The Secret to a Successful Product Launch: Tying Your Launch to Your Roadmap Strategy
Product professionals spend countless hours researching, prioritizing, and planning, all in the name of creating a successful product launch. And while they may know the problem space like the back of their hand, what we’ve heard time and time again when speaking with product folks is that no stakeholders involved have great visibility into what happens during a launch. And that is true for the product professionals themselves! In fact, a significant number of go-to-market efforts are entirely coordinated by a separate team without the direct involvement of the product organization. To add more complexity to this issue, these teams handling the launch processes typically coordinate their efforts in a tool that is entirely separate from the product roadmap. Therefore, it is no surprise that these teams have information gaps. Communication silos in the product launch process are a recipe for disaster It can feel worrisome to spend all this time developing a product based on a strategic vision and then have to turn the launch of your precious product or feature to a separate team to bring it to market. However, product professionals care deeply about the success of their product. And the product launch remains a crucial factor in determining overall success. You may solve the customer’s most significant pain point with a feature you just released, but how will the customer know about it? It doesn’t make much sense for the product team to own the research and strategy, disappear during the launch phase and come back to analyze the success. As a result, launch coordinators may have to create time-consuming reports to give updates on the launch. For instance, they have to repeatedly answer which upcoming items have launch plans, when the launch is happening, and if it’s on track. In addition, the siloed launch contributors often have to ask for updates on a release so they can adjust their launch plans and dates accordingly. In short, it becomes one big tangled mess of communication. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Putting all the pieces together: Your roadmap strategy and a successful product launch What if your launches were all in one place, and they tied directly into your roadmap strategy? With LIKE.TG, this is a reality! We wanted to create a deeper connection with your launch planning and roadmap strategy so that your teams have all the information they need in one place. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '842368a9-af78-421f-a3cb-4da00ad39f75', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Our product and engineering teams have been hard at work enhancing our Launch Management solution with additional functionality for our customers. As you add bars and containers to the “Included in the Launch” section of your Launch Checklist, it will trigger the launch name to display on your Roadmap and Portfolio, reducing the need for you to have to update stakeholders on which items have planned launches and how they’re going. The information is front and center for all who need it. Keep reading for a quick recap of recent enhancements and capabilities to our Launch Management solution. 1. See associated launches in the Table View for roadmaps and portfolios On the table view, a new column displays associated launches. Here, your product leaders and stakeholders can easily look at all items on a roadmap or portfolio and understand which have an associated launch and which don’t. They can dig a little deeper by clicking on each Launch to find the status updates. 2. Launch information can also be accessed in the Timeline View for roadmaps and portfolios This concept extends to the timeline view for roadmaps by connecting associated launch information on hover and showcasing upcoming launches as milestone-like flags at the top of your timeline. These flags are designed a little differently to stand out but can be turned off via a toggle at the bottom of your roadmap if you need a more focused view. All of this happens when you connect a bar or container to a launch. You can now focus your time on more pressing needs. 3. Target dates for bars and containers display within the launch checklist Lastly, we know that coordinating launch tasks is a feat in itself. Your team must complete all the tasks in time for the launch. If you’re not involved in the day-to-day development, this may mean following up with a product manager or engineer to ensure that the item is still on track and adjusting your plans accordingly. By displaying target dates for bars and containers within your launch checklist, you eliminate the status updates and follow-ups. If you have your roadmap integrated with JIRA or ADO, this may be even easier as the dates now pass through from your development tool to your roadmap items, and finally, to your launch. 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, 'd4bd00d0-70a8-4c3e-8784-09d1cafeb2f8', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});
The Secret to Product Planning
The secret to product planning starts with “why.” In some cases, product planning focuses on what we’re building, completing, and what’s up next. The rationale for all that activity isn’t simply to cross things off the list or pump out new functionality. It’s about turning a vision into reality. But connecting the dots between the activities of a particular product development team and the overarching corporate vision can be a bit of a stretch for those not steeped in the strategic exercises occurring at the top of the organization. How a particular widget maps back to a vision of “transforming the world of peer-to-peer finance” or “unlocking the potential of idle computing power” or whatever can be a heavy lift. To unlock the secret to product planning, product professionals need to develop a clear product vision. Putting Vision into Context In an ideal world, everyone should understand the organization’s overall vision. It’s beneficial to take a top-down approach. Breaking that vision down into smaller pieces becomes more relevant to different parts of the business. It’s not always easy to map the contents of an individual sprint. However, a high-level strategy for an entire company remains possible. The significance of each element of the strategy increases stakeholder alignment. Alignment creates motivation and enthusiasm amongst the teams. They can now realize how their contributions impact the big picture. This increased fidelity must begin at the planning stages, creating the platform for ongoing alignment and teamwork. At LIKE.TG, each engineering team has a vision. That aligns with the product vision, which in turn aligns with the company vision. Though there is no one secret to product planning, this concept comes close. It enables engineering teams to understand how the world looks different if they’re successful. Planning for Outcomes While Preserving Accountability Each squad understands its purpose and objectives. The squads remain grounded on a shared understanding of what success looks like to them. Boiling down grand sweeping statements and visions to something tangible is key to bridging that gap. Each member should answer the question: “What will our customers be able to do tomorrow that they can’t do today?” This very concrete, specific ideal guides their actions without being too prescriptive. For example, it might be that customers can now automate more of their daily updates. The update doesn’t spell out precisely what that might look like or how it will get built. However, the vision is crystal clear. The product manager can then fill in more details. Consequently, delivering value is more important than a list of features. That value must also be measurable to ensure the team achieves its goal of executing its vision. Alignment around how we know our customers’ lives got better is just as crucial as intending to improve things. That shared definition of success keeps everyone pointed in the same direction. Moreover, it creates a benchmark for ongoing, measurable refinement. Finding the Sweet Spot While strategic thinking and keeping everything in perspective are product managers’ strong suits, that’s not always the forte for everyone in the organization. They may not have the impetus or motivation to do so, and they may also lack the information and context even if they did. Therefore it’s up to product managers to determine the right level of vision required to give everyone enough autonomy to move forward without overwhelming them. This task only becomes more difficult as the scale of the vision expands thanks to growth. Creating a shared vision For example, at LIKE.TG, our vision is to help companies accelerate product outcomes. By presenting a shared vision and securing buy-in, the product calibrates the squad to be on the same page. Presenting roadmaps tailored to the audience in question provides a helpful resource to paint this picture as well. That’s why we keep narrowing things down. We know this team in particular’s contribution to accelerating product outcomes centers on collaboration within the application. We briefly explain how collaboration contributes to the vision, giving product development further insight into the purpose of their work and not just the “what.” Shrinking the view and scope of things isn’t typically how the product discusses vision, but departing from grand narratives and concentrating on specifics is what the implementation teams need to succeed. Like with IMPACT, it conveys what’s meaningful about the work, giving the team a better picture of how their individual and team efforts plug into the larger strategic objectives and customer experience. It turns abstract platitudes into concrete action plans and tasks. Get Strategic Project Alignment ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'bfb5032e-5746-4c05-9f2a-54b36ba0e871', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Planning for the Future Without Becoming a Feature Factory Company missions rarely change. Visions for the business typically extend five or ten years into the future. And strategies tend to cover the next year or two. Things get more specific the closer they are to the present. But while missions and visions are vague, strategies and roadmaps tend to get more detailed out of necessity. Things can’t remain fuzzy once it’s time to build stuff, and that granularity helps teams plan accordingly and deliver functionality that adds customer value. However, one shouldn’t confuse increased specificity with rigidity. The secret to product planning is to remain vision-driven and customer-centric. Product teams should stay flexible at every stage of the product planning process. Our product vision gets more precise as we continually learn more about our customers, their needs, and the overall market dynamics. That’s where a roadmap based on themes versus specific features comes in. We’re all aligned about what areas we’re focusing on and our goals for each effort, but there’s still plenty of wiggle room on the details right up until implementation kicks off. Maintaining Excitement and Energy. Building products is still a job, and work remains an obligation versus a choice for most. However, imbuing the team with a sense of purpose can elevate the team above the daily grind and get them pumped up for what they can achieve. By continuing to build what customers need and not just the promises in an outdated vision, strategy, or roadmap, we keep that joy of delighting customers close to the surface. We know we’re prioritizing what matters and spending our cycles on enhancements to the product experience that genuinely make a positive difference. And we won’t just build things because months or years ago, we happened to say we would. The process only works well with the suitable structures in place. A foundation built on increasingly relevant visions grounds the work in its purpose. Visual roadmaps tie each project, task, and sprint back to each level. This transparency builds trust and alignment while leaving room for flexibility as situations change and conditions evolve. It doesn’t happen overnight, and each stakeholder might warm up and embrace this approach on their timeline. By creating a solid understanding of the process and delivering a relevant vision for each team member, the team has established a product plan everyone can get behind. The secret to product planning will continuously evolve. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3be75db1-0d50-46dd-b222-ce0aa84f6b08', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});
The Secret to Product Planning
The secret to product planning starts with “why.” In some cases, product planning focuses on what we’re building, completing, and what’s up next. The rationale for all that activity isn’t simply to cross things off the list or pump out new functionality. It’s about turning a vision into reality. But connecting the dots between the activities of a particular product development team and the overarching corporate vision can be a bit of a stretch for those not steeped in the strategic exercises occurring at the top of the organization. How a particular widget maps back to a vision of “transforming the world of peer-to-peer finance” or “unlocking the potential of idle computing power” or whatever can be a heavy lift. To unlock the secret to product planning, product professionals need to develop a clear product vision. Putting Vision into Context In an ideal world, everyone should understand the organization’s overall vision. It’s beneficial to take a top-down approach. Breaking that vision down into smaller pieces becomes more relevant to different parts of the business. It’s not always easy to map the contents of an individual sprint. However, a high-level strategy for an entire company remains possible. The significance of each element of the strategy increases stakeholder alignment. Alignment creates motivation and enthusiasm amongst the teams. They can now realize how their contributions impact the big picture. This increased fidelity must begin at the planning stages, creating the platform for ongoing alignment and teamwork. At LIKE.TG, each engineering team has a vision. That aligns with the product vision, which in turn aligns with the company vision. Though there is no one secret to product planning, this concept comes close. It enables engineering teams to understand how the world looks different if they’re successful. Planning for Outcomes While Preserving Accountability Each squad understands its purpose and objectives. The squads remain grounded on a shared understanding of what success looks like to them. Boiling down grand sweeping statements and visions to something tangible is key to bridging that gap. Each member should answer the question: “What will our customers be able to do tomorrow that they can’t do today?” This very concrete, specific ideal guides their actions without being too prescriptive. For example, it might be that customers can now automate more of their daily updates. The update doesn’t spell out precisely what that might look like or how it will get built. However, the vision is crystal clear. The product manager can then fill in more details. Consequently, delivering value is more important than a list of features. That value must also be measurable to ensure the team achieves its goal of executing its vision. Alignment around how we know our customers’ lives got better is just as crucial as intending to improve things. That shared definition of success keeps everyone pointed in the same direction. Moreover, it creates a benchmark for ongoing, measurable refinement. Finding the Sweet Spot While strategic thinking and keeping everything in perspective are product managers’ strong suits, that’s not always the forte for everyone in the organization. They may not have the impetus or motivation to do so, and they may also lack the information and context even if they did. Therefore it’s up to product managers to determine the right level of vision required to give everyone enough autonomy to move forward without overwhelming them. This task only becomes more difficult as the scale of the vision expands thanks to growth. Creating a shared vision For example, at LIKE.TG, our vision is to help companies accelerate product outcomes. By presenting a shared vision and securing buy-in, the product calibrates the squad to be on the same page. Presenting roadmaps tailored to the audience in question provides a helpful resource to paint this picture as well. That’s why we keep narrowing things down. We know this team in particular’s contribution to accelerating product outcomes centers on collaboration within the application. We briefly explain how collaboration contributes to the vision, giving product development further insight into the purpose of their work and not just the “what.” Shrinking the view and scope of things isn’t typically how the product discusses vision, but departing from grand narratives and concentrating on specifics is what the implementation teams need to succeed. Like with IMPACT, it conveys what’s meaningful about the work, giving the team a better picture of how their individual and team efforts plug into the larger strategic objectives and customer experience. It turns abstract platitudes into concrete action plans and tasks. Download Strategic Project Alignment in an Agile World ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'bfb5032e-5746-4c05-9f2a-54b36ba0e871', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Planning for the Future Without Becoming a Feature Factory Company missions rarely change. Visions for the business typically extend five or ten years into the future. And strategies tend to cover the next year or two. Things get more specific the closer they are to the present. But while missions and visions are vague, strategies and roadmaps tend to get more detailed out of necessity. Things can’t remain fuzzy once it’s time to build stuff, and that granularity helps teams plan accordingly and deliver functionality that adds customer value. However, one shouldn’t confuse increased specificity with rigidity. The secret to product planning is to remain vision-driven and customer-centric. Product teams should stay flexible at every stage of the product planning process. Our product vision gets more precise as we continually learn more about our customers, their needs, and the overall market dynamics. That’s where a roadmap based on themes versus specific features comes in. We’re all aligned about what areas we’re focusing on and our goals for each effort, but there’s still plenty of wiggle room on the details right up until implementation kicks off. Maintaining Excitement and Energy. Building products is still a job, and work remains an obligation versus a choice for most. However, imbuing the team with a sense of purpose can elevate the team above the daily grind and get them pumped up for what they can achieve. By continuing to build what customers need and not just the promises in an outdated vision, strategy, or roadmap, we keep that joy of delighting customers close to the surface. We know we’re prioritizing what matters and spending our cycles on enhancements to the product experience that genuinely make a positive difference. And we won’t just build things because months or years ago, we happened to say we would. The process only works well with the suitable structures in place. A foundation built on increasingly relevant visions grounds the work in its purpose. Visual roadmaps tie each project, task, and sprint back to each level. This transparency builds trust and alignment while leaving room for flexibility as situations change and conditions evolve. It doesn’t happen overnight, and each stakeholder might warm up and embrace this approach on their timeline. By creating a solid understanding of the process and delivering a relevant vision for each team member, the team has established a product plan everyone can get behind. The secret to product planning will continuously evolve. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3be75db1-0d50-46dd-b222-ce0aa84f6b08', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});
The Ultimate Motivation: What Gets Product Managers Out of Bed Every Morning?
