Imagine a product team out for dinner and drinks. They’re celebrating a big win. The product manager, development team, product owner, maybe even a couple of company executives are there. They must have achieved something significant, right? A revenue milestone? Important roadmap deadlines? Reaching a target number of customers? A positive product review in a major industry publication? What if I told you the team is celebrating the fact that they released the new version of their product a day before the internal deadline on their roadmap? That might be cause for celebration. But maybe not. Pushing out a new feature or product—even if you do it on time—is only one way to measure team success. And it isn’t the best way, not by a long shot. Before this hypothetical product team starts raising their glasses and making toasts, they might want to wait for the answer to a far more important question. Will our customers be enthusiastic about this new product release? Themes—Not Dates—Are the Stars of Your Roadmap A product roadmap conveys the strategic direction and goals of your product. I like to think of a roadmap as a brief, clear story of how and why a product will impact the market. That’s why you want to arrange your roadmaps into themes—those big-picture goals your team sets out to achieve. You want your team to focus first on product strategy, not deadlines. When stakeholders view the roadmap, you want them to easily grasp the story behind your planned work in the coming months. For a B2B software maker, those themes might look like these: Enable a self-serving buying experience online Create a free trial download Develop a scaled-down product at a lower price to attract single-license users That tells a story. It depicts a company that’s thinking strategically. The themes on this roadmap show the product team is trying to find new ways to reach customers, doing business with them more conveniently, and reposition their product to find new markets. But what if, instead of themes and strategies, the most prominent elements of your roadmap were dates and timeframes? Imagine if what stood out on your roadmap were these: Complete in Q2 2021 Release March 17 Push live by the end of January Where’s the story behind this roadmap? Where’s the vision, strategic thinking? What is this company even building? 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For more information on how to unsubscribe, our privacy practices, and how we are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy, please review our Privacy Policy.#wistia_grid_43_wrapper{-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;box-sizing:content-box;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;height:100%;position:relative;text-align:left;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_43_wrapper *{-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;box-sizing:content-box;} #wistia_grid_43_above{position:relative;} #wistia_grid_43_main{display:block;height:100%;position:relative;} #wistia_grid_43_behind{height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;top:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_43_center{height:100%;overflow:hidden;position:relative;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_43_front{display:none;height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;top:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_43_top_inside{position:absolute;left:0;top:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_43_top{width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0;left:0;} #wistia_grid_43_bottom_inside{position:absolute;left:0;bottom:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_43_bottom{width:100%;position:absolute;top:0;left:0;} #wistia_grid_43_left_inside{height:100%;position:absolute;left:0;top:0;} #wistia_grid_43_left{height:100%;position:absolute;right:0;top:0;} #wistia_grid_43_right_inside{height:100%;right:0;position:absolute;top:0;} #wistia_grid_43_right{height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;top:0;} #wistia_grid_43_below{position:relative;} Download Your Free Guide to Product Roadmaps ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'c4a6fb52-ab88-49e7-9a08-99c0cb718839', {}); The deadlines won’t matter in the long run. To put this another way, let’s say Microsoft adds a feature to its Teams collaboration app. Unfortunately, the new tool falls flat with users. Now imagine that the product team launched this new feature by the internal deadline they set for themselves. In a year, is anyone in the company going to say, “Well, that Teams widget was a disappointment, but at least our product team released it on time”? Yes, Dates Are Important to Product Success At this point, you might be wondering if I put much value at all on dates and deadlines. Absolutely. Product managers always have limited resources—including time. You’ll need dates and deadlines for several strategic reasons, including: Helping your team weigh which items it can work on over a given timeframe Giving your developers a sense of how to structure and schedule their work Keeping your team on pace with relevant events, such as tradeshows or holidays Gauging your effectiveness at driving products forward according to plan So Why Shouldn’t We Hit All Roadmap Deadlines? If you can achieve everything you want strategically for your product and still meet every deadline on your roadmap, you might be ready to think bigger. Empowered product management teams are constantly adjusting course to meet their customers’ evolving needs and the market. A product roadmap should be somewhat aspirational. Its themes should include at least some stretch goals that may not be clearly defined and require creativity and lateral thinking. Creating a roadmap with space for learning and insights means you will be ready to take advantage of new opportunities. It also means you can regularly question if your original roadmap delivers the most value to your customer. This is why I’m skeptical about any team’s ability to set those big strategic goals for their product but still get all of their projects done on time. And if you have to choose between these two competing goals—aiming big with your product or hitting all of your roadmap deadlines—I’d highly recommend you choose to aim big. A Deadline Culture Has Nasty Side Effects Becoming date-focused on your product roadmap is dangerous not only because it can take your team’s attention away from the strategy they should be focusing on. The risks are much greater than that. Here are some of the negative side effects of prioritizing roadmap deadlines over themes: 1. Focusing on deadlines assumes you have nothing to learn. When planning your roadmap, you have a good idea of the problems you are looking to solve, whether framed as jobs to be done, business objectives, or even features. You likely have some hypotheses about how you will solve them and even the technical challenges, but you should be prepared to learn along the way. Reserve space for additional validation and discovery, and be open to learning that you need to make some changes. You may find the problem isn’t worth solving or that it’s no longer the highest priority due to market trends. Alternatively, you may find that to solve it well, and you need to do much more than you planned. If you are focused only on meeting the deadline, you are not delivering the best solution possible. 2. You might set deadlines later than necessary to make sure you hit them. In a company culture that treats deadlines as its prized metric, product managers will undoubtedly be tempted to set their roadmap deadlines out as far as possible. What better way to ensure “success,” as the company defines it? But when you take this approach, you also under-use your developers, product owners, project managers, and other team members. You might not be allowing your team to function at top capacity and do all the great work they’re capable of. 3. You might aim too low because you’re afraid of upsetting stakeholders. A date-obsessed product team also runs the risk of playing it safe, under-promising, to hit their deadlines. This often happens in organizations whose executives focus on deadlines over other success metrics. But your senior leadership’s obsession with roadmap deadlines can’t be your excuse to limit your strategic goals or vision. As a product manager, it is your responsibility to show your executive stakeholders that you have big goals for your product. You’ll need to persuade them that achieving those goals will be more important than whether you hit your roadmap’s deadlines. 4. You might prioritize work, not for its strategic value but because it seems easiest to complete on time. And what an innovative and impactful product that will be! Failure can be a powerful teacher. If you set aggressive deadlines for a project and miss it, that can still yield some successes. For example, it can help you discover important details about your team’s capacity and pacing and any shortcomings of your processes. But even more important, building a culture that allows for a degree of failure—such as missed deadlines—also encourages more innovation and risk-taking. Both are keys to building products that make a positive impact on your market. How to Deal with Roadmap Deadlines Having said all of this, I do believe deadlines can play a useful role in your product roadmap. After all, I’ve overseen the development of the date-based milestone feature on LIKE.TG’s roadmap app. But you need to make sure your team treats roadmap deadlines with the proper amount of weight. Your team shouldn’t ignore the deadlines on your roadmap, nor should they think their success rests on meeting those dates. Here are a few steps I’d recommend: Build a team culture that emphasizes product quality first (even above deadlines). Set a success rate for hitting deadlines that you’ll be happy with. It should be a high percentage but below 100%. When your team fails to hit a roadmap deadline, please don’t treat it as a reason to reprimand your coworkers or to hang your head in shame. Instead, learn from those misses. As a Product Manager, Your Real Goal Isn’t on Any Calendar As you drive your products’ development and continuous improvement, you’ll want to hit your deadlines whenever you can. That’s one way to measure how effective you are in your product management role. But it’s not the end in and of itself. The goal behind any product management effort—releasing a new feature, for example—is to benefit both your customers and your company. Remember: Your primary role as a product manager is to solve real problems for your market. It’s not to deliver those solutions on June 11. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'fce9ff32-fc97-45d5-a22b-8ac8e9c76cb2', {});

Imagine a product team out for dinner and drinks. They’re celebrating a big win. The product manager, development team, product owner, maybe even a couple of company executives are there. They must have achieved something significant, right? A revenue milestone? Important roadmap deadlines? Reaching a target number of customers? A positive product review in a major industry publication? What if I told you the team is celebrating the fact that they released the new version of their product a day before the internal deadline on their roadmap? That might be cause for celebration. But maybe not. Pushing out a new feature or product—even if you do it on time—is only one way to measure team success. And it isn’t the best way, not by a long shot. Before this hypothetical product team starts raising their glasses and making toasts, they might want to wait for the answer to a far more important question. Will our customers be enthusiastic about this new product release? Themes—Not Dates—Are the Stars of Your Roadmap A product roadmap conveys the strategic direction and goals of your product. I like to think of a roadmap as a brief, clear story of how and why a product will impact the market. That’s why you want to arrange your roadmaps into themes—those big-picture goals your team sets out to achieve. You want your team to focus first on product strategy, not deadlines. When stakeholders view the roadmap, you want them to easily grasp the story behind your planned work in the coming months. For a B2B software maker, those themes might look like these: Enable a self-serving buying experience online Create a free trial download Develop a scaled-down product at a lower price to attract single-license users That tells a story. It depicts a company that’s thinking strategically. The themes on this roadmap show the product team is trying to find new ways to reach customers, doing business with them more conveniently, and reposition their product to find new markets. But what if, instead of themes and strategies, the most prominent elements of your roadmap were dates and timeframes? Imagine if what stood out on your roadmap were these: Complete in Q2 2021 Release March 17 Push live by the end of January Where’s the story behind this roadmap? Where’s the vision, strategic thinking? What is this company even building? 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.w-css-reset-button-important{border-radius:0!important;color:#fff!important;} Complete the form to access the full webinarFirst Name*Last Name*Job Title*Email*LIKE.TG is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy, and we’ll only use your personal information to administer your account and to provide the products and services you requested from us. 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To put this another way, let’s say Microsoft adds a feature to its Teams collaboration app. Unfortunately, the new tool falls flat with users. Now imagine that the product team launched this new feature by the internal deadline they set for themselves. In a year, is anyone in the company going to say, “Well, that Teams widget was a disappointment, but at least our product team released it on time”? Yes, Dates Are Important to Product Success At this point, you might be wondering if I put much value at all on dates and deadlines. Absolutely. Product managers always have limited resources—including time. You’ll need dates and deadlines for several strategic reasons, including: Helping your team weigh which items it can work on over a given timeframe Giving your developers a sense of how to structure and schedule their work Keeping your team on pace with relevant events, such as tradeshows or holidays Gauging your effectiveness at driving products forward according to plan So Why Shouldn’t We Hit All Roadmap Deadlines? If you can achieve everything you want strategically for your product and still meet every deadline on your roadmap, you might be ready to think bigger. Empowered product management teams are constantly adjusting course to meet their customers’ evolving needs and the market. A product roadmap should be somewhat aspirational. Its themes should include at least some stretch goals that may not be clearly defined and require creativity and lateral thinking. Creating a roadmap with space for learning and insights means you will be ready to take advantage of new opportunities. It also means you can regularly question if your original roadmap delivers the most value to your customer. This is why I’m skeptical about any team’s ability to set those big strategic goals for their product but still get all of their projects done on time. And if you have to choose between these two competing goals—aiming big with your product or hitting all of your roadmap deadlines—I’d highly recommend you choose to aim big. A Deadline Culture Has Nasty Side Effects Becoming date-focused on your product roadmap is dangerous not only because it can take your team’s attention away from the strategy they should be focusing on. The risks are much greater than that. Here are some of the negative side effects of prioritizing roadmap deadlines over themes: 1. Focusing on deadlines assumes you have nothing to learn. When planning your roadmap, you have a good idea of the problems you are looking to solve, whether framed as jobs to be done, business objectives, or even features. You likely have some hypotheses about how you will solve them and even the technical challenges, but you should be prepared to learn along the way. Reserve space for additional validation and discovery, and be open to learning that you need to make some changes. You may find the problem isn’t worth solving or that it’s no longer the highest priority due to market trends. Alternatively, you may find that to solve it well, and you need to do much more than you planned. If you are focused only on meeting the deadline, you are not delivering the best solution possible. 2. You might set deadlines later than necessary to make sure you hit them. In a company culture that treats deadlines as its prized metric, product managers will undoubtedly be tempted to set their roadmap deadlines out as far as possible. What better way to ensure “success,” as the company defines it? But when you take this approach, you also under-use your developers, product owners, project managers, and other team members. You might not be allowing your team to function at top capacity and do all the great work they’re capable of. 3. You might aim too low because you’re afraid of upsetting stakeholders. A date-obsessed product team also runs the risk of playing it safe, under-promising, to hit their deadlines. This often happens in organizations whose executives focus on deadlines over other success metrics. But your senior leadership’s obsession with roadmap deadlines can’t be your excuse to limit your strategic goals or vision. As a product manager, it is your responsibility to show your executive stakeholders that you have big goals for your product. You’ll need to persuade them that achieving those goals will be more important than whether you hit your roadmap’s deadlines. 4. You might prioritize work, not for its strategic value but because it seems easiest to complete on time. And what an innovative and impactful product that will be! Failure can be a powerful teacher. If you set aggressive deadlines for a project and miss it, that can still yield some successes. For example, it can help you discover important details about your team’s capacity and pacing and any shortcomings of your processes. But even more important, building a culture that allows for a degree of failure—such as missed deadlines—also encourages more innovation and risk-taking. Both are keys to building products that make a positive impact on your market. How to Deal with Roadmap Deadlines Having said all of this, I do believe deadlines can play a useful role in your product roadmap. After all, I’ve overseen the development of the date-based milestone feature on LIKE.TG’s roadmap app. But you need to make sure your team treats roadmap deadlines with the proper amount of weight. Your team shouldn’t ignore the deadlines on your roadmap, nor should they think their success rests on meeting those dates. Here are a few steps I’d recommend: Build a team culture that emphasizes product quality first (even above deadlines). Set a success rate for hitting deadlines that you’ll be happy with. It should be a high percentage but below 100%. When your team fails to hit a roadmap deadline, please don’t treat it as a reason to reprimand your coworkers or to hang your head in shame. Instead, learn from those misses. As a Product Manager, Your Real Goal Isn’t on Any Calendar As you drive your products’ development and continuous improvement, you’ll want to hit your deadlines whenever you can. That’s one way to measure how effective you are in your product management role. But it’s not the end in and of itself. The goal behind any product management effort—releasing a new feature, for example—is to benefit both your customers and your company. Remember: Your primary role as a product manager is to solve real problems for your market. It’s not to deliver those solutions on June 11. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'fce9ff32-fc97-45d5-a22b-8ac8e9c76cb2', {});

