Why Do You Need Roadmapping Software? Roadmapping software has emerged as a core need for the modern product manager. In a role that requires not only the creation of both a vision and a strategy for what to build and why, but also the communication of that vision to an endless sea of stakeholders, product managers must be able to quickly build roadmaps that are visual, compelling, simple to navigate, easy to customize, share, and integrate with the other vital tools within their toolkit. While some software may try to cover the entire gamut of what a product manager might do on any given day, there are those tools that focus solely on roadmapping. This is for a good reason. The roadmap is the focal point around which everything else orbits. It is a strategic tool, a product management tool, a communication tool—even a visualization tool. As such, it needs dedicated features to support all of these important functions. Today, we’ll be comparing two roadmapping platforms designed to do just that: LIKE.TG vs. Roadmunk. Both founded in 2013, LIKE.TG and Roadmunk offer software that makes it easy to build and share beautiful roadmaps. Before we go any further, a quick note on objectivity. As a product marketer working for LIKE.TG, you could argue that any competitive analysis I write about these two platforms will be biased. My mission with this piece is to be as objective as possible with the resources I have available. Education is a core function of what we do here at ProductPlan. We want to ensure product managers have the knowledge and tools to find the software that works best for their use case. Now on to the comparison. LIKE.TG vs. Roadmunk: Ease of Use When evaluating a new platform, the first impression usually isn’t whether or not the platform will help you achieve your goals (although that might be the most important consideration). Often, the first impression is whether or not the platform is easy to use. It could have all the features in the world, but it won’t make a bit of difference if those features are hard to find if the controls are clunky, and the in-app onboarding is obtuse. Product managers are short on time, bandwidth, and often energy. As such, roadmapping software needs to be easy to adopt. Product Introduction In the case of LIKE.TG vs. Roadmunk, both do an excellent job of introducing you to the platform with the following features: In-app tutorials and help messages Roadmap template designed for your use case Contextual links to help articles on the support section of their website Seen here below: The ability to start with a roadmap tailored to your use case is a great way to get users familiar with the platform. This is specifically helpful for anyone who might be new to roadmapping or product management in general. They can use these templates as a framework for how their own roadmaps could be built and function as a great jumping-off point. Roadmunk also features a nice additional option to view a real-world roadmap example for inspiration. Both platforms also feature in-app tutorials but implement them in different ways. LIKE.TG greets you with an optional 2-minute guided tour of the platform that does a good job highlighting all the primary features and functions before taking the training wheels off and allowing their users to explore independently. Suppose at any point a LIKE.TG customer wants to revisit the tour or access other tutorials. In that case, they can find them readily available in the bottom right-hand corner by clicking on the green light bulb icon. Roadmunk similarly has in-app tutorials but instead surfaces them contextually when a new user clicks on a particular feature. This gives users guidance as they explore, which some who would rather poke around at their own speed might prefer. Building Roadmaps Regarding how easy it is to build and edit roadmaps within each tool, let’s refer to Capterra, a popular site for software reviews and comparisons. Ease of use is one of the primary categories that factor into their overall score for a particular product. Both LIKE.TG and Roadmunk score well here, with LIKE.TG having the edge over Roadmunk with a score of 4.5 (out of 5) to Roadmunk’s 4.3. Looking at each feature set in combination with individual reviews gives us a glimpse into why LIKE.TG has a slight advantage. Here’s a quote from Capterra: Customers like LIKE.TG’s drag-and-drop control scheme, which makes on-the-fly edits intuitive to create. Additionally, the ability to drag items from the sidebar, whether it be a container, bar, or even an item from the legend, makes building out a comprehensive roadmap a relatively quick process. This isn’t to say that Roadmunk is challenging to use. Roadmunk also features the ability to move roadmap items around with ease, as this user calls out about in particular: Where Roadmunk does run into some ease-of-use problems is in its performance. Several reviewers cite poor performance, long load times, and more that weigh down the overall experience. Ease-of-use issues for LIKE.TG mostly center on its simplicity, which occasionally doesn’t allow for more advanced use cases as we see here: While both LIKE.TG and Roadmunk feature similar control schemes and in-app tutorials, the performance issues that continue to gnaw at Roadmunk’s platform give LIKE.TG the greater advantage here. Edge: LIKE.TG LIKE.TG vs. Roadmunk: User Interface (UI) When it comes to the UI of a roadmapping tool, there are a few important considerations: Is the UI easy to navigate? Are the colors and fonts appealing to the eye? Is the information presented legibly? Do the roadmaps created with the tool look professional? Does the UI create moments of delight? Some of these considerations are subjective. For example, a color scheme or font family that appeals to one person might be downright ugly to the next. So as we dig into the LIKE.TG vs. Roadmunk UIs, respectively, we’ll stick to a more objective analysis centered around one primary question: Does the UI of the tool enhance or detract from the user experience? Roadmunk’s UI The Roadmunk interface is a lively place. The bright colors pop against an off-white background, visually categorizing roadmap items by ownership, goal, or theme. Bars pulse as you hover over with your mouse, helping users orient themselves within the UI. Arrows crawl across the screen, connecting bar to bar, illustrating dependencies. The question, then, is, do these little “flourishes” within the UI help or hurt a user’s ability to use the tool? I think it depends. Some might enjoy a more animated interface, and certainly, anything that helps users identify the information they need is a good thing. But others might find these features, specifically the animations, distracting. There is still a degree of personal preference here. There are also different flavors of Roadmunk’s UI, depending on the view you’re looking at. For example, in Roadmunk’s timeline view, roadmap items are represented as thin bars that stretch across the screen, with easy toggles at each end that allow users to extend or contract each bar as needed. In Roadmunk’s Swimlane view, roadmap items are instead represented as cards that display a little more information outright without requiring users to click into each card individually. Taken together, these differences are a nice visual touch that helps users distinguish between each view while also giving users a functional reason to look at one view over another. LIKE.TG’s UI LIKE.TG’s UI also features bright colors that users can customize as they wish but lack some of Roadmunk’s UI animations. Overall, it’s a more static screen. Like Roadmunk, LIKE.TG also features two views, which LIKE.TG refers to as Timeline and List View. But instead of taking Roadmunk’s approach, where each view is given its own UI, the Timeline and List view’s design is fairly consistent. While you do lose some of the functional variations with this approach, the holistic standardization it brings to the roadmap helps users quickly understand what’s being conveyed regardless of the view. What LIKE.TG does skillfully is present information clearly and legibly. The way they visualize items vs. sub-items (in their case, containers vs. bars) helps users understand at a glance which items rollup into larger initiatives, as seen below. There’s a good use of white space here too, which helps the roadmap feel less cluttered. Additionally, using different colors within a specific lane or container allows product managers to better track initiative goals, ownership, and more. Overall, both UIs look great and function similarly with a few key trade-offs, namely function vs. design and variation vs. consistency. Which is better ultimately comes down to what you prefer. Edge: Tie LIKE.TG vs. Roadmunk: Customer Feedback For product managers, what gets prioritized on the roadmap is largely a result of customer feedback. Listening to your customer’s problems, understanding their goals, and measuring the impact of in-market products via customer sentiment are critical components of deciding what to build next or what to fix first. Due to this, many product management tools have built features that help product managers capture customer feedback. For these features to be effective, they need to allow product managers to tap into the vast array of sources for customer feedback and then have a place for that feedback to be aggregated, analyzed, and then transitioned to the backlog (or deleted if found irrelevant). Roadmunk delivers well here. Their platform includes a “feedback inbox” where customer-facing teams (sales, customer success, etc.) can submit feedback for product managers to review. Roadmunk has also built a Chrome extension that allows team members to capture feedback from popular tools like Salesforce, email, and more for ease-of-use. From here, specific feedback can be assigned to a specific product or product manager and then linked to the product backlog for prioritization. LIKE.TG doesn’t support feedback capture, at least in this way. It features a Table View with both a planned and parked section. Still, this view is designed more for backlog management and prioritization—not capturing individual feedback ideas directly from customers. The Table View does make it easy to organize backlog ideas, with ways to categorize and sort items, however. Edge: Roadmunk LIKE.TG vs. Roadmunk: Prioritization In comparing LIKE.TG vs. Roadmunk, both have prioritization boards that feature pre-built frameworks and weighted scoring systems for helping users decide which backlog item makes it on the roadmap. Using these boards, product managers can score backlog items according to a customizable set of benefit vs. cost categories. These categories could be aligned to essential company goals, like revenue generation and customer adoption, or known costs like development effort and maintenance. This feature is excellent for enabling product teams to consider all the essential variables that go into prioritization decisions while teaching new product managers how to score roadmap items based on tried and true methods effectively. One advantage to LIKE.TG’s prioritization board is the ability to create custom weights for each benefit or cost. For example, perhaps building features that generate revenue is less important than building features that increase customer adoption. If that’s the case, LIKE.TG will allow users to assign weights that reflect each consideration’s overall importance to the company. Overall, both prioritization boards work great, but the edge goes to LIKE.TG for its additional customization options. Edge: LIKE.TG LIKE.TG vs. Roadmunk: Roadmap Functionality When we dig into the roadmaps’ functionality, we see a lot of parity between LIKE.TG vs. Roadmunk. First, both focus on ease of use, with templates that allow product managers to avoid starting from scratch. Secondly, both include a Timeline View as well as a Swimlane or List View. Finally, both feature ways within their UI to track progress, set milestones, and illustrate dependencies. You can find a full breakdown of roadmapping features below. LIKE.TG vs. Roadmunk: Feature Breakdown Is there a clear winner here? Not really. How each tool goes about implementing the features above might differ subtly, but the end experience is largely the same. Edge: Tie LIKE.TG vs. Roadmunk: Roadmap Sharing While building a roadmap that effectively tells your product story is likely priority number one, we can’t dismiss the importance of sharing the roadmap to a broader audience or the ability to customize what you share based on the audience. When done right, your roadmapping tool should double as a communication tool. Both LIKE.TG and Roadmunk have taken that lesson to heart, with features to filter roadmaps for specific audiences based on goal, ownership, and more. The initiatives an engineer might be interested in tracking likely won’t be the same as a CEO, for example. Each platform also includes ways to publish the roadmap, either via URL links or in a PDF/PNG image that can be added to an email or presentation slide. LIKE.TG vs. Roadmunk: Roadmap Sharing Breakdown While parity exists between most of LIKE.TG’s and Roadmunk’s sharing and publishing features, there is one crucial difference to note. LIKE.TG offers unlimited viewers across all of their pricing plans. This means an organization doesn’t have to pay for additional licenses just so team members can view and comment on existing roadmaps. This is especially important for larger organizations that have a variety of stakeholders that might need to view and approve roadmap initiatives. In contrast, Roadmunk charges an additional $5 per viewer (note: they call viewers “reviewers”). Roadmaps provide the most value when shared, and LIKE.TG’s allows organizations to share their roadmaps with more people at a lower cost. Edge: LIKE.TG LIKE.TG vs. Roadmunk: Integrations Roadmapping is merely a piece (albeit an important one) of a much larger set of strategic activities that product managers are invariably responsible for. This may include planning sprints, gathering customer feedback, validating product-market fit, and communicating with various stakeholders within their organization. For each activity, a product manager will often use a tool, be it Jira, Azure DevOps, and even Slack. If the product roadmap is to be your source of truth, your roadmapping tool must be able to capture the additional work happening across your toolkit when relevant. Here’s how LIKE.TG vs. Roadmunk’s integrations with other product management tools stack up. LIKE.TG vs. Roadmunk: Integration Breakdown Both LIKE.TG and Roadmunk feature a native Jira and ADO integration, which allows product managers to connect their overarching product strategy to the daily objectives necessary to execute it. It’s a natural synergy, one that reduces the amount of manual updating required to ensure both tools reflect the same data. In both cases, the integration is primarily used to sync fields between tools using a two-way sync. That means that sprint planning information can be pushed into LIKE.TG and Roadmunk, or the inverse; updates made to your roadmap can be pushed to your delivery tools. Jira isn’t the only integration product managers ask for. Other tools, such as GitHub,and Trello, are popular additions to a product manager’s toolkit. LIKE.TG offers native integrations for many of these tools, the full list of which you can see above. To integrate these same tools with Roadmunk, you’d have to install their API and build a custom integration yourself, provided you have the time and development resources to do it. LIKE.TG also has an API for anyone that would like to build a custom integration not listed above. Edge: LIKE.TG LIKE.TG vs. Roadmunk: Data Organization and Flexibility Both tools feature a wealth of ways to organize the information and data one might want in a roadmap. With each tool, you can organize your roadmap items by the project owner, by the team, strategic objective, completion status, line of revenue, target audience, product line, and more. Both tools also feature lanes, legends, and columns that can be adjusted to have more than one category of information represented and cross-referenced. This ensures that both tools code information in the ways that best suit the product manager’s individual needs. However, the ability to “pivot” this data is one major difference between LIKE.TG and Roadmunk. Roadmunk offers it. LIKE.TG doesn’t. Data pivoting refers to the ability to shift data represented as rows to columns (in a spreadsheet, for example). In the case of a roadmap, select almost any standardized field and represent it as a lane. For example, you could switch your lanes to the product owner and see what individual contributors to your roadmap have in their queue. On the one hand, data pivoting gives product managers a good degree more flexibility in the different views they can create within their roadmap. But there’s a tradeoff here. The more ways a product manager can orient their data means more variations of roadmaps, which can create issues with consistency and standardization in larger teams. If you need the extra data flexibility, then Roadmunk is the way to go here. Edge: Roadmunk LIKE.TG vs. Roadmunk: Pricing When it comes to pricing, Roadmunk features four pricing plans (billed either annually or monthly): Starter: $19 per month Business: $49 per month Professional: $99 per month Enterprise: Contact sales LIKE.TG features three pricing plans (billed either annually or monthly): Business: $39 per month Enterprise: Contact sales Enterprise Plus: Contact sales Both tools also offer a 14-day free trial. Four plans vs. three with slightly different naming conventions makes comparing pricing between these two tools seem more complicated than it is. Roadmunk does offer an additional “starter” plan for individuals. Still, otherwise, for the sake of simplicity, you’ll want to compare LIKE.TG Business vs. Roadmunk Business, LIKE.TG Enterprise vs. Roadmunk Professional, and LIKE.TG Enterprise Plus against Roadmunk Enterprise. Comparing plans along those lines, Roadmunk is the more expensive tool to start. Their Business plan is $10 more expensive than LIKE.TG’s. Moving through the more expensive pricing plans, LIKE.TG adopts a “contact sales” approach which suggests some room for flexibility depending on your use case. Roadmunk does this too, but only on their final Enterprise Plus plan. Roadmunk is also more restrictive than LIKE.TG, depending on the pricing plan. Notice how they restrict reviewers, API access tokens (for integrations), file attachment size, products supported, and custom weighted factors depending on which pricing plan you’re on. LIKE.TG doesn’t restrict access to its tool, nor does it limit the use of most features within its tool by pricing plan (the sole exception here being its MS Teams integration). Both LIKE.TG and Roadmunk provide additional administrative features for their higher-priced plans, as well as enhanced security. Better training is also reserved for those willing to pay more. For a detailed list of what you get with each plan, check out each pricing plan and compare. Overall, in most cases, you get more for less with LIKE.TG, so they grab the edge here. Edge: LIKE.TG Download the Product Planning Guide ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'a00f7861-658a-4ef3-829a-60fc115c8a11', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Key Takeaways There are quite a few roadmapping tools in the market these days. Which you prefer will ultimately be determined by functionality, feature set, design, and how much you’re willing to pay for it. If you want to pay more for a tool with better feedback capture, greater data flexibility, and a more animated UI—Roadmunk may be the way to go. If you want to pay less for a tool that’s easier to use and learn, offers more integrations with more tools, and doesn’t charge you every time you want to share your roadmap with someone else in your organization—LIKE.TG is your best bet. Click the link to try LIKE.TG’s 14-Day Free Trial. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '56139fb5-57dd-4d1a-a48d-efc65befde61', {});