No matter how much we love our career, we all have some days when we’d rather stay in bed. So what motivates product managers to get out of bed and show up? I recently moderated a panel of experts to talk about the intersection of happiness and product management. We found that our panelists and our attendees had a variety of reasons they not only show up every day but are excited to do so. Check out what other product management professionals use for their motivation. File away a few of your favorites for the next time you’d rather keep hitting the snooze button. What Motivates Product Managers to Get Out of Bed Every Morning? Variety When you’re working in product management, no two days are the same. With a wide range of tasks on our plate and the dynamic nature of the role, you’re never in danger of getting bored. This unpredictableness is a spark that many product managers thrive on. Suzanne Abate, CEO of The Development Factory, was one of the featured panelists in our happiness webinar. She cited this element of the job as her spark to start the day. “It’s never the same,” Abate said. “Every single day is going to be a different kind of thing because there’s going to be different tasks that you’re facing or different fires you have to put out.” This sentiment was echoed by several webinar attendees. One product manager from a healthcare company, who cited “The opportunity to do something new every day.” A product manager in the content protection industry said, “I get excited to wake up and learn, do something new.” Embracing the pandemonium Not only must product managers tackle a diverse array of tasks during their workday, but there’s also an element of unpredictability. You simply never know what the day will throw at you. For panelist Kevin Steigerwald, Director of Product Design at Jama Software, that’s a feature, not a bug. “Knowing that there is going to be a little bit of chaos today, and there are going to be different problems to solve,” he said. “I have to coordinate with everyone in the organization. I’m not going into work and just talking to one person all day long.” Another webinar attendee eloquently echoed this. “If you’re not drawn to crazy, then you don’t belong in product,” said a product manager for a credit rating firm. Download The Essentialist Product Manager ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'be753440-dc4d-40c5-9808-cad744d00a28', {}); Teamwork Product management is a team sport, even if the other players aren’t technically on your “team” in the org chart. But the tasks on our plate require a ton of interaction and working together with colleagues from across the organization. Together you’ll investigate, discuss, debate, and solve problems. This powers another panelist’s internal alarm clock. “Collaboration is a pretty key thing that I really enjoy. When you come together with everyone from the different disciplines, working with design, working with developers, with support and marketing,” said Candice Yono, Senior Product Manager at Pivotal. “I love seeing the different perspectives and the different take that everyone brings to the table and how that comes to shape some solutions that no single individual would have been able to come up with on their own.” Some of our attendees also found this facet of the job to be their reason for clocking in every day. A product manager for auto dealer software referenced “my core working team” as his motivation. “The people I work with,” said a product development manager for a guitar company. “And the pride we all share in the quality products we make.” Innovation One of the best parts of product management is bringing new solutions to the market. It’s the perfect combination of creativity, business savvy, and execution. For some attendees, this was their catalyst for seizing the day. A product manager for a user research platform craves “exciting challenges to solve,” while a senior product manager for a computer-aided design firm is pumped about “changing the industry.” “The opportunity to create cool, new products,” said a product manager for a real estate software firm while their colleague answered, “Addressing my beta testers issues.” Making a real impact was key for a security firm product manager for a security firm, who cherishes “the opportunity to have real input into effective change.” But an associate product manager working on employee engagement solutions might have summed it up best, exclaiming, “watching my idea come to life!” Delighting customers A customer-centric mindset is essential for developing great, useful solutions, and thinking about their users was another commonly cited incentive. The COO of a healthcare call center solutions provider mentioned: “the end value our products provide our clients.” However, the big motivator for others is addressing their customers’ key challenges. “Solving someone’s problem, making them enjoy their job, and making their day,” said a product owner for a process management firm. The grind Patience is a virtue. Especially in product management, where it can take months or years to bring an idea to life and reach end-users. To keep their eyes on the prize and show up every day with a smile, some product managers lean into the routine. A senior business analyst for a television production and monetization firm referenced “my 7 am daily standup” as their wake-up call. Others just enjoy chipping away at things a little each day. A product owner in the financial services industry mentioned “moving things forward one step,” while an industrial systems product manager said, “I want to complete something.” “I really enjoy what I do… with challenges and all,” said a product manager at a process automation firm. “I have still so much to learn only being a year in this position coming from QA… major change but loving it more every day.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); A Little Hectic, but Pretty Happy No matter what particular part of the job ultimately gets people going, product managers remain a pretty happy cohort. Our 2020 product management survey found the vast majority of product managers are happy with their role. The average satisfaction rating is 3.8 out of 5. To read a little more about the current state of product management, download the 2020 product management report below. There are some important drivers for that happiness—and definitely, a few things we’re not fans of—but most of us wouldn’t want to do anything else. 92% of product managers plan to stay in a similar role, and most of us just want more help and support to do the jobs we have. Download the Free Product Leadership Book hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'b3ac6e76-f5cd-45d6-95a0-813fcd905bd1', {});
Thinking Beyond Roadmapping to Elevate and Revolutionize Product Organizations
At LIKE.TG, we have the tremendous privilege of working with and listening to tens of thousands of product leaders. Our customers span across thousands of organizations ranging from smaller, growth-stage startups to Fortune 500 global enterprises. This vantage point has helped us better understand what communication strategies work best. Moreover, we understand why companies face alignment issues, and why products fail to live up to expectations. In particular, we’ve observed customers struggling to democratize access to the artifacts & insights that inform prioritization and go-to-market. The roadmap can serve as an organizational blueprint that binds strategy and execution. To assure product success, product organizations need to ensure the entirety of the organization is informed, aligned, and accountable. Whether that means automating time-consuming approval processes, creating a central repository for go-to-market artifacts, or providing more meaningful analytics on product progress, LIKE.TG’s product operations platform will help organizations orchestrate their entire product strategy. Change is Afoot Many of our customers are in the midst of rapid change. For some customers, this change may be rebalancing how collaboration happens with an increasingly remote workforce. Others are witnessing larger-scale changes to their business model as buying behaviors shift in response to current macroeconomic or other factors. Product-led growth (PLG) companies are becoming increasingly commonplace as PLG unlocks distribution advantages that can lower acquisition costs and improve the consumer purchasing experience in b2c and b2b businesses. Gartner reported that 85% of organizations surveyed had adopted or intended to adopt a product-centric delivery model. The proliferation of software tooling to support data analytics, user research, and design, among other areas, has never been more accessible for product teams. While these tools often solve acute problems for their purpose, data managed within these tools can remain siloed, adding further complexity to the product organization. This ‘swivel chair process problem’ keeps product organizations from elevating critical strategic perspectives to the broader organization. LIKE.TG helps stitch together this siloed data to create a more unified view of the product story. Tool proliferation is one of the reasons companies are introducing Product Operations into their organizations. The emergence of Revenue and Sales Operations disciplines and platforms such as Salesforce.com, which enabled organizations to improve transparency, alignment, and operational rigor, serve as a potential analog for what lies in store for Product. We view ourselves as a close product partner to this emerging discipline. Embracing digital transformation Finally, incumbents within industries such as financial services and healthcare that tend to embrace change more slowly are in the midst of a significant digital transformation as the competitive landscape shifts around them. Our SVP of Engineering, Mark Barbir, recently wrote about Implementing a Successful Product Transformation Strategy addressing digital transformation among other topics in case you are interested in learning more. Elevating The Product Organization All of these changes have accelerated the demand for product managers. Our 2021 State of Product Management Annual Report noted that interest in product management has doubled in the last five years. We also see an increase in product operations evidenced by LinkedIn’s recent assertion that the job skill of product operations has increased by 80% within the past year. Despite these changes, many product teams still use slide decks or spreadsheets to communicate their roadmap strategy. They’re sharing information without context that no one can ‘double-click’ into to learn more. As a result, product managers spend too much time answering low-value questions from stakeholders. 60% of product managers say they spend most of their time updating teams internally, according to our 2021 State of Product Management Annual Report. Yet strong alignment among Product, engineering, and the entirety of the go-to-market function is pivotal in delivering positive outcomes. Marketing needs to understand more about the persona or segment targeted. Sales want customer stories and the latest slide deck. Executives want to understand the KPIs and other metrics that will determine success. The product organization has the potential to be the heart of this insight connecting the broader team more closely to the product strategy to unlock crisper execution. We believe the companies that can successfully elevate the product organization to the heart of strategy & execution will be the most equipped to disrupt the future. The change will require executives across the organization to think differently about the role of Product within the company. Many product leaders may feel powerless to initiate systemic changes. However, we are here to partner in this revolution.