The new year is right around the corner, and digital transformation continues to be the rage as companies evolve to seek relevance – modernizing systems, procedures, and mindsets for the modern world. CEOs tout the benefits and hype up their planning and investment. Product leaders swoop in to shepherd these efforts. Finally, customers eagerly await the benefits of the shift. Yet 80% of digital transformations fail. What’s causing so many failures? One key factor is a fundamental lack of understanding of product transformation relative to traditional operating models. Many leaders fail to realize that digital transformation must be synonymous with product transformation and the ability for an organization to be successful. Remarkably, the COVID crisis accelerated the importance and availability of digital customer-facing touchpoints by five years. Companies that stayed on the sidelines face a major uphill battle when they decide to attempt a transformation strategy. “The COVID crisis accelerated the importance and availability of digital customer-facing touch points by five years.” For the small group of companies who successfully pivoted, will their product transformation continue or revert back to traditional ways of doing business? The global pandemic has taught us that businesses that remain agile and open to digital transformation will be successful, but that doesn’t guarantee changes in how a company operates. Digital transformation and product development’s relationship A strong response during a crisis isn’t a transformation but a reaction. And as soon as the dust settles, many companies risk going back to traditional ways of doing business. The status quo ultimately holds their transformation back. Why not leverage the new year to help your team adapt to this brand-new world? First, break the mold of top-down management expectations When facing intense adversity, successful leaders break the mold by loosening the reins and relinquishing their control in the name of survival. Yet top-down management styles quickly return to normal after a crisis. Most companies fail because they revert back to this leadership style. “A strong response during a crisis isn’t a transformation but a reaction.” Gartner reports that 85% of organizations surveyed had adopted or intended to adopt a product-centric delivery model. Open collaboration and creative problem-solving in this delivery model dissolve traditional and rigid operating patterns. You need trust to establish product processes. A well-formed roadmap is your best ammunition to create space and respect. Implementing an effective product transformation strategy Fundamental product transformation requires a permanent embrace of effective management strategies and tools to achieve alignment. These strategies help organizations withstand a crisis. Team autonomy is an essential pillar of digital transformation. And many product and technology leaders and executives fail to embrace this concept. Shift to a product-led mindset Busting down silos via cross-functional teams and collaboration limits empire-building. C-level executives may not always be a fan-favorite of eliminating silos. Toxic leaders find it uncomfortable to empower individual contributors to make decisions independently. To effectively manage this scenario, as a product leader, you should shift to a product-led mindset. Your organization can foster the development of an actual product management organization. The organization guides the process and changes the dynamic. A product-led mindset helps to diminish a toxic environment where diverse voices and opinions are pushed to the background. Bottom-up strategy Customer-obsessed perspectives drive change and alignment. It’s bottom-up from the customer to the product to the leadership; instead of a versus battle of egos and seniority. Product leaders should understand that the typical customer journey begins pre-purchase—a potential customer identifies a need, researches potential solutions, and ultimately selects a product. Companies are applying various digital tools to cut through the clutter and win customers at this critical stage. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '527dc6af-8860-436f-9ca6-ae2b71b0cc99', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Digital transformation and Agile methodologies are one and the same Understanding customers’ needs drive the conflict and set the stage to genuinely embrace Agile and embracing digital transformation. The market dictates what the company should build next. There’s no better way to address that quickly and efficiently than Agile practices. There’s less pushback when the benefits of a shorter time to market and quicker reactions and customer feedback are the impetus. Iterative development accelerates learning, which is key to product transformation. Product and digital transformation are synonymous with one another. If you want to go through digital transformation, you need to introduce product management as a discipline. Shorter feedback loops facilitate more efficient resource allocation. It provides early indicators of whether or not a given initiative is on the right track. Few companies have the runway to put all their eggs in one basket while also sustaining asymmetrical attacks from various competitors. How to set the stage for success with stakeholders To execute change without adding extra drama and resentment, it’s key to handle the current state properly. Who are the actual stakeholders, and how do they feel about things? Many important stakeholders may feel hesitant to implement a digital transformation. To mitigate this issue, you’ll need to dig in a little deeper to uncover their pain points. Your product vision should help them see how the product transformation can resolve their pain points. From there, a clearly articulated vision creates some boundaries and a destination for the process. Below we explore how roadmaps, understanding product transformation, and effective communication can address customer’s pain points and get stakeholders on board. Roadmaps aid your transformation In my experience, the best weapon to combat this backsliding and increase the comfort level for stakeholders is a solid product roadmap. This illustration displays the key steps the team will take to achieve strategic goals and objectives and provides a structure for leadership to wrap their heads around. Complimenting this well-defined roadmap process for crucial product development ensures that things won’t become a free-for-all. Most product teams would rather have a flexible, responsive approach grounded in shared core principles, as well as an adequately socialized strategy aligned with key stakeholders. The power of visual roadmaps When a visual roadmap is focused on outcomes versus deliverables, strategy shines through instead of the shiny objects that distract stakeholders and the product team from their actual goals. The roadmap also drives home the transition from thinking about “projects” to focusing on “products.” Although visual roadmaps may be light on the details, it’s much easier to get stakeholder buy-in, trust, and support when the plan is positioned in terms of themes and objectives rather than dates and specific features. Stakeholders may also relish the opportunity for additional measurables and metrics. They only work when the product is tied to strategic goals and objectives. Understanding product transformation improvements Product transformations themselves may also deserve a roadmap of their own. While these might detail the steps required to achieve success, they’re even more valuable by describing the progress these initiatives can make. By describing both the current and desired state and the mid-transformation improvements along the way, stakeholders can better grasp the importance of this work and the benefits it brings. Each bit of progress must address stated goals for the product or current organizational and operational deficiencies. Rewarding those who greenlight the transformation with tangible, measurable gains. Targeted transformational change Product and organizational transformation need to be targeted. These improvements reduce customer support inquiries and increase recurring revenue. The shift speeds up onboarding and cuts down on churn. The shift can bring stakeholders on board and calms their fears about the digital transformation, which for them may seem like a radical change away from traditional manners of business. Milestones Regardless of which roadmap you’re working on, milestones are one way to make it real. They demarcate, passing from one gate to the next. Moreover, they provide a sense of accomplishment and achievement that doesn’t always shine through when everyone’s plowing through one sprint after the next. Avoid communication breakdown during product transformations So many problems and misunderstandings in organizations stem from communication breakdowns. When embarking on a product transformation, it’s more important than ever to keep folks in the loop and feeling included. Keeping stakeholders informed Less is seldom more in these cases since even the biggest proponents of product transformation may still have concerns about particular aspects of the change. Create consistent channels for sharing updates and make sure it’s a two-way street. You may not want their feedback and input, but it’s essential that everyone feels like they have a voice in the process. If stakeholders remain hesitant about an overall digital transformation, you can ease the process by walking them through the transformation. Stakeholders may also find it helpful if you take the time to explain to them the importance of the Agile process. Agile eases communication and helps everyone come to a single source of truth, especially stakeholders. Oversharing allows you to avoid having to clean up avoidable messes in the future that might damage stakeholder confidence in the new ways of doing things. Throw away those outdated playbooks and embrace the future with a product transformation strategy Change is hard, particularly when things don’t seem particularly broken. But even if a product or business is managing at the moment, digital and product transformation are necessary to survive and succeed in the coming years. As you fight this uphill battle in preparation for the New Year, take solace in the fact that you’re not alone. Countless organizations continue to resist, dig in their heels, and count on past successes to continue. Getting stakeholder holdouts to come around requires a multi-pronged effort. Benchmarking against peers and competitor points demonstrates that the old way of doing things holds the organization back. Meanwhile, product leaders can convince the old guard that getting from the current state to the desired destination won’t happen using the rigid top-down rules of yesteryear. Organizations resistant to embracing product transformation may remain confident that their tried-and-true methods worked before, so they’ll work again. But there’s little evidence to support that. Industries and dominant players continually disrupt other companies willing to use these new tools and techniques. It’s only a question of when—not if—one will come gunning for them as well. Ready to jumpstart your product transformation strategy? We’re here to help! Schedule a demo to connect with our team of product strategy experts.

Today, LIKE.TG is officially launching a brand new Product Discovery tool available exclusively to our Enterprise customers. With Product Discovery, you can capture ideas, organize them in a central repository, and validate the right opportunities that will drive your strategy. For Enterprise customers looking for more detailed information on how to get started, check out our support documentation. And for those not on a LIKE.TG Enterprise plan, we’d love to show you how Product Discovery can help you make better product decisions with a quick demo. You can schedule that here. Finally, let’s spend some time walking through why we invested in solving challenges around capturing ideas and validating opportunities. We’ll also show off what you can expect to find in Product Discovery with a quick tour of the platform provided below. Let’s get started. Why We Built It Product teams have long needed an easy way to organize all of their product ideas. Feedback can come from anywhere. An idea might come from the company strategy that asks the product team to deliver on a particular objective. Or an idea might come directly from your customers who ask for specific improvements to your product. But ideas alone don’t make a product strategy. Adding every feature request or new idea from a vocal stakeholder onto your roadmap is a quick way to become a feature factory. So while capturing and organizing ideas is certainly step one, it can’t end there. We wrote more about our approach to helping you turn feedback into strategic product decisions late last year. The takeaway being that there needs to be an established process that helps you decide whether possible solutions will drive desired company outcomes. This is the Product Discovery process in a nutshell. Develop a profound understanding of your customers, then use that knowledge to build vital products. Without a way to capture and compare possible solutions for the same opportunity, product teams are unable to make prioritization decisions confidently. Everything becomes a priority. And when everything is a priority, nothing is. Sound familiar? How LIKE.TG Helps LIKE.TG’s Product Discovery tool has two main spaces. The first is a dedicated Ideas space for you to capture and manage customer feedback, feature requests, and more. Ideas can be submitted directly by internal stakeholders with the right permissions, or by customers via private intake form. This helps you control the influx of ideas, focusing on quality over quantity. The second is an Opportunities space designed to help you uncover the work that will make the biggest impact on your business. Opportunities help you bridge the gap between your strategy and the ideas you collect. Use opportunities to outline possible strategic priorities for your team. Then, assign the ideas that could help you accomplish each priority you identify. With opportunities, you finally have a place to document your strategy, compare opportunities, and define what success looks like. Opportunities are also a great way to keep your ideas organized. Finally, we want to make sure you can easily move validated priorities from your Discovery space over to your LIKE.TG roadmaps. In a few clicks, you can connect opportunities to relevant bars and containers in your roadmap. Getting Started Enterprise plan customers can get started today by logging into LIKE.TG and heading over to the new Discovery space by clicking on the ‘lightbulb’ icon in the top right menu. For non-Enterprise customers, request a demo by clicking on the button below.

Diversity and inclusion is a high-priority topic for many organizations worldwide. And it’s no different at ProductPlan. For years, our team has been working to build a more inclusive and welcoming company for people from all backgrounds. This vision for an equitable and diverse workplace has evolved and transformed through the years. I’m honored to share what we have accomplished and some of our plans for the future. But first, allow me to introduce myself. My name is David Hughes. I am a Customer Success Manager and Diversity and Inclusion Manager at ProductPlan. As you can probably tell, I love wearing multiple hats. And diversity and inclusion are very near and dear to my heart. I don’t have the typical background of someone who works in tech. So, I am keenly aware of how important it is to welcome folks from all walks of life. As the Diversity and Inclusion Manager, I work closely with our People and Culture team and our Diversity and Inclusion Task Force. Together, we ensure a diverse group of people feels comfortable, welcomed, and fully integrated within the company. We seek to achieve lasting equality, equity, and justice by making LIKE.TG an inclusive, safe space where all employees can thrive. Who is part of the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force? The D&I Task Force is comprised of passionate individuals from all areas of the business who come together to brainstorm ways to promote diversity and inclusion at the company as well as act as liaisons for their respective departments. Everyone who is interested is welcome to join the D&I task force. It’s all about getting as many voices and perspectives involved as possible. The group is always learning new strategies and tactics for supporting a diverse workforce. The journey so far… Since the creation of the D&I Task Force, we have been hard at work building scalable programs to help foster an inclusive culture for all employees across the country. Giving employees opportunities to get to know each other outside of work It’s important for employees to feel comfortable bringing their full selves to the workplace. This can be especially challenging in a remote environment. So our D&I Task Force began hosting regularly scheduled opportunities for employees to get to connect and collaborate cross-functionally with specific topics, questions, and cultural activities. We call these monthly events, Culture, Connection, & Collaboration Break. During a CCC Break, employees are randomly paired up to discuss a specific topic or prompt. It’s been a great experience so far and has given employees who might not normally cross paths an opportunity to meet. Encouraging employee-led diversity education We are lucky to have such an enthusiastic group of employees who come from unique backgrounds and perspectives. It is important for us to encourage and celebrate our differences and learn from one another. This plays out at LIKE.TG in a couple of ways. First, we have Lunch&Learn events where an employee can speak about a D&I-related topic with their peers. Everyone is welcome to join the Lunch&Learns and to host them. We have enjoyed a lot of great conversations, and look forward to hearing more from employees as we continue to grow and have new voices join the team. For our employees who are not inclined to host a live discussion, we also provide a dedicated Slack channel for D&I discussions. In that channel, employees can share knowledge, resources, and ask questions. It’s a great way to bring the team together asynchronously. Establishing partnerships with local non-profit organizations Volunteering with our local communities is core to the LIKE.TG culture. The Diversity & Inclusion Task Force has established two amazing partnerships with two Santa Barbara organizations. First, is the Equal Learning Fund, a nonprofit organization that provides school supplies to children from low socioeconomic households and communities. In partnership with the ELF, the LIKE.TG team has participated in back-to-school fundraisers where we raised enough funds to supply hundreds of kids with backpacks and school supplies for the new school year. Another partnership we are very proud of is with the United Boys & Girls Club of Santa Barbara County, an organization that provides a safe, welcoming place for kids where they have access to tutoring and education programs, sports, art and music classes, and other opportunities. We had a blast participating in the Corporate Playdates hosted by the UBGC. We get to meet some of the students, play games, and learn more about how the organization supports the local Santa Barbara community. The best part is, this is only the beginning! We are proud of the incredible work the team has accomplished in just a couple of years. However, we are nowhere near done! Looking ahead, we plan to scale our D&I programs and initiatives alongside our plans to grow the LIKE.TG team. Stay tuned for more updates from the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force! If LIKE.TG sounds like a good fit for your next chapter, take a look at our open roles in Sales, Customer Success, Engineering, and Product on our website: https://www.productplan.com/careers/