Mind the Product has certainly established itself as a premier event for product people to connect, share, and learn from their peers. For 6 years now, the conference has drawn product people together from all corners of the globe. Last year, we were thrilled to attend, and published a recap blog post of what we learned (10 Takeaways from Mind the Product 2017). Unsurprisingly, this year did not disappoint, as we were once again reminded what we love about the product management community. There were plenty of nuggets of wisdom shared throughout the day. Topics ranged from the product management career path, to improving customer interview questions, to product launch best practices. After digesting the rich diversity of insight shared, we thought we’d share our own list of four themes that really stood out at Mind the Product 2018. 1. Product Managers are generalists in a world of specialists. Martin Erikkson kicked off the day with a brief but humbling perspective on our roles as product managers. He admitted that he often feels the effects of Imposter Syndrome. As product people, we’re surrounded by brilliant engineers, creative designers, and motivated marketers. Amidst the brilliance, it can be hard to feel like you belong. That feeling, or awkwardness as Martin called it, is important, and product managers should embrace it. As he said, “In order to be innovative, we have to end our addiction to always being right”. You can’t solve everything, and often times you will be wrong, but with the support of a team (your specialists) you can turn those failures into opportunities. Building on that notion, the next speaker, Christina Wodke, suggested that as a product manager, you have 3 jobs: You’re a business owner, a vision holder, and a team coordinator. We all know there’s no set path to product management – we come from diverse backgrounds and experiences. For example, Christina was managing a restaurant before she became a product manager. This experience taught her valuable lessons that transferred over to product management. For example, she realized that any effective team must have: Mutual accountability A common purpose Performance goals Complementary skills You’ll often depend on other departments (and more importantly, other people) to help you achieve your goals as a product manager. Teams should be collaborative and they should work to help each other. After all, we make products to make people’s lives better. People are at the heart of our products, and should be at the heart of how we work, too. 2. Data, data, and more data Leisa Reichelt, Head of Research and Insights at Atlassian, started off her presentation with a simple question: Is bad research better than no research? Product managers love data. After all, who doesn’t love a good graph? But as Leisa astutely reminded us, “Just because you can put information on a graph, that doesn’t make it science.” She said we should be more critical of what data we trust, and what we don’t. We rely on data to define our successes—and our failures. So shouldn’t we make sure it’s as useful as possible? As an example, Leisa examined how to conduct better customer interviews. She pointed out that the answers you get depend on the questions you ask. When interviewing, she advised: Start with a wide context. Be user (not product or feature) centered. Invest in analysis. Treat this like research. Preceding Leisa’s talk, we heard from Cindy Alvarez, an expert in customer research. Cindy offered great, tactical suggestions for how to reframe your interview questions to avoid confirmation bias. As she mentioned, “Any yes or no questions will have an obvious socially preferable answer.” Instead of simply asking “Do you want this specific feature?” rephrase your question to maximize its utility. For example, “Tell me about a feature that would improve your experience”. But Cindy also pointed out that before you can ask the right questions, you have to ask the right people. A sobering point she made is that “we look for evidence that proves us right, and we avoid or ignore evidence that contradicts our beliefs.” Cindy dubbed this the “Happy Customer Bias”. What we should be doing, she suggested, is talking to our churned customers, customers with low usage, and those who use our competitors’ products. From this we are reminded that the context and source of your data is just as important as the data itself. Focus on a data set that tells the whole story. Fail to do so and you’ll never know where opportunities might exist. 3. We have a responsibility to our customers – and the world! It’s a little telling that two different speakers independently chose to include the same quote in their presentations: “With great power, comes great responsibility.” Dan Olsen delivered an interesting perspective with this quote. He pointed out that while product managers might not feel like they hold great power, they certainly hold great responsibility. Dan conceptualized the product development process by breaking it into two categories: the problem space, and the solution space. As he advised, “Don’t jump to solutions. Start in the problem space”. Doing this helps remind us that the products we build are meant to serve people’s needs. We should provide solutions to real problems—not create problems for which we reactively offer solutions. Once we understand the problem, we can take steps to address it. Dan referenced the Kano Model as a useful framework for linking potential solutions to the problems they address: Touching on the importance of ethics in developing products, Mariah Hay spoke about the potential ramifications of the products we build. Her philosophy is “First do no harm”. Mariah reminded us that we are serving people, and that “focusing on human-centered ethics will pay dividends”. As she said, “Product managers are problem finders and solvers. But if we’re not careful, we’ll be problem creators.” She cited companies like Volkswagen and Cambridge Analytica. Clearly, the decisions we make in building products can have dire effects on our communities and our society. 4. Successful products do not require divine intervention Not every company is going to be successful. In fact, most of them will fail. So what is the secret to building a product that prevails? A few speakers tackled this topic from different angles. One was Nir Eyal, who delivered an energetic and insightful talk questioning how we handle distractions. Why are we distracted? Nir considered that we are trying to escape from discomfort, and he challenged us to acknowledge our own distractions. He even recommended time management products like Forest (a mobile app that encourages less smartphone usage) and SelfControl (a web app that helps you avoid distracting websites). To be “indistractable” is today’s ultimate superpower, he said. Avoiding distractions helps create a better work space. And according to Tom Coates, the final speaker of the day, the best ideas we have require work. Innovation doesn’t strike from the divine. Rather, it comes from hard work and perseverance—sometimes over the span of many years. In his presentation, “How to find the product”, Tom recognized that everyone is capable of having good ideas if they’re willing to put in the work. One thing that may help build better products, according to C. Todd Lombardo, is reconsidering how to utilize a roadmap. Todd was preaching to the choir for us LIKE.TG folks in attendance. As he said, “A roadmap is not a list of features or a detailed release plan.” Roadmaps are strategic, and they may look different for everyone. His recipe for an effective roadmap has 5 parts: Product vision Business objectives Timeframes (long term, or short term) Themes A Disclaimer (a way to manage your audience’s expectations) Sarah Tavel further added to the discussion on what makes a successful product. We know that eliminating distractions and building a clear roadmap is key. But Sarah also gave us a way to measure our success. As she explained,“What matters is not growth of users. It’s growth of users completing the core action.” Her point was that the best products are the ones where, if they no longer existed, we would have the most to lose—products like Instagram and Pinterest that create a library of memories and interests. If these disappeared, we’d be devastated to lose all the energy we’ve put into them. Successful products are the ones in which people find continued value. And no, it doesn’t require divine insight to build them—we just have to be willing to put in the work. Final Words on Mind The Product 2018 Much like last year’s conference, Mind the Product 2018 focused a lot on the human elements of product management. The speakers satisfied our desire to learn with actionable advice and compelling data. But more importantly, they inspired us with their personal stories and experiences. We may all build unique products for a variety of people, but at the end of the day, product people are people too. We can all learn something from the motto at Slack HQ: “Work hard and go home.” As product managers, it can be easy to forget to take some time for ourselves. And who knows, maybe your next big feature idea will come from focusing a bit more on your own life and the ways in which you personally interact with products!

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending HubSpot’s INBOUND conference in Boston. The conference marked my first trip to Boston (go Sox!) and was a delightful mix of education, networking, and hot buttered lobster rolls. All three were immensely satisfying. INBOUND 2018’s theme, “Grow Better,” was thoughtfully incorporated into every track of the event. Many talks focused on empowering marketing, sales and customer success teams to help their respective companies scale up and grow their customer bases. As modern marketers, we have the tools available to deliver personalization at scale, and it’s our responsibility to create a customer-centric growth strategy and deliver value to our users with every touchpoint. As a product marketer myself, I believe that product marketing plays an important role in acquiring and retaining customers. INBOUND 2018 left me feeling inspired and ready to create a better experience for visitors and customers. In the spirit of paying it forward when you’re gifted useful knowledge, here are 5 key takeaways for product marketers. 1. Marketing deserves a seat at the product table (but sometimes it needs to fight for it). In my first breakout session (and one of my favorites from the entire week), Matt Hodges from Intercom shared advice from his experience surviving as a marketer at a product-centric company (slides here). Matt was the first marketing hire at Intercom, a high growth SaaS company that focuses on customer messaging. He shared his experience building out a product marketing team at a company with a product that the founders believed “sold itself.” One of Matt’s main points was that marketing leadership deserves a voice in discussions about product. It’s easy for product managers at a product-centric company to think they have everything figured out. And it can be extremely difficult for marketers to gain respect and prove value in that environment. Matt shared three solid tips for earning respect from product management: Know your product better than anyone at the company. Know who you sell to and who you’re up against (customers, current competitors, future competitors). Know how your product team works. Embed yourself in their process when you can. The fact of the matter is, product teams that don’t take advantage of talking with marketing are missing out on extremely valuable front-line product feedback. But it is largely up to marketing to prove their value and earn the right to share their feedback. Suggestion: If you are a marketer at a product-centric company, don’t just expect clout from the outset. Put together a tangible plan for proving value, gaining respect, and making your voice heard. 2. Customer Success is part of the product (and should be part of your launch strategy). A major theme discussed at INBOUND 2018 was the continuous shift from a more traditional funnel-centric mindset to HubSpot’s concept of the growth flywheel. The flywheel is essentially a continuous circle where the customer is at the center and sales, marketing, and customer success work in tandem to grow and support that customer base. I personally see a few challenges with HubSpot’s idea of the flywheel. One being that it forces you to lose the concept of an input, and that there’s no easy way to visualize the customer journey. But, I like seeing customer success finally receive the respect it deserves. Not only is customer success an important component of the product (as Peter Merholz famously noted, “the experience is the product”), but also, it plays a vital role in growing MRR and therefore should be included in your overall growth strategy. Alison Elworthy, VP of Customer Success at HubSpot, spoke about this in her talk, “How to Evolve Your Customer Success Strategy to Fuel Your Company’s Growth” (slides here). One section of her talk especially resonated with me: using customers as a go-to-market lever. As customer acquisition costs (CAC) rises—CAC has risen 50% in the last 5 years across all industries—-and buying behaviors change—customers don’t trust businesses anymore, they trust their networks—customer success teams play a massive role in growing a company’s customer base and increasing customer lifetime value (LTV). At HubSpot, net promoter score (NPS) is a key business metric. which continuously gets measured at various stages in the customer journey. As results are measured, they’re shared across the organization (HubSpot, like LIKE.TG, has a designated Slack channel for NPS responses). But the team at HubSpot knows that customer delight is not solely the responsibility of the customer success department. It is a team sport influenced by a wide variety of levers. HubSpot took specific steps to ensure this is the case, including: Creating a dedicated customer marketing team. Tying sales commissions to customer performance (commissions are taken back if a customer churns too early) and promoting sales team members based on them bringing in *successful* customers as opposed to just gross volume. Making NPS a performance metric for product teams in addition to product line-specific revenue. The end result was a customer success team that not only prevented churn but created a contingent of successful customers that expanded their usage and served as important reference customers. Suggestion: Make sure your marketing goals are tied to long-term customer success. Try measuring campaigns against the lifetime value they generate for the business as opposed to just looking at lead volume or customer count. 3. Don’t overthink it. In a refreshing talk on the viral side of B2B marketing, Nathan Rawlins (CMO at Lucidchart) shared his experience creating and publishing a series of viral videos showcasing Lucidchart’s product in an accessible fashion (slide here). First off, his videos are fantastic and should serve as inspiration for any creative B2B marketer trying to figure out how to make their product relevant to a wide target market. Here’s their most popular video to get you started: Second, I loved one of Nathan’s key takeaways from his experience: don’t overthink it. Lucidchart’s most successful video took two days to create. One of their biggest flops, however, involved a significant amount of resources to create and launch. Part of the “don’t overthink it” mantra is creating an environment where experimentation is welcome and failure is accepted as part of the game. Nathan’s team never imagined their video series would be as popular as it was. But if it wasn’t for the culture of experimentation at Lucidchart, they might have never created the first video. Suggestion: If you lead a marketing team, make sure everyone feels comfortable experimenting and making mistakes. Build experimentation into your DNA. Better yet, write it down and make it a part of your company values. 4. Marketing is becoming more and more conversational. Whatever your opinion might be about chatbots, there is no denying that marketing has trended more towards conversations over the last 5 to 10 years, and this includes product marketing. In his talk, “Introduction to Conversation Growth Strategy,” Brian Bagdasarian, Senior Conversational Strategist and Inbound Professor at HubSpot, talked about the evolving role of chatbots and conversations in the customer journey (slides here). One of the most important takeaways from Brian’s talk was the importance of context, especially when it comes to live chat. He outlined a number of don’ts to consider when rolling out chatbots: Don’t have a chatbot suggest a visitor to view a webpage that they are already on. Don’t use a bot for tasks that are highly custom and require a human touch. Don’t have a bot lie about whether it’s a human or not. The end goal is creating a conversational touchpoint that delivers the right message at the right time. While chatbots and live chat can be useful, one main challenge is figuring out when to use them (as opposed to a different medium, such as email or one-way messaging). At LIKE.TG, we have a simple cheat sheet for determining what medium to use and when. Live chat for a message that is likely to elicit a response and spark a conversation (we use Intercom). A slide-in or pop-over with a short form for a message promoting an asset or content offer (we use Hubspot). A formless tooltip or pop-up for messages serving to educate or quickly share new features (we use Pendo). We have seen great success with launching new features via live chat messages. These feature launches serve to re-engage leads or inactive conversations, and the ensuing conversations often result in an increased number of conversions or (at the very least) important feedback on the feature that is being launched. Suggestion: Experiment with using live chat in appropriate situations. Decide ahead of time what the goals of your experiment will be and make sure they are tied to creating a great experience for your user. 5. Your marketing strategy needs to by in sync with your sales process. Prospects today expect a custom, tailored approach when it comes to marketing and sales outreach. But one of the challenges of creating this personalized customer journey is maintaining that personalization as your company scales. It’s easy to chat live with customers when your customers number in the hundred. But what happens when you have 100,000 customers? In their session at INBOUND, Jamie Sloan, Director of Marketing Operations and Automation at InVision, and Francis Brero, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at Madkudu, shared their experience moving the marketing and sales teams at InVision to an account-based model as opposed to a traditional MQL-type model (slides here). InVision’s smarketing (Sales + Marketing) model is actually quite similar to ours at LIKE.TG: they are a SaaS tool with a portion of free users, a portion of self-service customers, and a portion of enterprise customers. The challenge InVision faced was building a marketing and sales process that worked for their enterprise leads. Because the purchase journey was so different, the traditional model of scoring individual contacts and assigning them to sales just didn’t work. InVision ended up working with Madkudu to implement an account-based model of marketing and sales that worked. I think there are two very important takeaways from Jamie and Francis’s experience: First, you need to find a smarketing process that works for both sales and marketing. And they need to stay in sync. And you can’t be afraid to change them as your company grows. Second, you need to find a smarketing process that works for your customers. Individual contributors don’t want to get calls from sales trying to sell them on a company-wide enterprise deal. Marketing messaging to c-level executives should be different from the messaging aimed at one-person-shop designers. Suggestion: Evaluate your current smarketing strategy and see if an account-based approach might help address the challenges you’re facing. Inbound 2018: Some Final Thoughts There were of course plenty more takeaways from INBOUND 2018, but these were the 5 which I found most useful as a product marketer. Periods of growth are always exciting times for marketers and product people, but they tend to come with their own sets of unique challenges—growing pains, if you will. During these times it’s always useful to hear stories and advice from people who have made similar journeys themselves. But at the same time, it’s important to remember that every team is different and what works for others might not be the best solution for you.