Top 5 Best Product Management Websites of 2022
So many websites and so little time. And while that truism could be applied equally to recipes, sports analysis, or politics, we’re focusing here on product management websites. It turns out a lot of product folks like to share their tips and wisdom on the Internet. Here at LIKE.TG, we can’t get enough of product-related content, so we’re always on the lookout for who’s doling out easily-digestible-yet-professionally-fulfilling insights. That’s why we can save you the Googling and share our top five product management websites from 2022, along with why they topped our year-end list. 5. Product Talk There’s no one more immersed in applying discovery and customer insights to prioritization and planning than Product Talk’s Teresa Torres. She literally wrote the book on it! But this author didn’t stop there and continues pumping out quality content, all focused on gathering great customer and market intelligence along with best practices to put it best to use. Real-world stories from the trenches at companies like trivago and CarMax share a stage with meaty posts on how to stop salespeople from blocking your access to customers and using opportunity decision trees to visualize discovery work for easier consumption. There’s even content on how to land your first product job, what to do when your buyers aren’t your users, and implementing continuous discovery at startups. And if you prefer to watch versus read, there are excellent videos on topics including collaborative decision-making and showing your work to attain stakeholder buy-in. With years of quality content in the archive, you won’t run out any time soon. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'cb271161-c23a-4241-ad26-4d616275a28b', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); 4. Silicon Valley Product Group The Silicon Valley Product Group isn’t just a bunch of product peeps that happen to have a 415 area code. The SVPG remains at the forefront of thought leadership in product development. Founded by Marty Cagan, who cut his product leadership teeth at places like eBay, Netscape, and Hewlett-Packard, the SVPG has been sharing best practices and practical insights into product development for more than two decades. That means there’s a massive back-catalog of meaty posts on agile, waterfall, and the age-old dilemma of where product management should live, and the hits keep on coming 20+ years later. Recent entries include articles on coaching vs. mentoring, product/market fit, and what product managers need to take off their plates so they can focus on interacting directly with customers and engineers. But a quick search on nearly any topic should uncover a gem or two from their list of published posts. 3. Department of Product This company’s bread and butter is training product managers, but their blog doles out a ton of useful content for anyone interested in the field. For PMs lacking technical backgrounds or who are decades past their days writing code, explainers on buzzy topics, including Web3, GitHub, and natural language processing are unintimidating primers on subjects you need to be conversant in to hold your own with developers. Posts on process—such as writing release notes and managing UX debt—show they’re not afraid to spend time on the less-sexy parts of the job, while content regarding SaaS pricing and measuring product-market fit helps product managers optimize their go-to-market tactics. There’s also plenty of career advice, including pointers on how to build useful skills, including reading API documentation, SQL, and even how to draw on a whiteboard with confidence. And, if your eyes are tired after all that close reading, pop in your earbuds and check out one of their podcasts, where they interview product leaders from companies including Wayfair, Venmo, and Uber. 2. Sachin Rekhi Notejoy founder and CEO Sachin Rekhi’s website provides a flavorful variety of hundreds of essays and videos spanning a cornucopia of product-related topics. Videos on career-propelling topics such as mastering influencing without authority and getting actionable product feedback stand alongside posts on midlife career exploration, finding product culture fit, implementing OKRs, and the importance of leaders reviewing which metrics you’re using Sachin also frequently re-reads some once-hot business books and gives a fresh take on them with a bit of 20/20 hindsight, including Peter Thiel’s Zero to One and Hamilton Heller’s 7 Powers, as well as more recent reads such as the behind-the-scenes look into Amazon’s working backward approach to product development and where you begin with the press release and Andrew Chen’s The Cold Start Problem. 1. Bring the Donuts Ken Norton’s Bring the Donuts is sadly not the latest subscription box or instant delivery service for baked goodies, but it is our top website of 2022. What—other than its unforgettable moniker—makes it stand out from the crowd? Ken’s a former Google product leader and his posts are so thorough they even have footnotes. He challenges product managers to think beyond the immediate and consider nontraditional topics such as thirty-year product plans and why companies should offer dual career tracks for product management. But he also digs into some fundamentals, including creating strong product cultures and figuring out the ideal PM-to-engineer ratio. There are also “deep dives” into how products get built at leading companies such as Stripe, Slack, and Airbnb, giving product leaders behind-the-scenes peeks into how those firms roll out innovative new offerings. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '5b343bd1-a164-41f2-bb9e-37f5f6e02cf9', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});
Top 5 Ways to Mine Your Digital Customer Experience to Strike Insight Gold
As a product manager, you spend a lot of time trying to dig into the minds of your customers and unearth exactly what the experience of using your product is like for them. Which needs or wants are they trying to address? How easy or difficult is it to complete their task? Where, specifically, do they stumble and why? The answers to these questions are worth their weight in gold. That’s why product managers are turning to a wider array of technologies to help them survey every nook and cranny of their customers’ digital experience. With tools like session replay, heatmaps, on-the-fly funnels, and customer event tracking, today’s picks and shovels are more sophisticated than ever. Finally, product managers have what they need to prospect for the insights that will help them optimize the customer experience to a flawless shine. The only question now is how do you use this technology to sift through mountains of data to find the nuggets that are truly valuable? In this post, we’ll focus on the specific ways analyzing your customer’s experience can help you understand and optimize customer interactions on your site or app like never before. What Is the Gold Standard for Understanding Your Digital Experience? Imagine the benefits of being able to observe how real customers engage with your product. Modern session replay makes this possible by seamlessly capturing the experience of what it’s really like to use your site or app, allowing you to observe video-like reenactments of individual user sessions in their entirety. In other words, you can see what your visitors experienced, cheer for their successes, and relive and learn from the pain of their failures. So Many Sessions, So Little Time However, for product managers on the hunt for answers, this staggering amount of digital experience data begs a crucial question: Where does one begin to look? If you have thousands, tens of thousands, or even millions of users in your online product or app, how do you know which sessions to watch? You need to narrow your scope—and find only the sessions that matter. Here are five ways you can use to quickly put replay to work. 1. Find the Rage! Session replay registers the digital equivalent of aggressive, rapid-fire button mashing on your site or app. These “frustration signals” indicate a user’s cry for help when they encounter something confusing or unexpected, and they’re all indexed and made searchable so you can quickly find and replay the sessions containing them. As you watch these sessions, you’ll see what the entire sequence of events looked like to the user, and you’ll learn exactly when, where, and how your product failed to meet their expectations. If you’re starving for real insights, you’ll get an understanding of the steps you can take immediately to make your digital experience better. Frustration signals are low-hanging fruit: Your users are letting you know quite clearly what they wish to do on your site, and all you have to do is pave their desire paths. Session replay captures the following frustration signals: Rage Clicks: The digital equivalent of rapid-fire button pushing, Rage Clicks are digital body language indicating that a user has clicked multiple times in the same area. Perhaps they are frustrated because a video is taking forever to load, or a string of text or product icon looks like it should link somewhere but doesn’t. Mouse Thrashes: The digital equivalent of rocking the vending machine, Mouse Thrashes signify erratic or circular mouse movements. Perhaps the user is still waiting for that video to load. Error Clicks: The digital equivalent of getting an “out of order” or “out of stock” message, this type of click triggers a client-side JavaScript error. Dead Clicks: The digital equivalent of the vending machine not responding at all to your selection, this type of click has no effect on the page and happens for one of two reasons: 1) A button, link, or other element isn’t working, or 2) A user clicks an element that isn’t supposed to do anything, indicating that something on the page is misleading or confusing. Tips to Get Started Timebox an hour to replay sessions that contain Rage Clicks, Mouse Thrashes, Error Clicks, and Dead Clicks. Take notes on what users are doing or trying to do before their experience goes south. Note any patterns and rank issues to triage based on their frequency. 2. Watch Why Users Fail to Convert Now that you’ve investigated the issues that are causing customers to pull out their hair, it’s time to aim your sights on what may be causing you to pull out yours: low conversion rates. Because session replay automatically records everything that happens on your site, (so long as your replay service indexes events) using it to build funnels and investigate trouble spots is incredibly easy. You don’t have to worry about setting anything up in advance. All you have to do is search for the specific engagement (such as visited URL or “Add to Cart” clicked text), user identification (such as “return customer”), or properties (such as “product SKU”) you wish to include. Oh, and remember our frustration signals? You can add them to your funnel to narrow your investigation even further. Basically, you can get as granular as you want and set up your funnel to include any combination of events in the order you specify, or in any order. Once you’ve drilled down to the sessions that match your exact criteria, it’s time to watch and learn from the firsthand experiences of individual users who failed to act in the way you wanted them to. As you watch exactly what they did before abandoning a shopping cart or ignoring a CTA, for example, you’ll gain the context needed to explain why drop-offs are happening. Tips to Get Started How about diving right into your most consternating conversion issues first? For example, what’s the story behind users who add items to their shopping cart and enter their purchase information but still bounce before completing their purchase? Build a funnel and replay these sessions to find out. 3. Find and Fix Buggy Code What other ways can your team use session replay to quickly find golden insights? It’s time for your engineers to put on the headlamp. Few things send users scrambling away from your site faster than the sight of an ugly, scary-looking software bug. And few things are more time-consuming for your engineers than trying to reproduce a bug and find the source of the problem. It’s a painstaking process requiring a ton of guesswork. Replay, however, helps eliminate the need for guesses—and almost all the work. When engineers can see exactly what the error looks like to the user and exactly what caused it, they no longer have to waste time on trial and error. This first-person perspective, combined with a detailed console log of JavaScript errors, also provided with every session recording, gives engineers all the information they need right from the beginning to reproduce and solve bugs fast—often in a matter of minutes. Engineering teams at thredUP, GenM and Sixty rely on session replay to understand and replicate bugs. Tips to Get Started How do you find the replays that shine a light on where bugs live? Simply integrate your session replay platform with your bug reporting tool to automatically include a link from each ticket to its associated session. Or you can manually bring up all sessions with JavaScript console errors by searching for “Error Clicks.” 4. Optimize Onboarding Another way to dive right into using replay for a specific purpose is to analyze the behaviors of your prospective customers: specifically, ones who signal interest in demoing your product. You want your demo to be as easy as possible to complete and for them to fully grasp the value of your product so they’ll sign up. When you watch the sessions in which users interact with your demo, you can easily pinpoint the sources of frustration that may be preventing them from taking the next step. The team at Classtime (formerly Go Pollock), an online education tool, did exactly that. K-12 teachers use Classtime during lessons to quiz their students (who answer on their own devices) and gain immediate feedback on their level of comprehension. The Classtime UX team was curious why so many of the teachers who visited their demo page failed to make it through the setup process and actually start the demo. As they watched user after user gets tripped up in certain areas, they quickly diagnosed the reasons why and developed a list of improvements: After implementing these solutions, Classtime saw their conversions to the next page immediately increase by 25%. Class dismissed! Tips to Get Started Whether you’re looking to optimize a demo, tutorials, or other onboarding features, session replay can help you make sure users learn how to use your product with as little friction as possible. You can find these sessions by searching for users who visit a specific URL (such as the demo page) or who engage with a specific element (such as onboarding pop-ups). 5. Search Their Search Our last way to mine your replay data is to use it to make your knowledge base significantly more helpful. Indeed, watching users interact with the search bar in your knowledge base is a powerful learning experience. Viewing these sessions can help you find insights into helping your site visitors find the answers they’re looking for—quickly, easily, and with no frustration. Case in point, eCommerce platform Shopify used session replay to unearth the gaps in their knowledge base and fill them with relevant content. First, the Shopify UX team discovered that users commonly entered questions into the search bar, such as “What can I sell on Shopify?” and, based on this knowledge, they created dedicated answer pages to address frequent queries. The team at Shopify also used session reply to provide additional context for the feedback they received for articles on their help center. At the bottom of each article is a section where users can provide optional feedback on its helpfulness. These ratings and comments often fail to paint the full picture of why users are dissatisfied. With replay, Shopify can fill in the missing context around negative user feedback by watching the sessions that prompted it. Tips to Get Started Playback digital experiences to pick up trends on how users look for answers, and if you notice common searches that are coming up empty, start compiling a list of missing content to address. Search and Replay Their Digital Experiences to Find Insights You Can Take to the Bank Session replay offers a way to see the digital experience “through your users’ eyes” exactly how your product is fulfilling—or failing to meet—their expectations. And with these tips, you’ll be able to narrow your scope and extract the most valuable nuggets from this data goldmine, which will in turn help inform exactly what ends up on your product roadmap. Want to learn more about session replay? Check out FullStory’s Definitive Guide. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"});
Top 7 Reasons You Need to Conduct a Squad Calibration With Your Product Team