Criticism can uncover important truths. This is one reason that product managers have such a difficult job: Sometimes the only way to learn what your users truly think about your product is to launch and then listen to their unvarnished “feedback.” One valuable truth that criticism can uncover is how much your customers have come to expect and demand from your company and your products. So it says a lot about what an innovative powerhouse Apple has been that the public now expects the company to transform another industry every couple of years, and that we assume every one of its product releases will offer something revolutionary. Apple has certainly earned that reputation. They changed digital music, with the iPod and iTunes; how we consume video entertainment, with Apple TV; and how and where we interact with the Internet and our digital communities, with the iPad. And of course, with the iPhone, by standing on the shoulders of countless innovations before them, they’ve literally changed the way more than a billion people hold their heads — downward — for much of every day. The Next Stages of an Innovation The iPhone was introduced in 2007, the iPad in 2010. Apple TV? That hit the market almost a decade ago, in 2007. And the first iPod was launched way back in 2001. One major new addition to the Apple product line in recent years, the Apple Watch, wasn’t the first wristwatch to connect via Bluetooth to the owner’s smartphone. Nor was the concept of a piece of wearable, wireless technology so groundbreaking — fitness trackers like Fitbit had already been gaining popularity for years. So it’s understandable that people are now publicly asking — Why aren’t Apple’s product teams innovating anymore? I believe those criticisms miss part of the story. Yes, Apple revolutionized several industries — across music, movies and television, web browsing and phone communications. Heck, they even created the concept of an “app store,” where millions of other innovators could sell their own digital tools over web and mobile platforms. But here’s the real question, a question to which every product manager should give serious thought: When you’ve innovated and brought something truly original and different to the market, what then? What’s your next move? Should you just keep innovating more new products, or should you spend more of your resources and your team’s creative energy improving, tweaking, refining and upgrading that first innovation? Tweet This: Should Apple innovate new products, or should they spend time improving existing innovations? Apple took advantage of a wildly creative period at the company a decade or so ago, and launched a flurry of groundbreaking products. Those products were so groundbreaking, and changed so many people’s lives, that the company has been correct in treating the follow-up stages — nurturing and improving these innovative products — with as much energy and enthusiasm as they gave to the original innovation stage. Download the Anatomy of a Product Launch ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '0edb2611-2761-4434-90b0-f055704d9daa', {}); The Next Stage in Innovation Isn’t Another Innovation — it’s Nurturing and Improving So when people criticize Apple for not unveiling more cool, never-before-seen tech year after year, here’s what I think they might be missing. The very Apple products that have so endeared the company to millions of fans — fans, mind you, not merely customers — require a tremendous amount of ongoing stewardship from Apple’s product teams. The reason the iPhone is still so popular in its seventh iteration, now nearly ten years after its original release, is that the company has put so much thought, analysis and, yes, innovation, into continually improving it. The seventh version of any product might not sound like it leaves much room for innovation. But consider, for example, the company’s decision to remove the phone jack from the iPhone 7 and introduce a set of wireless headphones. That move was bold and gutsy. And as Apple’s product team no doubt expected, they immediately received serious criticism for it. In this sense, Apple is damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Many of the people critical of Apple for not releasing more completely new products — in other words, demanding more innovation — are at the same angered at the company’s innovative move to change the way we interact physically with our smartphones. But that’s okay. True innovators understand that it can take time for the public to see the value in their innovations, even if with time everyone claims the ideas made sense all along. Is Amazon Today a Snapshot of Apple a Decade Ago? Perhaps another reason so many people have taken issue with Apple for slowing their pace of new product launches is that there are examples all around us of other companies, in their own wildly creative and productive periods, introducing flurries of groundbreaking products right now. Consider Amazon. The product teams there are on an innovation tear — across product categories, customer personas and industries. The Echo is already redefining how people interact with the Internet in their homes. The Dash Button is a simple, brilliant solution to a household problem faced by tens of millions of people every day. With Amazon Studios, the company is taking a bold step from another set-top-box provider of TV and movie apps to a content creator in its own right. The company has of course become a major player in the enterprise cloud-computing game, with Amazon Web Services. And if all of that weren’t enough, there’s the drone delivery project (called Amazon Prime Air). Now if this isn’t innovation, we don’t know what would qualify (whether or not it eventually becomes a reality). The whole idea is so revolutionary it almost sounds like the punchline to a joke uttered by an obsessed Amazon customer: “I love Amazon, but I hate that it takes a whole day for them to ship me stuff. Why can’t they just have a drone pick up my shipment from the distribution center, fly it to my house and land it on my front porch? Hahaha!” Of course, maybe the idea actually did originate as a joke like this uttered in a customer’s home… and the Amazon Echo was listening. Just kidding. Probably. Tweet This: Is Amazon today a snapshot of Apple a decade ago? Looking at Amazon’s rapid-paced introduction of new products alongside Apple, what are we to conclude? Amazon is certainly enjoying a flurry of creativity similar to the one Apple experienced maybe a dozen years ago. If that’s the case, then perhaps as its new products — the Echo, Amazon Prime Air — become ubiquitous and then begin to mature, Amazon will slow down the rush of revolutionary new products out the door (or, in the case of the drones, out the roof). And like Apple, Amazon will begin shifting its focus to refining and improving its existing portfolio of products. We’ll see. The Best Innovators Care for Their Products Well After the Initial Thrill of the Innovation Wears Off The initial unveiling of an innovative new product is fun, not only for the public but for the company itself, particularly the product teams responsible for it. That unveiling is what grabs the headlines. It’s what wins new fans. But even if the new product is an instant hit with the public — in fact, especially if the public takes to it immediately — the company then needs to shift to the next stage, which is learning how to improve upon the product and make it even better. That’s what champion product managers do. Even after an early win in the market with a new product, they head right back to their desk to start gathering new data from users, and whatever else they can find, to start improving the product for the 1.1 release. Tiger Woods was famously spotted practicing on the driving range just hours after winning the US Open. Real champions in any field, including product management, never stop practicing, never stop learning and never stop improving. We believe that as Apple slows its pace of unveiling category-defining new products, it’s not because they’re resting on their accomplishments or playing it safe. It’s because they are treating the all-important next steps in product innovation — nurturing and improving — with equal respect. But that’s just one opinion. Agree? Disagree? Perhaps Apple has slowed its innovation for another reason. And perhaps Amazon’s product teams never will. We want to know what you think about Apple’s slowed pace of innovation. Please share your thoughts in the comments section. Let’s get this product discussion flowing.

Great products come from great product teams—not from frameworks. Using the right product framework can help guide a team’s work. But the product will be only as good as the people behind it. Product Frameworks Can Become a Crutch A few years ago, marketing author Seth Godin appeared on a business podcast. The host wanted to talk about Godin’s legendary blog, where he has published a post every day for decades. When the host asked him to describe his process for sticking to such an impressive schedule, Godin refused. I’ll paraphrase his response. The process I use to write a blog every day is irrelevant to everybody but me. The danger in telling it to you is that many people are looking for a shortcut or easy answer to becoming more productive. If they’re listening to us now, they might be hoping they’ll find it in a list of steps. They won’t. My process is just that, a process. It’s not the work itself. Don’t get me wrong. As a product leader, I encourage my teams to use whichever product frameworks they find helpful. LIKE.TG has written about frameworks to help with product prioritization, frameworks to develop an effective product strategy, and some of our favorites for UX designers, including Google’s HEART framework. But as Seth Godin said, you need to avoid the trap of confusing your framework with the work itself. For product teams, that work involves all of the familiar roles product managers and product leaders are responsible for, including: Building and leading a great product team Getting to know your market and users Identifying market problems worth solving Earning the trust of your prospects and customers Directing your team’s energy toward the right strategic goals That bullet list could serve as your product framework. But you will need to execute each of those steps successfully, and the framework can’t magically make that happen. How Useful Are Product Frameworks? To answer this question, I’ll ask one of my own: Can your clothes lead to success? You know Steve Jobs wore identical outfits to work every day: the black turtleneck, the blue jeans, the sneakers. I’m guessing you also know why. It reduced the number of things he had to think about each morning, giving him more mental energy in the day for Apple. Thousands of entrepreneurs and executives followed that Steve Jobs framework. Today, we have thousands of business leaders wearing the same thing to work every day. But do we have thousands of more Apple-caliber companies out there as a result? Of course not. Which is a good lead-in to discussing what frameworks can and cannot do for product leaders and their teams. 1. Product frameworks free up time and creative energy. Think of all the steps along your journey, from developing a new product concept to get that product into your customers’ hands. Many of those steps will involve creative thinking, strategic planning, and effective teamwork. To get the most from your team on those steps, you’ll want them to have as much focus and mental energy as possible. Then there are the less-creative steps: the checklists, the meetings, the review processes. One way to free up more energy and time for the project’s creative aspects is to make these steps as routine and standardized as you can. Think about it this way. If your team’s sprint sessions run each time differently, team members will have to spend more time thinking about how they’ll handle the various ways the next meeting might go. They’ll also spend more time during each session discussing the logistics of the meeting itself, leaving less time to focus on the tasks they need to work on in the next sprint. The good news is that you can use frameworks to take your team’s guesswork and additional mental energy out of the project’s routine stages. For example, you can create frameworks to: Standardize your team’s sprint, retrospectives, and other meetings Give your team the right tools to complete their work efficiently. The right tool meant they don’t spend mental cycles thinking through how to manage those aspects of the job Create a standardized signoff process. A process ensures your team knows exactly when and by whom they’ll need their work approved before they can consider it done Most teams get this wrong, I believe, is thinking the right framework will improve their work’s quality or creativity. In reality, it works more like this: You use frameworks to move the logistical tasks to the background, so you can create more space and focus for the creative work. But the quality of that work will depend on your team’s talent and effort, not on the framework you’re using. You can put on a turtleneck and jeans, walk into your office, and brainstorm with your team. But if you want to develop a product as ingenious and disruptive as the iPhone, then you’ll also need to walk in with a Steve Jobs brain—and have a team as brilliant as his at Apple. 2. Product frameworks can help a team avoid skipping an important step. Use frameworks to help your team move the routine aspects of their work into the background. We can call this the turtleneck effect. By increasing standardization, you might find their newfound energy leads to some great ideas and increased enthusiasm. That’s great. But you need to be careful. If your team is so excited about an idea for a new feature and so energized to start building it, you could neglect an important step, such as your normal vetting process. You might be convinced the idea is viable, even groundbreaking. But before you commit resources to it, you’ll need to step back and take a few important steps. Maybe part of your process is to perform a cost-benefit analysis of any new functionality or ask your sales team if they’ve heard interest in such a feature from prospects or customers. You never want a framework to constrain your team’s creativity or to slow their work. But you also don’t want your process to be ad hoc, so driven by intuition, that you’re creating products using completely different processes every time. It would help if you constructed some guardrails to keep from going down the wrong path. Build a very loose framework that includes at least a few basic steps—such as “Let’s test this idea with our persona before building it.” 3. Product frameworks can prevent ad-hoc requests from pulling the team off-track. Using a product framework—and, more important, making sure your organization knows you’re using it—can also help your team deal more effectively with the never-ending stream of requests that can derail their progress. Let’s says your team has no fixed stages or guidelines during the development process. You improvise your approach from scratch for every new product or even for every update to an existing product. What’s to keep a sales rep or executive from demanding your team stop everything from building something they want to prioritize? Without a process that you can point to, you will have to negotiate these requests every time. And in many cases—particularly with an executive—you’ll lose. Worse, every time they have to shift gears and refocus on a different creative project, your team risks not fully re-engaging in the work they were doing on your product. Using a framework that allows you to stop accepting new ideas or requests after a certain stage will help you protect your product team from these disruptions and frustrations. It will let them stay focused creatively on the same initiative throughout the development process. That will improve the chances your product will be a success. Pro tip: make your own product framework mashup. Bruce Lee famously developed a unique martial arts style by using moves and strategies from many different fighting styles to build his own. Essentially, Lee created a martial arts mashup. You can do the same with your team’s framework for building products. A product framework exists to serve you, not the other way around. If you can’t find a framework that suits your team’s unique traits and needs, design your own. Or do what Bruce Lee did, and poach just what works for you from several existing frameworks. Download IMPACT ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '76387af0-7ef4-49da-8b36-28e99e4f5ba3', {"region":"na1"}); How Should Product Leaders Guide Their Teams? Working with product teams all over the world as part of my job with LIKE.TG, I often hear product managers explain that they use a framework—Jobs to Be Done, the Scaled Agile Framework, SWOT Analysis, etc.—because their Vice President of Product or CPO insists on it. I understand a product leader wanting to standardize how their teams build products. If every team uses an impromptu strategy every time, it can be challenging for the company’s product executive to gauge each team’s progress along the way. But as a product leader myself, I can tell you from experience that adhering to a product framework can become a crutch. A team can fall into the trap of devoting their energy to checking all the boxes on their framework—which takes the focus away from making sure they’re building a product that will make their customers’ lives better. My take on frameworks is that teams should treat them as suggestions and tips—not rules. Product leaders should encourage their teams to use frameworks only if they serve the team’s needs. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '57ff7e42-ccfa-4d9e-b5be-8a0f6ba69363', {"region":"na1"}); So, if they’re not going to insist on a product framework to manage their teams’ process step by step, how would I suggest product leaders guide their teams? They should focus on a few broad strategic goals: 1. Hire the right product team. I’ve written some tips on the LIKE.TG blog about knowing you’re hiring a good product team member so that I won’t rehash those details here. But I do want to point out that building great products starts with building a great product team. You can also think of it this way: even with an excellent product framework, a poor or inexperienced team will likely develop a disappointing product. 2. Give the team the tools they need. Once you’ve assembled a team of smart, skilled, and enthusiastic people, your next task as a product leader will be to equip them with the tools to succeed in their roles. This might include a project management platform, a product roadmap app, data analytics software—whatever tools your product team needs to accomplish the strategic goals they are attempting to achieve. One of these tools could even be a product framework. What’s important to keep in mind, though, is that the decision to use a framework—like the decision to use other tools—should from your product team. These should not be top-down decisions the product leader makes. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '83ca4782-9cfe-4234-83e5-2ac0ed8ecf84', {"region":"na1"}); 3. Establish success metrics to guide the team. You’ve built a strong team and equipped them with tools that will give them the best chances for success with the products they create. Now you’ll want to tell your team exactly how you will measure their product’s success. This is a key reason the right tools play such an important role in your product team’s work. If you choose user-session length as the success metric for your SaaS app, your team will need the analytics tools to monitor that data and learn how and where they can improve the app to increase session time. If you make revenue your main gauge of success, you’ll want to make it easy for the team to view every initiative on their roadmap through a lens of its revenue potential. In that case, you’ll want a web-based roadmap app that makes it easy to connect themes and epics to strategic goals. But it’s also important to remember that, just as no product framework can guarantee you a better product, the tools you buy for your product team won’t be able to do the creative work for them, either. When they open it for the first time, even the best roadmap software on the market will present your team with a blank screen. Download Product Success Metrics ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '18f5a8aa-393b-4397-9fd4-f7758c1edf55', {"region":"na1"});