When I joined Sonos in 2005, I was the only software product manager. The company, known for its wireless smart speakers, was founded 3 years earlier and had just recently launched its first product. At the time, Sonos had 3 offices in Santa Barbara, California, Cambridge, Massachusetts and Hilversum, Netherlands. When I left the company in 2017, the company had expanded to 12 locations worldwide, as well as a boutique retail store in SoHo, New York. During my tenure, the company grew from about 50 employees to nearly 1,500. Fortunately, the co-founders of Sonos started, led, and scaled the company successfully. Many leaders, however, have failed to scale their companies for reasons that can be explained by the following myths. Myth #1: Scaling fast is the key to success. Many people believe in the mantra “Go big or go home.” While this saying might make sense if you’re a professional athlete, this is usually not the best way to build a successful, long-lasting business. In fact, scaling too soon is often the cause of death for startups. Zynga is often cited as the poster child for scaling too fast too soon. As part of their rapid growth as they sought to dominate the mobile gaming market, they hired a massive number of employees from competitor gaming company Electronic Arts while spending hundreds of millions on acquisitions such as OMGPop. The company didn’t compensate for scaling other parts of the business which became even more critical as the corporate culture tried to absorb thousands of employees from different companies. Birchbox very recently sold a majority stake of their business because they were running out of cash. Birchbox’s co-founders have talked about how they quickly scaled the company by doubling in size each month and being relentless about feature changes. They were so focused on growth and change that they overlooked two very important factors: First, they failed to successfully diversify their revenue from selling full-size products (which was part of their original business plan). Second, they didn’t keep their eye on the competition and lost market share to newcomers such as Ipsy and Fabfitfun. Generally speaking, growth cannot be forced. Sure, scaling is often an indicator of a company’s recent success, but be careful not to believe that a causal relationship exists between the two variables. The companies that scale effectively are patient, and they strike when the timing is right. Tweet This: “Companies that scale effectively are patient, and they strike when the timing is right.” Myth #2: More developers = fewer problems. Somewhat related to myth number one, is a problem that I encountered during my early days at Sonos. It was one of the few times I saw the company struggle to scale. There was a point when the ratio of software developers to product managers at Sonos was 50:1. It was recognized that this was a problem and there were even jokes made about cloning me. The fact of the matter is that it was really hard to hire good software product managers who met the high quality bar that Sonos had established. When I asked the head of engineering to scale back on hiring until we could bring on more product managers, I was laughed out of his office. The ratio did improve over time, but it took a long time to get there. A key lesson from my experience is that companies that are focused on doubling the number of employees month over month or year over year need to be careful not to overlook certain functions or departments. When you add more engineers to crank out more features, you’ll need more designers to create the user experiences for those features, you’ll need more marketing people to tell the stories behind why those features matter and you’ll probably need more customer success people to help your customers deal with changes. Myth #3: Innovation slows down the more you scale. As companies get larger, especially once they go public, their appetites for risk usually grow. Public companies become laser focused on hitting their quarterly numbers and limiting risk is a big part of their strategy. However, it doesn’t have to be this way. Just look at Google. Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have stayed closely involved in the management of the company while maintaining a commitment to innovation. They have done this by committing to research as well as fostering internal idea incubation. When Apple announced the iPhone SDK in 2008, the Sonos product team quickly reacted to what would be a huge market change by making the bold decision to embrace mobile and launch a free mobile app despite selling its own remote control product for hundreds of dollars. By pivoting quickly and spinning up a product team that could design and develop for a completely new software platform, Sonos was able to ride the wave of innovation that was enabled by the iPhone. Sonos eventually phased out its hardware controller in 2011. Myth #4: Money makes it easy to expand to new markets. This myth is also similar to growing too big too fast. Often when companies receive an infusion of funding in their early years, they are tempted to spread themselves thin and introduce products and services to address adjacent markets. But when you are scaling your company, it’s best to stay true to your mission (and hopefully, your company has a clear mission) and stay focused. Think about the great startups that have grown into huge businesses. Google was all about search. Amazon just sold books. When I was at Sonos, we would often be asked by customers, retailers and the press when we would have a product for video or for cars. This is when our leadership team really shined because we would always stay true to our mission of filling every home with music. That has allowed the company to successfully scale in a very intentional way. The odds of being truly great at one thing are low. Don’t make it even harder by spreading yourself too thin. Warby Parker is a great example of a scaling company leading with its mission statement. Since launching in 2010, Warby Parker’s founders stayed true to their roots by offering designer eyewear at a revolutionary price, all while leading the way for socially conscious businesses. They haven’t launched a shoe line and they don’t sell handbags. They just do one thing and they do it extremely well. If you are a product manager at a startup, you are likely to see your company struggle with some of these myths. If you want to be a great product manager, use your skills of influence and critical thinking to identify these potential dangers before they arise, and help your leadership team understand these pitfalls. One way to do this is to create and share a well-planned roadmap that explicitly outlines your company’s core initiatives for the foreseeable future. While this is a great way to explain to your team what you will be working on, it also communicates what you will not be doing. For example, if you are a product manager at Warby Parker, you could explain “We’re not launching a shoe line” in the next 3 years. Letting your stakeholders know what is off the table can be just as helpful as letting them know what you do plan to build. Another thing you can do is to be aware of your company’s hiring plans and speak up if you detect any imbalance in projections. There is no magic ratio of product managers to developers, but knowing the pitfalls of unbalanced teams will help you advocate for what is best. Finally, be willing to let go. Be willing to let go of your ideas. Be willing to let go of your preconceived notions. Be willing to let go of that product that sustained the business, but will ultimately become an anchor that drags down your business. Stay focused and stop chasing unicorns and rainbows. Because the best way to scale like the Amazons and Googles of the world is by doubling down on what works, just like they did.

It’s that time of year where I’m both overwhelmed and excited to work on my roadmap. Maybe it’s the feeling of a fresh start and an empty calendar. Perhaps it’s all those social media resolutions to eat better or work out more or learn a new skill. Or maybe it just has enough time off from work to form some new perspectives. Whatever the reason, there’s no questioning that January is the official home of the “Roadmap Revolution.” Why the Roadmap Revolution? During this time of promise and possibility, we allow ourselves to begin anew, mix things up a bit, and try something different. Revolution is a chance for a fresh start. The old way doesn’t have to be the only way going forward. You can change the things you want to change. You’re empowered to make things as awesome as you want them to be. When it comes to your roadmap, it’s an opportunity to clear your “mental cache” and reemphasize what’s important. We can take a step back from the daily grind, recenter, and focus on what will move the organization toward its most important goals and objectives. This reexamination is difficult when you’re in the throws of business as usual. Our roadmaps get loaded down with baggage over time. Then inertia sets in, and we stop questioning why things are on there because they’ve become the status quo. We don’t have the time or mental bandwidth to ask ourselves if the “why” is still valid or if there’s a critical missing piece we’ve overlooked. But the start of the new year is our chance to hit reset, take a deep breath, and resurvey the landscape. At ProductPlan. write and share resources on roadmaps all the time on our blog and in our Learning Center. Part of the landscape resurvey we see is roadmap readership grows by 68% in January. The Roadmap Revolution bug is making everyone hungry for learning and improvement in the new year. Tweet This: “Roadmap readership grows by 68% in the month of January. The Roadmap Revolution bug is making everyone hungry for learning in the new year. ” While it’s likely not time to scrap everything and start from scratch, there’s no better opportunity for a seismic shakeup. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '7c551d2b-ed71-444c-888b-18461bcb6944', {}); Some Data that Shows You’re Primed for Change The roadmap revolution doesn’t happen in a vacuum—you’re still going to need stakeholder alignment and executive buy-in for your new master plan. But there is more openness to change and optimism about the future during the early part of the calendar year. In January 2020, there was a flurry of activity in LIKE.TG’s roadmap platform. We found that our customers shared roadmaps 39% more often than they did the other 11 months in the year. They also make changes to legends 57% more frequently. Bar dates were edited an extra 23%. If your company happens to use January as the start of its new fiscal year, other changes will create a more open environment. Not to mention there’s still time to influence budget and lobby for more tools for your product stack. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3be75db1-0d50-46dd-b222-ce0aa84f6b08', {}); What Your Roadmap Revolution Might Entail Everyone’s experience may vary when it comes to their own roadmap revolution. Outdated, misaligned, or unfocused items will be dependent on one’s individual situation. Take a lingering look in the rearview. New years are about what lies ahead. But it is important to start with an examination of what’s already happened. Think back on the past year and break down how you and your product roadmap got to its current state. Were there technical breakthroughs or blockers that shifted the course? Did a competitor’s actions cause a scramble to react? Was an overbearing client or juicy prospect throwing its weight around and disrupting plans? While your organization’s reactions to these events may or may not have been appropriate, they inevitably sideline other initiatives. What deserves a second look? And knowing what you know now, are they still the right items to prioritize? Beyond these disruptive forces, what did you learn last year? Whether it’s data-driven insights sifted from analytics or a deeper insight into what makes the management team members tick. What do you know today that twelve months ago was a mystery? Adjusting your style. In addition to these external factors, we’ve hopefully applied some introspection to ourselves as well. We all have areas we can improve upon. Those can even surface in our product roadmaps through subtle nuances or deliberate decisions to steer product strategy. Switch things up to a Kanban view, so they focus less on “when” and more on “why,” if stakeholders are too obsessed with dates and deadlines. Ditch the specifics and move to a theme-based roadmap emphasizing overarching objectives over specific deliverables if your roadmap looks more like a feature factory than a strategic plan. Try adding color-coding and a legend to provide additional context if the motivation behind roadmap items isn’t clear. Employ swimlanes if you’re trying to help stakeholders visualize how work maps to various implementation teams or parts of the product. Add a key milestone or two if you can’t completely ignore dates but don’t want them to dominate the roadmap conversation, If you want to show how the whole master scheme comes together andbreak down some silos, use a portfolio view to show all your products’ high-level roadmaps on a single screen. Employing any (or all) of these visual elements can add entirely new dimensions to the roadmap experience. Do this to communicate much more information and explanation from the same page. Download the Cross-Functional Partnerships Checklist ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3fa6d5d9-0d4d-435e-9254-5101713ba85f', {}); Revisit your story. Product leaders are storytellers, and product roadmaps are key to the tales we spin. But is the story we shared last year the same one we want to spread in the year to come? Over time, the setting evolves, characters change, and our goals and objectives may shift. Now is the time to ensure the roadmap reflects the story we want to be telling, not the one we gradually slipped into. Resetting the roadmap to ensure itfocuses on outcomes versus features is a critical step in this process. Assess whether the themes are still appropriate and match the latest thinking, or if it’s time for new ones to emerge and phase out older ones. If your roadmap doesn’t help you tell the story you want to tell, make that change. Convert features into value statements, and don’t treat it like a parking lot. Hold every item up and make sure its “why” is still valid. Download Feature-less Roadmaps: Unlock Your Product's Strategic Potential➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '75a856d7-09d6-4ced-a463-0d114a3752bf', {}); Planting the Seeds for the Roadmap Revolution Roadmap revolutions don’t happen overnight, and the best-laid plans begin months before the true shakeups take shape. Starting in November, I connect with engineering and implementation teams for some reality checks. North Star I layout where we want to be two years out as a North Star of sorts and work backward. What must happen this year so that vision can happen in Year Two. This drives what our 12-month roadmap for the coming year must contain for the longer-term vision to have a fighting chance while ideally giving current customers some true added value in the interim. Backlogs This also sets the stage for the hardest part of roadmapping… cutting out the clutter. Our backlogs and parking lots are full of great ideas, but we can’t do them all. So, if they’re not helping us set the stage for our ultimate goals, cull them from consideration. That’s not always easy. You’re disappointing internal stakeholders and customers. You’re taking ownership of sunk costs and broken promises. But this is the hard work of progress and evolution and the only way to excel in the areas the organization prizes most. Don’t forget to position your own team for this new outlook. You don’t want to dump a new roadmap on them and tell them to “make it happen.” Squad Recalibration Set aside time right before or after the New Year’s break for a little squad recalibration to ensure everyone knows the new plan and is happy with their role in it. It’s an excellent time to shift roles and responsibilities if appropriate, which can also be energizing for team members to embark on this journey’s latest leg. You want to create momentum and get people talking about the most important things in the right way. Reconnecting the product’s daily activities and nuances to the business and overall objectives create renewed motivation and clarity regarding adding value. But don’t assume they’ve parsed it all perfectly; make sure they’ve connected the dots in their own minds for optimal results. The Roadmap Revolution is Real You might be thinking this is all just an excuse to reiterate how pivotal roadmaps are to the product management process. Still, people really do spend more time roadmapping in January than at any other time of the year. We see spikes in product trials, usage data, and web site searches, indicating this is a genuine phenomenon. Best of all, this process can be inclusive and engaging for stakeholders across the organization. While you’re tweaking the product’s plans, your sales team is going through its own reevaluation. Ask them if their target account list has changed or if they’re shooting for a new vertical this year. It’s also a great time for customer service and account management check-in to see what trends they noticed over the course of the previous year and which product capabilities users are asking about lately. Likewise, aligning with marketing regarding their messaging to the market and major activities. Touching base with key customers themselves can also pay dividends. They’re going through their own revolutions and resolutions as they set their own goals and outlooks for the coming 12 months, and their shifting priorities may influence which value propositions your own product should emphasize. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'bcf47ad4-3832-42c0-9ae8-1fd954c6be9c', {});