Ocean’s 11. “The A-Team.” All those Fast & Furious movies… US popular culture is littered with examples of assembling all-star teams to overcome the odds and combine their unique skill sets to save the day or pull off a heist. Although your organization may not employ car thieves, cat burglars, or demolition experts, your teams are still a collection of diverse individuals that bring a range of experiences and talents to the table. How will you bring out the best in what everyone has to offer while adapting to unexpected changes in your company, teams in this COVID-19 world? After years working in and coaching numerous software development teams, O’Reilly recently released the second edition of my book on how to get better at adapting to changes in teams, called Dynamic Reteaming. The book focuses on how organizations grow, shrink and change as a natural occurrence. Since your organization is going to change anyway, you might as well lean in, and get better at thriving in times of change as opposed to floundering in it or trying to fight it. So how do you transform your changing team into a symbiotic superteam? And how do product managers fit into the equation? Start with doing a calibration with your product team. What is a Team Calibration? Your “team” is your fellow travelers on this particular phase of your professional journey. They are the team (both ad hoc and formalized in nature) you must work with to bring your product vision to market. Depending on the task or project at hand, its size may vary, as may the unique personalities comprising the team. But what you all share is a need for clarity, alignment, and collaboration to accomplish your collective goals. Team Calibrations are a proactive way to manage the changes in your team to drive your work, and relationships forward. Product Managers Play a Critical Role in Team Calibration There’s no designated facilitator for team calibrations in many organizations, however, product managers are in a prime position to take on this role. Product managers are used to creating alignment and communicating with cross-functional groups, so they should already possess some of the soft skills required to pull this off. But product management is also uniquely suited for this because they are far more familiar with the product and project mission, as well as the “why” that’s driving the whole thing. Product managers know what’s valuable, what to expect, and what’s irrelevant far better than anyone else. Product managers can reframe every task and project within the lens of how this solves a customer’s problem. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '57ff7e42-ccfa-4d9e-b5be-8a0f6ba69363', {}); It’s also in product management’s best interests to have their team operating effectively. After all, you and the team are all working together to turn the product vision into reality. Team calibrations ensure that when a talented team bands together it goes off without a hitch. It’s best to perform an initial calibration when the team is formed or when the composition of the team has changed significantly. When team members come and go, you can re-align with a team calibration. 4 Suggested Team Calibration Activities A team calibration doesn’t have to follow a set playbook; several activities can enhance team performance and interactions. I like to meet with teams to understand what their key needs are, and then devise a workshop that might include some of the following activities. 1. Align on the mission and initial work to be done with a charter While it might be evident to you, the product manager, what a given project is aiming to accomplish and what must be in place to do so, it isn’t always clear to everyone else. Creating a charter for the project ensures that all team members understand expectations and how things fit into the big picture. It isn’t far off from the overall product vision and plan that is already encapsulated in your visual product roadmaps. But it boils things down to just what’s relevant for this particular team. A charter sets down on paper the project’s scope, its mission, and measurable goals. Everyone can look to this for inspiration, motivation, and clarification during the lifetime of the project. 2. Getting to know your teammates There’s a good chance that not everyone on the team will have the same level of familiarity with each other. But the more you know about someone and understand their personality, the more empathetic they can become, and you’ll usually develop more respect for their abilities and knowledge. Invest some time in having everyone share their backgrounds, relevant experiences, and areas of expertise. It can also extend beyond the purely professional realm, as people sharing some anecdotes and interest areas can humanize everyone and break any remaining ice. Some teams will even create posters or shared slides about each member. This activity highlights what people have done, can do, and want to do, along with other details about themselves. You’ll discover commonalities among the team members that might ordinarily remain hidden. It’s all about uncovering each team member’s strengths so you can fully leverage them. Everyone’s great at something, you just need to figure out each person’s superpowers. 3. Users Guide to Me Beyond simply knowing what a person is good at or cares about, it’s also incredibly helpful to understand how people prefer to work and communicate. I’ve found a beneficial tactic for this is to have everyone write up their “users guide to me.” There are many online accounts of how to do this and how it’s helped individuals create a work environment that works better for them. But it all comes down to clearly stating how you work, how you want others to interact with you, and how you best communicate and process information. We’ve all heard about how some people are “visual learners,” and others prefer “overcommunication.” These may be predilections versus mandatory accommodations, but when other people “get” you, it makes a massive difference in satisfaction and output. 4. Agreeing on Workflow and Tools Team members should also select a workflow and tools that meet the specific needs and preferences of the team. It could just be a reinforcement of the standard processes and tools already used in the company, or it could be a variant specifically tailored to this particular team and the work they’re completing. Some folks may prefer digital tools to power their workflows, such as JIRA or Pivotal Tracker. Others may prefer sticky notes on a whiteboard as an ad hoc Kanban board (although probably less common in the COVID-19 era). There’s no right answer, it’s just what works for your team and company. But one essential point the entire team must reach a consensus on is the definition of done. So why bother with a team calibration? Here’s why. 7 Reasons to Calibrate Your Team If you’re not sure whether a team calibration is necessary, consider the following. 1. You Don’t Know Everyone on the Team Whether it’s a new hire or two trying to mesh with an existing cohort of colleagues or it’s a completely new team, any addition to the bunch represents an opportunity to calibrate. It will make new team members feel welcome and start things off by positioning the whole team for success. 2. You haven’t already talked to everyone Once your company graduates from a couple of buddies bootstrapping in a garage or a coworking space, chances are there are coworkers that haven’t really had much dialogue with each other. They may not have had the opportunity, or they might just spend their time in different circles. Regardless of the reasons why there might be a disconnect, this lack of prior conversation is an excellent impetus for some team calibration. No one should feel like they can’t talk freely with any other members of the team. 3. You don’t typically see your team day-to-day In a big enough (or distributed) corporate setting, physical location can be another barrier to optimal team performance. If you don’t already know where everyone is spending the bulk of their working days, there’s a good chance you don’t know a lot of other things about them. Use this opportunity to share everyone’s work environment and how that impacts their preferences for communication, meetings, overlapping work hours, etc. 4. You don’t know what everyone is working on Agile product development only works when everyone’s work is aligned with larger projects, timelines, and goals. If everyone doesn’t know what’s on each team member’s plate, there’s a high probability of a disconnect, which could impact product quality, hitting deadlines, and morale. A team calibration event can mitigate this by giving everyone a glimpse at what others are working on. It’s an opportunity to shift or rebalance responsibilities if there’s a definite issue, but it also builds respect among team members when they realize how much everyone has to do. 5. Everyone’s communicating through their managers Teams intend to flatten hierarchies in the name of innovation. It requires peer-to-peer collaboration among members of the team and not just sending missives up and down the food chain. Relying on managers to mediate interactions, communications, and minor disputes between team members defeats the purpose of assembling a cross-functional team in the first place. If people don’t feel comfortable speaking directly to their counterparts, it’s time for a reset. 6. The team doesn’t share the same vision Teams thrive and flourish when they’re all working in sync toward shared goals. But if the objectives aren’t mutual or are misunderstood, then individuals could be completing work that’s redundant, inefficient, or straight-up in conflict with the output of others. Product managers are already well versed in crafting, honing, and inspiring the rest of the company with a clear mission and vision of the product, so aligning their team should be a top priority. 7. Unclear roles Teams make sense when everyone understands their job and accompanying responsibilities. If things were planned and well-staffed, it’s making the most of their individual attributes while delivering maximum value for the company. But if someone isn’t sure what they should be doing or if the others aren’t aware of how each person’s work fits into the larger plan, it’s time to create clarity. It ideally occurs when the project starts, but it’s worthwhile to occasionally revisit this topic and remind everyone else how it all comes together. Additionally, as initiatives progress and evolve, the roles of team members (and even team membership itself) may also change. The whole gang should understand the ramifications those changes have on each person in the team. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '35d36a84-b157-43a1-acb7-b972dcb1d1ad', {}); Adapt or Fail Calibrating your team isn’t a luxury; it’s your secret weapon to creating a dynamic, high-performing team. Be proactive! To learn specific tactics about Dynamic Reteaming and step-by-step instructions for conducting team calibrations, check out Dynamic Reteaming, Second Edition. Get 20% off through September 15, 2020, at this landing page. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"});
Using Net Promoter Score to Guide Your Product Roadmap
Magoosh, an online test prep company based in Berkeley, California, calls Net Promoter Score their “reliable referral indicator.” And it is. But that’s not all it is. Although many people think of NPS as a customer success or support metric, product developers in innovative companies, like Magoosh and so many others, are using it to help guide their product roadmaps. What does NPS guide them towards? Aligning product around users’ desired outcomes. “At Magoosh, NPS is one of the most important metrics we track – it helps us determine not only whether students like our customer service and user interface, but also how well our products prepare students for their exams.” – Peter Poer, Director – Product Content How Product Teams are Using NPS to Build Better Products & Better Experiences We often see product teams using NPS to track customer happiness (it’s a lean way to get a constant stream of customer sentiment). But, it’s also incredibly useful for helping to prioritize improvements and allocate resources. As Jason Lemkin of SaaStr says – “it is the one metric that keeps SaaS companies honest.” Let’s say your NPS dips. Now what? When NPS alerts you that there is a problem, the qualitative feedback that NPS responders offer can often tell you what the issues are. But, figuring out exactly what went wrong is one thing – finding the best way to solve it for customer happiness is another challenge altogether. Use A/B Testing with NPS This is where Magoosh, a test prep company, brought in A/B testing. They’d identified a falling-off point for their scores after students took the actual GMAT test. Looking into why, they found that passive and detractor students complained that their actual scores were lower than their practice test scores. “Our algorithm was telling students to expect one score, but for some, their official reports were coming back lower – obviously a frustrating experience.” The solution was to fix their score prediction algorithm to be more accurate – but they hesitated: Would it be more frustrating for students to get lower scores on their practice tests, or disappointing scores on the actual tests? Their approach to solving this problem was to use A/B testing to, essentially, optimize for NPS. They deployed the updated algorithm to half of the GMAT students and kept the other half on the previous algorithm. They were able to ask the NPS question and get feedback from currently studying students in real-time, instead of waiting to ask months later after students had taken take their exams and received their results. “Suddenly, NPS had a new use case for us – as a powerful, agile product tool.” Magoosh discovered that the more accurate algorithm had no effect on student satisfaction while studying with Magoosh, which allowed them to roll out the change to all students more quickly. The results: Students from the A/B test who studied with the updated algorithm had their NPS jump 9 points after they completed their exams. Magoosh used NPS data as an agile tool to shape the evolution of their product, prioritize updates, and act as a compass for their product roadmap. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); Effectively Use Qualitative Data for Product Dev The NPS survey asks for qualitative feedback – the “why” behind the number. But there are right ways and wrong ways to use the ‘why’ data you get. And, if not used correctly, you can waste a lot of your product team’s time chasing the wrong leads. Segment by Promoter, Passive, Detractor First, you’ve got to understand where your “why”s are coming from. Promoters? Passives? Detractors? Promoters will tell you what you’re getting right, and maybe, sometimes, what they’d like to see improved. Take their feedback very seriously, because they are your best customers, your target audience, the whole reason you’re sitting in your chair, gainfully employed. Passives and Detractors can be a mixed bag, and here’s why: Some of these Passives and Detractors are not your ideal customers, or target clients. Some of them are just in the wrong place, using the wrong product for their needs. Be cautious about taking their “why”s as directives, you may make your product a worse fit for your Promoters and waste time and money doing so. However, most Passives and Detractors are people who want to love your product. And they graciously contributed their time to telling you what you can do to make their experiences better. Pay attention. Be sure to follow-up with them and thank them all, because they’re doing you a big favor. Segment responses by key user properties Different categories of users have different needs and will experience your company in slightly different ways. You can segment NPS by any property that you have on your users – think about your business drivers. An Enterprise user may have a higher LTV than a Pro plan user. Allocate resources accordingly. Track themes in the feedback Keep score of trends in your feedback, and once you’ve identified a problem experienced by many, A/B test your solution. It is a bit easier to filter and analyze trends with tagging, which gives some structure to qualitative feedback. You can use tags to track common themes related to your customer’s experience of your product or app — such as features, usability, support, pricing, performance. Conduct Additional Research with NPS NPS can help product development teams most when supported with deeper research, and deeper research can be facilitated by NPS segmentation. Hubspot’s product managers, for example, reach out to select NPS survey respondents to investigate further.. In one instance, they found that a mobile app they had created wasn’t getting as many recommendations as they’d hoped, so Hubspot reached out to a subset of users who had a high NPS for the desktop version, but a low score for the app version, to locate the disconnect. Their top tip for reaching out to people is a good one: “Make it clear this request is coming from the product team.” Customers are contacted by a lot of departments – sales, customer service, marketing. But when a call for help comes from the people making the product, it sends a strong message that your company is deeply invested in their success. You’ll get a higher response rate, and very likely, rich feedback. And Don’t Forget to Share Net Promoter Score isn’t just a “customer service” thing, or even a “product development” tool – it’s a tool every team can use to do what they do better. But, sometimes, data stays stuck within the product team, or within customer service. Don’t be afraid to take the lead and close the loop! Pass that data around to other teams. Pass promoters to marketing or sales. You have a wealth of data at your fingertips – don’t forget to share. About the Author Jessica Pfeifer is Co-founder and Chief Customer Officer at Wootric. Jessica has onboarded and advised more than 200 companies on effective use of the Net Promoter System. Prior to co-founding Wootric, Jessica spent six years growing brands at The Clorox Company. She also spent five years in China leading customer experience management initiatives for Aon Hewitt. Jessica holds a BA from Yale University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
What are the benefits of having your launch plan in the same tool as your roadmap?