Great products come from great product teams—not from frameworks. Using the right product framework can help guide a team’s work. But the product will be only as good as the people behind it. Product Frameworks Can Become a Crutch A few years ago, marketing author Seth Godin appeared on a business podcast. The host wanted to talk about Godin’s legendary blog, where he has published a post every day for decades. When the host asked him to describe his process for sticking to such an impressive schedule, Godin refused. I’ll paraphrase his response. The process I use to write a blog every day is irrelevant to everybody but me. The danger in telling it to you is that many people are looking for a shortcut or easy answer to becoming more productive. If they’re listening to us now, they might be hoping they’ll find it in a list of steps. They won’t. My process is just that, a process. It’s not the work itself. Don’t get me wrong. As a product leader, I encourage my teams to use whichever product frameworks they find helpful. LIKE.TG has written about frameworks to help with product prioritization, frameworks to develop an effective product strategy, and some of our favorites for UX designers, including Google’s HEART framework. But as Seth Godin said, you need to avoid the trap of confusing your framework with the work itself. For product teams, that work involves all of the familiar roles product managers and product leaders are responsible for, including: Building and leading a great product team Getting to know your market and users Identifying market problems worth solving Earning the trust of your prospects and customers Directing your team’s energy toward the right strategic goals That bullet list could serve as your product framework. But you will need to execute each of those steps successfully, and the framework can’t magically make that happen. How Useful Are Product Frameworks? To answer this question, I’ll ask one of my own: Can your clothes lead to success? You know Steve Jobs wore identical outfits to work every day: the black turtleneck, the blue jeans, the sneakers. I’m guessing you also know why. It reduced the number of things he had to think about each morning, giving him more mental energy in the day for Apple. Thousands of entrepreneurs and executives followed that Steve Jobs framework. Today, we have thousands of business leaders wearing the same thing to work every day. But do we have thousands of more Apple-caliber companies out there as a result? Of course not. Which is a good lead-in to discussing what frameworks can and cannot do for product leaders and their teams. 1. Product frameworks free up time and creative energy. Think of all the steps along your journey, from developing a new product concept to get that product into your customers’ hands. Many of those steps will involve creative thinking, strategic planning, and effective teamwork. To get the most from your team on those steps, you’ll want them to have as much focus and mental energy as possible. Then there are the less-creative steps: the checklists, the meetings, the review processes. One way to free up more energy and time for the project’s creative aspects is to make these steps as routine and standardized as you can. Think about it this way. If your team’s sprint sessions run each time differently, team members will have to spend more time thinking about how they’ll handle the various ways the next meeting might go. They’ll also spend more time during each session discussing the logistics of the meeting itself, leaving less time to focus on the tasks they need to work on in the next sprint. The good news is that you can use frameworks to take your team’s guesswork and additional mental energy out of the project’s routine stages. For example, you can create frameworks to: Standardize your team’s sprint, retrospectives, and other meetings Give your team the right tools to complete their work efficiently. The right tool meant they don’t spend mental cycles thinking through how to manage those aspects of the job Create a standardized signoff process. A process ensures your team knows exactly when and by whom they’ll need their work approved before they can consider it done Most teams get this wrong, I believe, is thinking the right framework will improve their work’s quality or creativity. In reality, it works more like this: You use frameworks to move the logistical tasks to the background, so you can create more space and focus for the creative work. But the quality of that work will depend on your team’s talent and effort, not on the framework you’re using. You can put on a turtleneck and jeans, walk into your office, and brainstorm with your team. But if you want to develop a product as ingenious and disruptive as the iPhone, then you’ll also need to walk in with a Steve Jobs brain—and have a team as brilliant as his at Apple. 2. Product frameworks can help a team avoid skipping an important step. Use frameworks to help your team move the routine aspects of their work into the background. We can call this the turtleneck effect. By increasing standardization, you might find their newfound energy leads to some great ideas and increased enthusiasm. That’s great. But you need to be careful. If your team is so excited about an idea for a new feature and so energized to start building it, you could neglect an important step, such as your normal vetting process. You might be convinced the idea is viable, even groundbreaking. But before you commit resources to it, you’ll need to step back and take a few important steps. Maybe part of your process is to perform a cost-benefit analysis of any new functionality or ask your sales team if they’ve heard interest in such a feature from prospects or customers. You never want a framework to constrain your team’s creativity or to slow their work. But you also don’t want your process to be ad hoc, so driven by intuition, that you’re creating products using completely different processes every time. It would help if you constructed some guardrails to keep from going down the wrong path. Build a very loose framework that includes at least a few basic steps—such as “Let’s test this idea with our persona before building it.” 3. Product frameworks can prevent ad-hoc requests from pulling the team off-track. Using a product framework—and, more important, making sure your organization knows you’re using it—can also help your team deal more effectively with the never-ending stream of requests that can derail their progress. Let’s says your team has no fixed stages or guidelines during the development process. You improvise your approach from scratch for every new product or even for every update to an existing product. What’s to keep a sales rep or executive from demanding your team stop everything from building something they want to prioritize? Without a process that you can point to, you will have to negotiate these requests every time. And in many cases—particularly with an executive—you’ll lose. Worse, every time they have to shift gears and refocus on a different creative project, your team risks not fully re-engaging in the work they were doing on your product. Using a framework that allows you to stop accepting new ideas or requests after a certain stage will help you protect your product team from these disruptions and frustrations. It will let them stay focused creatively on the same initiative throughout the development process. That will improve the chances your product will be a success. Pro tip: make your own product framework mashup. Bruce Lee famously developed a unique martial arts style by using moves and strategies from many different fighting styles to build his own. Essentially, Lee created a martial arts mashup. You can do the same with your team’s framework for building products. A product framework exists to serve you, not the other way around. If you can’t find a framework that suits your team’s unique traits and needs, design your own. Or do what Bruce Lee did, and poach just what works for you from several existing frameworks. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '76387af0-7ef4-49da-8b36-28e99e4f5ba3', {"region":"na1"}); How Should Product Leaders Guide Their Teams? Working with product teams all over the world as part of my job with LIKE.TG, I often hear product managers explain that they use a framework—Jobs to Be Done, the Scaled Agile Framework, SWOT Analysis, etc.—because their Vice President of Product or CPO insists on it. I understand a product leader wanting to standardize how their teams build products. If every team uses an impromptu strategy every time, it can be challenging for the company’s product executive to gauge each team’s progress along the way. But as a product leader myself, I can tell you from experience that adhering to a product framework can become a crutch. A team can fall into the trap of devoting their energy to checking all the boxes on their framework—which takes the focus away from making sure they’re building a product that will make their customers’ lives better. My take on frameworks is that teams should treat them as suggestions and tips—not rules. Product leaders should encourage their teams to use frameworks only if they serve the team’s needs. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '57ff7e42-ccfa-4d9e-b5be-8a0f6ba69363', {"region":"na1"}); So, if they’re not going to insist on a product framework to manage their teams’ process step by step, how would I suggest product leaders guide their teams? They should focus on a few broad strategic goals: 1. Hire the right product team. I’ve written some tips on the LIKE.TG blog about knowing you’re hiring a good product team member so that I won’t rehash those details here. But I do want to point out that building great products starts with building a great product team. You can also think of it this way: even with an excellent product framework, a poor or inexperienced team will likely develop a disappointing product. 2. Give the team the tools they need. Once you’ve assembled a team of smart, skilled, and enthusiastic people, your next task as a product leader will be to equip them with the tools to succeed in their roles. This might include a project management platform, a product roadmap app, data analytics software—whatever tools your product team needs to accomplish the strategic goals they are attempting to achieve. One of these tools could even be a product framework. What’s important to keep in mind, though, is that the decision to use a framework—like the decision to use other tools—should from your product team. These should not be top-down decisions the product leader makes. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '83ca4782-9cfe-4234-83e5-2ac0ed8ecf84', {"region":"na1"}); 3. Establish success metrics to guide the team. You’ve built a strong team and equipped them with tools that will give them the best chances for success with the products they create. Now you’ll want to tell your team exactly how you will measure their product’s success. This is a key reason the right tools play such an important role in your product team’s work. If you choose user-session length as the success metric for your SaaS app, your team will need the analytics tools to monitor that data and learn how and where they can improve the app to increase session time. If you make revenue your main gauge of success, you’ll want to make it easy for the team to view every initiative on their roadmap through a lens of its revenue potential. In that case, you’ll want a web-based roadmap app that makes it easy to connect themes and epics to strategic goals. But it’s also important to remember that, just as no product framework can guarantee you a better product, the tools you buy for your product team won’t be able to do the creative work for them, either. When they open it for the first time, even the best roadmap software on the market will present your team with a blank screen. Download Product Success Metrics ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '18f5a8aa-393b-4397-9fd4-f7758c1edf55', {"region":"na1"});

“Being Agile” and “being predictable” may seem mutually exclusive, at least when it comes to product management. A good sprint cadence creates a predictable frequency of software releases but divining what’s actually in them feels harder. Isn’t the whole point of Agile that we can continuously adjust, making on-the-fly tweaks to seize opportunities? Contrary to some prevailing opinions, managing products in an Agile environment doesn’t mean surrendering planning to the whims of the development team. In fact, Agile can help you be more predictable in some ways. I say this speaking from personal experience. I’m predictable in an agile product environment. Agile ≠ Chaos Those unfamiliar with Agile often have some misconceptions about how it really works. Let’s start by dispelling a few Agile myths: Agile is a free-for-all. Developers don’t code what they feel like, and the software doesn’t just ship at random points of time. Agile is merely empowering the product development team to make iterative progress while adjusting to incoming data. Product managers don’t have a role in an Agile environment. Product managers are still prioritizing features, gathering and synthesizing customer feedback, defining a strategy and product vision, and offering input to the implementation process. None of these tasks go away. You’re no longer writing lengthy product requirements documents with the same exacting detail as before. But developers still both need and value your input. Dates don’t matter. Agile certainly embraces a more fluid approach to project management. But if something needs to ship by a specific date, there’s nothing in the Agile Framework preventing it. In fact, by iteratively developing the software over multiple sprints, chances are the desired functionality will ship with fewer defects. Unlike in the waterfall model, it’s reviewed numerous times during the process. There’s no visibility into what’s happening. With waterfall, there are often project plans detailing what every resource is doing all the time. Anyone can take a peek and know precisely what folks are up to and how things are progressing. This type of visibility may be murkier during the actual sprint, but that’s not the case before and after. Setting sprint goals before a single line of code is written, and retrospectives (or micro-retrospectives) provides an opportunity to dig into what transpired and improve things going forward. Plans are useless as everyone chases the latest shiny object. First of all, once a sprint begins, what the team is working on for those two or three weeks shouldn’t change. The sprint goals remain locked. However, if something new does come up, the sprint planning team (including the product manager) can decide whether it’s worth altering the course for future sprints. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '4a6bc7bb-4a31-4597-a392-485a84e4207f', {}); Applying Agile Values to Product Management The Agile Manifesto has four core values. These Agile Values are the central tenets that drive everything else. Looking at each one, we can see their potential to make product management (and product managers) more predictable in agile environment. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools At first glance, you may already be scratching your head. How does this make a product manager more predictable? But note that this value uses the word “over” and NOT “instead of.” There is still plenty of room for tools and processes. Agile needs those to be in place to avoid developers idling and things from getting out of hand. But it also elevates the importance of communication and addressing stakeholder concerns. By creating more frequent dialogue, there is an increased level of transparency; when people know what’s happening and why they can better predict what’s to come. There’s no black box, no guessing about when things might ship. In an Agile world, things may change a little more often. But everyone will also know about changes much faster and understand any potential ramifications. Working software over comprehensive documentation By removing the requirement for, well, detailed specifications, teams can deliver updates and new functionality faster. This process shortens the distance from prioritization to ship date. When there are fewer hoops to jump through and hurdles to clear, it’s easier to predict availability. After deciding to build, product managers should have a solid sense of when things will debut. They can then provide clear communication to coworkers and stakeholders. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Customer-centric companies are committed to doing everything with the best interest of customers in mind. They’re continually processing user feedback and turning those requests and complaints into a better product. Guess what gets in the way of that kind of responsive, ongoing progress? Having to renegotiate a contract every time something changes. When the lawyers get involved, there’s no telling how long things can get held up. Removing those entanglements lets teams focus on building a great product. It removes this common source of uncertainty from the equation. Customers need to pay for things, and a contract might be required. But Agile-friendly companies structure those agreements, so they don’t hinder innovation and iteration. Responding to change over following a plan Of the four values, this one seems the most contentious with our thesis. Plans make things predictable, don’t they? Well, executing a plan properly is predictable. But while the plan’s elements are predictable, you can’t always predict what transpires after a product ships. Adoption, usage, churn, reviews, net promoter scores… there’s no way to know what’s going to happen until it happens. If you’re operating with an inflexible long-term plan, it’s hard to adjust based on the product’s reception. When the cruise ship is chugging along, it’s tough to change course. The best part of Agile is being able to measure, learn, and adjust. That means plans must be a little more dynamic instead of plotting out every single move for the next 18 months. That’s why roadmapping is a predictable product manager’s best tool for managing expectations and hitting target goals while still utilizing the benefits Agile has to offer. Get Strategic Project Alignment ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'bfb5032e-5746-4c05-9f2a-54b36ba0e871', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); The Art of the Agile-Friendly Roadmap One reason some product managers can turn negative toward Agile is that their “capstone” project (the product roadmap) might seem at odds with the framework’s fluidity. Well, if your product roadmap is chock full of particular features and exact dates, then you’d be well within your rights to be frustrated. However, including that level of detail and specificity isn’t the only way to build a roadmap. We’d argue that approach isn’t doing anyone any favors, including product managers. Feature-Less Roadmap Instead, product roadmaps featuring goals and themes are usually a much better way to go. Themes illustrate what parts of the product will be worked on at different times, along with the desired outcomes of those efforts. You can escape the trap of promising features and dates—which are inevitably destined to change in an Agile environment—while still communicating the direction and priorities for the product. If there’s concern that a feature-less roadmap is too vague and open to interpretation, add milestones as specific scheduling targets. This change doesn’t guarantee a particular feature will be available by a specific date, but it conveys that you’ll reach a goal by that time. Remember, a roadmap’s primary purpose is communicating a vision for how the product strategy will become a reality. Implementation details and schedules aren’t required to build stakeholder alignment. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); Getting on Board with Agile We get that Agile can sometimes feel like it’s taking control away from product managers and handing over more power and decision-making to the implementation side of the house. But wary PMs should take comfort in a few Agile principles that simplify their ultimate goal of delighting customers. #1) Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. Customer satisfaction is the first principle of Agile. Not “building cool stuff” or “unshackling the creativity of our development team.” #2) Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project. We used to throw requirements “over the wall” and see how things shook out. But the ongoing dialogue between product and development should result in products meeting expectations and delivering customer value. Moreover, you get the chance to stick your nose into things every day! #3) The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face communication. We mean, you might need to attend daily standups. But it also means you’re not spending as much time writing lengthy documents no one ever reads. You can continually assert yourself as the business owner and voice of the customer. You can be Predictable in Agile Ready to learn even more about how Agile and product management can not only coexist but simultaneously thrive? Read the Agile Product Manager's Guide to Building Better Roadmaps hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'f7b97c22-2e32-45da-99f7-1ddcb66e57d3', {});

