accomplishments mean to you? To your company? To your users and customers? When reviewing your experience, the emphasis must be on how they solved pain points and helped the company reach its overall impact goals. People A product manager’s relationships and interactions with coworkers are fundamental to their success. Those soft skills may not be measurable, but they are essential traits of your current future employer’s values. Are you a good teammate that people enjoy working with? Do you make life easier and better for your colleagues? Are you a great mentor or a devoted protégé? Those skills also come into play when interacting with customers. Can you speak in a language they understand and connect with them where they’re at? Can you engage them in deeper conversations to uncover the root issues and not just the surface-level gripes and wish lists? Talent, intelligence, and creativity aren’t enough for a successful run in Product. You need to be a people person, too. Actionable When listing accomplishments, it’s important to deviate from the laundry-list approach and instead emphasize anecdotes or success stories where you either took action or set the stage for stakeholders to do so. You need to explain beyond merely discussing the completion of a task and what you did with the results. You didn’t just “survey users,” you used that survey data to make recommendations, and one of those recommendations improved a KPI or led to a big deal, which better illustrates the meaningful impact of those actions, not that you just took them. Clear Keep things short and sweet while focusing on real-world examples of how your accomplishments made an impact. Showing off your skills and touting what they’ve done for you in the past are both keys to convincing folks you’re worth adding to their team. Did you bridge gaps and build consensus by creating clarity among stakeholders. Have you inspired the masses with your oratorical prowess? Did you slice and dice the data and create dazzling visuals or unignorable metrics that won people over? Testable The dull, repeatable, everyday elements of your job aren’t the best measures of your competency. You need to get uncomfortable in an unfamiliar situation before knowing if you’re up to the challenge. Push yourself to try new things, learn new skills, and dive into new areas of interest. Measure your faculty with this new material and see if you’ve got the resilience to power through when things get tricky. Watch the full webinar below: Putting IMPACT Into Action On a Job Hunt With your elevator pitch nailed, the next part of advancing your career is assessing new opportunities. Once again, IMPACT can help by weeding out postings that won’t be a great fit while zeroing in on the good ones. Job descriptions aren’t just ads; they’re problem statements you’ve yet to unpack. What problem is this company trying to solve? Where can someone add value and make an impact? Are they mentioning customers and data? Which verbs do they use? Are they super specific in what they’re looking for or searching for an athlete to grow into the position and evolve with it over time? Of course, what they say they want isn’t always what they need (or want), but it is a sneak preview of how they view product management today. It might be wrong and negotiable, but it provides a good glimpse of their current mindset. With this as a starting point—and the remainder of the interviewing process as a series of additional opportunities for further digging—you can better ascertain the expectations for the role, your fit for the opportunity, and whether it will provide you with enough chances to make a true career impact. You want a job where you’re motivated to succeed, not just happy to collect the paycheck. A Position with Purpose The product offers us the opportunities to change lives, fuel businesses, and transform organizations. The problems we solve may be trivial or life-changing, but they all have the chance to impact our product’s users and customers. Finding impactful opportunities throughout our career means more than just a job we enjoy or a product we’re passionate about. It gives our entire lives purpose and adds to the story of our career, adding new chapters with every step we take. To learn more about how IMPACT can help with your career and other dimensions of product management, download the free ebook today. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '76387af0-7ef4-49da-8b36-28e99e4f5ba3', {"region":"na1"});