Not every product manager is lucky enough to work with a purpose-built roadmapping tool. But those that do seldom return to their old methods of managing the product roadmap. The great benefits outweigh other roadmapping options such as spreadsheets and presentations. When we asked Jay Hum, Director of Product for Autonomic, the first open cloud-based platform for connected vehicle data, about his experiences during a webinar ‘‘What’s in Your Product Stack: Roadmaps,” he expounded upon the pros of creating and maintaining roadmaps in a tool designed for the job. Not only does it make his job easier, but he sees how it helps the entire organization. The 5 Key Pros of Switching from Excel Spreadsheets to a Roadmapping Tool A purpose-built roadmapping tool is seldom among the initial investments a company makes. They typically only realize there’s a true need for this solution after finding cobbled-together workarounds lacking. Starting out with the pain of long roadmap spreadsheets and presentations. Hum’s experience at Autonomic was the same when they found the old way of doing things didn’t scale as the company grew. “We started with PowerPoint and decks and of course Excel, which is the universal tool that does pretty much everything for everybody,” Hum said. “When I started at Autonomic we were a small, scrappy little startup and we’ve grown in terms of people and numbers of teams and spread out across geography.” Hum found that even though Google Sheets were easy to share, thelimitations of using a spreadsheet for roadmapping started to impinge on the company’s ability to execute and forced him into labor-intensive ongoing maintenance. Finding a new roadmapping tool that is easy to maintain. “It was really tough to communicate a really rugged and overall strategy across several teams and different offices, as well as to be able to quickly react to some of the changes that were coming up both from a number of these teams and with the customer,” Hum continued. “The last thing that anybody ever wants to do—specifically product managers—is go back and update roadmap spreadsheets every single week or every single month, and it is immensely painful.” Startups and product managers can be the most resistant to investing in a roadmapping tool because it’s not where their attention lies. “They tend to focus on action, the building, the writing of the stories, the testing, and the designing, like all the ‘fun, sexy stuff’ of being a product manager coming up with ideas,” Hum said. “Planning and looking at dependencies, it’s a grind, it’s tedious, it’s not the sexy stuff that everybody reads about in the blogs.” Eventually, many organizations find their lack of a comprehensive tool leads to disconnects. There are too many inefficiencies when things get too big to keep all in your head or a spreadsheet roadmap. “There’s a point of no return, where they’re building and moving quickly, but then the teams start getting misaligned because teams get bigger or they’re more spread out. Or there are more things they need to prioritize,” Hum said. “They need to go to a tool that’s more flexible and will actually help them drive the discipline to elevate the planning and the strategy and the communication thereof as a very, very high priority.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'c7d13196-bc0a-4522-8c86-b1fd59c56fb0', {"region":"na1"}); Pro 1: Building Alignment Getting everyone on the same page is an essential task for product management. A well-designed roadmap can expedite this ongoing need. “New product development, especially in startups, it’s messy, it’s ambiguous, it’s unpredictable, Hum said. “The roadmap or roadmapping tools really provide that North Star, not only where the company’s going but where the teams are going.” With a roadmap providing the desired end state, the rationale, and the target audience, product management can loosen the implementation constraints and not be so prescriptive. “You just want to show the high-level goal and get the hell out of that team’s way,” Hum said. “As long as you’ve given them that high-level goal and they know where to go and potentially when it should be delivered, that’s all you need to do, and let them go.” Ideally, a roadmapping tool can elevate the product strategy to something inspirational. “If someone comes to you with a roadmap that is fairly defined for the next three-to-six months, then I see that as very inspiring to the team because you know where you’re going or where your angle is, what success looks like,” Hum added. “It allows the team to understand how either the product manager or leadership is thinking strategically and then how that’s broken down to allow them to execute methodically.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '04400104-0283-44c3-92be-cf2464e248d5', {"region":"na1"}); Pro 2: Saving Time Now that Hum has a purpose-built roadmapping tool at his disposal; he doesn’t actually spend too much time using it. Every Monday morning, he holds an Iteration Planning Meeting, with the roadmap tool open alongside Pivotal Tracker. He can make sure everyone knows the high priorities and whether they’re working on them, then dig into any refinements in Pivotal Tracker as needed. Other than that, he only spends time on the roadmap once per quarter for more strategic planning and prioritization. Not only has the tool cut down on manual tasks, compared to roadmap spreadsheets, but it’s saving him time in other areas as well. Cutting down on meetings. “It’s cut down on meetings and communication because, within the tool, I can really put in the cross-dependencies,” Hum said. “We have a number of different teams across a number of different offices and time zones, so sometimes just being able to jump on a call is very hard.” Now he can tell them to go into the tool and add their comments to see everything and coordinate asynchronously. There’s less room for interpretation and lower chances of things descending into chaos with things written down. It also gives him more time to spend on more valuable tasks. “Creating and communicating a roadmap is a high-level task in terms of thought process,” Hum continues. “But manually going in with these small little steps is not a high-value task, and having a dedicated roadmapping tool allows product managers to leverage their time much, much better.” Working across multiple teams. Hum cherishes the flexibility roadmap tools provide, as well as how quick it is to make changes. “I work very closely with engineers, and we’ll get into the nitty-gritty details, but then half an hour later I may turn around, and I have to give a presentation to the leadership around what is our Q2 and Q3 objectives,” Hum said. “Being able to quickly go into a tool and change the view and hide stuff where I know they don’t need to know about or I don’t want to show them because they’re going to ask me irrelevant questions for a particular thing is an excellent advantage of having a dedicated roadmapping tool.” Pro 3: Single Source of Truth Deciding what item goes into scheduling or the backlog can be a major source of contention within a business. Everyone has good intentions, but a lack of clarity can lead to factions, mistrust, and doubt. Humuses the roadmapping tool as a single source of truth to minimize these issues. Issues idle in the parking lot before a prioritization exercise, which includes weighting via customer feedback in the tool itself. This leads to greater transparency in the entire prioritization process. “It’s important to figure out the ‘why’ of what makes it on and what doesn’t and really communicating the matrix or weighting system,” Hum said, emphasizing the importance of having that context come through in the roadmap. “A roadmap will allow you to show that visually, and most tools will allow you to drill down just by clicking on it, and you can add little notes or the rationale behind a certain priority.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '9e6140b2-e382-45fd-ace0-16435228cf7b', {"region":"na1"}); Pro 4: Adapting for Different Audiences According to ourmost recent product management survey, 56% of product managers are unhappy with their process for communicating product strategy.Finding that Goldilock’s sweet spot for a roadmap presentation requires a solid understanding of what your audience cares about. Give them too much, and they’ll be bored or derail the conversation with detours, but if it’s too skimpy, they won’t have enough context to assess its merits properly. “When you’re talking to the executive level, they’re thinking more in quarters and the three big objectives that you’re trying to achieve,” Hum said. “They don’t really need all this fine-grained detail.” In contrast, crafting these customized versions of roadmaps in spreadsheets can take up hours and produce outdated artifacts before the meeting’s even over. “We work very closely with external partners and customers, and we want to be very transparent with them,” Hum continued. “As we go higher up concerning the seniority, we are summarizing more and more of our roadmaps.” However, not every presentation warrants exposing the audience to the roadmapping tool itself. “We’re looking just to hit the really high notes or the big epics or big features that we’re trying to do within a particular quarter,” Hum explained, referring to why he sometimes uses other presentation tactics. “That’s why it would just be two or three bullet points in a deck or just showing quarter out where the big features will land.” Pro 5: Empowering Engineering Hum’s product management approach is based on the simple premise that “alignment enables autonomy.” His goal is to empower individuals so they can make their own informed decisions and execute. That means they need three things: What: What are we building Why: What is the purpose of this thing we’re building, and what that end state means (i.e., users saving time, the business increasing revenue) Who: The target customer “Engineers want to go off and solve the hard problem,” Hum said. “So you provide that independence and, obviously, you’re working with a lot of smart people, so get out of their way. Let them work on what they need to work on because they’re all aligned. They have that North Star.” Proving the context behind the product story. This runs counter to more traditional product management. This is not where a product manager writes many user stories and schedules each feature release. “If they don’t have the proper context, they may go off and blindly build something because this is what they’re supposed to do. They’re supposed to go build,” Hum continued. “But if you give them the proper context and end goal, you’re allowing the engineers a bit more freedom and a bit more creativity to think about how they would actually approach the problem that they are trying to solve without you being too prescriptive.” But that freedom only comeswhen engineering is aligned with the business and understands the rationale behind product managers’ direction. Hum says many product managers make the fatal mistake of thinking that they’re responsible for the solution, but he doesn’t see it that way. “I’m responsible for the problem… I’m just defining the problem. You go figure out which way you want. Here’s the outcome that I want. The rest is up to you,” Hum continued, adding that while he may provide ideas and feedback, that’s not the main part of his job. “My whole goal as a product manager—and especially with roadmapping—is to lay out that grand vision, where we go and what’s aspirational,” Hum said. “I’m not here to draw out every single little path and dot to get there. That’s not our job as product managers.” Download Get Buy-In on Your Product Stack➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'c4f7dcc8-378e-4b20-9c16-637fcb9589a5', {"region":"na1"}); Listen to the full webinar here: 点击播放声音 @keyframes VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } @keyframes VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } .volume__small-wave { animation: VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite; opacity: 0; } .volume__large-wave { animation: VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite .3s; opacity: 0; } 55:32●●●●●●●AgendaWhy Roadmap Tools?Current Tools ProcessesUnderstanding the Why: Selecting a Roadmap ToolSpeed RoundLive QAAdditional Resources #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_71_wrapper .w-css-reset{font-size:14px;} #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_71_wrapper 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When you think of company-sponsored events, a few scenes may come to mind. There’s the holiday party where coworkers schmooze over food and drinks, be it in the office kitchen or at a fancy hotel with significant others in tow. There are fun activities where silos are temporarily broken down, giving way to bowling matches or scavenger hunts. And there is, of course,the company all-hands meeting where leadership shares future direction and celebrates past achievements. These everyday work rituals translate poorly for the new normal of remote work and often result in a negative experience. When your team participates in video calls all day, the idea of an extended virtual gathering may fill your team with dread. Here at LIKE.TG, we believe we’ve cracked the code on making these events fun, engaging, informative, and meaningful. We wanted to share our experience and inspire others to plan or improve their own virtual events. Why Events Matter to Your Team Rituals and stories create a team identity. Ritualized gatherings build a cultural heartbeat and team identity. Gatherings are a huge part of life, and they’re a part of the human experience. But the time we spend in them is often underwhelming and uninspiring. Invest the time, energy, and attention-to-detail to make them great. Humans are story-seeking creatures. One key to great events is creating a shared experience that generates stories your team can tell months or years from now. It’s rare to go to a conference or a social gathering and find that the event organizers have given serious thought to how guests will connect and get something meaningful from the event. We tend to focus on the mechanics like Powerpoints and Zoom logistics more than we think about people and human connection. Thinking about the connections that can result in storytelling is where the “magic moments” exist. Gatherings help build trust in relationships. Interacting with our peers creates empathy and humanizes our coworkers, building trust. They’re not just an email address or a Slack handle, or a voice on video chat. They’re real people with homes and pets, and families, trying to pay their bills, have a little fun, advance their careers, and do interesting work. This is particularly true for cross-functional relationships where conflict may commonly arise. Gatherings build flexibility, grace, and resilience in your team relationships. Team members are less likely to judge or jump to conclusions once we build deep connections through effective events. Our humanity is reinforced via these interactions – especially face-to-face. Whether at the coffee station, small talk before a meeting starts, or riding in the elevator together. These micro-interactions are a huge part of our relationships in an office environment. When distance reduces or eliminates those casual exchanges, intentionally create similar opportunities for similar interactions to happen. Doing so not only leads to increased social contact (and the corresponding mental health benefits) but also helps people work better together. The more familiar you are with a coworker, the better you’ll understand their communication styles, motivations, and concerns, which leads to more productive interactions where people don’t stick to niceties. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '35d36a84-b157-43a1-acb7-b972dcb1d1ad', {}); How LIKE.TG’s ‘Fest’ Started Like many programs at LIKE.TG, “Fest” began in our Engineering department, which was remote long before a global pandemic. For five years, Fest was a semi-annual engineering event and was an opportunity to give face-time with the entire remote engineering team within our Santa Barbara office. This eventually evolved into a full-fledged cross-functional event to create alignment across ProductPlan. Each discipline developed tracks on exciting topics. It became a shared experience and tradition that forged deeper relationships among employees. Those connections lead to grace in their business interactions instead of everyone jumping to their own conclusions. While LIKE.TG had an advantage as Fests began pre-COVID-19, there’s no reason other organizations can’t make these types of virtual gatherings a success starting from scratch. You can use elements of past in-person events as the springboard for planning a new virtual gathering. Carryover activities and sessions that translate well to a remote environment while also using some new virtual activities. 7 Lessons from LIKE.TG Virtual Event Success 1. Do your research. We began the planning process by conducting an employee survey to tease out key themes that spoke to the new remote team’s needs and combine feedback themes from our previous on-premise events. This helped us identify which tracks would be popular and relevant to the team’s needs and which external speakers would be a good fit. It also reassured us that employees wanted to participate in the event versus begrudgingly attend. Develop a Clear Purpose and Shared Assumptions. Our synthesized goals became clear based on our collective team feedback. First, we needed to create an aspirational vision and alignment coming into 2021. Secondly, the agenda had to be dedicated to team-building activities. Lastly, we needed to figure out how to provide opportunities for professional development. 2. Hosting intentionally is more important than being laid back. In modern life, being chill is often treated as a virtue. As a result, we’re hesitant to tell people what to do, even at events we are hosting ourselves. Being laid back, not imposing on our team members feels like the right thing to do. But when it comes to gatherings, being a “chill” host is an abdication of your responsibility to your gathering and guests, and it’s a sure-fire way to let things fizzle out. Feel empowered to be hands-on and drive because it will only serve to create a better event. Build up anticipation and excitement. Recognize that your team will form impressions about what to expect from your event before it’s even started. So prime them with the right expectations. LIKE.TG intentionally provided a “drip” of the agenda each day to foreshadow and build excitement for the event. Start and end on a high note. A strong start and solid finish are also key to a great gathering. You want everyone to be pulled in immediately, so think high energy to kick things off. Then save the best for last, so your team goes out on a high note. Incorporate physical elements in the virtual event. A principle in executing great gatherings is honoring team members on arrival. What a better way than providing a “mystery box” full of surprise gifts, some related with portions of programming with “don’t open” stickers to make sure the element of surprise and anticipation was maintained throughout the event. Our mystery box was a vessel to tie us together in the virtual world and made our event more special. Other items included new LIKE.TG swag for the team to enjoy, materials required for our fun events such as a deck of cards, gummy sushi candy (-a special homage to our in-person fests tradition in which we usually enjoy a full table of sashimi), and a lightbox to share our collective experience. 3. Shift expenses to provide new opportunities. Because we knew the event would be virtual, we wouldn’t have some traditional expenses to worry about. We would not need to rent meeting space or provide food and drinks all day long (although we did give employees gift cards to order in). This let us spend a little more in other areas, such as investing in our guest speakers’ quality from around the world! 4. Incorporate dead space. We did a survey, and that pulled themes out of the needs of remote workers. For instance, Zoom fatigue is a thing – People only have so much tolerance for videoconferencing. So instead of spending all day on Zoom, we took a different approach. We elected to limit the event to four half days with Friday off. This less-is-more approach ensures you’ll get everyone’s best versus a raging case of Zoom fatigue. 5. Provide quality and contrasting content. The latestFest agenda focused on career development. It was important to employees and a way to show that management cares about them as people and not just the role they currently fill. We included many great external speakers, including CEOs and executives from other companies, product management thought leaders, authors, and executive coaching consultants. 6. Leave room for fun. This formal agenda was augmented with some fun, including trivia contests, magic shows, and escape rooms. We include a fireside chat with our leadership team and breakouts for each discipline. It added up to a half-day full of great content that employees rated highly in their post-event survey responses. 7. Be ready to adapt. Never be afraid to change things up if your formula or adjust the event elements as you go. Room For Improvement There is always room for improvement. Approaching each event as the next one in a series creates a growth mindset for everyone. That said, we do have some things we wish we’d done differently and a few more suggestions for a successful virtual event. 1. Become even more inclusive. Ourteam spans across multiple time zones, and we didn’t do the best job of making sure it was convenient for everyone to attend. Try to find the best overlap opportunities for most participants. Although for a truly global organization might not have had other options. If you really need to, you could also have special sessions for employees too distant to take part and record some of the content they can’t access live. As previously mentioned, feel free to “call an audible” when needed. Whether it’s a session running long or one that doesn’t resonate with the crowd, it’s OK to shake up the agenda on the fly. The most important thing is an engaged audience, not the schedule. 2. Include more bonding time. Build-in breakout sessions, so people get a chance to participate one-on-one or in smaller groups. While some staff may feel comfortable speaking in front of the whole company, others may prefer a smaller venue. Plus, it helps make sure everyone gets a chance to contribute to conversations. 3. Perform a retrospective. The post-event survey is a definite must-have to continue improving and iterating on the event while it’s still fresh in their minds. Perform a retrospective on the virtual event to improve the next event and talk to the other organizers about what worked and didn’t. Create benchmarks from event to event to measure whether or not you are improving the planning and facilitation You can compare their responses to those conducted during the planning stages to see if what people asked for was what they actually enjoyed. The next virtual event will be halfway planned with some good feedback before you’ve finished rehashing this one! 点击播放声音 @keyframes VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } @keyframes VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } .volume__small-wave { animation: VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite; opacity: 0; } .volume__large-wave { animation: VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite .3s; opacity: 0; } 1:02:52●●●●●●●●●●●●Meet the PanelToday's AgendaAre you currently working from home?Our Remote AwakeningsAre you temporarily working from home, or do you always work from home?Remote Work Best PracticesRemote Key TakeawaysWhat tools do you use to create sources of truth?Managing AlignmentHow effective is your team's communication?Staying Connected and Having FunLive QA #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_57_wrapper .w-css-reset{font-size:14px;} #wistia_chrome_23 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Collaboration” and “remote work” may not seem like a perfect match. But teams can’t skimp on group work because the days of everyone being in the same room are a distant memory thatmay never return in quite the same way. There’s still no real replacement for real-time, dynamic discussions and exercises to foster stakeholder alignment. Asynchronous apps have their place, but sometimes you need everyone to debate and sort through things together. According to Isabelle Berner, Director of Product Management at Def Method, the secret is intentionality. She shared her suggestions and tips during our recent webinar “What’s in Your Product Stack: Collaboration.” Berner, 12-year product management career included stints at Pivotal and Betterment, joining the software development consultancy specializing in Lean and Agile. She is a true believer in the importance of working together on these fundamental product issues. As a consultant, Berner has seen a wide range of collaboration challenges. But she firmly believes “collaboration is the foundation upon which great products are built” and that product managers can be effective catalysts for this activity. “The role of facilitating a lot of remote collaboration conversations comes to the product manager. Often product managers have been part of a lot of different teams, and so they maybe have a better read on where collaboration is flawed.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '57ff7e42-ccfa-4d9e-b5be-8a0f6ba69363', {}); To Drive Alignment, First Look at Your Team Establishing rapport and respect. An essential ingredient in successful remote collaboration is creating familiarity, comfort, and trust with colleagues before attempting true collaboration. “It’s good to spend time with each other one-on-one. Even if it’s on work-related items so we can appreciate each other as human beings,” Berner said. “I love to do walking one-on-ones. Just moving in a direction together and talking about something—it’s nice to stretch your legs and really good for building rapport.” Berner also finds standups can be another forum to get teams more comfortable with opening up and talking about important issues. “I started seeing the value of standups when I worked at Betterment,” Berner said. “Being tuned in to what everyone’s working on and being able to air any challenges that we’re up against quickly. I’ve carried that with me and never stopped doing standups whenever I’m on a project.” However, standups come with their own risks to the team dynamic, especially when they become placeholders that morph into some of the larger meetings and conversations the team should have in a more intentional and dedicated forum. “Something to mitigate that is to have someone in your standup that’s responsible for putting a pin in those conversations and making sure that they happen because they’re important,” Berner said. “But keeping the standup short and moving along is essential.” Creating a feedback-friendly culture. Being open and honest in a work setting doesn’t always come naturally. People don’t want to step on any toes or offend anyone, both out of civility and protect their own careers. But an environment that encourages authentic dialog is essential to avoid groupthink-driven disasters. Organizations need people to challenge assumptions, ask “why” more often, and voice their opinions. And while a suggestion box or an “open door” policy might try to set that tone, people need to walk the walk as well. “A great way to establish a culture of giving and receiving feedback is to ask for it. Ask for some specific feedback. Then listen to it and hold yourself accountable to respond to that feedback and show the team how you do that. That’s an easy way to show that feedback can make a big difference.” Berner is a big fan of Team Speedback. This one-hour activity is for everyone on the team. Each person writes down a piece of feedback for every other member. They then share that feedback one-on-one in a speed-dating type of format. “You have an opportunity to give and receive feedback with every single member of the team. ” Berner said, adding that holding these once every month or two “sets the expectation that this is an OK thing to do, and it makes it a lot less scary if you’re doing it regularly.” Conduct a Stakeholder Analysis ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3eb23c05-aee3-46a4-9662-df983ee6cc53', {}); Drive Alignment with Stakeholders Remote Collaboration Exercises Define goals and anti-goals. A lack of alignment on the objectives of an initiative creates a shaky foundation for any product team. But if the group hasn’t put in a concerted joint effort to build a consensus, chances are team members are operating under various assumptions. One of Berner’s favorite exercises to ensure everyone agrees on what they’re trying to do (and not do) is defining Goals and Anti-Goals. “This is a very tactical piece of collaboration. But it really sets teams up to collaborate effectively and build on that if they have an obvious understanding of what their goals are and also a sense of ownership of those goals,” Berners said. The very act of going through this exercise together and putting in the work also strengthens the team’s bonds. This co-laboring creates a stronger consensus since they all witnessed and took part in the process. “Working together to achieve a shared objective and a shared set of goals is important towards driving that ownership of goals,” Berner said. “That ties into group idea generation and how to facilitate collaborative conversations.” Have a remote collaboration group meeting. This group exercise takes about an hour and requires no preparation. Get the team, and any stakeholders get in the same real or virtual room. This meeting’s goal is for everyone to agree upon what they’re trying to accomplish in the next three-to-six months. First, give each attendee their own color sticky notes to write down what they understand to be goals. They should also add what they don’t consider essential for this timeframe. This is why it’s essential to establish those dates upfront. Then after everyone’s scribbled ideas down, the group shares their goals or anti-goals round-robin style. This way, each person has an opportunity to share what they think is most important. “If people have something similar, group other people’s stickies in that category. And you end up with a series of categories for things that might be considered goals.” Berner said. “Then, from a facilitation standpoint, you can take these goals, summarize them, refine them, and then ultimately vote on which ones are most important as a group.” Download Get Budget Approval on Your Product Stack➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'c4f7dcc8-378e-4b20-9c16-637fcb9589a5', {"region":"na1"}); Include ownership The benefits of this exercise go far beyond alignment. Inclusivity in the process also creates a sense of ownership. “Being part of the process of coming up with the goals is really empowering for the people on your team,” Berner said. “They’ll understand the goals a lot better because they’ve had these conversations, and they’ll care about them a lot more because they had a hand in choosing what was most important to accomplish.” Anti-goals Agreeing on the anti-goals is also sometimes even more valuable than the goals themselves. “What is something important down the line or something that might be seductive and distracting but that isn’t actually the most important goal for us right now?” Berner says calling out these out-of-scope goals brings additional clarity and focus for everyone and might be the most important discussions of all. “When someone in the room thinks an anti-goal should be a goal, surfacing and bubbling up this misalignment and then being able to talk through it and to talk about the relative priority of goals and then make a decision together that something that one person thought should be a goal is actually an anti-goal,” Berner said. “This is where the trickier, more sensitive conversations happen.” The final step is each participant “dot voting” on how to prioritize those categorized goals. “You want to have clarity about not just what your goals are, but what your most important goals are,” Berner added. If this sounds hard or even undoable in a remote or distributed environment, using a virtual whiteboard such as Miro can recreate the actual pen and paper feeling. As an added benefit, there will now be a “permanent” digital record of the exercise’s outcome for newcomers to the team or when someone wants to revisit a decision. That isn’t usually possible since someone else will need the IRL whiteboard for the next meeting in that conference room. What’s at stake is what matters. By collaboratively aligning around goals, this common understanding filters down into every other aspect of product management. They can even show up in user stories tying small, incremental work to the big picture and laddering up to the business and user value. Berner also cited product roadmaps as another instance where this coherent vision can play a role. “Focusing on outcomes versus outputs, but really telling the story through your roadmaps of what those outcomes are, what they mean to your users, and how they benefit the business helps with that communication and connecting people with what they’re building and why it matters.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '5894a003-79ce-4ea3-9804-dae280a96106', {}); It’s also wise to revisit things regularly. Priorities and goals might change or evolve but not automatically flow down through the rest of the organization. Berner recommends using stoplight check-ins to keep everyone on the same page. “Have your stoplight check-ins, or just your ten-minute ‘is this on-track/off-track and then address the things that are off-track,” Berner said. “I’ve seen goals sit and get dusty in a corner, and it’s not pretty.” Berner also recommends excluding stakeholders from these stoplight check-ins and retrospectives. “You want the team not to have to worry about any repercussions if a goal is off-track and just be able to have transparent, problem-solving conversations about getting it back on track,” she said. Spending 15 minutes per week every week or two isn’t much time to confirm things are still headed in the right direction. Other Tips for Remote Collaboration Challenges Replacing the natural interactions that occur in a physical workplace doesn’t happen by itself. Creating surrogates for watercooler time requires some real effort. Berner’s biggest concern is that a distributed workforce isn’t celebrating wins like they usually would, which can impact morale and take some of the fun out of working on an exciting project with peers you like and respect. “Getting everyone energized and excited about what’s being accomplished is important,” Berner said. At Def Method, they’ve carved out time in their weekly company meeting for that and have also madelittle gestures of gratitude, such as sending contributors a care basket after completing something big or putting in the extra effort. To learn about other ways remote collaboration teams can work together, you can watch the entire webinar for free.