“Being Agile” and “being predictable” may seem mutually exclusive, at least when it comes to product management. A good sprint cadence creates a predictable frequency of software releases but divining what’s actually in them feels harder. Isn’t the whole point of Agile that we can continuously adjust, making on-the-fly tweaks to seize opportunities? Contrary to some prevailing opinions, managing products in an Agile environment doesn’t mean surrendering planning to the whims of the development team. In fact, Agile can help you be more predictable in some ways. I say this speaking from personal experience. I’m predictable in an agile product environment. Agile ≠ Chaos Those unfamiliar with Agile often have some misconceptions about how it really works. Let’s start by dispelling a few Agile myths: Agile is a free-for-all. Developers don’t code what they feel like, and the software doesn’t just ship at random points of time. Agile is merely empowering the product development team to make iterative progress while adjusting to incoming data. Product managers don’t have a role in an Agile environment. Product managers are still prioritizing features, gathering and synthesizing customer feedback, defining a strategy and product vision, and offering input to the implementation process. None of these tasks go away. You’re no longer writing lengthy product requirements documents with the same exacting detail as before. But developers still both need and value your input. Dates don’t matter. Agile certainly embraces a more fluid approach to project management. But if something needs to ship by a specific date, there’s nothing in the Agile Framework preventing it. In fact, by iteratively developing the software over multiple sprints, chances are the desired functionality will ship with fewer defects. Unlike in the waterfall model, it’s reviewed numerous times during the process. There’s no visibility into what’s happening. With waterfall, there are often project plans detailing what every resource is doing all the time. Anyone can take a peek and know precisely what folks are up to and how things are progressing. This type of visibility may be murkier during the actual sprint, but that’s not the case before and after. Setting sprint goals before a single line of code is written, and retrospectives (or micro-retrospectives) provides an opportunity to dig into what transpired and improve things going forward. Plans are useless as everyone chases the latest shiny object. First of all, once a sprint begins, what the team is working on for those two or three weeks shouldn’t change. The sprint goals remain locked. However, if something new does come up, the sprint planning team (including the product manager) can decide whether it’s worth altering the course for future sprints. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '4a6bc7bb-4a31-4597-a392-485a84e4207f', {}); Applying Agile Values to Product Management The Agile Manifesto has four core values. These Agile Values are the central tenets that drive everything else. Looking at each one, we can see their potential to make product management (and product managers) more predictable in agile environment. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools At first glance, you may already be scratching your head. How does this make a product manager more predictable? But note that this value uses the word “over” and NOT “instead of.” There is still plenty of room for tools and processes. Agile needs those to be in place to avoid developers idling and things from getting out of hand. But it also elevates the importance of communication and addressing stakeholder concerns. By creating more frequent dialogue, there is an increased level of transparency; when people know what’s happening and why they can better predict what’s to come. There’s no black box, no guessing about when things might ship. In an Agile world, things may change a little more often. But everyone will also know about changes much faster and understand any potential ramifications. Working software over comprehensive documentation By removing the requirement for, well, detailed specifications, teams can deliver updates and new functionality faster. This process shortens the distance from prioritization to ship date. When there are fewer hoops to jump through and hurdles to clear, it’s easier to predict availability. After deciding to build, product managers should have a solid sense of when things will debut. They can then provide clear communication to coworkers and stakeholders. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Customer-centric companies are committed to doing everything with the best interest of customers in mind. They’re continually processing user feedback and turning those requests and complaints into a better product. Guess what gets in the way of that kind of responsive, ongoing progress? Having to renegotiate a contract every time something changes. When the lawyers get involved, there’s no telling how long things can get held up. Removing those entanglements lets teams focus on building a great product. It removes this common source of uncertainty from the equation. Customers need to pay for things, and a contract might be required. But Agile-friendly companies structure those agreements, so they don’t hinder innovation and iteration. Responding to change over following a plan Of the four values, this one seems the most contentious with our thesis. Plans make things predictable, don’t they? Well, executing a plan properly is predictable. But while the plan’s elements are predictable, you can’t always predict what transpires after a product ships. Adoption, usage, churn, reviews, net promoter scores… there’s no way to know what’s going to happen until it happens. If you’re operating with an inflexible long-term plan, it’s hard to adjust based on the product’s reception. When the cruise ship is chugging along, it’s tough to change course. The best part of Agile is being able to measure, learn, and adjust. That means plans must be a little more dynamic instead of plotting out every single move for the next 18 months. That’s why roadmapping is a predictable product manager’s best tool for managing expectations and hitting target goals while still utilizing the benefits Agile has to offer. Download Strategic Project Alignment in an Agile World ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'bfb5032e-5746-4c05-9f2a-54b36ba0e871', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); The Art of the Agile-Friendly Roadmap One reason some product managers can turn negative toward Agile is that their “capstone” project (the product roadmap) might seem at odds with the framework’s fluidity. Well, if your product roadmap is chock full of particular features and exact dates, then you’d be well within your rights to be frustrated. However, including that level of detail and specificity isn’t the only way to build a roadmap. We’d argue that approach isn’t doing anyone any favors, including product managers. Feature-Less Roadmap Instead, product roadmaps featuring goals and themes are usually a much better way to go. Themes illustrate what parts of the product will be worked on at different times, along with the desired outcomes of those efforts. You can escape the trap of promising features and dates—which are inevitably destined to change in an Agile environment—while still communicating the direction and priorities for the product. If there’s concern that a feature-less roadmap is too vague and open to interpretation, add milestones as specific scheduling targets. This change doesn’t guarantee a particular feature will be available by a specific date, but it conveys that you’ll reach a goal by that time. Remember, a roadmap’s primary purpose is communicating a vision for how the product strategy will become a reality. Implementation details and schedules aren’t required to build stakeholder alignment. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); Getting on Board with Agile We get that Agile can sometimes feel like it’s taking control away from product managers and handing over more power and decision-making to the implementation side of the house. But wary PMs should take comfort in a few Agile principles that simplify their ultimate goal of delighting customers. #1) Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. Customer satisfaction is the first principle of Agile. Not “building cool stuff” or “unshackling the creativity of our development team.” #2) Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project. We used to throw requirements “over the wall” and see how things shook out. But the ongoing dialogue between product and development should result in products meeting expectations and delivering customer value. Moreover, you get the chance to stick your nose into things every day! #3) The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face communication. We mean, you might need to attend daily standups. But it also means you’re not spending as much time writing lengthy documents no one ever reads. You can continually assert yourself as the business owner and voice of the customer. You can be Predictable in Agile Ready to learn even more about how Agile and product management can not only coexist but simultaneously thrive? Read the Agile Product Manager's Guide to Building Better Roadmaps hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'f7b97c22-2e32-45da-99f7-1ddcb66e57d3', {});

Kicking off a greenfield project can be one of the most challenging tasks a product manager ever faces. Greenfield projects present different risks from other types of product development. Bringing these products to market requires a different strategic approach. And the process can be downright scary. I’ll walk you through a few strategies I’ve found work well for turning a greenfield project into a successful product. What Is a Greenfield Project? First, let’s make sure we’re on the same page about this concept. The term greenfield gets its name from the construction industry. It describes a project that builders will be starting from scratch. That is, they’ll be building on a green field with no infrastructure already in place. Adding a science lab to an existing college campus, by contrast, would be a brownfield project. In product management, greenfield projects refer to products developed entirely from scratch. For software companies, this would mean that the solution your team plans to kick off does not have: Existing codebase for the development team to build on. Current user base to leverage for usage statistics and feedback. Market history to estimate adoption rates, revenue, or customer lifetime value. Company familiarity with the value proposition or user personas. Constraints on how to proceed (which might be the most challenging aspect). hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '527dc6af-8860-436f-9ca6-ae2b71b0cc99', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); There’s Greenfield, and Then There’s Greenfield There’s a spectrum in terms of how green the field is among these projects. For example, a product idea might be new to the company thinking about building it but already available from a competitor. Then there are projects where the concept itself is new to the market (think Uber a decade ago). The truth is, any greenfield project is going to be challenging. But for a product concept that doesn’t have a comparable on the market, you’ll find even more obstacles. From this point on, let’s use the latter definition of greenfield. Imagine your team wants to build a product that is genuinely new to the market, has no direct competitor, and which your target users don’t even know they’re missing. Let’s start with an example of such a product idea. Then we’ll walk through a few strategic steps that can increase your chances of market success with this greenfield project. Hypothetical Greenfield Product: A Chat-based Hiring App First, let me briefly discuss the difference between a brownfield project and a greenfield project. An online job site that decides to build an instant-messaging feature into its platform is creating a brownfield project. The company already runs a job site with a wealth of usage data. And they can work with existing users to validate the idea of adding a chat feature. But let’s assume that’s not your situation. Instead, imagine your company is a startup. And you want to create a brand-new hiring app built as an AI-based chat platform. You’ll be creating the solution from the ground up. Since there are no other chat apps on the market that connects job seekers and hiring managers—you have a true greenfield project. How the heck are you going to pull this off? Here are a few thoughts. 1. Prepare to spend months on research. Because you are starting literally from scratch with this idea, your team will need to front-load your research work. With no competitive chat-based hiring apps to investigate, you’ll need to get creative. Your research might involve activities such as: Talking with representatives of each of the app’s personas: job seekers, recruiters, company founders, department leaders, and HR managers. Learning from these key personas about their current hiring processes. Find out what tools these people use today. Understand how those tools help and where they fall short. Know where these personas struggle in the process, and what solutions they wish they had. The more information you gather, the better. Validating your idea with your key personas. Note: Market validation is more than your focus group liking the idea of an AI-based chat app for hiring. They also need to confirm that they would be willing to pay to use it. Investigating other business areas to discover if any of these areas have successfully improved their processes by using messaging. The investigation could give your team a sense of the workflow improvements that your app can offer the industry. Researching the existing online job sites and other digital tools used to connect candidates and recruiters. Here, you’ll want to learn whether these platforms use messaging in any way. If so, need to find out how people use these tools and how they affect the hiring process. 2. Start educating your market on the problem. Let’s say you’ve confirmed with your personas that there’s a market out there for your app. You’re confident you’ve hit on an ingenious idea that’s going to cause an earthquake in the recruiting industry. That’s great. You’ll need to maintain that enthusiasm and share it across your company. But you also need to remember that nobody cares outside the walls of your organization. Nobody knows your product is on the way. And because the market has never introduced such an app to them, your personas don’t feel like they’re missing anything. Education is a critical component of thought leadership. Because you are building this app from scratch, you can anticipate a longer timeframe for the initial development. Your product and marketing teams can use this time wisely to create content discussing the problems your personas face today. Start a public conversation about the many drawbacks Again, you’ll be facing a similar challenge here in terms of being able to show direct data. You can’t demonstrate that chat-based recruiting tools speed hiring time by XX days. Or that it reduces the number of interviews required to fill a job by XX%. That data doesn’t exist yet. But you can plant the seed in your future customers’ minds about the inefficiencies they’re living with today. You can base your claim on the existing apps available to customers. For example, you might be able to find data showing: Most hiring managers and job seekers feel unsatisfied with the traditional job interview format. Both sides wish they could engage the other using less formal communication. The average time to hire using traditional online job sites is XX days. It is XX% longer than recruiters would prefer. The average number of interviews per hire is X, which is XX% more than recruiters would prefer. HR managers say that the hiring process consumes XX% of a typical hiring manager’s time. 3. Share the vision with your company, and evangelize the heck out of it. Your coworkers won’t know why your product team is bouncing off the walls with enthusiasm, either. So you’ll need to persuade them to start bouncing too. You will need to spread your enthusiasm across the company—and you need to start right away. For example, you’ll want to: Make sure your engineering team understands the app’s objectives, use cases, and value proposition. Engineering is a true strategic partner as they build from scratch. Product and Engineering can work side by side on all coding decisions. The more your engineers can envision the power of this product, the better decisions they will make. Walk your marketing and sales teams through your strategic vision for the app. At this greenfield stage, your plans and ideas are all abstractions. You need to help your marketing team understand the value proposition and market opportunity. Without that information, marketing can’t do its best work. Make your evangelism an ongoing project. Remember, bringing your greenfield project to market will take many months. Therefore, you need to keep the momentum and enthusiasm levels high for as much of that period as you can. You must encourage ongoing communication. You need to regularly check in with each team. And most importantly, you need to share all insights that show this new app will be awesome. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '9252db78-e0f2-4f64-b933-416e291c2422', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});