As a product marketer, I’ve run a good number of launches throughout my career. Product launches. Feature launches. Some were quite big, requiring a tidal wave of activity that spanned departments. Others were small, perhaps only involving an entry in the biweekly release notes. Regardless of size and scope, launches always turn out better when you involve the product team. It should be a given, considering that what you’re launching is a direct result of the research, prioritization, and planning the product team did months prior. So much of the knowledge you need to launch a product—whether you’re a salesperson, a customer success rep, or a product marketer—is in the minds of the product team. But time and time again, we hear from product teams that they don’t have great visibility into what happens during a launch. Many, in fact, describe a siloed approach to launching products. Product teams may be responsible for the planning and development of the product. But the launch of it? That’s someone else’s job. This was one of the significant challenges we set out to solve when we built our new go-to-market tool within LIKE.TG, Launch Management. We wanted to create a single space to plan your launch, where the product strategy could flow from roadmap to execution. We also wanted to give product people complete visibility into all the activities required to launch a new product or feature. So that begs the question. What are the benefits of having your launch plan in the same tool as your roadmap? Read on to find out. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '842368a9-af78-421f-a3cb-4da00ad39f75', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); For those managing the launch, visibility creates the opportunity for better strategy and launch quality. Try searching for product launch software, and you’ll likely come across several project management tools with launch templates. These tools are effective for managing the launch of a new product. However, the product team often doesn’t own or operate them. This creates a scenario where the product team works in one tool, and the go-to-market team responsible for the launch works in another. When this happens, it’s difficult for the product team to maintain visibility into the development of product messaging, creating marketing materials, implementing customer support initiatives, and so forth. You can partially solve this by juggling licenses and getting your product team to work out of both. But in an era of work defined by tool proliferation and the increasing cost of the Enterprise tech stack, that can be expensive to maintain and cumbersome to use. Your launch plan should be in the same tool as your roadmap. It gives the product team a clear view into critical launch activities, allowing them to ensure each demonstrates an understanding of what the product is designed to achieve and for who. It also helps product understand the timing of key communication events to inform their expectations for product awareness and adoption. And finally, it helps product feel assured that every deliverable has an owner. Every piece of the launch has been accounted for, is planned, and is ready to be executed. For those supporting the launch, it encourages roadmap readership. Having your launch plan in the same platform your product team spends their time ensures a cohesive strategy, from plan to launch. But it also plays a critical role in establishing shared ownership of the launch and the entire product strategy. For the marketing folks planning campaigns, the salespeople writing emails, and the customer success reps working with customers, the roadmap needs to be available. If your roadmap has been built well, it contains the context your go-to-market teams need to execute. “Who is this product for? Why did we build it? What goals will it help our business achieve?” Answers to questions these questions are found in the roadmap. And they can guide the development of your launch plan. As a product marketer, I’ll be the first to admit I don’t always read our product roadmap. But I know I can find the information I need for my launch plan in the roadmap. This accessibility encourages viewership of the roadmap in a context that makes the information contained within the roadmap actionable. For instance, if you’re writing product taglines, you can use the roadmap to view supporting documentation. Overall, a product launch should never take place in a vacuum. It should be a natural extension of the product strategy and serve as the execution of the product roadmap. Each launch is your opportunity to measure outcomes. And to determine whether you achieve the goals associated with the overall product strategy and vision. With that being the case, it makes sense that the launch plan should live alongside the roadmap. Schedule a demo with our team to learn more about Launch Management.
What Does a Lead Engineer at LIKE.TG Do in a Day?
I’m writing for the first time on the LIKE.TG blog! Long-time reader, first-time writer. I’m currently a remote Lead Software Engineer at LIKE.TG, where I head up a team of four engineers focused on bringing you List View, among other things. Our team is distributed throughout the United States and Central America, making my workday out of San Luis Obispo, CA unique from our in-house colleagues. I’ve been a part of LIKE.TG for over a year now and am excited about how we’ve approached remote team-building. My time here has been unlike anywhere else, which is rooted in the focus on communication, alignment around projects, and the transparency from our leadership team. A Day in the Life of a Lead Engineer at LIKE.TG Working here is pretty special. So, what does a Lead Engineer at LIKE.TG do in a day? Here’s a look into my Thursday. Morning activities 8:00 am: The alarm goes off and I immediately hit snooze. Half of my team members are a time zone ahead, so they’re already up and working off our team’s backlog before the other half arrives. 8:15 am: Snooze again. Luckily, my commute is right around the corner. 8:30 am: Rise and shine. Now, my baby is awake! I get this time in the morning to bond with him while I make a cup of coffee before my wife takes over. 9:00 am: I’m sitting at my desk. Crack my knuckles, and the workday begins. We use Slack at ProductPlan. I add the :coffee: emoji to our Slack’s #development channel. Our entire development team does the same. We find this to be an easy way to indicate when we’re all available, especially with overlapping time zones. Next, I go into my personal Trello and organize my to-do list for the day. 9:15 am: Time for our team stand up. Here’s where I attempt to make a joke in the morning, it’s challenging with the caffeine just barely sinking in. But our team is benevolent, and I get a few chuckles. Our stand-ups are timeboxed to 15 mins. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '6291e080-7d48-43d6-99df-4a101a0c4487', {}); 9:30 am: At this point, we’re all logging into Zoom for our All Team Retro. It’s an opportunity to give shoutouts, explain what went well, and learn what didn’t go well to better pinpoint what we could improve on as an engineering team. At LIKE.TG, I’ve come to appreciate how much we embrace being “judgment-free.” This enables us to spend time reviewing the wins and losses as an entire engineering team. We’re not a huge team, so we still make the time to do this. We always try to derive some action items from this meeting. Then it rolls into Part 2 of the meeting with the same attendees. 10:00 am: The next part of our All Team meeting is All Team Planning. Myself and other team leads demo what was just released. I like to use this time to “eat our own dog food” and showcase new features we built within LIKE.TG. For instance, I use List View to effectively show what we have in store for the coming sprint. I like to use the Sprint style because I can see our sprint start and end dates. I use Legends to differentiate our Sprint Goals vs. our Stretch Goals—this is nice to have and use as a reference to review past sprints. Here’s what it looks like: Yesterday, I used this same view to pitch what we’re planning to product and engineering stakeholders. I synced up with our Director of Product Management (Annie) and SVP of Engineering (Mark) to agree on which projects align with the business goals for the given sprint. Once they share their feedback, I guide my team with Mark and Annie’s input from our earlier conversation. I love to emphasize that my team helps create the pitch, which goes a long way in building motivation. In today’s meeting, I am presenting my team’s upcoming sprint to the other engineering teams. I value this time when all the engineering teams come together and have the ear of our CEO (Brad), Annie, and Mark. We do a great job of having one single source of truth, and that’s ProductPlan. We’re not scattered between a Google Doc here and a Powerpoint there. My team can see this, and my boss can see the plans at any time. Then I sit back and listen to the other engineering teams present their plans. 10:30: Time for headphones and VSCode. Today is a high context switching day, so let’s pick up a low-hanging fruit item. 11:30 am: Time for more coffee. One cool thing that we do to forge relationships with the team are virtual coffee breaks. These are especially important since we don’t have the opportunity to chat over a water cooler in a remote setting. Once a month, we are randomly paired with another co-worker for 15 minutes (but often the conversation rolls into overtime) and given a prompt question if we need it. It’s a great way to learn about other departments and build your network. 12:00 pm: It’s lunchtime! I grab a bite with the baby before he takes his afternoon nap. I play with our dogs and try to get out and get some fresh air. Afternoon activities 1:00 pm: Once I’m back from lunch, I hold a Project Kickoff with the team. In the background, my dog is barking at the mailman like clockwork. With every Project Kickoff, I like to start with “Why?” and “What is the problem we are trying to solve?” I’ll leverage our customer feedback board in Trello to pull customer quotes that reinforce the customers’ voice and put them first when trying to solve the problem. The better I can convey this message to the team; the more successful the project will be. 3:00 pm: LIKE.TG’s most recent Book Club has been going on for a few weeks. We meet once a week to discuss the chapter we read and answer the questions seeded beforehand. It’s a fun way to collaborate with people outside my team and talk about things that aren’t necessarily tied to the product. We’re currently reading Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High. If you haven’t read this book yet, I highly recommend it! Coffee Breaks and Book Club are just some of the great remote team bonding experiences at ProductPlan. I also get a kick out of some running Slack channels like #pets, #parents, and #battlestations. 4:00 pm: Headphones back on! I set my Slack status to “In the zone” to indicate to my teammates that I may not respond to any messages for a bit. Let’s close this pull request from earlier! 6:00 pm: What a day. Before I wrap, I like to post an end-of-day status in Slack. This consists of what I did for the day and any requests for code that needs to be reviewed or tested. The rest of the team does this as well, which helps us easily resume in the morning when we’re spread out across different time zones. Time to start making dinner and enjoy the rest of the night with my family! Takeaways The days where we are not planning out the next sprint benefit from being more focused. We strive to have as much asynchronous communication as possible and minimize meetings so our engineers can get into the zone. At LIKE.TG, every engineer has a say in how we should go about solving a customer problem. I find that being close to determining the solution is highly motivating for everyone involved. We index on team-building opportunities since remote life can be challenging and encourage people to step away to prevent burnout. We’re all here to support one another and help each other out, this is an example of one of those days. If this sounds good, then you’ll be happy to know, we’re hiring!
What I Learned From My Product Management Internship
Product management isn’t a very well-known occupation—at least among college students. On top of that, it seems like unless someone has been a product manager or has worked directly with a product manager, people have a hard time defining what exactly a product manager does. I first heard about product management in my freshman year of college, and since then, I’ve had the amazing opportunity to work at both AppFolio and LIKE.TG as a product management intern, learning firsthand what product managers actually do. At both LIKE.TG and AppFolio, I’ve been able to observe many successful product managers, and it seems like there are several similarities they all share. 1. Cross-Functional Collaboration First, they work cross-functionally with several different teams, mainly with UX/UI, sales and marketing, and developers. From my perspective, a product manager’s job seems to involve developing a strategic vision and then actualizing that vision, which involves the help of all the different teams. At LIKE.TG, product managers actually seem pretty hands-on, taking on some of the responsibilities of the different teams, and mainly helping with UI design and assisting with quality assurance testing. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'a6df8971-315b-4e8c-ad02-5e133239bfda', {}); During my internship, I was able to experience this cross-functional teamwork. I worked with the UX/UI team, reviewing designs and suggesting changes. I also worked with the QA team to help test new features before they went out to customers, and helped write several Pivotal Tracker stories to document bugs and fixes. For some of my other projects, I worked with sales and marketing to improve lead generation and I helped with user data analysis. Interestingly, according to our 2017 Product Planning Survey Report, the most common challenge PMs face involves working with different teams. 2. Customer Interview Skills Second, product managers are expert interviewers. They’re constantly asking customers for advice and feedback. Don’t know what functionality a feature should have? Ask a customer. Don’t know which interface is better? Ask a customer. Want to know how to expand the product to fit user needs? Ask a customer. Since it’s the customers who are ultimately using the product, it seems like good product managers actively listen to their customers and build their feedback into the product. That being said, sometimes the customer is not always right, and a product manager’s job is to analyze customer feedback to find the root of the problem and implement a solution with the biggest impact. Tweet This: “Good product managers are expert interviewers. They’re constantly asking customers for advice and feedback.” A large part of my summer internship actually involved interviewing customers. Some of these calls were exploratory, some were for validation, and others were simply to ask for feedback on existing features. Finding customers to interview leads us back to the idea of cross-functional teamwork. Customer support, sales, and marketing are departments that are very customer-facing and, as such, can provide valuable input as to which customers PMs should contact or highlight feedback they’ve already received. Since LIKE.TG is a startup, it’s easy for product managers to go directly to each department since they know everyone on each team so well. At AppFolio, it seemed like product managers had one or two go-to people in each department that they sought advice from. 3. Prioritization Practice Third, product managers know how to prioritize features for implementation. How product managers prioritize varies from product manager to product manager, but I’ve noticed that the PMs I’ve worked with tend to prioritize features based on customer demand and company goals. At the root of it, product managers oversee a product, or parts of a product. They’re in charge of determining what features the development team should build, working with UI and UX to figure out how to streamline the interface and overall user experience, and ensuring the product makes it to market. Once the features are out for the customers to use, product managers must compile customer feedback and ensure the success of the features, iterating and changing the features to meet changing customer needs over time. After working as a product management intern, I now have new insight into what it is product managers actually do. I’ve enjoyed my internship at LIKE.TG very much—so much so that I now know I want to become a product manager after finishing my computer science degree. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"});
What is the Learning Center?