At its most basic level, a customer-led product strategy means that your customers are the top priority at all times. Sounds pretty obvious, right? But creating a truly customer-centric business model means balancing a lot of different factors, not just customer service. All too often, customers are losing out to more influential stakeholder groups and other priorities. One report found that80 percent of customers said the experience a company provides is just as important as its products or services. Therefore, it makes total sense to look at the products you offer from the customers’ perspective. Ensuring your products and services bring joy to customers at every stage of their journey will help grow your business, helping it survive even in tough times. Putting Customers First Any time you launch a new idea, a new product, or a new system, ask yourself the following questions: #1 Who will this serve? #2 How will it benefit the people it serves? #3 What are the company’s goals for this product or service? By asking – and answering – these questions, you can create something that people truly value. Anticipating the kind of products customers need and making sure they get them will lead to deeper brand loyalty and customer retention. But first, you need to know exactly what the customer wants to deliver it. Making use of key customer insights and then implementing them is vitally important. For example, if you discover that most customers want to receive their purchases in the fastest possible time, you could use retail inventory management software to speed things up. Remember that81 percent of consumers are willing to increase their spend with an organization in return for a better experience! Read the Customer Interview Toolbox ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'd7d86cbd-164a-46c9-8c8f-f15fee88bc7f', {}); Looking at the Data You might think you’re pretty hot on knowing what your customers want, especially if you’ve been running a successful business for many years. However, here’s a sobering statistic: 80 percent of companies believe they are delivering a superior customer experience, but only 8 percent of customers agree! This proves that you shouldn’t claim to be customer-centric if your products and services don’t reflect that. Digital technology means there are now more avenues for observing customer behaviors and spotting crucial insights – and statistics suggest thatinsight-driven customer experiences help businesses retain 89 percent of their customers. By blending data from customer surveys with qualitative and observational insights, you can build a detailed profile of your target users and see their needs. It’s also helpful to note what your competitors are up to and look at non-competitors to get an idea of best practices. You don’t have to copy their approach, but you can tease out the best bits and blend them into the perfect strategy for you. Creatinga partnership with a competitor can actually aid the customer journey in some cases. If you cannot offer a product or service that your customer really wants, put your rivalry to one side and team up with a company that can! Making a Plan Once you’ve taken a look at the improvements you could make, it’s time to produce your plan of action. This framework should always put the customer front and center while ensuring any changes are viable within your overall business model. Product roadmaps are useful in planning and development and can be used to create alignment across the organization. Start with the product vision statement, then set out your goals and initiatives. The customer-led product strategy must be ingrained at every level of your company, so all your employees need to understand who the product is aimed at, what its unique selling points are, and what the long-term goal should be. Having your customer service and marketing departments work together is a good way to boost the customer experience. Hiring the right people, who truly believe in your vision, is crucial – as is keeping them up to date and motivated. Using video conferencing software can help maintain face-to-face contact with those in other sectors of the business. Download the Guide to Roadmap Software ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '4bf8579a-d29b-4f68-83a0-dff66a99d470', {}); Adapting to Change The digital environment has created a definite shift in customer behavior, meaning that customers become more discerning and impatient in the products and services they choose. They now have higher expectations and more choice than ever before – so if you don’t meet their needs, they can just as easily go elsewhere. New technology might make it easier for you to communicate with customers, but it’s also easier for them to complain! Older businesses, in particular, can struggle to adapt to the new pattern, compared to newer companies and start-ups with millennials at the helm. But it’s basically a case of “adapt or die.” Companies that consistently find innovative ways to develop and market their products will succeed in the long run. Tapping into Technology One prediction is that by 2021, there will be over 230 million digital shoppers in the United States. The role of technology affords many opportunities to provide a superb customer experience and gain customer insights at all the different touchpoints. The automation of customer service is one such element, and we’re seeing businesses introduce improvements like a call recording service to make life simpler for both customers and agents. Meanwhile, the rise of artificial intelligence can give extra insights into the customer experience using smart chatbots and analytics. Technology will only increase in importance, but you should make sure it is always useful to the customer and helps rather than hinders their journey! For older customers and more traditional businesses, the latest tech may not necessarily be the best solution for booking appointments, where it has advantages and disadvantages. Making it Personal A customer-led product strategy means learning which products appeal to customers and viewing them as much more than mere transactions. However, just offering them excellent products and an enjoyable, hassle-free experience isn’t enough. Personalization is the real key, as it makes customers feel like they are genuinely valuable to the business. Finding ways to personalize both the product and the overall journey will boost customer retention – and a happy customer will share their positive experiences with others, thus enhancing your rating on product review sites. It goes without saying that you should deliver a great omnichannel experience as standard. Still, it also helps to give customers personalized support as they browse and hopefully make a purchase. Customers appreciate little details, such as adding extra filters to narrow down browsing choices and save time. A customer-facing product roadmap can be used to let individual customers know what you’re up to and how you’re implementing their feedback, helping you to build a deeper relationship. You can encourage employees to develop empathy for the customers by talking to new service users and regular visitors if a customer has decided to switch to a different company, try to find out why – and see if there’s a way to tempt them back in. 点击播放声音 @keyframes VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } @keyframes VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } .volume__small-wave { animation: VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite; opacity: 0; } .volume__large-wave { animation: VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite .3s; opacity: 0; } 1:09:25●●●●●IntroCustomer Feedback and Your Product VisionDeciding What to BuildHow to Use Metrics to Align Product Strategy...Questions Answers #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_103_wrapper .w-css-reset{font-size:14px;} #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_103_wrapper 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.w-css-reset-button-important{border-radius:0!important;color:#fff!important;} Complete the form to access the full webinarFirst Name*Last Name*Job Title*Email*LIKE.TG is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy, and we’ll only use your personal information to administer your account and to provide the products and services you requested from us. 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For more information on how to unsubscribe, our privacy practices, and how we are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy, please review our Privacy Policy.#wistia_grid_103_wrapper{-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;box-sizing:content-box;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;height:100%;position:relative;text-align:left;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_103_wrapper *{-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;box-sizing:content-box;} #wistia_grid_103_above{position:relative;} #wistia_grid_103_main{display:block;height:100%;position:relative;} #wistia_grid_103_behind{height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;top:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_103_center{height:100%;overflow:hidden;position:relative;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_103_front{display:none;height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;top:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_103_top_inside{position:absolute;left:0;top:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_103_top{width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0;left:0;} #wistia_grid_103_bottom_inside{position:absolute;left:0;bottom:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_103_bottom{width:100%;position:absolute;top:0;left:0;} #wistia_grid_103_left_inside{height:100%;position:absolute;left:0;top:0;} #wistia_grid_103_left{height:100%;position:absolute;right:0;top:0;} #wistia_grid_103_right_inside{height:100%;right:0;position:absolute;top:0;} #wistia_grid_103_right{height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;top:0;} #wistia_grid_103_below{position:relative;} Maintaining Momentum A customer-led product strategy means you need to be proactive instead of reactive. Make sure you ask the necessary questions before the customer embarks on their experience, thereby keeping in control of the process. Once a customer has been convinced to create an account, the onboarding system is crucial in executing your product strategy. You could keep them coming back by creating personalized messages or offering free trials or discounts on products you’ve learned that particular customer would like. The importance of website maintenance cannot be overstated if you want customers to choose you over your competitors. Ensure your whole online presence is optimized to give all users the best experience on whatever device they use, including personalized product suggestions and plenty of up-to-date, relevant content. The eventual aim is that happy customers will keep returning, so you won’t have to spend so much on marketing and sales activities – especially great news for smaller businesses. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '1f74539e-d4fc-4cb3-97c6-fd86de2bf62e', {});