The ugly truth is product launches are a messy business. At times, they can be overwhelming, impossible nightmares. There are launch activities to track, expectations to manage, and stakeholders to hold accountable. Product teams carry this burden alone without the help of proper tooling. Launch Management is a first-of-its-kind tool for product teams that helps you wrangle the chaos of a product launch. We are incredibly excited to show you how you can guarantee launch readiness, all within a single platform. For more, check out our guided product tour of Launch Management functionality provided below. Today our Launch Management solution enters General Availability as an exclusive Enterprise Plan feature set. For our LIKE.TG customers, if you have questions about our pricing plans or want to see a demo, you can reach out to your Customer Success Manager, or you can schedule a demo here. Or, if you’re new to LIKE.TG and want to try everything we offer, including best-in-class roadmapping and tailored launch planning, you can also sign up for our two-week free trial. But first, let us take a step back and explain how we realized the opportunity for launch management. So why did we build Launch Management? Ask any product manager about their launch process, and you will likely hear something like this: “It’s a nightmare. There’s no standard process for go-to-market. It’s confusing for everyone.” Or maybe something like this: “It’s a nightmare. I’ve never worked for a company that had an airtight GTM process. There’s always a stakeholder who wants to be more in the loop and says there isn’t enough communication.” Or even this: “Lol, what launch process?” Disclaimer: These are all actual statements our customers made when we spoke to them about their launch process! Product managers are some of the most organized people in the world. They must be to rally their entire organization around the product strategy successfully. So it’s telling that such a critical piece of the product strategy—its execution—is described as a trainwreck. However, it’s not their fault. Launching a new product or feature requires the complex orchestration of multiple moving pieces. It extends beyond the product and engineering teams to include marketing, sales, customer success, legal—the list goes on. It’s one of the few instances where an entire organization collaborates to do a single project simultaneously. Of course, it’s a mess. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '842368a9-af78-421f-a3cb-4da00ad39f75', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); What challenges does Launch Management solve? Many of our customers spoke candidly about their challenges with inconsistent and disorganized launch processes. Our research discovered three core challenges at the heart of the problem. 1. Lack of visibility across teams There is no single place to check the status of an upcoming launch and any deliverables it requires. Instead, that information is often scattered across documents and minds, spanning teams and, at times, entire departments. To uncover what needs to be done next is to go on a scavenger hunt. The result is wasting valuable time and fraying nerves. 2. Building manual, time-intensive reports to access launch progress Many product managers are stuck building manual, time-intensive reports to assess launch progress and identify loose ends. Time spent here is time spent away from work product managers want to be doing: talking with customers and collaborating with their dev teams to build new cool things. 3. Inconsistent and disorganized launch processes And finally, the ad hoc, figure-it-out-as-we-go nature of these proceedings means no two launches follow the same process. Instead, launches are inconsistent and disorganized. Repeating successful launches isn’t easily done. Failed launches have no easy answer to the question, “why didn’t this work?” And every new launch must start from scratch. In many cases, stakeholders involved in the launch aren’t clear on expectations and therefore default to peppering the launch leader with the dreaded “so what should I do next?” question. Instead of distributing mutual ownership of the launch among all relevant stakeholders, the lion’s share of the responsibility rests with the product team. If the product team doesn’t make sure it happens, it simply doesn’t. The problem with status quo solutions These challenges haven’t had great solutions. Yes, you can build a launch process on a house of cards using spreadsheets, slide decks, and a jumbled array of documents. But that leaves you chasing the work when you’d rather be directing the strategy. To make matters worse, there are no purpose-built tools for launching a new product. There are plenty of tools that help you organize a project. They might allow you to plan deliverables, assign owners, and create due dates—all of which are useful in planning a product launch. But it’s rare for tools like these to be managed by the product team, and they never live alongside other important pieces of the product puzzle, like the roadmap. A launch process that’s severed from the product strategy is a dangerous thing. It encourages messy handoffs while creating unintended silos. Ideally, your product vision will carry from your roadmap to the launch plan. You want every deliverable created—whether a marketing asset, a sales talk track or a customer support article—to demonstrate a firm understanding of the “why” behind the product. If you create these deliverables in a silo, it’s less likely they will leverage important pieces of product knowledge. They may not empathize with key customer pain points, for instance, or show little understanding of the target audience. The cost of a bad launch It’s difficult to overstate the cost of a bad launch. There is, of course, the opportunity cost to the product team when things break down. Instead of doing more important work, they must play the role of project manager and hold things together for their go-to-market team. Occasionally, a launch cobbled together on the fly like this is a success. Even if the road was a painful one. The cost of product diverting their attention to wrangle the chaos might not be felt until later when it becomes clear other opportunities slipped by the wayside while the product team had their hands full. But more likely, a bad launch means, well, a bad launch. That means your product isn’t being pushed by your enablement team or sold by the sales team because there was no clear direction or ownership over key deliverables. A bad launch might result in poor customer awareness of the new thing you’ve built or, perhaps worse, a betrayal of customer expectations. A bad launch can also result in a delayed launch, meaning less time on the market, generating revenue for the company. Overall, a launch that flops is painful for everyone involved. It takes a cut from sales expectations. In addition, it hampers the marketing team’s ability to bring in new leads. It steals a vital tool away from customer success in their fight against churn. This reflects poorly on the product team, who tragically may have built the perfect product. The launch just didn’t do it justice. Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be this way! Let’s dive into an overview of LIKE.TG’s new Launch Management solution. A guided tour of Launch Management To ensure every launch is a winning launch, you now have Launch Management. With our solution, you can: Create thoughtful launch strategies that your entire team can get behind Build tailored plans for each launch, assign due dates, and assess progress While creating shared ownership of your go-to-market process The Launch Dashboard: Ditch the hassle of weekly launch reports Welcome to the Launch Management Dashboard. This is your 10,000-foot view of all upcoming launches in a single place. We designed the Dashboard to wrangle together all the important details you need to see at a glance about every launch you have planned. Use the Dashboard to see all upcoming launches and their respective launch dates. You can also use the Dashboard to track progress on individual launches, which is calculated automatically according to the percentage of completed deliverables in the Launch Checklist (more on that later). Based on the progress of your launch and its launch date, you can assign each launch a status: low risk, medium risk, high risk, or launched. While the Launch Dashboard is fantastic for helping you and your team stay organized in your go-to-market planning, it’s also the perfect place to send executive stakeholders whenever they come sniffing around asking for an update. It houses everything the curious senior executive needs to feel “in the know” about your launch strategy. And as a bonus, it allows you to sidestep having to create manual, time-intensive reports every week. The Launch Checklist: Manage the launch strategy, not the work The Launch Checklist is where a product launch comes together. A successful launch includes a tailored array of deliverables. In some cases, the list may be small. It might only include release notes, a new section in a product support article, and a slide for the sales team. Other launches might require the kitchen sink. In either case, for a new product or feature to land successfully in your customers’ laps, you need other members of your organization to pitch in and help support. We designed the Launch Checklist for this purpose. Many product people we work with described how the handoff between the release of a new product and its launch often felt like tossing items over a fence, hoping others would be on the other side to receive them and run. You have complete visibility into every task required to see a launch through to success with the Launch Checklist. The Launch Checklist has a few purpose-built tools to help you do this. Each item added to the Launch Checklist has a place for a brief description, a due date, and an owner. So, you can assign anyone in your account (both editors and viewers) as a deliverable owner. Upon assigning, that person receives an email alerting them to the required task. The goal is to create co-ownership of the launch. We’ve heard many horror stories of the one-person launch, where someone on the product team ends up holding the launch together through sheer force of will (likely complimented by a disorganized flurry of ad hoc meetings and one-on-one Slack conversations). These kinds of launches unravel quickly and come at a significant opportunity cost to the product team, who end up playing project manager and dealing with all the questions from confused stakeholders. Instead, the Launch Checklist can be your central place to plan a launch tailored to the released product or feature and get buy-in early from your cross-functional partners. And if you give your cross-functional team editor permissions, it’s also a great best practice to have them help you determine which deliverables you commit to as a team. Consider delegating the customer communication plan to a marketing or customer success person. Have your sales engineer come up with any deliverables needed to train your sales team on how to demo a new feature. These are great ways to encourage others to feel a sense of ownership over the launch. You’ll need their expertise to help guide your new product to market. All this might beg the question: what should go into your Launch Checklist? There are no hard and fast rules. Every launch will be different and depend on the product itself, your customers, and your organization’s makeup. That said, you can find 20 great ideas for your next product launch checklist here to help get you started. Connect your launch plans to your roadmap One of the benefits of having your launch plan in the same platform as your roadmap is it helps ensure your product vision influences your go-to-market deliverables. We make this easy with the “Features Included in the Launch” module found to the left of your Launch Checklist. Your roadmap houses all kinds of helpful information about your product. Many of our customers use their roadmap to document their roadmap strategy (what they’re building and when) and the why behind the features they prioritize. They will add context to the descriptions within their bars and often link to essential assets like objective documents or customer-facing collateral. This information is gold for anyone planning a marketing campaign or coming up with sales talk tracks to support the launch. Adding features to your launch allows cross-functional partners easy access to what is on deck for the release and the vital context fueling it. It also encourages team members outside of the product team to read your roadmap because the information there is now actionable. The connection works both ways. From your LIKE.TG roadmap, you can also assign an individual bar or container to a specific launch in Launch Management, allowing you to quickly switch between your strategy and your execution plan with a click. Try Launch Management today! Launch Management is available as a part of our Enterprise plan and our two-week free trial. If you’d like to learn more, schedule 45 minutes with us, and we’ll tailor a demo to your unique launch goals and challenges. We’re looking forward to turning your next product launch into a success! hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'd1163e8d-11be-4436-91aa-b02b58ebcba4', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});

Acquiring a consensus on product direction remains the number one challenge for product professionals, according to LIKE.TG’s 2021 State of Product Management Annual Report. The art of product leader communication relies on the concept of responsibility without authority. Product managers who follow this concept understand the responsibility to influence others to achieve the organization’s product goals. The dynamic turns upside down as we progress through our careers and establish ourselves as product leaders. As product managers, we have the power to task others with responsibilities. We need to convince stakeholders in other departments to buy into strategies and get things done. The responsibility of managing a product team gives us a type of control that we’re not used to. We can give orders and hold people accountable, and we also have the authority to assign our direct reports with tasks. But should we treat our direct reports differently than our other coworkers and colleagues? Should we skip the niceties and consensus building within our own teams just because we can? Product Manager’s Control of Employee Expectations With your team, no one can stop you from giving orders and micromanaging staff. As a product manager, implementing an effective product strategy should remain a priority. Though you may have authority, it remains crucial that you wield this power responsibly. Remember your time as a junior team member or individual contributor. The product managers who provided clarity around expectations and responsibilities empowered their employees. In contrast, those who failed to exude product leader communication let their product team down. As a junior product team member, what you were looking for was the “why.” The “why” provided you the context to think and act strategically versus tactically. Now that the roles have switched, you want to set up your product team for success, by developing your own product leader communication strategies. By leading with context versus control, you position yourself to empower your staff to complete their tasks and reach their objectives. Autonomy provides employees with the freedom to solve problems and accomplish tasks utilizing their processes. You likely hired your team members because you believed they had a good head on their shoulders and the ability to fulfill the job responsibilities. After they get fully onboarded, you can tap into those abilities. When you grant your employees some level of autonomy, you convey to them that they have your trust. Trust can go a long way towards mitigating any cases of imposter syndrome and boosting employee confidence. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'e1e87713-3763-4c27-8f73-f817614e5f52', {"region":"na1"}); Leading with context instead of control. Product managers who provide context instead of control open up the possibilities of potential solutions. If you’re always offering basic action plans, you’re limiting your product team’s creativity. When you close off avenues that might be worth exploring, you ultimately miss out on opportunities that can lead to a better product. Finally, leading with context means you create alignment within your own team. You must ensure that you provide consistent messaging to external stakeholders. As a united front, you can then start tackling product initiatives. Your product team needs to understand the rationale and motivations for these initiatives and decisions. Plenty of opportunities exist to lead your team. By empowering them with knowledge, you refrain from bogging them down with directives. Recognizing the 0pportunities to lead your team. For example, let’s say you have a disgruntled customer bugging you to add a new feature. The request falls within the domain of an associate product manager. You could use a command approach: (1.) directing them to write up user stories based on sales team and customer services notes. (2.) Follow up to make sure it gets prioritized. In contrast, the alternative approach calls for you to lead with context. To achieve this, you can tell the associate PM that a particular customer may need more attention than a returning customer. You need to emphasize that they should do some research to understand the customer’s true pain points. The overall goal to solve and recommend one or more solutions permits them to do some real product management work. The customer’s request for a feature may relate to a symptom of a whole other issue, such as a lack of training. An effective product professional understands a small tweak takes less time than weeks of work. These revelations wouldn’t happen if you simply handed down a direct order from a project manager to an associate PM. Likewise, you can also be less prescriptive with how junior team members spend their time by emphasizing context over control. Moreover, you can provide them with adequate context to make those decisions for themselves. Utilizing metrics to measure success. In addition, product managers—who understand the metrics used to define and gauge success—can identify the gaps themselves and add value where they see opportunity. It puts the onus on them to consult with colleagues to see where they might need some extra help. Moreover, they can review the overall situation and identify the areas that require an active owner. If you take a holistic approach, junior staff can see the big picture and their contributions for maximum impact. While this may be too much leeway for newly hired staff, a solid contributor should quickly discern where they can do the most good. Setting the Stage for Successful Context-Based Leadership Context-driven management requires two key ingredients—clarity and communication. As any veteran product leader knows, there’s no better tool to facilitate that than the product roadmap. A theme-based roadmap articulates the initiatives that need prioritization. Roadmaps can also convey the intended outcomes, objectives, and goals the plan expects to achieve. An effective product roadmap can align stakeholders and provide an appropriate framework for managing your team. With a firm understanding of the roadmap, the entire product team operates from the same foundation by utilizing product software to remain in sync. In addition, the roadmap acts as a starting point where any decisions or conversations can provide context for the team. Product managers may have a hard time loosening the reins. For this reason, product managers need to develop their product leader communication skills. Frequent check-ins and updates can ease the discomfort you may have with letting go of some of that control. In addition, if the guidance fails to provide them enough context, you can ask them questions before they jump back. Creating an environment where the product team remains steeped in context ensures that the product team does not lose the product narrative. The entire team can play a role by remaining curious and seeking advice. Spend Time on What Matters Most We know from our 2021 State of Product Management report that product managers dislike mitigating issues through a reactive process instead of implementing a strategic process. Context-driven leadership can change that dynamic by forcing even the most junior members of the product team to think strategically. This mindset can also inform your hiring strategies as well. Leading with context only works when you have staff members capable of synthesizing information and making sound choices independently and not just blindly following detailed instructions. You may feel uncomfortable giving up control, but part of your job responsibility includes letting your team blossom and maximizing their potential. This concept mirrors the same basic tenet that underlies the entire Agile framework, where developers mitigate problems by developing solutions. Plus, it will give you more time to focus on strategic thinking, which 96% of product leaders say they don’t have enough time for.