Our library of content helps thousands upon thousands of product people every month continue their education and understanding of the product space, thought-leadership, best practices, and trends, all for free. You’ll find over 500 blogs and articles, 250 glossary terms, 50+ webinars, 30 books/guides, 15 checklists, and counting live in the Learning Center. Educating the product community has been a core tenet of LIKE.TG for nearly a decade, and we’re so excited to revamp the experience to empower you with better product education. What is LIKE.TG’s Learning Center? The Learning Center is the central hub of LIKE.TG’s content to educate the product community on best practices and industry trends. Similar to Google Search, you can search for anything product management-related. For instance, we have content on topics from product strategy examples to Agile, presenting a roadmap to stakeholders, change management, and so much more. Of course, if you seek best practices for using LIKE.TG’s roadmap platform, you’ll also find tips in the Learning Center. You can find light, skimmable reading, more extended downloadable readings, in-depth webinars, and quick video tutorials. You can also filter by a category you’re interested in, like roadmap and roadmap management, product leadership, and Agile or development. Finally, you can also filter by your skill level (beginner, intermediate, and advanced) to elevate your educational journey. What’s happening to the LIKE.TG blog? The LIKE.TG blog is also still live. As such, you will find pieces on LIKE.TG’s culture, thought leadership, and product releases on the blog. Our Most Popular Pieces of Content to Get Started Dive in and explore the pieces that readers keep coming back to. The 2021 State of Product Management Report Product Roadmaps: Your Guide to Planning and Selling Your Product Strategy The Product Strategy Playbook From Product Manager to Product Leader What is MoSCoW? What is Product Development? The Ultimate Guide to Product Management? Learning Center Takeaways Finally, the Learning Center hub is easy to navigate to find your favorite product management topics in one place. Let us know your favorite piece of content you’ve read in the Learning Center in the comments below.
What LIKE.TG’s Integrations Can Do for Your Company
TL;DR LIKE.TG integrations help your team extend the value of your roadmapping app. The integrations help you automate the flow of data across your most essential product management tools. This post will show you what some of our key integrations can do for your company. Your Roadmap Doesn’t Exist in a Vacuum. We built the LIKE.TG roadmapping app to simplify product management. Historically, most product managers—including our founding team—were stuck building and updating their roadmaps in spreadsheets and presentation files. We wanted to give product professionals an easy-to-use web platform to let them build and share visually compelling roadmaps. Customers can easily update those roadmaps with drag-and-drop ease. But product roadmaps don’t exist in a vacuum. The information on a roadmap is interconnected with data in other apps used by stakeholders across the company. If your roadmap app does not connect with these tools, your product team could perform a lot of manual re-work and app hopping. For example: As your development team closes out user stories in Jira, you might need to update the status of your roadmap’s initiatives manually. When your product team wants to add backlog items to your Roadmap, you might need to re-enter those items from your original backlog source manually. If you want to walk your stakeholders through your Roadmap but can’t get them all together, you might need to explain your Roadmap over and over as each stakeholder becomes available. If you want to keep up with the progress of roadmap initiatives, you might need to review these details in your development team’s task management app. When you make changes to your Roadmap, you might need to send out the update notifications to stakeholders manually. Soon after we released the LIKE.TG app, we went to work building integrations to connect our customers’ roadmaps with the apps and data sources their stakeholders use every day.Download the Essential Feature Kickoff Book ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '28f87cb3-284f-41bb-aa69-525372e559e0', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Add Value to Your Roadmap with the Right Integrations Let’s look at how a few of the many LIKE.TG integrations can help streamline your workflows, improve alignment across teams, and help everyone in your company make better product decisions. The LIKE.TG Jira integration: sync the development team’s progress to your product roadmap. After you’ve communicated the strategic plan for your product, your development team will break those projects into discrete tasks. They will likely assign and track those tasks in another software development tool, such as Jira. With the LIKE.TG Jira integration, you can 2-way sync fields between Jira and your roadmap so updates to your projects in one tool are reflected automatically in the other (and vice versa). The dev team breaks up an epic into five separate user stories in Jira and assigns an equal number of points to each story. You can associate all five stories with the relevant epic in your Roadmap. And as the developers mark each task complete in Jira, your Roadmap will update the “percent complete” field to reflect the good news. When you click into the epic in your Roadmap, you will see the status of each user story in Jira—either complete or in progress. Key benefit You can save time and stay better informed by monitoring the progress of both your dev team’s tasks and your strategic projects—all without leaving your LIKE.TG app. You can also use your bar’s percent complete feature to show the overall status of the epic based on the total story points the dev team has marked complete in Jira. Note: We also offer an Azure DevOps integration if that’s your jam. The LIKE.TG Confluence integration: make it easy for your stakeholders to stay up-to-date on your product strategy. The LIKE.TG Confluence integration is an example of how our integrations can help you keep stakeholders across your company better informed about your product strategy and progress. This integration lets you embed a live version of your LIKE.TG Roadmap into the Confluence workspace your developers, marketing department, or other teams use to get their work done. Your developers or marketing team spend most of their time collaborating and working in their Confluence wiki. Perhaps they won’t want to log into your Roadmap each time they need to view the latest version or remind themselves about the objective behind an epic or theme. With this integration, they won’t have to. You can create a page in Confluence for these teams to view the current version of your Roadmap without having to leave their favorite workspace or even log into ProductPlan. Your stakeholders can also interact with the Roadmap from their Confluence environment—including adding a comment or question for you. Key benefit You can make it easier for stakeholders to check in on your product roadmap, which will increase the chances they refer to it when needed. The result will be that your cross-functional team stays aligned and up to date on your product’s strategy. Oh, and one more big benefit: Implementing integrations like this, which make life easier for stakeholders across your company, will also help you build a sense of trust, respect, and teamwork among those stakeholders. The LIKE.TG Slack integration: automatically send notifications to stakeholders whenever your roadmap changes With a simple web link, you can invite stakeholders to view the latest version of your product roadmap anytime. But the LIKE.TG Slack integration makes it even easier to keep your stakeholders up to date. With the apps linked, you can program LIKE.TG to send an automated notice to the relevant Slack channel when someone updates your Roadmap. Imagine you have a Slack channel of stakeholders contributing to your product launch: people from the product team, dev, sales, marketing, customer success, and an executive sponsor. Anytime you add an item to a container, change the timeline of an initiative, or make other updates to the Roadmap, LIKE.TG will send a message through that Slack channel. Also, if a stakeholder adds a comment or question on the Roadmap, LIKE.TG will send that exchange to the Slack channel. Key benefit By automatically pushing roadmap-update notices through Slack, you accomplish two objectives. First, you increase the chances of stakeholders seeing a notification they need to know about because you won’t be relying on them checking in with the Roadmap. Second, you eliminate a lot of work for your team, sending out update alerts manually anytime something changes on the Roadmap. Nor are these the only ways this LIKE.TG integration can improve team alignment around your Roadmap. Check out our recent article to discover more ideas for communicating your Roadmap with Slack. Note: We also offer a Microsoft Teams integration if that’s your jam. LIKE.TG Integrations… Thousands of Them We wanted to make sure LIKE.TG integrates with any of the roadmap-adjacent apps and data sources your team uses. That includes tools for task management, DevOps, spreadsheets, team collaboration, analytics, marketing automation, customer relationship management, team chat, etc. So, in addition to the many native integrations we’ve built, LIKE.TG also integrates with Zapier. This integration makes it easy for you to connect your Roadmap to any of the 3,000+ apps in the Zapier library. Want to integrate your Roadmap with Salesforce, Google Docs, Asana, Zendesk, Dropbox, GitLab, etc.? No problem. Just turn on your LIKE.TG Zapier integration—and start extending the value of your Roadmap across your company. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '68f4841e-0e88-4b86-9ddc-7e644a82dc92', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});
What the 2016 DDoS Attack Can Teach Product Managers About Disaster Preparedness
Chances are you weren’t giving much thought to the global stability or security of the Internet on Friday, October 21, 2016. Even if you run an Internet-based business, it likely wasn’t a top concern. But it certainly was on that Friday! That was the day when, for a time, it seemed the Internet itself was at risk of catastrophic failure. In case you’re reading this post several years after its publishing (which, thankfully, means the Internet is still functioning), here’s a quick refresher: October 21, 2016 was the date we experienced what cybersecurity experts at the time deemed one of the largest and most sophisticated hacks ever on the Internet itself. The DDoS attack (a “distributed denial-of-service”) was generated when thousands of Internet-connected devices (digital cameras, DVRs, etc.) were infected with a malware called Mirai — significantly slowing web traffic and disrupting or even shutting down service for many of the world’s most popular websites. Tweet This: “Is your roadmap flexible enough to handle a disaster?” Again, if you’re reading this several years from now, these sites include Hotmail, AltaVista, CompuServe and MySpace… just kidding. It actually affected sites like Amazon, Twitter, Spotify and PayPal. Although all of the specific security measures and defense protocols taken to counteract this DDoS attack weren’t shared with the general public, it seems the companies responsible for the Internet’s backbone handled things as well as we could have hoped for. Perhaps most relevant to our discussion here, the company responsible for the managed DNS infrastructure most affected by the attack — an organization called Dyn — seemed to have a disaster preparedness plan already in place for just such an event. Dyn’s plan included: Technical countermeasures to stop, slow, or at least mitigate the damage A real-time investigation to trace the attack back to its source Real-time learning to help the company immediately develop and deploy new measures to strengthen the Internet’s defenses and prevent similar future attacks An ongoing communications plan to keep the hack’s most affected businesses, law enforcement agencies, the media, and the public informed at all stages of the attack What is Your Product Team’s Plan for a Disaster? As damaging and concerning as that Internet DDoS attack was, it does present us with a silver lining. (See that? No cloud puns. You’re welcome.) This hack serves as a great reminder of the need to review our own disaster prevention and disaster recovery plans — or, to create them for the first time. So the question for you and your business is this: How would you handle a disaster that affected your product and your customers? Do you have a plan in place that can be activated if your product experiences a failure or your company suffers a disaster such as flooding or a cyber hack? Are all of the necessary people in your organization prepared for such an event? Will they know how to respond? Tweet This: “How would you handle a disaster that affected your product and your customers?” And just as important, are you building preventative measures into your product itself? A strong disaster response plan will help minimize the harm done to your company and customers in the event of unexpected emergency. With this massive attack still in the news, this might be a great time for you and your product team to review your disaster preparedness protocols, or develop new ones, and to earn the needed buy-in from your stakeholders to build both disaster prevention and disaster recovery planning into your product roadmap. Here are some suggestions. Disaster Prevention (or Mitigation) for Product Managers As a product manager you are under relentless pressure to add game-changing features to your product. But you need to balance your roadmap’s focus between those headline-grabbing features your stakeholders and customers demand… and the much less exciting but equally important components that will give your product stability, safety, and protection against disruption or failure. Some examples of these to feature on your roadmap include: Compliance and certification Bringing your product into compliance with data regulations like HIPAA, or obtaining quality-assurance or security certification from standards bodies such as ISO can be a good idea. These certifications can help establish your company’s credibility with prospective customers. But they are also important for a more practical reason. Gaining certification from these organizations can serve as a valuable proxy for determining that, yes, your product can withstand many forms of disaster — and either maintain normal operations or recover in a timely manner. The right data backup infrastructure If you’re running a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) application, part of your product development needs to focus on how your customer data will be backed up. Will you store it on a single server? Should you maintain multiple copies of each customer’s data? Will you keep these copies in separate geographical locations to ensure redundancy? Will you encrypt this data while it’s at rest under your care? And if you sell a software product that your customers download and maintain on premise, what responsibilities, if any, will you maintain for backing up their data? Will you have a recommended backup architecture for them to maintain? Will it include mirroring their data to an offsite cloud backup service? To reference our earlier suggestion about certification and compliance, it’s worth noting that federal data laws like HIPAA and GLBA demand regulated businesses to safeguard their customers’ data. Among other measures, deploying a secure offsite backup solution is just one of those requirements. This is to ensure that if the company’s headquarters are affected by a power outage or fire, their customers’ data can still be recovered and accessed. An appropriate level of fault-tolerance Another important but unsexy component of your product roadmap should be a focus on setting up the right hardware to support your expected levels of traffic. You will need to understand the volumes of traffic your product is likely to receive —how many simultaneous visitors, what features they will be using and how much bandwidth that usage will require to maintain a stable and acceptable user experience. The hardware architecture you’ll need to support 1,000 customers will of course be very different from the hardware you’ll need to handle 1,000,000 customers. For this reason, you might also want to campaign for a hardware architecture that is designed for faster and easier scalability. That way, if your product experiences the coolest of all “disasters” — overwhelmed with greater-than-expected customer usage — you will be able to quickly ramp up capacity to keep your customer enjoying a high-quality user experience. Tweet This: “Fault tolerance: not as sexy as a new feature, but still important for your roadmap.” Of course, some of the suggestions we’re offering here might fall under the responsibility of your engineering team or some other department in your company — and not product management. That’s okay. The important thing is that you have these disaster prevention items on your mind and that they make it onto the product roadmap. How about you? What disaster preparedness or recovery strategies has your company put into effect? Have they proven useful? Please share them here. These are the types of learnings we’d much rather gain by reading a blog post than from firsthand experience.