Product Strategy is Important One of the most important roles of a product manager (PM) is setting the product strategy. The strategy, by way of a roadmap, is the document that drives team alignment.When a group of people adopts a strategy, it transforms the product strategy from just a piece of paper to something that drives team success. Informed teams, including product and everyone that affects product development—from engineers to executives, can deliver consistent results, essential to any organization that wants to grow from pure greenfield exploration into gaining product-market fit. When you are looking for consistent strategic results that you can sell to the business and the team around you, you’ll need to escape the trap of pure feature velocity (“building stuff”) and get to building the “right stuff” that makes an impact for customers and the business. Consistent strategic results are essential because as teams scale, wasting time and resources gets easier. Consistency is why the strategy must exist and live in the minds of those who need to operationalize it. That is when the strategy is truly alive when you can see it in action. But, unfortunately, most strategy is dead when it exists, but in name only. What makes a strategy alive or dead? Well, let’s start by making sure you have a strategy that works first. If you aren’t sure what that looks like, you can find our complete guide here. A Refresher of the Six Pillars of an Alive Product Strategy: 1. A product must have a purpose. Building a product just for the sake of creating and maintaining something isn’t a strategy. Products should have a raison d‘être and exist for something beyond themselves. What drives the company? Why does the founder wake up in the morning? What about your product can the customer not live without? Take the time to communicate externally to find the locus of your product’s truth. Once you simplify that into something repeatable that a team can align around, you are most of the way there. The alive product strategy has a clear, repeatable purpose. Dead strategy is muddled. 2. Understand the customer’s needs and their evolution. Our customers are important, so it is critical that any product strategy we make also has to meet the customer where they are. But, more importantly, we can’t fall into the trap of “building a faster horse” instead of a car. Our customers don’t deal in features, and they deal in problems. Those problems evolve, and so must our strategy. Alive strategy evolves with the customer. Dead strategy is static. 3. Understand your value chain and how it’s evolving. Products don’t exist in a vacuum. Neither do its users. The product strategy must incorporate how it fits into the larger ecosystem, determining where it adds value and where friction points remain. As an ecosystem changes, the product’s role within it may also evolve. When determining strategy, you can find insight into how your product makes decisions—whether looking at your competitors or what systems your product builds on to work. Alive strategy engages with the ecosystem. Dead strategy engages with a point in time. 4. Determine what change is likely to happen. Although strategic thinkers don’t possess psychic powers, they should cast an eye toward the future and anticipate likely disruptions to either limit or expand the product’s opportunities for growth and usage. Then, with a good strategy, you’ll see what chances the business is willing to take. An alive strategy makes bets. Dead strategy “knows” the future. 5. Define actions against those changes. With a view on the horizon, what can your strategy do to mitigate disruption or seize opportunities? Alive strategy anticipates risks. Dead strategy hides them. 6. Measure success and course correct. There’s no way to know if a strategy is successful if no one’s keeping score. While the strategy itself shouldn’t be hitting specific metrics, tracking progress and KPIs illuminate progress and offer potential warning signs. Alive strategy iterates. Dead strategy always starts from scratch. 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#wistia_grid_43_bottom{width:100%;position:absolute;top:0;left:0;} #wistia_grid_43_left_inside{height:100%;position:absolute;left:0;top:0;} #wistia_grid_43_left{height:100%;position:absolute;right:0;top:0;} #wistia_grid_43_right_inside{height:100%;right:0;position:absolute;top:0;} #wistia_grid_43_right{height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;top:0;} #wistia_grid_43_below{position:relative;} Strategy Doesn’t Need to Just Exist Simply having a strategy isn’t enough, however. For example, if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, did it make a sound? Unfortunately, many teams that find themselves with a product strategy have to ask. “how does this matter to me?” and, as a result, lose interest. Strategy means nothing if it isn’t alive, in people’s hands, hearts, and heads applying to their work. So, as we continue this article, let’s ask ourselves some questions. First, does any of this sound familiar to you? Feeling unsure of what to do, even though the strategy is there. Having a ton of distractions, even though the strategy is there. Operating in the past, even though the strategy is there. Then your strategy might be dead. Don’t fear! There is an opportunity here. If you have a strategy, you’ve already done the first step, create a strategy! So, we need to turn it around, and on that note, it feels like a good time to talk about what we mean by “alive.” An Alive Product Strategy Yes, your strategy is living. In fact, strategy is a muscle and an important one for teams to exercise. Much like the muscles in your body, they need nutrition, and for them to operate at their best, they need exercise. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '1f74539e-d4fc-4cb3-97c6-fd86de2bf62e', {"region":"na1"}); So, what do we mean by that? When we mention nutrition, your strategy needs context. Think about point two, mentioned above “2. Understand customer needs and their evolution Our customers are important, so it is critical that any product strategy we make also has to meet the customer where they are. More importantly, we can’t fall into the trap of ‘building a faster horse’ instead of a car. Our customers don’t deal in features, and they deal in problems. Those problems evolve, and so must our strategy. Alive strategy evolves with the customer. Dead strategy is static.” When you think about your customers, this concept makes sense. Our strategy needs to build towards our customers’ context of the marketplace. What if I told you that it needs also to do so internally – stakeholders who use your strategy also need that context. So how is that strategy you made a few weeks ago? Is it alive? Does it have its nutrients? Has it gotten its exercise? In fact, when is the last time anyone referenced it? Let’s talk about alive in another way – author Robert Greene once told author Ryan Holidaythis: “He told me there are two types of time: alive time and dead time. One is when you sit around when you wait until things happen to you. The other is when you are in control when you make every second count when you are learning and improving and growing.” “Strategy is something that grows” is great as a mental model to see product strategy. But, remember, product strategy is a muscle. When a team sits around and doesn’t exercise that muscle, it will atrophy. An atrophied strategy is a recipe for disaster, as it is as good as no strategy at all. In fact, an atrophied strategy is a one-step towards a dead strategy. So, let’s pose the question again, is your strategy alive? Like any new artifact, your strategy, once well crafted, starts that way. That said, from a distance, an alive product strategy can look like a dead one if you don’t know what to look for. Don’t let your strategy turn into a zombie. A Dead Product Strategy Will Become A Zombie Grrr, brains Zombies are scary (and possibly real). But we aren’t talking about those zombies right now. So instead, what we’re looking at is a zombie strategy. The people we work with are smart and ready to work. A dead strategy, however, will sap their energy and leave our teams to fend for themselves. Moreover, as our teams grow, a culture built on dead strategy is a culture whose problems compound. Product strategy is our domain, not theirs. When strategy atrophies, they will spend time working on things that make sense to them. Sometimes, the team will get lucky. Oftentimes, they will end up distracted. That distraction is how you look up in the middle of the third quarter and wonder what happened to that roadmap you set in December. But, unfortunately, you’ve been bit by the strategy zombie, and as a result, the team is now playing catch up. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '527dc6af-8860-436f-9ca6-ae2b71b0cc99', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); The bad news, as a PM, is you’ve turned into a necromancer. The good news is that you can step away from that. The first step, though, is to identify if there is a dead strategy in your midst. How do you identify a zombie strategy? Well, if it’s well built, here are a few indicators. Of course, we won’t leave you without homework either, so expect some ways to clear the zombies out. Then, each section holds a way to move that strategy from dead to alive. 3 Ways to Identify a Dead Product Strategy 1. Team members can’t remember what’s important. Our brains’ short-term memory holds 5-7 things at a time. Why is that important? One of the issues that can zombify a product strategy is overloading people with too much information. We may have an urge to load the strategy with everything we need to get done. You, as a PM, may feel like you are giving proper context – however, overloading the team with context is exactly what will atrophy your strategy. Instead of giving context and helping folks find alignment, you allow the team to turn off and figure it out independently. This is how your strategy sits on the shelf and eventually zombifies. So, let’s make this real. Let me ask a question: If you were to go around your team and ask, “What are the three priorities from our product strategy?” How confident are you that individual team members can list these top priorities? What about within 80% of your expectation? If you gulped during that question, chances are, you may have a zombie product strategy on your hands. Unfortunately, whatever you thought was happening isn’t. The zombie strategy is eating your team’s mental space. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '4077b305-9bcc-4a5a-a982-aad75ee06c23', {"region":"na1"}); In fact, brain science provides a reason for that. Our brains are more tuned to negative experiences than positive ones, up to seven times more. So those near-death experiences are negative experiences. Strategy is a positive one. Simplify your strategy The basis of strategy is here. You need to simplify. Evangelize. Become a broken record and talk about the strategy regularly. Remind people at the end of every team meeting of the important pillars of your strategy. When people start getting sick of hearing it, you’ve only begun. Prioritize. Be clear about what is important, and get rid of the rest. Cut until it hurts – a strategy that doesn’t make any choices will atrophy. Positivize. Remind people of the small wins regularly. Remember, teams think negative first, so overwhelm them with positivity. 2. Strategy incorporates incentives for all Every discipline has its own incentives. It’s important to recognize that the strategy isn’t about you. Human beings are storytellers, and without something more compelling, they will take what is around them to create their incentives. That is why a telltale sign of a lack of an alive product strategy looks like this: Engineering cares about engineering stuff, same with design, marketing, and sales. It’s natural with any vocation. Teams are just telling themselves a story and running with it. Since it isn’t compelling, they have to make it up as they go along. A strategy will atrophy if the members of the team don’t see themselves in the strategy. As a PM, are you aware of everyone’s incentive? If you have to wonder, chances are you don’t. When building the strategy, remember strategy is an abstraction. That abstraction helps people fit their mental model into the world itself. If that strategy doesn’t help them, they’ll split their time between your strategy and their incentive at best, and at worst, completely ignore your strategy. Then your strategy is dead. As an owner of the product strategy, make sure you talk to the point of contact from every discipline. Meet with the team regularly and have coffee with random team members to find out what drives those team members to work. This is a slower process, but every time you iterate, the strategy gets better. This is because you are working your strategy muscles with each conversation as you make it more alive. As a bonus, your relationship with the other discipline will get better, too. 3. Strategy relies on consistent process Do not try to turn the entire ship at once. Our teams have enough on their plate. That is why we, as PMs, have to be very careful when we bring in a new process. If we do, we have to do so thoughtfully and repeatedly. Once is not enough. Remember, our brains can only hold 3-7 things in short-term memory, so it’s far better to leverage things that are already comfortable in an organization or build it into muscle memory. As PMs, we live with our strategies for a long time, making sense to us (only). So we want to try a new process to shake things up and partially bring newness to ourselves, selfishly. So, we make the team go through an exercise, something you may find on the internet, and never refer to it again since the pieces fit so well in your head. Well, while you may remember it, the team around you has their own issues, and more than likely, is overloaded. When this happens, you’ve walked right into a dead strategy since the team has learned not to take anything you’ve done as seriously. As a rule of thumb, small edits to the current process are better than a new process. If you aren’t going to plan around a new process to ensure it’s compelling and do it often, don’t do it at all. Alive Product Strategy Starts with You There is a pattern here. A product strategy isn’t alive on its own. So simply writing a great one isn’t good enough. Instead, as a PM or product leader, you’ll need to work hard at keeping it alive continuously. It’s worth bringing up this quote again. “He told me there are two types of time: alive time and dead time. One is when you sit around when you wait until things happen to you. The other is when you are in control when you make every second count when you are learning and improving and growing.” One is when you sit around when you wait until things happen to you. The other is when you are in control when you make every second count when you are learning and improving and growing. A great strategy is something you control, iterate, and grow. If you aren’t careful, you’ll turn from a PM into an unwitting necromancer. So your strategy will be less about control and more about waiting. Strategy is a way to speed up alignment, and alignment isn’t stationary. If you aren’t working those strategy muscles, your strategy will turn from alive to dead. As a result, your team will get further and further away when strategy stands still. Building a product strategy is not enough; make sure the strategy is alive and aligned not just with the market and the customers but also with the team that is working through it. When other functions use product strategy, it lessens the cross-functional burden and gives the organization a chance to course-correct when things aren’t going well. Keep your product strategy alive with focused goals, aligned incentives, and repeatable processes. Download IMPACT ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '76387af0-7ef4-49da-8b36-28e99e4f5ba3', {"region":"na1"});

There’s a concept in business called the trust communication curve. It states that the more trust between people or teams, the less one-on-one communication they’ll need to align on goals. If you graphed that curve, it would look like this. The product trust communication curve follows the same logic. As trust increases, product managers can rely more on communicating information. They can even refer people to the roadmap, rather than repeating twice. And according to the data we’ve collected, product managers want that ability. In LIKE.TG’s 2022 State of Product Management Report, we uncovered interesting data points on this topic. First, most product professionals (62%) share product information with internal stakeholders by hosting live meetings. That is more than 5x the number who said they refer people to the product roadmap and ask them to review it themselves (11%). But when we asked how they would prefer to communicate this information, our survey respondents voted strongly in favor of asking stakeholders to review the product roadmap. As you can see from the response percentages here, many product professionals (45%) would be happy to host a meeting with stakeholders. They don’t mind communicating product strategy, plans, or other details to everyone. But they don’t want to repeat answers to the same people asking the same questions repeatedly. Download the stakeholder analysis guide ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3eb23c05-aee3-46a4-9662-df983ee6cc53', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Why It’s Valuable to Understand the Product Trust Communication Curve The sooner you establish trust across your company, you can reduce your time repeating yourself to stakeholders. The more they trust the product team, the more your stakeholders will feel confident finding the answers to their questions. In other words, boosting trust with stakeholders is a great way to save your product team a lot of time. In the next part of this post, I’ll offer suggestions for improving your product trust communication curve. What Improves Trust Between Product Managers and Stakeholders? Unfortunately, the first factor that increases trust is one you can’t manipulate: time. I’ve worked with hundreds of product professionals in my career. I have also had the chance to work closely with customers. In my experience, I have found that more seasoned product people tend to trust their processes more. They and they also enjoy more trust from their colleagues. Both factors enable senior product professionals to communicate information once, and they can refer stakeholders to the roadmap instead of answering the same question twice. Some of the trust you’ll earn as a product manager comes only with time and experience. But the good news is that there are things you can do today to improve your company’s product trust communication curve. Yes, even if you’re a newbie to product management. 4 Tips to Improve the Product Trust Communication Curve at Your Company 1. Invest in relationship building. One key to building trust is to build familiarity. Your developers can’t trust you if they don’t know you. Time spent together—even just chatting in the lunchroom or exchanging fun GIFs over your chat app—can go a long way to establishing that level of comfort that leads to trust. Also, the more time you spend talking with stakeholders across the company, the more you can develop a common language to ensure everyone aligns around product strategy, goals, and vision. Every department has a unique shorthand, and your role as a product manager includes uniting all stakeholders around a shared language. 2. Keep your roadmap accurate and up to date. Trust goes both ways. Suppose you want to feel confident that your stakeholders will always be able to find the details of your latest strategy, timelines, and priorities. In that case, you’d better make sure that the roadmap is always current. If your stakeholders trust you—but they don’t trust the roadmap will always be up to date—you can expect them to come to you with their questions every time. And that’s one more reason to use native roadmap software. When your roadmap lives on multiple stakeholders’ computers as static files (XYroadmap-v3-new-FINAL-updated-v2.xlsx), someone could quickly be working from an outdated version. But if you have a purpose-built roadmap app, you’ll have one version—online, to which you can easily invite stakeholders—and updating it will be as simple as drag and drop. 3. Present your product information consistently The details on your product roadmaps will change over time, and you’ll include different information from one roadmap to another. But to build trust, you’ll want to create as consistent a process as you can to present that information each time. For example, if you add an epic or feature to the roadmap, you’ll want to explain how it supports the strategy. That process builds trust because it helps you show stakeholders the strategy behind your decisions. But here’s the key: Include that strategic reasoning every time you add an epic or feature. Using purpose-built roadmap software, you can drop a strategic statement just below the epic in the same bar. What’s important is that your stakeholders learn to find that strategy in the same place each time they see a new initiative added to the roadmap. To the degree your stakeholders have a consistent and predictable experience reviewing your product roadmap, it will enhance their trust in the process—and in you—and make them more self-sufficient. And remember: the more your internal stakeholders become more self-sufficient at staying current on your product strategy, goals, and responsibilities, the less time you and your team will have to explain—and repeat those details. Download From Product Manager to Product Leader➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '0d4b3291-d656-408e-a01c-f54629389934', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});