This article outlines the advice I gave students and includes updates on some of the concepts to my current thinking on lean market validation. For many first-timers with great ideas, the process is exciting but also a bit intimidating. I believe that the tactics can help both entrepreneurs and product managers launch better products with a higher chance of succeeding in the market. So, What is Lean Market Validation? What is market validation? It’s a question I hear a lot, especially when mentoring newer entrepreneurs and product managers. Market validation is the process of determining whether your product is of interest to a given target market. Market validation involves a series of customer interviews with people in your target market, and it almost always takes place before you’ve made a significant investment in your product/concept. The goal for my talk at Startup Weekend was simple: To lay out a few practical tips for entrepreneurs to quickly validate their ideas. I also wanted to help them understand that even first-time entrepreneurs can launch successful products by taking a few easy (and often free) steps. After using lean market validation to launch several software products, including LIKE.TG, I’ve discovered that with the right process, even inexperienced entrepreneurs can bring exceptional products to market with excited buyers on the first day. 10 Ways to Rapidly Test Your Startup Idea Here are my tips for using lean market validation to confirm whether you have a product/market fit with real customers. By simply engaging with real people and asking the right questions, you can confirm if your idea solves a problem, who your potential buyers are, and ultimately whether or not there’s a market for your product. 1. Write down your product concept. Just the simple act of writing forces you to consider things you may have previously glossed over. I’m not talking about writing a “business plan.” (For startups, a business plan isn’t the best use of time and will change as soon as you start talking with prospective customers). I’m talking about answering a few key questions that you can go out and test. These are your assumptions, and the sooner you can test them, the less risk you will have when launching your product. Download the Anatomy of a Product Launch ➜ You can start with the questions below or use a tool such as the Business Model Canvas to guide your thinking. Write down some basic assumptions that you can go out and test: Who is your customer? If you say “everyone,” you are already setting yourself up for a tough time. Be sure to get specific. For example, if your customer is a business, answer: What kind of business? How big or small is the typical business? In a particular market? What is the title of the buyer? What problems are you solving? Many entrepreneurs think about the product first — they fret about the features, launch the product, and then wonder why their product has trouble getting traction. My suggestion is to start with the problem first. What this means is being explicit about the problems your product solves. By writing down these problems, you can validate whether customers also see them as problems. And, more importantly, whether customers think they are problems worth solving. How does your product solve those problems? Only after writing down the problem do you move to the product. From here, you tie the value of your product directly back to customer problems. How does solving their problems make their life better? Does it make them more money? Look better? What are the key features of the product? The features need to be more than cool — they need to solve specific problems—the more quantitative (e.g., time saved, money made), the better. I encourage you to think Minimum Viable Product and limit the feature set as much as possible (you need to provide just enough value for some customers to buy). 2. Decide. At Startup Weekend, 54 hours go quickly. The same concept holds for startups and new products in the real world. Time and resources are scarce. There isn’t time to agonize over details that, in the end, may not matter. For that reason, lean market validation helps successful teams get just enough information and data to make decisions. And then they make them. I like to adhere to the 80% rule — get just enough (valid) information from customer interviews and other data sources and then decide. In the end, you will never get to 100% certainty, and getting close will eat up an excessive amount of time. 3. Most of what you write down are assumptions. This brings me to my third point: All the writing you do, the discussions (and debating) you have, are assumptions. Teams often take these discussions (and what’s in their heads) as facts when they are simply assumptions that need to be tested. I like to think of the scientific method when reviewing ideas — how can they be tested? I often see teams (at Startup Weekend and at startups) debate minor details, waste valuable time rather than make a guess (a temporary decision), and then get out into the real world to test whether it’s the right idea. It’s essential just to make a guess and get started because your assumptions may turn out to be wrong, and you’ll have spent valuable time (not to mention the toll on team dynamics) debating something that didn’t matter in the first place. 4. Find the truth by getting out to test your assumptions. As soon as you’ve made some basic decisions, and written down your assumptions, get out to test them to see if they resonate with potential customers. I encouraged Startup Weekend attendees to get out on the street and save valuable time by getting on the phone if the customer type warrants. Lean market validation relies on customer interviews with potential buyers of your product. You can also test your assumptions by interviewing experts (for example, analysts for the industry, people who have been employed by the industry, consultants, etc.). There are also some great ways to test digital ideas with landing pages and inexpensive ads. Download the Product-Market Fit Book ➜ 5. Start with your network. I’m often asked how teams can easily find prospects to speak with. I recommend working with your own network and the networks of friends, mentors, investors, and others to reach potential customers. The downside of interviewing people in your network is they are friendly to your cause. This means that you are introducing some potential bias into your learning. But my attitude is that some bias is better than not interviewing and getting closer to the truth. 6. Interview your customers. When I mention interviewing, I’m not talking about a cursory conversation (or worse, a survey). Start with a list of questions but deviate from the questions as you learn more information. Approach the conversation with a sense of curiosity about the customer’s problem and needs, and you’ll get some really valuable insight. Download our Customer Interview Tool Box, including templates you can use to track your interviews. 7. Ask, “Why?” “Why?” is by far the most important question you can ask. With it, you can get closer to the truth from customers. Unfortunately, this question isn’t used often enough — too many people ask a question and then take the answer at face value. It’s a missed opportunity to understand motivation and validate what someone would really do. The Five Whys is a great technique for getting to the underlying reason — the real reason — behind a customer’s motivation. 8. Find the value proposition. I encourage entrepreneurs to focus less on features and more on explaining the value proposition for their product. What does that mean? A value proposition is the expected gains that a customer would receive from using your product. Value can be quantitative, such as time saved or additional revenue earned. Measuring this is usually straightforward. But value can also be qualitative, such as pain relief or lifestyle benefits your product provides. By thoroughly understanding and documenting this qualitative value through customer interviews, you can set your product apart from the competition. For example, it could be time saved, more revenue, or maybe some social benefit (like looking good). Whatever it is, these value propositions are directly tied to the problems that you have previously discovered. 9. Liking your idea is not the same as buying your product. Unfortunately, validating a product idea with prospective customers is subjective. There is no black and white answer. In fact, because people are generally nice and want to please you (especially the friendly university students at Startup Weekend), you need to be careful about accepting their answers at face value. When someone tells you enthusiastically, “it sounds great,” or “that’s an interesting idea,” your first reaction should be to follow up with “why?” It’s important to understand that someone liking your idea is not the same as buying the product. Your challenge during your lean market validation process eliminates as much of these “false positives” as much as possible. 10. Jump off the cliff and have fun! My advice to the group (and all entrepreneurs) is to take a risk, jump off the cliff, and have fun with the lean market validation experience. It’s taking chances that are the hallmark of successful entrepreneurs, and using these techniques helps you get closer to success.

Lessons from a Product Launch: Rivian Ask any product manager, and they will tell you that product launches are equal parts daunting and exciting. “Go, go, go” is the mantra, as all team members kick into high gear to get the first minimum viable product (MVP) out into the world. Launching a product should be an exciting time for product managers and key stakeholders. However, it is often a daunting task because there are a lot of moving parts throughout the launch process. It includes running customer validation interviews and developing team sprints, communicating updates with internal stakeholders. And so much more! It’s a lot to manage, both at a macro and a micro-level. Pretty daunting, right? A successful product launch provides a sense of accomplishment and excitement, despite how chaotic it first appears. That’s the situation Zack Suhadolnik, a Senior Product Designer, found himself in at Rivian—an American electric vehicle automaker and automotive technology company. “It was pretty chaotic; I’d say,” he mused. It is completely understandable, considering Rivian was simultaneously going to market with the first-ever EV truck, gearing up for their IPO, and grounding its new brand. Zack was gracious enough to sit down with us to share his first-hand experience with Rivian’s R1T electric truck launch. We came away from the discussion with some fundamental principles that can benefit any product person managing their own respective launches. View Chaos as an Opportunity Chaos—it’s a state of being that evokes images of complete disarray and a lack of process. It is a natural byproduct of a product launch of any size. Yet, we should view chaos as an opportunity to create order by streamlining the product launch process. “I personally thrive in the chaos [of a launch]. It’s really easy for me to pump something out fast, and I get inspired when we’re just like, ‘All right, we gotta stand this up as soon as possible.’ It sparks creativity for me.” During launches, Zack noted that things need to get done and get done fast. The need for speed sparks and generates inspiration that would not exist otherwise. “Creativity comes out of those less structured chaotic projects. For designers, the beginning of a project is where it’s the most fun. As soon as a project starts to get very organized and you’re starting to implement things is when I think creativity drops off.” When Zack joined the team at Rivian, there were some initial structures in place for his team, but also room for creativity. This unique freedom—given to everyone in the organization—was a boon to a designer like him. “If you look at a lot of other automotive industry companies, their design is all very similar, very templatized. It is clean, and it probably converts really well, but it lacks character and any sort of voice that’s different.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '8e19b48f-8595-47ff-ab25-1211bd3d6159', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Stay Open, Come Together Complete freedom and collaboration did not just happen organically at Rivian. It’s their core principle, embodied in the mission statement, “Stay open, come together.” At all levels of the company, there is a shared vulnerability that encourages employees to reiterate on ideas to make them better. Coworkers have a pride-driven “fight” instinct to redo initial versions of products. The company firmly believes everyone should have pride in their work. While collaboration is encouraged at every company, during Rivian’s launch, they took it a step further. Zack references the “storming” phase of Tuchman’s stages of group development to describe research and ideation at Rivian. During this phase, leadership and individual teams leverage as many creatives as possible to solve a problem, produce the best ideas, and prioritize the right items. “It’s really hard for some people to accept this strategy, and I think it takes a certain personality type to thrive in that sort of ambiguity and uncertainty. But you get to make sure that everything’s on the table, and then you can start to narrow in on what’s feeling right.” Zack admits that this is a unique approach to Rivian, not in execution but the executive buy-in. They allow teams to bring in people early and often at the beginning of ideation and even intentionally cross-pollinate teams on the creative side. As a result, the process allows each team a broader view of their options and opportunities and keeps fresh perspectives at the forefront of their projects. Collaboration Doesn’t End with the Launch What happens after the product gets launched? At Rivian, they pump the brakes. Then, each team carefully works in a cross-functional way to smooth out any leftover rough edges from the launch. “For me personally, it’s been a very new way of working. I’ve always been so used to just owning everything. So to be vulnerable and open up has been hard, but I think it really leads to better design in the long run.” Groups that got siloed came together to foster further collaboration. Their goal is to move forward and align on what worked and what did not retroactively. 3 Key Takeaways from Rivian’s Product Launch Experience Rivian’s product launch has several key takeaways from a product perspective: 1. Embrace the chaos of the launch, and use it to your team’s advantage. Tap into that mix of creativity and independence to get a bird’s eye view of the problem at hand, ensuring that you have a higher chance of executing the right decision. 2. Collaborate with anyone and everyone at the early stages of a launch. Early collaboration ensures that you have good coverage on all ideas for your side of the product. Additionally, it ensures you plant the seeds of cross-functional teamwork to deal with possible siloes later in the launch. Executive buy-in can be another way to ensure the success of this collaboration. 3. Conduct a retrospective and reach out to siloed teams post-launch. The retrospective process allows your team the opportunity to align with others from a process perspective and take stock of what worked and what didn’t during the launch. No product launch will turn out perfectly, but there are important learnings to be had from each launch, even those outside of a traditional software product launch. Take these findings and apply them to your next major launch! P.S. Have a great product launch story to share? We’d love to hear it! Send a brief overview of your product launch tale to [email protected], and we’ll be in touch. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '68f4841e-0e88-4b86-9ddc-7e644a82dc92', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});

Heart, humility, and hustle. These core values aren’t just central to how LIKE.TG operates as a business. They also play a significant role in our Diversity and Inclusion efforts. Through our D&I Task Force, LIKE.TG has partnered with several wonderful non-profit organizations helping the local Santa Barbara community. We’d like to take a moment to highlight one of our non-profit partners, the Equal Learning Fund. And who better to talk about the ELF than its Founder, CEO, and Board President, Hannah Huelin-Meek? Keep reading to learn more about Hannah and the Equal Learning Fund! 1. Can you tell us a little about your background and experience? I’ve spent my entire career in the nonprofit world. So, before launching Equal Learning Fund, I worked for the Red Cross for almost 15 years in disaster relief and blood donations, but I’d always had a passion for helping with children’s causes, which led me to start Equal Learning Fund. Throughout my career, I’ve specialized in providing strategic vision and real-world solutions focused on building teams. Bringing this expertise to my own nonprofit has been a gratifying endeavor. 2. What is the Equal Learning Fund, and what is its mission? Equal Learning Fund is a 501c3 nonprofit organization created to help bridge the socioeconomic gaps for underserved youth. We believe that every child should have an equal opportunity for education regardless of socioeconomic status. We provide educational funds, school supplies, and program support to those most in need so that every child can have a chance at a great future.\ 3. How does the Equal Learning Fund identify communities to support? Equal Learning Fund prides itself on researching school district data, talking with educators, and working directly with our shelter partners and school programs to identify real-time needs. We have also been cautious only to take on the right number of community partners we can service and make meaningful impacts with based on our available funding. 4. Having spent over 15 years in the non-profit sector, what led to the decision to create the Equal Learning Fund? Before creating Equal Learning Fund in 2020, I had been pondering the idea for a couple of years. As mentioned, I’ve always had a special place in my heart for children’s causes, and even from a young age, I would donate and volunteer – the calling was definitely there! Having grown up in the UK and attended college here in the US, I have had the opportunity to learn about different education systems and learning opportunities with a very objective lens. So, I knew there were gaps when it came to learning; this certainly was not a new issue, but when the pandemic hit, it brought these socioeconomic gaps to the forefront of so many households across the nation. Additionally, I knew families that could purchase laptops for virtual learning, get extra tutors, and help their kids continue to succeed, and then some families shared with me that their kids weren’t learning at all; there was no better time to launch than that moment. 5. What accomplishments are you most proud of with the Equal Learning Fund? There are a couple; our backpack drives each year have been amazing, and providing kids with what they need to feel confident returning to school is great. I was able to meet with some of the families that received these, and it was heartwarming to hear their stories and see the direct impact of our work. The other accomplishment I feel really good about is being able to provide tutors in core academic subjects to some of the students we support. We get progress reports weekly, and it’s incredible to see the improvement week over week! 6. Where do you envision the Equal Learning Fund accomplishing in the next 10 years? That’s a great question and one I love! Currently, our primary focus is on the California market, with some special projects sprinkled in. Our goal is to scale our model over the coming years so that we can do more nationally and eventually have more of a presence overseas. 7. What do you look for in a corporate partner? Let me start by saying that we LOVE all our current partners and have a lot of respect for your team at LIKE.TG; I often find myself sharing your company as an example because of the fantastic teamwork and partnership provided. We look for partners who are aligned in what they want to achieve from a giving standpoint; we also look at the company itself and the work they do to see if there might be further overlap and opportunities to collaborate. Ultimately though, we are looking for individuals who have a passion for making an impact and care about the communities that they are in – LIKE.TG is an excellent example of this! 8. What can companies like LIKE.TG do to support organizations like yours? There are a few ways companies can help: Fundraisers – These give employees a chance to give back, help their communities, and get involved with a cause! One-time donations – Great for targeting a specific impact. Volunteering – We love our volunteers and strive to match individuals with projects they will enjoy! We offer virtual and in-person opportunities. Spread the word – Help raise awareness. 9. How can folks participate and volunteer without a corporate affiliation? Individuals can donate their time by volunteering or become an advocate for the cause by reaching out at Get Involved – Equal Learning Fund in Santa Barbara, CA. 10. Can you share any insights about the successes the Equal Learning Fund has seen over the years? We are proud to have served over 2k students with school supplies, technology, and storytelling sessions! Also, we have provided over 600 backpacks, and over 700 reading books and tutored 15 students in core academic subjects. We have made significant impacts and want to do more! Check out the links below to our current fundraisers. Is there anything else you would like to share or promote? LIKE.TG’s Giving Tuesday Technology Fundraiser: LIKE.TG’s Giving Tuesday Fundraiser! – Campaign (equallearningfund.org) Holiday Fundraiser – Join us for gift giving for children in shelters: Holiday Giving! – Campaign (equallearningfund.org) We’d like to thank Hannah and the Equal Learning Fund for being such an incredible partner to the LIKE.TG Diversity & Inclusion Task Force. We look forward to continuing our efforts to support our local communities. If LIKE.TG sounds like the right fit for your next chapter, we’d love to hear from you. Take a look at our open roles at https://www.productplan.com/careers/.