What We’ve Learned from User Feedback: Enhancing Our Platform
At LIKE.TG, we’re constantly striving to improve our products and services to better meet user needs. That’s why we were so excited to release our first-ever customer survey last month. Our customer survey was a pivotal step in our journey to thoroughly understand our customers’ challenges when using our platform. By focusing on these areas, we can ensure that our product strategy is not only customer-centric but also aligned with our users’ needs and expectations. In our customer survey, we asked users about: Areas of LIKE.TG that work well for them Areas of improvement for LIKE.TG Usage of currently available integrations Which integrations they want to see in the future Our product team cares deeply about building a product that exceeds expectations. We want to lead by example and ensure we put our customers first with a customer-led product strategy. Our commitment to continuous improvement is unwavering, and we are dedicated to making the changes that matter most to you. While our product team is working hard behind the scenes to implement what we’ve learned, we wanted to share some of our key findings and takeaways from the survey. What we learned from the customer survey results The survey revealed invaluable insights into how people use our product management software and what value it provides to product teams across various industries. Most importantly, our product team wanted to know what areas of LIKE.TG met user expectations and where we needed to improve. When we probed what was working well, customers shared that the best parts of our platform include the ability to visualize and communicate work, ease of use, and planning and prioritization. On the other hand, when asked where LIKE.TG could be improved, customers shared that Product Strategy & OKRs, planning and prioritization, and visualizing and communicating work were the most critical areas. In the past few months, we focused on developing many areas of our product management platform, including our Strategy, Teams, and API features. However, our survey results tell us that there is still room for improvement. While our team has put in a lot of work to go beyond roadmapping, we plan on revisiting the heart of our software and prioritizing efforts to improve the functionalities that customers value most. The feedback shared in this customer survey was consistent, leading our team to invest in the problems we aim to help our users solve. We hear all of our customer feedback, and we remain committed to empowering organizations to effortlessly craft, communicate, and prioritize strategic roadmaps with confidence. Our ongoing commitment to solving customer problems Our customers’ honest insights about their experience using our platform will have a lasting impact on our roadmap and the direction of our products. While our team continues to do what we do best—work hard to provide the most value to our users—we welcome all of our customers’ feedback and hope you’ll stay tuned to see what changes we’ll announce in our major Fall Release. As a result of your feedback, there are some exciting improvements coming soon. We value your feedback and believe continuous improvement is a powerful way for product leaders to embrace change and innovation. If you’re a current LIKE.TG customer and have insights to share, we encourage you to contact our Product Team at [email protected]. Let’s keep the conversation going!
What Your Executives Want to See When You’re Presenting Your Roadmap
As a product manager who now sits on the other side of the table as an executive, I’ve had lots of experience both presenting executive-facing roadmaps and receiving those presentations. I understand how much thought (and possibly anxiety) goes into these roadmap presentations. They’re the culmination of months of work, customer conversations, and experience. There’s no need to be afraid of your roadmap, either. They’re the capstone for a product manager’s vision and strategy. I want to share my thoughts from being on both sides of the process. I hope it gives you some inspiration to help you present executive roadmaps that align, guide, and facilitate the right conversations. And of course, to help you deliver a better product to your customers. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '57ff7e42-ccfa-4d9e-b5be-8a0f6ba69363', {}); Mistakes I’ve Seen When Presenting Executive Roadmaps The most common mistake product managers make in the roadmapping process is assuming they know exactly what to build without building consensus first. Of course, you are the customer expert, but leading with the assumption that you alone know the ideal priorities has consequences that might sabotage your well-intended agenda. The best way to overcome this is through curiosity and communication. Have informal discussions with executives and other stakeholders before the executive planning meeting. That way, you’ll present a roadmap with the right priorities and align those to the company’s business goals. It will help you to have a seamless review and approval process. Another key mistake: over-optimism. Believing your team can deliver more done than is realistic sets everyone up for disappointment in future planning meetings. If you must create a roadmap with delivery dates, try to keep broad timeframes such as quarterly. Things are always more complicated and take longer than you and your team think, right? It will help your cause if you educate executives over time to know that you can only estimate fuzzy delivery dates and that priorities will certainly shift. How to Present Your Executive Roadmap Delivering a winning roadmap presentation to the executive team isn’t just about the hour or so you get in the conference room. It takes a combination of preparation, execution, and follow-up to get your plans blessed and leave a room of satisfied and confident stakeholders in your wake. What to do before the roadmap presentation With so much focus on the roadmap itself, many people overlook one of the fundamental secrets to success: laying the groundwork for when you present your executive roadmap. The goal of a roadmap presentation isn’t to wow the audience of stakeholders. You’re not trying to knock them off your feet with bold new ideas and surprises. In fact, if stakeholders are seeing things for the first time during your presentation, you’re setting yourself up for failure and frustration instead of praise. A big reveal during a roadmap presentation puts everyone on the defensive and opens yourself up for a debate of whether it’s the right thing to build Alternatively, prepare everyone in advance for what they’re going to see. Build enough support and consensus that the presentation itself is an official sign-off opportunity. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); Continuous communication and conversation Remove the element of surprise and set the stage for broad acceptance and support by maintaining a dialogue with each stakeholder in advance of the presentation. You want each person to be familiar and comfortable with each item on the roadmap. Schedule time with each stakeholder at least a couple of weeks in advance. You can most effectively get alignment by linking each item back to the overarching business goals guiding the prioritization and roadmapping process. Don’t tell people that something’s essential—explain why it’s crucial – why it will add customer value or delight customers in some way. Then justify its priority and a rough timeline. Moreover, remember that these should be two-way conversations. The aim is to solicit feedback from your stakeholders at this stage. Again, curiosity goes a long way. Give them enough time to solicit feedback from their own organizations. While you may not agree with everything you hear, you’ll have the opportunity to incorporate their suggestions when warranted. Ideally, any dissent or open issues are dealt with and resolved well before everyone gathers together for the actual presentation. Set the agenda The objective of an executive roadmap presentation is to get their approval. Your agenda should reflect that. Provide enough context about the strategic goals to set things up and then efficiently communicate the elements of the roadmap itself. Address any outstanding issues or questions that require the entirety of the executive team to settle. Finally, get a solid green light to move forward (or particular action items if they’re not yet ready to provide that). Your slides or visual aids should move the conversation along accordingly, with a firm eye on the clock as you go. You only have so much time with the entire group assembled, so stick with the important topics and table everything else. Scope it out A quick way to reduce your credibility is to predict specific ship dates. As a product manager, you’re only one input into the development effort. You and your engineering team may also be unaware of dependencies that can impact a schedule. Do your homework, huddle up with tech leads, and develop rough estimates for each initiative (and have an idea of the minimal version for each one). Preparing this information will prevent you from overpromising and under-delivering. Plus, it’s helpful when you’re prioritizing. It might also come in handy during preliminary conversations with executives (or during the meeting itself) if there’s a request to reshuffle some things. During the Roadmap Presentation The main event is all about meeting executives wherever they are. They are not obsessing over your product roadmap. They’re trying to figure out how to achieve the business goals and want to see how your roadmap helps get them there. Show them. Keeping the strategic goals top-of-mind helps create and deliver a productive and successful roadmap presentation. Stakeholders want to walk away confident in the path you’ve plotted and excited to see your plans come to fruition. The power of a visual Using graphics and pictures to connect the roadmap to the rationale behind it is helpful. It ties the initiatives in the roadmap to actual customer value, business goals, and meeting real needs. Big picture thinking Executives have a lot on their plates and generally, try to stay as high level as possible. While you might want to take a deeper dive into the platform details with the CTO or the new messaging opportunities with the head of marketing, this isn’t the forum for those interactions. Those more specific conversations can take place before or after the presentation itself. This meeting is all about consensus, buying in, and signing off. Sticking to the big picture avoids thorny topics or detours that might lose the audience or make them question if the plan is fully baked. Levels of certainty Product managers aren’t psychics, so every roadmap item sits somewhere on the spectrum between “definitely going to happen” and “definitely a possibility.” However, without the proper context, executives will view everything on there as equals when it comes to delivery expectations. Unfortunately, people hear what they want to hear. Don’t be afraid to acknowledge that there are unknowns. Communicate your level of certainty for each initiative during the presentation. There are two dimensions to this. The first is more prominent, in that the further out you go, the less certain things are for everyone. You can mitigate this by creating roadmaps that don’t extend as far into the future. However, beyond that, there may be uncertainties driven by things other than the calendar. There may be unknowns lurking, such as dependencies, regulatory issues, expected new technologies, or customer commitments. If these could impact the roadmap and leave you less certain about some items, be sure to call that out. Product managers will often color code or identify roadmap initiatives based on how positive they are that it will all fall into place. Tie everything to business goals This audience cares about top-line business goals. While they may not embrace a “by any means necessary” mentality, they also don’t have time to worry about all the details. Therefore the context of the entire conversation should be about the KPIs they care about and how the roadmap moves the needle in the right direction. For example, how does a particular feature accelerate growth or decrease churn? How does a roadmap initiative influence progress on a strategic objective? Your presentation should both ask and answer those sorts of questions, as that’s what interests executives. Everything else is a detail. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '5894a003-79ce-4ea3-9804-dae280a96106', {}); There will be questions If you’ve done an excellent job beforehand, your presentation shouldn’t have a bunch of “gotcha” questions. You’ll already know the hot button issues before the meeting and will have addressed them in previous discussions or during the meat of the presentation. You, of course, should be asking consensus-building questions during the meeting. And you will likely hear a few different types of questions from executives: Clarifications and deeper dives. An executive may want to drill down on a particular element of the presentation. It’s OK to answer, but if it’s going to derail the momentum offer to meet with them later to discuss things in detail. A direct challenge. Maybe you didn’t quite have the consensus you thought you did, or perhaps you had a holdout you were hoping would be won over by the crowd. Ask questions to uncover the real concern. Don’t be afraid to let an ally on the executive team chime in with their support. An impromptu change request. Despite all your preparatory work, an executive may decide the roadmap review is the time to ask for something to be added, dropped, or swapped. It might be totally valid and based on new information, or it could be a bright shiny object that will fade under a more in-depth examination. In the end, it’s possibly a good idea, but it’s your job to educate them that there are other higher priorities. After the Presentation Follow up and follow-through Chances are you walked away with some sort of to-do list. It could be sharing the roadmap with other parties, further research, providing more data, or clarifying something. Don’t let those open issues fester; get on them as quickly as possible so they can be closed out. Closing the loop, maintains momentum and shows you’re responsive and were paying attention. You can also formalize any final decisions by sending out a follow-up email outlining what was decided and the expected next steps. For executives, this is the “speak now or forever hold your peace” opportunity as they realize this roadmap is now ready for execution. Changes to roadmap priorities are inevitable. Alert the executive team when these changes happen as part of your job. Also, if any of those disruptions require executive input, don’t put things off any longer than necessary. You don’t want to have that hanging over your head for the next meeting. Finally, if it turns out some of the business goals that drove the prioritization and roadmap planning have evolved, be sure to re-engage with the executive team and grapple with their impact. Don’t assume you should stick with the existing plan. Product management is hard. But presenting your roadmap to executives is your opportunity to shine and show why you were hired in the first place. Learn how to build an executive-facing roadmap with these 8 tips.