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

As a product manager at LIKE.TG, I’m particularly proud of our new integration with Zapier because of the impact I know it can make. My appreciation of Zapier’s capabilities started years ago when I worked inCustomer Success here at LIKE.TG. Back then, we used Zapier to automate how we shared NPS feedback across the company. It was empowering to reduce the time I spent in spreadsheets, and I felt a connection with our customers who had similar pain points. I remember thinking how much time they could save by integrating Zapier’s app with LIKE.TG’s roadmap platform. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3dea6f5f-f0d8-4af6-984a-1814bd725dc2', {"region":"na1"}); The Challenge With Spreadsheets Spreadsheets are a natural part of my and many product managers’ workflows. Yet, the manual work they require can be at the detriment of my more strategic work. During my research and customer interviews, I continuously heard conversations like the following, “I have 40 product managers in ProductPlan. I need to quickly and reasonably see what everyone is doing entirely in ProductPlan. Yet, a lot is still happening in Google Sheets and requires a manual transfer, which is time-consuming.” This type of scenario is where setting up the Zapier integration fits seamlessly. The automatic updates will support the workflow of product managers much more cohesively (including my own). So the choice becomes: do you spend the afternoon populating a spreadsheet or unshackling your roadmap data and syncing it effortlessly across your organization? Moving roadmap data automatically with Zapier feels I have my own personal product management assistant. Before I geek out further on the benefits of having Zapier automatically working with my roadmap, I want to be clear; it’s not an end all be all ‘magic solution.’ You still have to make intelligent decisions for Zapier to connect all the data dots into your roadmap effectively. Do the work properly, and with the help of Zapier, you will stress less about how you’re going to organize your work. 4 Ways Zapier Can Improve Your Work 1. Less manual effort, more time and energy. The number of product stack apps is growing every day. Getting your data moving from one place, like a project management tool, to your roadmap can be a lot of manual effort. You can export and import using spreadsheets, but that involves much data reformatting and room for error with each manual input. If both tools in question have an API, you could use that to keep data in sync, but that will usually require engineering resources. Despite your best efforts, data in your roadmap becomes static. I could spend my time manually updating and reimporting regularly—but that’s counterintuitive to the nature of roadmaps. I know from speaking with my peers, this manual workflow left us unsure that the version we were sharing with our key audience was, in fact, the latest and greatest. There’s always the looming question, “What if changes are being made elsewhere and not reflected in LIKE.TG?” The time and energy I spent on remedial tasks felt so ingrained in my work but ultimately took away from the time and energy doing more important tasks, like talking to our customers. 2. Confidently manage a standardized, single source of truth. I’m constantly plagued by the feeling that as a PM, there can be a constant influx of information from various sources, all organized differently—Slacks, emails, research, talking to customers coming from everywhere. Sure, I can track it all in a notebook or my head, but to get it into a presentable format, I need to organize it manually. With the Zapier integration, standardizing your input sources is much easier to maintain. Inputs from Slack and email are funneled through Zapier into the LIKE.TG roadmap and repository format: ideas, descriptions, sources, and where those ideas are coming from all in the same formatting. Zapier, the dubbed product management assistant, has it all done for you in one central place automatically. I can export and import, prioritize, and share my roadmap. Then, the Zapier integration spits it out in a format that’s easy to manage. What are the critical decisions I can make because of this information? Previously, standardizing my work would take me an hour or two on a Friday afternoon. The beauty is you have Zapier, an execution tool, efficiently collaborating with, LIKE.TG, a more high-level tool. 3. Rethink how you execute things. Take a moment to ask yourself, what are the time-consuming or frustrating tasks that you can offload? The Zapier to LIKE.TG integration helped me rethink my work in many ways, but here are two examples. We use Pendo to track NPS. I used to export the feedback into a spreadsheet every week. I’d read through all of the input. Not anymore. Zapier automatically culls through keywords and pulls out the scores I’m looking for. We started using Zapier for our Sales “Deals Closed” announcement to unify the team and foster excitement and celebration when deals were closed. Slack’s post included how each deal closed, with a summary paragraph that mentions the feature or product use case that won the deal. Here’s another example that I heard from customers. They have a Google Form on their website for requests. Once a week, they would export, review, and then manually transcribe it into the roadmap—spending about an hour every week doing this. Zapier and LIKE.TG’s integration automatically combs through the requests. It reformats them in a way you want. Hop in the roadmap, see who sent the form, what plan they are on, and who they are. All that information is in real-time on your table. I am executing the action of data entry. That time spent thinking about those feature requests and prioritizing those requests was manual overhead. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '4077b305-9bcc-4a5a-a982-aad75ee06c23', {"region":"na1"}); 4. Support collaboration with your broader team. Last but not least, this integration empowers me. I’m not a technical person. I can’t build something with an API. Yet, with Zapier, I can skip the phase of sheepishly asking one of my developers for help to build an API. This opens up so many possibilities. At larger companies, it can take forever to get things done. Some of the work I’ve done in Zapier would take months to get done at a larger company. From securing engineering resources to actually building the sync, you could easily spend a quarter just trying to get the data you need instead of focusing on your core responsibilities. If a bunch of processes bogs you down, then you can’t achieve the job you’re actually trying to do. Do the thing instead of waiting. Any product manager can set this Zapier to LIKE.TG integration in a matter of minutes and not dedicate all your resources. That way, you have a quickie proof of concept with Zapier, and you’re not pulling engineers off of something more substantial. When I develop a plan with the rest of my team, Zapier will help me execute that plan with the tools that other teams, like marketing and sales, are using. This opens up possibilities for folks outside of the product. When we have feature requests, it can automatically pull these into our table view and comments through Slack, bringing visibility to anyone. It’s picking things up for me from all of my apps while working on my roadmap. Takeaways Zapier is a productivity tool. It’s a means to an end, but not a solution itself. Before, there was a disconnect between the ever-revolving cast of tools and our roadmap platform. Zapier integrating with LIKE.TG won’t make you a better product manager; you still have to make good decisions. What it did for me was change how I think about where I’m spending my time. Whether you use Zapier or not, I hope these examples help people think about how they can automate tedious processes or think about how they can be more efficient in their day-to-day tasks. Get Buy-In and Budget Approval on Your Product Stack➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'c4f7dcc8-378e-4b20-9c16-637fcb9589a5', {"region":"na1"});

When prioritizing items for our product roadmaps, we sort and select them based on their ability to influence key metrics, achieve strategic goals, delight customers, and generate revenue. In evaluating possibilities, we choose the initiatives that maximize ROI and make the most of the available time and resources. In short, we’re trying to create a positive impact, and one lens to deploy for these exercises is the IMPACT mindset I’ve written about in our new free ebook. But the decisions we make as product leaders extend far beyond which themes and enhancements cut the next release. In this blog, I want to talk about hiring with an IMPACT mindset. Deciding which roles our team needs and who should fill them exercises muscles product leaders don’t use that often. It’s not like we’re hiring new product managers every few weeks like some of our engineering counterparts might fill out their vastly larger ranks. Product management hires at all, but the largest companies are relatively few and far between. And because we don’t get many opportunities, that makes these decisions that much more critical. We can’t just hire another if the first turns out to be a dud without navigating painful human resources processes. Plus, we have to find someone else to do the work while restarting another lengthy recruitment and hiring process. There’s usually a decent appetite for experimentation, ongoing learning, and trial and error in product development. But not so much when it comes to staffing. This makes our hiring decisions in many ways even more impactful than some of the choices we make around our products themselves. Why hiring product managers is so hard I don’t need to tell anyone in product management that finding good talent is tricky; anyone who’s ever had the opportunity knows that resumes and cover letters don’t give you a full sense of the candidate. Plus, you tend to get a flood of highly unqualified applicants you still need to sift through. But why is a product hire so much harder than finding another engineer or salesperson, or customer service rep? It’s because we ask so darn much from product management at every level. No other job requires you to do many different things with a high level of competence and mastery. In addition to being asked, forced, and blessed to wear so many hats, there’s also no preferred path to a career in product management. Our ranks include former developers, marketers, analysts, and customer success reps. They all bring unique experiences and skills to the table. But comparing candidates with such diverse professional backgrounds can be challenging. Especially since they may all have their own ideas about what product management actually is and what the day-to-day job looks like. Product management also requires a broad slate of soft skills to succeed. These aren’t binary, checklist items that a hiring manager can surmise from a glance at their C.V., and your HR department typically can’t offer much assistance in this department either. It requires probing interview questions and reference checks that try and uncover the real person you’ll be working with and relying on if they join the organization. Using IMPACT to Choose the Right Product Hire We know product management hires are important and that it’s hard. Luckily we can apply IMPACT to this process to help ensure we make quality hires that increase productivity and cut down on turnover. IMPACT comes in handy from the very first step—writing a killer job description—to making the final decision. Each pillar gives us something to think about and consider as we seek out additional team members. Download IMPACT ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '76387af0-7ef4-49da-8b36-28e99e4f5ba3', {"region":"na1"}); How to Hire with IMPACT Interesting You want to work with interesting people—you’re going to spend a lot of time with them, after all—so you can look for candidates with backgrounds you find intriguing. A clone army is not the goal for product teams, as every new person brings a new perspective and lived experience to the table. More importantly, you want to hire people who are interested in things. You want people that always have another question and are lifetime learners. They should be intrigued by customers and their stories, always inquisitive but not seeking to impose their viewpoints on others until they’ve done their homework. If they’re not curious, they’re not likely to be an excellent product manager. Meaningful Even the most junior product manager has a lot of leeway in how they spend their time. Since you don’t want to spend all your time babysitting your staff, finding candidates that are instinctually focused on important things is key. Their resume and how they talk about their past achievements can be indicatory in this department. Using language about “improving” or “enabling” things and “delighting customers” resonates with me far more than simply “increasing revenue” or “delivering” lots of projects. I’m looking for a strong moral compass and recognition that they have the ability to make a difference in people’s lives through their work… even if it’s on something relatively mundane. People Product management is a team sport, even if you’re the only one with “product manager” on their business card. No one in this role can succeed if they don’t work well with others. So, naturally, I’m seeking evidence of past success in this area and an awareness of its importance. “Collaboration” and “partnering” carry much more weight than simply “leading” or “running” things. Candidates must truly value the importance of working with others and creating alignment and consensus. Actionable Coming up with ideas is easy. Coming up with good ideas that are actually doable is a lot harder. I’m looking for team members that don’t let “perfect” be the enemy of “good.” This means actually getting things done. I also want individuals who identify doable opportunities and not just pie-in-the-sky ideas. By ensuring candidates are grounded in reality, I know they’re going to gravitate toward opportunities that are practical and possible. It necessitates a 360-degree-view of the situation, collaboration with technical stakeholders to assess how actionable things are, and a focus on incremental progress toward goals. I also want product managers who don’t just present information and problems. I want them to have a clear ask or solution to go along with it. This is happening, this is what it means, and this is what we need to do now. Clear Communication skills are one of the top requirements for successful product management, and I’m looking for clear, concise communication from candidates from the get-go. This starts with their own “elevator pitch,” as I expect them to entice me and sell me on them quickly. This isn’t to be mean or overly judgmental. Rather, it’s an indicator of their ability to command the room and convey the essential information—and do so in a convincing way. Product management is always competing for the time and attention of stakeholders. So I want to know they’ve got what it takes to thrive in those environments. Testable The job application and interview process is really one big series of tests and questions. Have they checked enough boxes to warrant a phone screen? Do they still seem interested after learning more about the job? Did they conduct themselves well during interviews with myself and colleagues and distinguish themselves positively versus the other candidates? hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '6dfa8cf7-7fd5-4e22-8d7e-edacfc23154a', {"region":"na1"}); I’m also testing for my comfort with the hire. What do they bring to the table, and how will it positively (or negatively) impact the combined skills, experiences, and talents of the overall team. Is it filling a need or duplicating an existing strength? But for a product management role, I will also literally put applicants to the test. These should be reserved for finalists out of respect for their time (and mine!). But for such a key hire, it’s important to see their work output and the tactics and strategies they utilize to do it. I have several examples of these test exercises in my book. Hire with IMPACT at Every Opportunity More than anything, incorporating an IMPACT approach into your hiring philosophy is all about making the most of the limited chances managers get to augment and improve their staff. Who we hire will have a massive impact on both the products in our portfolio and the teams we manage. We want assets instead of liabilities, high performers, and not needy neophytes. This requires scrutiny, inquiry, judgment, and a healthy dose of gut feel (which we normally try to tamp down in this line of work). At the end of the day, we want employees that share our values and work ethic. They should be worthy of our trust and not clash too much with our style. Using IMPACT is one way to ensure our choices match that intent.