Over the past ten years, you’ve heard from us a lot. Therefore, we think it’s time to turn the spotlight on who matters: our customers. Thanks to the review site G2, our users share their honest thoughts about our product management platform. We love hearing directly from our customers. And what they have to say is helpful to anyone looking to learn more about how an end-to-end product management platform works. We’re excited to highlight some of the feedback they had to share below. If you want to provide feedback or check out the full reviews, visit our G2 page today! Fostering better collaboration It’s all too common to feel siloed, especially when working at an enterprise company or in a highly cross-functional role. Getting feedback and keeping people updated with outdated tools and increasingly remote teams is tough. Luckily, our customers have overcome these pesky silos thanks to the LIKE.TG platform. A verified user in the computer software space notes, “Before LIKE.TG, we would have to update multiple sources constantly. It was hard to maintain and keep up to date while including only relevant information for specific groups. Now we can leverage tags in LIKE.TG to create specific views that are always up to date. Overall it has already led to time savings and is improving how we communicate internally.” Commenting on LIKE.TG’s roadmap features, Tiffany W., a Product and Business Analysis Director, writes, “While we still maintain a couple of different styles of roadmaps (for different audiences), they are all in one place and they are all linked – making it easy to keep all of them up to date. Additionally, we have incorporated additional users to assist with collaboration on the relevant roadmaps, thus enhancing visibility and awareness and introducing better collaboration!” Collaboration at every level is absolutely essential for success. Our customers have benefitted from how our platform serves as a single source of truth for all stakeholders. Effective communication of the product strategy Establishing and maintaining a focused product strategy is difficult. Internal and external stakeholders naturally have conflicting priorities. So how do you alleviate concerns and keep people engaged and bought into the strategy? Our users found the answers to these questions with LIKE.TG’s help. A verified user at an enterprise-level Consumer Goods company comments, “LIKE.TG enables our team to share all of the activities that are going on in different areas so we can gain one clear view with the overall aim of using it to determine our medium to long term strategy. It is now forming a central part of our yearly planning process as it contains up-to-date information and can be manipulated as required to suit many different needs.” Phillip P., a Software Engineer from a mid-market company, gets even more specific: “I use more than 20 roadmap templates a day easily. With LIKE.TG it is relatively easy to plan, visualize and communicate a product strategy in a matter of minutes using the integrations with Jira, Slack, Trello to streamline each process.” On getting buy-in, Dylan, a Product Marketing Manager at a small business, said: “I utilize LIKE.TG to propose, visualize, show options, and track [the] progress of a full portfolio of products. This portfolio is made up of a number of products with overlapping requirements and dependencies. Being able to provide clear communication about this complex work is critical to getting buy-in and agreement amongst a large group of internal and external stakeholders.” We live in an era where many companies are doing more with less. The successful ones have the product strategy at the center of everything they do. Subsequently, they continue to deliver innovative products their customers love. And LIKE.TG is there to support them by organizing all the vital information in one place! Keeping the focus on the outcome rather than the output It can be tempting to fall into the trap of focusing on outputs during a product development lifecycle. Roadmaps and product strategies risk becoming a never-ending backlog if the emphasis on outcomes is absent. As a result, a product management team transforms into just another feature factory. With LIKE.TG, product organizations don’t have to worry about this common planning pitfall. A verified user at a mid-market insurance company stated that LIKE.TG helps him “[Keep the focus on] outcomes: [by having the] ability to see all company product epics, initiatives, and features in one place, and categorize by customer journey/teams. [LIKE.TG] saves time in creating packs with the information and allows stakeholders to self-serve the latest updates.” Louisa, the Head of Global Marketing at an enterprise company, comments on how staying objective-focused with LIKE.TG helped her team’s ROI: “We obtained better results in increasing our ROI, thanks to the fact that we had the support of LIKE.TG to be our daily guide and to manage all our business plans and objectives.” Productivity cannot be solely measured by items checked on a to-do list. With LIKE.TG, our customers can ensure the work they are doing aligns with the larger business goals. As a result, everything they launch delivers outcomes that support success and growth. We’re just getting started The feedback our customers share with us is invaluable to the work we’re doing on our end-to-end product management solution. We look forward to hearing more from our customers in the future! We cannot thank our customers enough for their continued support. Not a LIKE.TG customer yet? See how our product management platform can help you turn your product into a competitive advantage. Schedule a demo with our team of product experts to learn how to standardize your product operations, build strategic roadmaps, prioritize high-quality ideas, and launch new products. Download Our 2023 Product Management Report➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3606e408-64b7-428e-92de-d70da69b7d2a', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});

On behalf of the LIKE.TG team, we are excited and honored to share some exciting news. Along with the honor of getting certified as a Great Place to Work (May 2021—May 2022), we earned the recognition of Fortune’s 2021 Best (Small or Medium) Workplaces. Although one of our team’s values is humility, I wanted to take a moment to say, “heck yeah!” Thank you to the entirety of the team for your efforts navigating this past year. What Did This Year Look like for LIKE.TG? Like many companies, we practically learned overnight how to manage our business differently with the onset of the pandemic. The process of placing our operating practices and guiding principles under a microscope allowed us to solidify what was working well and what we needed to improve. In particular, we saw the need to be more intentional about how we build a great culture. LIKE.TG believes how employees act when nobody is looking defines company culture. We felt alignment become even more critical in a world where our team is all working remotely. We also know people want to work alongside people they trust. Strong values alignment becomes even more critical as a company scales and growth accelerates. In the past year alone, our business doubled in size. We released several key product enhancements. Product organizations utilized these enhancements to help simplify the shipment of products. What’s Our Secret Sauce? So how did we win Fortune’s 2021 Best (Small or Medium) Workplaces over the ten thousand contending companies? We believe a key was really clarifying and subsequently living by those values that bind us. LIKE.TG’s core values assist in recognition as one of Fortune’s great places to work. Hustle: We’re passionate about what we’re doing. But we hustle to preserve time with our friends and family. We empower employees to own the outcome. We encourage them to want to win because it means we are making an impact as a whole. Humility: We listen first and ask questions when we don’t have the answers. We approach interactions and problems with curiosity and adjust our course when needed. Heart: We want our work to have meaning, and we care deeply for our team, our customers, and our society at large. We embrace the visible and invisible differences to create a place where people feel safe speaking plainly and being the best version of themselves. “I’m really proud of how the team exemplifies Hustle, Humility, and Heart every day. We help our colleagues’ career paths grow and develop. I’ve loved getting to see team members get the chance to move into different teams and get promoted into new roles from a manager of customer success, becoming a product manager to a customer success manager, becoming a sales engineer. Seeing folks get the chance to spread their wings, try something new, and move forward is core to what I think Hustle, Humility, and Heart mean in our workplace.” – Diana Ciontea – Finance “We work with real people. We’re not just numbers and jobs to be done. The team gets to know each other and spends time caring about each other’s interests, and there’s trust built there. I trust that my colleagues are putting in their heart, with humility and they’re hustling in everything they do that helps us remember that we’re all people behind the job.” – Nick Fields – Product management [VIDEO on Heart Humility and Hustle] Fostering Connection at LIKE.TG After the Black Lives Matter protests, we came together as a company to openly share how people were feeling. It was particularly moving to hear people speak plainly about what this topic meant to them while also serving as a time to catalog our practices. These conversations inspired the creation of our diversity and inclusion task force. This cross-functional collaboration has spawned various initiatives, including mental health days, a fundraiser for disadvantaged children, and a fresh look at the hiring process. LIKE.TG’s biannual “Fest.” Another critical moment for our team was launching our first, all remote, teamwide gathering we call Fest. In the past, Fest represented a biannual event where in-office and remote coworkers would convene for social and educational activities. Activities included presentations from customers to lightning talks where employees volunteer to present on a topic of passion and trivia at a local brewery, to name a few. This event represented a great way to cultivate strong team alignment, especially since most of our team lives outside Santa Barbara. As we all know, large in-person gatherings weren’t on the agenda this past year, so we had to improvise. The process of building a weeklong schedule to support a 100% remote Fest helped flesh out many of the lingering habits ingrained from in-office work that didn’t support remote workers. While we all look forward to a face-to-face Fest again, we believe the emphasis on learning how to do remote work well sets us up for longer-term success. Inspired by feedback from our team, we have since launched a mentorship program and a Culture, Collaboration, and Connection (CCC) monthly meetup. At CCC, in a small group setting, we tackle various topics ranging from the company’s long-term strategy to learning more about each other’s interests outside of work. Trust and Strategy at LIKE.TG Some of us may have worked in lower trust or what some may call ‘political’ environments. People often expend unnecessary energy in the wrong areas. Also, those environments tend to stifle open communication among teams. We believe that the best ideas can come from anywhere. Consequently, it is incumbent upon our organization to ensure processes amplify and encourage the sharing of information. A great example is how information our team gathers from customers finds its way into our product prioritization process. The bulk of our team is talking with our customers every day. Harnessing insights from these conversations is foundational to our strategy especially given how quickly the product management space evolves. Trust, or a lack thereof, is something we know product managers often grapple with internally. Often, they feel frustrated conveying to stakeholders how and why things need prioritization. Ultimately, we see our role at LIKE.TG as helping our customers instill greater trust within their own organization. “It feels like my input is valued here. We work hard, but we love the work we’re doing because we know it’s positively impacting on ourselves, our customers, and the world.” – Sierra Newell – Marketing “I know when I come in, I can be my authentic self. I’m welcomed and valued for that. I can walk in the door and don’t have to be a different person. I can be who I am, and everyone respects and values me at ProductPlan. I can flourish and be happy and fulfilled because I can be myself at the end of the day. – Damon Navo – Customer Success Final Thoughts on Fortune’s Great Places to Work Being recognized as one of Fortune’s great places to work is a tremendous honor, especially in light of the challenges brought about over the past year. We also believe much of our success is still in front of us. We’re excited to continue our journey to help product organizations simplify the product life cycle and build organizational trust. Check out our Careers Page if you are interested in a role at ProductPlan. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '4bc8dfae-deb7-4eb4-b82f-7f20e14b8f2f', {"region":"na1"});

Let’s jump in and check out the latest and greatest updates from the past few months, brought to you by LIKE.TG’s product team!At the heart of these updates is our unwavering commitment to elevating your experience with ProductPlan. We’re diligently prioritizing key areas to deliver the most impactful improvements for our users.Launch Management EnhancementsWith our most recent release, you can easily attach and access any deliverables associated with tasks via a URL link. Accompanying this enhancement, the UI for tasks has been upgraded to include a “drawer” element that opens upon clicking the task row.Together, these changes help ensure that all users engaging with launches cross-functionally know where to find important assets relating to each launch.SSO User Provisioning for Editors and ViewersWe are excited to announce that the auto-provisioning options for accounts utilizing Single Sign-On have expanded to include editors. With this delivery, accounts have the option to auto-provision new users as editors via SSO, saving time and effort previously spent waiting for manually assigned access.Teams for Discovery, Launch and RoadmappingIn alignment with our plans to reduce noise and ensure that you can focus on what really matters to you, we have applied team associations and filtering across all product areas. Now, you can easily identify and find the information most relevant to you throughout the full product development life cycle.Platform Level API ExtensionTo connect your favorite external tools with your work in LIKE.TG, we have officially extended the API coverage to all product areas in the platform.Sneak peek: Upcoming enhancements to the LIKE.TG platformSince we’re looking back at the recent releases, why not give you a glimpse of what’s on the horizon!? As you know, the product and timelines are constantly evolving, so please take this with a grain of salt (or a healthy pinch)! At the core of our upcoming releases is a commitment to improving your experience within our platform. While we understand that we can’t tackle every challenge at once, we’re focusing on key areas.Establishing ConsistencyConsistency breeds familiarity and efficiency. With this in mind, we’re committed to creating a uniform experience across all product areas. Whether you’re navigating through different product areas, features beyond teams will be able to pull that narrative together.Seamless Workflow ConnectivityOur commitment to seamless connectivity extends far beyond individual product teams. We’re embarking on a journey to support end-to-end workflows by establishing a seamless connection across all product areas. This holistic approach ensures that your workflow integrates more into the platform to facilitate more collaboration and efficiency.Integration of LIKE.TG APIs into iPaas SolutionWe’re just getting underway building out an IPaaS offering connecting to our LIKE.TG APIs. This will open up a world of possibilities. The goal here is to allow custom integrations and workflow automation between LIKE.TG and other applications within your ecosystem.As we look ahead, our focus remains squarely on delivering an unparalleled experience for our customers. We continue to lay the foundation for a platform that meets your needs today and anticipates and adapts to your evolving requirements tomorrow. Stay tuned for what’s next! If this quarter recap has piqued your interest and you’d like to learn more about how your team can use a product management platform, please request a demo with our sales team.