When to Declare Backlog Bankruptcy
A few years ago, I was the acting product manager at a startup, developing an enterprise software product. Building the product was hard: it was taking longer to develop than everyone expected (of course). The complexity of what we were trying to accomplish became more evident as each day passed. The product backlog I managed grew daily. I heard requests from customers, domain experts, consultants, our development team, and internal stakeholders. And I diligently added the stories to the backlog. Feature request? Add it to the backlog. Bug found? Add it to the backlog. Corner case we needed to handle one day? Backlog. Declaring Backlog Bankruptcy I diligently prioritized and managed the epics and stories, moving them into the next two or three sprints in the sprint backlog. As the months passed, it became clear there was no way we’d be able to develop what was in the product backlog over the next few months. There was rising frustration from the whole team at the pace of development, partly from the perception that we would never get to everything. And every day, my stress grew as the backlog ballooned. What was the point of diligently managing the backlog when it would be impossible to accomplish it all? Especially when everything a few months in the future would likely be different? So along with the CTO, I made a decision – we’d declare backlog bankruptcy. Every story, issue, bug, and idea that we weren’t planning to release in a near-term sprint, I would delete. Clicking Delete was one of the harder things I’ve done. Over 600 items… gone. But then something interesting happened. There were no repercussions from that decision. And I got a sense of relief after eliminating the cognitive overhead created by the backlog. And after ruthlessly prioritizing and limiting what we added to the backlog, we got the product to market faster. Starting from scratch felt GOOD. The lesson declaring backlog bankruptcy taught me was that if an idea has high enough value for customers, it will come back. It will bubble up to the top. I no longer keep massive lists of all the ideas and things I want to do in the future. Sometimes the simplicity this creates in your product is a positive experience for customers. It also taught me more about the purpose of the product backlog – it’s not a place for every future opportunity. We needed to have a process around what gets added to the backlog. Download the free Backlog Refinement: How to Prioritize What Matters Book➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'ba6d6ffb-c21a-41c0-8f7e-7f79e553dae1', {}); What Does a Healthy Backlog Look Like? Every organization doing agile software development does it a little bit differently. My approach isn’t for everyone, especially for organizations that need to have more certainty about their product roadmap more than a few months out. For me, I’ve been a part of startups using only some variant of scrum. We plan the stories a few sprints ahead, guided by the epics and themes on the product roadmap. That’s typically enough for any product manager. Ideally, there aren’t hundreds of stories in the backlog. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); When the product backlog is too long, it clouds the vision and creates underlying stress of what’s not getting done. A shorter backlog frees you up to think about what’s most important. It improves creativity. Think in timeframes of perhaps three to six months out. Think about your process for what gets added to the backlog. It’s not for every possible “future” idea that you haven’t necessarily committed to. Yet you still likely want to track ideas and inspiration you’re getting from customer interviews. And you might want to remember who asked you for a particular feature so that you have context. For those situations, I recommend creating a separate “future opportunity” list, so you have a place to add your learnings as you proceed with customer discovery on the idea. After having been involved in launching multiple products over the years it’s clear to me that things you think are super important today aren’t as pressing a few months from now. So by adding every idea to the backlog, you’re doing yourself a disservice. But the stories and epics that you believe will add lots of customer value in the short term go for it. Also, it’s good practice to include bugs, tracking them and peppering them into near term sprints. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'a4593ff5-0cd1-4437-86db-eff7703f0d47', {}); Warning Signs Your Backlog is Unhealthy As a product manager, how do you know you’ve entered the dangerous territory with your backlog? Here are some of the things I’ve found to watch out for: Your backlog has become a dumping ground for every random idea from every stakeholder. Sure, it feels good to be able to tell a vital stakeholder you’ve “noted” their opinion, but is the minuscule, incremental cognitive overhead worth it if you do that 100 or 1,000 times? You’re adding ideas that you’d like to implement “someday.” This thinking is long-term, and because everything is guaranteed to change from a product, customer, and competitive standpoint, what’s the point? I suggest deleting anything in your backlog that is older than six months. You’re spending hours every month prioritizing items that aren’t winding up in your short-term sprint backlog. Be thinking every day about what will provide customer value in the short term. Sometimes You Need to Add More Now, to be clear, there are many situations where you might want to add something to the backlog even if it’s not going into a near-term sprint. For example, if your CEO believes a feature has merit, and you want to validate the idea and at the same time let them know you’ve noted it in the product backlog. If you absolutely must keep a long product backlog because it’s necessary from a corporate or process standpoint, try organizing it or grouping it by a theme, such as “near term” and “long term.” That might help a little bit with your sanity. As I mentioned previously, you don’t need to track everything that goes into your product backlog. You can use a separate “opportunity” or idea backlog, such as the Table Layout in ProductPlan. This approach is a great way to capture ideas that you haven’t committed to, and that need further validation. My decision many years ago to declare backlog bankruptcy has yielded so many lessons for me since then. By the way, out of extra caution, before I clicked Delete, I exported my product backlog. And I never went back to look at it. Want to learn how to efficiently funnel backlog items onto the product roadmap?Read Your Guide to Product Roadmaps hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '019ceee1-45ce-493c-8270-b738861f2296', {});
When to Declare Backlog Bankruptcy
A few years ago, I was the acting product manager at a startup, developing an enterprise software product. Building the product was hard: it was taking longer to develop than everyone expected (of course). The complexity of what we were trying to accomplish became more evident as each day passed. The product backlog I managed grew daily. I heard requests from customers, domain experts, consultants, our development team, and internal stakeholders. And I diligently added the stories to the backlog. Feature request? Add it to the backlog. Bug found? Add it to the backlog. Corner case we needed to handle one day? Backlog. Declaring Backlog Bankruptcy I diligently prioritized and managed the epics and stories, moving them into the next two or three sprints in the sprint backlog. As the months passed, it became clear there was no way we’d be able to develop what was in the product backlog over the next few months. There was rising frustration from the whole team at the pace of development, partly from the perception that we would never get to everything. And every day, my stress grew as the backlog ballooned. What was the point of diligently managing the backlog when it would be impossible to accomplish it all? Especially when everything a few months in the future would likely be different? So along with the CTO, I made a decision – we’d declare backlog bankruptcy. Every story, issue, bug, and idea that we weren’t planning to release in a near-term sprint, I would delete. Clicking Delete was one of the harder things I’ve done. Over 600 items… gone. But then something interesting happened. There were no repercussions from that decision. And I got a sense of relief after eliminating the cognitive overhead created by the backlog. And after ruthlessly prioritizing and limiting what we added to the backlog, we got the product to market faster. Starting from scratch felt GOOD. The lesson declaring backlog bankruptcy taught me was that if an idea has high enough value for customers, it will come back. It will bubble up to the top. I no longer keep massive lists of all the ideas and things I want to do in the future. Sometimes the simplicity this creates in your product is a positive experience for customers. It also taught me more about the purpose of the product backlog – it’s not a place for every future opportunity. We needed to have a process around what gets added to the backlog. Download the free Backlog Refinement: How to Prioritize What Matters Book➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'ba6d6ffb-c21a-41c0-8f7e-7f79e553dae1', {}); What Does a Healthy Backlog Look Like? Every organization doing agile software development does it a little bit differently. My approach isn’t for everyone, especially for organizations that need to have more certainty about their product roadmap more than a few months out. For me, I’ve been a part of startups using only some variant of scrum. We plan the stories a few sprints ahead, guided by the epics and themes on the product roadmap. That’s typically enough for any product manager. Ideally, there aren’t hundreds of stories in the backlog. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); When the product backlog is too long, it clouds the vision and creates underlying stress of what’s not getting done. A shorter backlog frees you up to think about what’s most important. It improves creativity. Think in timeframes of perhaps three to six months out. Think about your process for what gets added to the backlog. It’s not for every possible “future” idea that you haven’t necessarily committed to. Yet you still likely want to track ideas and inspiration you’re getting from customer interviews. And you might want to remember who asked you for a particular feature so that you have context. For those situations, I recommend creating a separate “future opportunity” list, so you have a place to add your learnings as you proceed with customer discovery on the idea. After having been involved in launching multiple products over the years it’s clear to me that things you think are super important today aren’t as pressing a few months from now. So by adding every idea to the backlog, you’re doing yourself a disservice. But the stories and epics that you believe will add lots of customer value in the short term go for it. Also, it’s good practice to include bugs, tracking them and peppering them into near term sprints. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'a4593ff5-0cd1-4437-86db-eff7703f0d47', {}); Warning Signs Your Backlog is Unhealthy As a product manager, how do you know you’ve entered the dangerous territory with your backlog? Here are some of the things I’ve found to watch out for: Your backlog has become a dumping ground for every random idea from every stakeholder. Sure, it feels good to be able to tell a vital stakeholder you’ve “noted” their opinion, but is the minuscule, incremental cognitive overhead worth it if you do that 100 or 1,000 times? You’re adding ideas that you’d like to implement “someday.” This thinking is long-term, and because everything is guaranteed to change from a product, customer, and competitive standpoint, what’s the point? I suggest deleting anything in your backlog that is older than six months. You’re spending hours every month prioritizing items that aren’t winding up in your short-term sprint backlog. Be thinking every day about what will provide customer value in the short term. Sometimes You Need to Add More Now, to be clear, there are many situations where you might want to add something to the backlog even if it’s not going into a near-term sprint. For example, if your CEO believes a feature has merit, and you want to validate the idea and at the same time let them know you’ve noted it in the product backlog. If you absolutely must keep a long product backlog because it’s necessary from a corporate or process standpoint, try organizing it or grouping it by a theme, such as “near term” and “long term.” That might help a little bit with your sanity. As I mentioned previously, you don’t need to track everything that goes into your product backlog. You can use a separate “opportunity” or idea backlog, such as the Table Layout in ProductPlan. This approach is a great way to capture ideas that you haven’t committed to, and that need further validation. My decision many years ago to declare backlog bankruptcy has yielded so many lessons for me since then. By the way, out of extra caution, before I clicked Delete, I exported my product backlog. And I never went back to look at it. Want to learn how to efficiently funnel backlog items onto the product roadmap?Read Your Guide to Product Roadmaps hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '019ceee1-45ce-493c-8270-b738861f2296', {});
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