Many of the customers we work with talk about their frustration with how they bring new products and features to the market. For some, launching a new product feels like an afterthought without a defined process. For others, a product launch is tossed over the fence to marketing, and what happens after that is a mystery. We want to help product people create thoughtful and repeatable plans for their next launch. We’ve introduced Launch Management (currently in open beta), a new space in LIKE.TG to plan, track, and share your upcoming launches. One of the key parts of Launch Management is the Launch Checklist, where you can work with your go-to-market team to decide what needs to be done to ensure your launch’s success. But how do you build a Launch Checklist? What should you include? How do you tailor the deliverables for the needs of your product, your audience, and your team? To help you, we’ve developed 6 tips for building your first launch checklist within ProductPlan. Read on to learn more! 1. Start Your First Launch Checklist With a List of Deliverables From a Previous Launch After you create your first launch within LIKE.TG, you’ll see what is perhaps a daunting blank slate of a launch checklist. Eventually, we will help you get started by populating your checklist with several task ideas that you could consider to help you launch your next product. But for now, the checklist remains blank, and you’ll have to build a list of launch tasks on your own. But fear not. Your first launch created in LIKE.TG is likely not the first launch you’ve experienced. If it’s not your first launch, we highly recommend you start your launch checklist by bringing over a list of tasks from a past launch. It doesn’t matter if they live in a spreadsheet, a slide, or even in your head. What matters is you create something that you can see in ProductPlan. Play with it. Begin to build out a list of options for what could go into your next launch. Once you have that, you can share it with your teammates and get feedback. Every launch is different, so there will always be a bit of tweaking based on the launch goal, the product or feature launched, the target audience, and more. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '527dc6af-8860-436f-9ca6-ae2b71b0cc99', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); 2. Start Your Launch List Early and Get Feedback From Your Launch Stakeholders As a product person, you might feel it’s your job to decide everything that should go into your next launch. You are the product expert, after all. But as you know, many launches involve work far beyond the conventional realm of product management. For example, there will be marketing campaigns to create product visibility and adoption, sales campaigns to acquire new customers, and support articles to help current customers understand how to use the latest thing you’ve built. You likely won’t be the expert on every task required to launch a product. So as you begin to build out your launch checklist, we encourage you to add members of your team to collaborate with you. By creating visibility into your launch checklist, you can spark conversations about the appropriate tasks required to ensure success. Field new ideas for training your internal teams on the latest product or find opportunities to communicate changes to new and existing customers. Successfully launching a product is everyone’s responsibility – not just the product team’s. All people involved in the launch should own the quality and completion of their deliverables and the outcomes they aim to achieve. It would help if you also involved your stakeholders early in the process. 3. Launch Deliverables Should Have a Single Owner It’s unlikely that every launch task will only require work from one person, and there will be many instances where an individual task may have multiple contributors. Take, for example, an enablement deck for your sales team. A project like this could involve a sales engineer, product marketing, and even a select group of salespeople for shaping and feedback. Despite this, we’ve found it is best to select one person (not one team) responsible for driving the task forward, reporting on progress, and ensuring it is completed on time. Either the selected person is doing the bulk of the work, or it could be the person who manages the team responsible for the work. Either way, a single owner means you know who to turn to when you need an update, and it also helps you create greater accountability among your go-to-market team. 4. Create a Playbook for Each Kind of Launch You Manage One of the best ways to create a consistent, repeatable, and thoughtful launch process is to create playbooks for each kind of launch you manage. Of course, not all launches are created equal, so they shouldn’t receive the same treatment. Some will require more resources, and others can provide a more significant opportunity for product adoption and engagement. In contrast, others are a footnote only relevant to a specific list of customers. To spend less time planning and more time executing, it helps to come up with a system to categorize your launches. Here are a few recommended ways you can go about it: Categorize your launch into tiers (i.e., Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3, etc.) based on the number of resources and effort required. The tiers are a great way to help you prioritize launches, especially when you have more than one happening around the same time. Categorize your launches based on who they impact the most. Does your launch matter more to your existing customer base? Or does your launch provide you an opportunity to acquire new customers? Answering these questions can help you determine the kinds of launch tasks required. Think about what you’re launching regarding how it helps your business. Does it close a feature gap between you and your competitors? Or does your new product create a competitive advantage? Another way to think about this is whether what you’re launching is something your market expects or finds delightful. Regardless of how you choose to categorize your launches, the important thing is to build a playbook for each. Think about the tasks required for each category of launch and document them. Now, whenever you begin planning the launch of a new product or feature, you can categorize your launch and start running with an already-established playbook. 5. Choose Fully Deliverable Tasks Every launch task will likely require a few subtasks to complete. For example, an in-app onboarding flow might require a series of product images. Which begs the question: what level of tasks should you include in Launch Management? We recommend only including tasks that represent a fully completed deliverable. Because you will be wrangling a wide range of deliverables from different teams and stakeholders, you don’t want to over-clutter your launch checklist. It also gives the person responsible for the tasks the ownership and discernment to determine what is necessary and sufficient for that deliverable to succeed. 6. Create a Cadence to Review the Launch Checklist and “Check-off” What’s Complete Timing is one of the most critical elements of any launch. From the first product development task to the final marketing material, there’s a crucial timeline for when things are assigned and completed. Knowing these tasks need to be managed by various stakeholders requires a release of control and setting expectations. When will you review the checklists as the launch owner and ensure things are running on schedule? Whether your releases come each sprint, quarterly, or annually will determine the right cadence for you. You must regularly check in with the task owner and overall product launch owner. Whether in weekly meetings or managed asynchronously, setting expectations is crucial. You’ll want to ensure stakeholders are checking off tasks promptly. Though you need to ensure they don’t feel the added pressure of managing the minutia of each task. Simply put, building a launch checklist aims to make your life as a product person more manageable. This provides you with a single place to oversee and drill into the details of each launch. It would help if you encouraged other team members to contribute and share ownership. As Launch Management is currently in beta, please share your feedback and best practices you learn as you work on your Checklists! hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'c0e72364-ed4f-4ef2-b88d-490d0ae4946f', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});

Information overload is a pre-existing condition these days. In our personal lives, we have endless streams of news stories and social media updates to scroll through. Our workplaces also overflow with facts, figures, and anecdotes that, in theory, empower us to make better decisions. Yet, we can only absorb so much at once. We have programmed ourselves to tune out whatever seems irrelevant. This allows us to maintain our sanity. We must balance between providing too little and too much information. Our stakeholders need just enough information to make informed decisions. And unfortunately, we’re going overboard far too often. Conduct a Stakeholder Analysis ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3eb23c05-aee3-46a4-9662-df983ee6cc53', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Making your case As product management professionals, our success depends on our ability to convince our stakeholders to pursue particular paths. We’ve prioritized these options based on what we’ve learned from our customers and the marketplace. From those findings, we align those insights with the business’s strategic goals. To move forward, we must make compelling and convincing cases to support these ideas. Without solid information, we can’t secure buy-in from our peers and superiors. We know hunches, emotional appeals, and personal preferences must take a backseat to data-driven decision-making and cold, hard facts. With the best of intentions, we want to give these stakeholders context. They require a full appraisal of the situation, the various dynamics, the ramifications of action or inaction. We want them to reach the same conclusion we’ve already reached. Though, we shouldn’t assume they need the same data and learnings we used to get there. At the same time, we want them to be independent thinkers. They should use their own autonomy to confidently reach conclusions they themselves believe in. This forces us to create a delicate balance, keeping the pendulum from swinging too far in either direction. Less is more when it comes to context We hear all the time that “context matters,” but there can be too much of a good thing. When we inundate stakeholders with information, a few bad things can and often do happen: They don’t see the forest for the trees. Context comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s easy to focus on the elements you agree with or find interesting or seem problematic. When presented with an extensive buffet of contextual elements, stakeholders can miss the big picture or give certain areas disproportionate attention and weight. They get distracted by something non-essential. Shiny object syndrome can strike anywhere, and some stakeholders can easily latch onto a certain detail and zoom in when they should be zooming out. This might be because they’re desperately trying to poke a hole in your case because they’re not personally a fan or maybe they’d just rather go down a rathole than actually make a decision. Regardless of why, these tangents stretch the entire process out, make meetings take forever, and squash momentum. They mentally check out. People don’t listen when there is too much information. Humans can only take in so much at once, especially when they don’t think they’re getting enough real value or benefit. When their eyes glaze over or they pick up their phone, you know you’ve lost them. After that, they’re unable to process what they’re seeing, hearing, or reading and just go through the motions, relying on instincts and previously held beliefs rather than the new information they’re receiving. With these dangers in mind, we must instead adopt an essentialist approach to context. Understanding Your Audience and Your Objective Bearing in mind the risks of overwhelming your audience, the key to deciding what, how, and how much context to provide is working backward: Who is your audience and what do you want from them? Each stakeholder, whether they’re a busy executive, a marketeer, or a seasoned sales rep, has a unique set of priorities, interests, experience, and preferences to account for. You can use a little stakeholder analysis to figure these things out and try to see the situation from their perspective. Next, determine what it is you need from them and pre-define what constitutes success. It might be buy-in or approval for a roadmap or change request or funding, but you may also need them to actually do something new or in a different way. If you don’t know what you need your audience to do with this new information, how can you expect them to? They must know why this matters to them and impacts their job since people also don’t listen when they don’t know how to put that context to use. Choose Wisely and Select with Intent From this point forward, every portion of context you dole out should be with the sole intention of getting them closer to making that decision of instituting that change. Anything extraneous only works against you. Your product development team doesn’t need to know your buyers are price-sensitive, but your sales and marketing team do. And the executive team likely doesn’t need detailed statistics about how many people use your app on a tablet versus a smartphone, but that’s some invaluable context for the UX team. What we edit and leave out is in some ways more important than what we leave in. As we tailor what we share and how we share it based on our different internal audiences, we must strip things down to only the crucial bits of context for that particular crowd and the business need at hand. While this applies to discrete meetings, presentations, and emails, it extends all the way to the dashboards, reports, and automated updates we provide stakeholders. If we’re hitting them with too much irrelevant context on the regular, why should they start paying attention now? By creating limited, filtered views of data that actually matter for each cohort, we keep them focused on the most pertinent details. Finally, you must create accountability. You can’t just give them a market overview or a tour of personas or an update on a new technology. You must set the stage before presenting all that context by explaining what they’re supposed to do with that information and then finish up by reiterating the action items and deadlines. Tell Them with a Story One way to limit context overload is to present information as a story. But we’re not writing a novel or meandering fluff piece, this is a straight-to-the-point fact-rich account with a clear call to action. Relying on the inverted pyramid structure, the most important information is always first. Since the reader might stop at any point (not to mention an editor lopping off the end of the story for space or brevity), storytellers don’t get the luxury of tossing in colorful anecdotes and descriptions or sprinkling in interesting but non-essential asides. There’s still a narrative, but after a few paragraphs, everyone gets the gist and knows what comes next. Consider sharing your context with the same ruthless approach. What must they know to make an informed decision and what’s expected of them next? If they want more details, they can ask for them, but you need to keep it short, sweet, and simple. It might feel like you’re depriving them of immersing themselves in all you’ve learned. You may also be concerned you’re not giving a hard enough sell. But in reality, you’re giving them just enough to grant them informed autonomy, facilitating the decisions and actions the product needs without bogging them down with extraneous embellishments. With this stingy-but-sufficient approach, each stakeholder has the context they need to decide or act and you get the results you set out to achieve. Save the rest for the water cooler. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '9252db78-e0f2-4f64-b933-416e291c2422', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});

Have your big-picture roadmap discussions in the roadmap itself Users of LIKE.TG’s roadmap app can always add comments to any bar or container in a roadmap. Users can click on an item in the roadmap and type a note or question into the comments field. The app even lets users add @mentions to their comments, to make sure the right stakeholders see them. But what if you want to add comments or questions about the roadmap? How can you start those higher-level conversations about product strategy or other roadmap-level issues? What if your comment or concern doesn’t fit neatly into any of the roadmap’s bars or containers? We discovered that many LIKE.TG users were creating these comment threads outside of our app—often in email and Slack channels. Feature: Roadmap-Level Conversations LIKE.TG has a feature that allows your team to have roadmap-level discussions within your roadmap itself. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '527dc6af-8860-436f-9ca6-ae2b71b0cc99', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); How does the new feature work Look for the bell icon in the upper-right corner of the LIKE.TG app? Clicking on it brings up our roadmap-level Comments menu. It lets you filter between Open Comments and Resolved Commentsto view All Comments for the roadmap. Now, when someone on your team wants to ask about timelines or budgets or competitive info—not for a particular theme or epic, but for the roadmap itself—they can start that conversation right here. Note: You can even have these high-level conversations for an entire portfolio of products if you’re using LIKE.TG’s Portfolio View to consolidate multiple roadmaps. With our Roadmap-Level Conversation feature, your team can now: Hold and document strategic discussions at the roadmap level (rather than the bar or container level). Review roadmaps asynchronously with your stakeholders. Discuss and resolve issues between individual roadmap bars and containers. Update your team on the status of roadmap initiatives, identify blockers, request additions, and document changes—all within your roadmap interface. You can also resolve comments at the roadmap level. This way, all stakeholders quickly ensure they’re participating in the latest conversation about the current roadmap. Make it easy for stakeholders to see what’s changed since they last viewed the roadmap Our app does a great job of tracking all changes to your roadmaps. But your stakeholders have limited time. They want to see those changes quickly without reading through a long list of details. Here’s how we took that customer feedback to make our app even better. What our customers wanted Sonia works for a multibillion-dollar tech solution company, and her team uses LIKE.TG for their product roadmaps. We’ve heard variations on her request from many customers. Here’s how she summarized the issue: “I want to see a view of what was planned and what actually happened. It’s not a question of what was completed or not, it’s a matter of understanding how our plans changed.” We knew we could do better. So, we created the Visualize Roadmap Changes option.” Feature: Visualize Roadmap Changes How it works With this feature, you can simply click a button and visually display the differences between roadmap versions or the differences between the roadmap at any two points in time. As you can see from the screen above, clicking into the History section still allows you to display roadmap changes as a list. Those updates display on the right-hand side. But now you can also toggle to a visual depiction of this information. As you can see in the main panel above, the app can now also display the changes to the bars and containers. For example: Items moved show both original and new placement, connected with lines and arrows, and are color-coded with red borders. Green borders depict items added to the roadmap. Strikethroughs show items removed after the previous version. With the app’s Visualize Changes feature, your team can: Make roadmap changes easy to grasp for stakeholders. Quickly and easily compare a roadmap between any two points in time. Eliminate the need to manually recreate visual changes for executive and other stakeholder roadmap updates. Visually monitor your performance and progress over time. (For example, to determine if your team is moving an items’ deadline more often than you’d like.) Takeaway These new features address two very different use cases in our app, but they have a common theme: improved roadmap collaboration. At LIKE.TG, we are always looking for ways that our roadmap app can help your team communicate and collaborate more efficiently—so you can build great products. Try our Visualize Roadmap Changes and Roadmap-Level Conversations features, and let us know if they hit the mark with your team. Get Your Free Roadmap Template Guide ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'aade5d3d-4c0b-4409-b1c0-31d727a356aa', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});

Does your product team celebrate launching that feature they’ve spent the last three months working on and then never give it another thought until it breaks? Is the senior leadership at your organization constantly ordering you to work on the top 10 priorities that change every other day? Are you too busy to reflect on how your product team can work better together? Then you probably have to begin to face the challenges of being in a feature factory. What is a feature factory? John Cutler coined the term feature factory upon hearing a software development friend complain that he was “just sitting in the factory, cranking out features, and sending them down the line.” The term has gained traction ever since. And even with all the bad-mouthing that feature factories have received since John originally coined the term, they still exist. LIKE.TG’s 2023 State of Product Management Report found that 54% of roadmaps are designed around outputs. Only 43% communicate outcomes. Who knows what the other 3% focus on… What happens when a product team is a feature factory So are feature factories all that bad? After all, you’re producing a lot of features. Isn’t that a good thing? Not always, no. Your unrelenting focus on pushing features out to market results in multitasking, over-utilization, and the hard-core environment that only Elon Musk would love. Ways to know your team is a feature factory: You produce a lot of features, but you don’t always know how they relate to each other and if they produce a viable solution. Your product becomes too complicated to use. You constantly add features and never remove any. Your product becomes too difficult to maintain. When you furiously add features without considering how they work with existing features, you end up with a maintenance nightmare. You introduce many features, but you never take the time to reflect on how to improve them. Instead of iterating, you move on to the next big thing. You’re more likely to introduce features solely for the sake of closing a big deal, which leads to several of the issues described above. Download How to Structure Your Product Management Organization for Success➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '5a8c45d2-3eb5-402a-ac48-fe7597dd4d69', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); How does a product team become a feature factory? Ok, so if feature factories are so bad, why do so many product teams go down that path? Our 2023 State of Product Management Report gave some clear indicators. Per the report: “Reviewing customer feature requests” is the number one source of actionable product ideas (35%). That’s not too surprising because feature requests (usually expressed as a solution) can seem like an easy way to decide what to work on. But when you don’t dig deeper into those requests and identify the underlying problem, you risk hoping on the feature conveyor belt – introducing features with no overarching understanding of why except for “our customers asked for it.” Role of senior leadership Senior leadership is also a common source of product ideas, according to the report. That source of ideas comes with a big downside – a lack of product manager confidence. The report explained product managers are “five times more likely to rate their confidence [in their ability to identify problems worth solving] at one out of six when ideas come from senior leadership compared to respondents getting their ideas from other sources” Suppose senior leadership tells you what to build. In that case, you’re probably not going to be very confident in your ability to identify problems to solve, and you’re more likely to focus on outputs. Another reason teams focus on outputs and risk becoming feature factories because it’s hard to measure outcomes. When asked if the return on product development investments meets their senior leadership’s expectations, nearly a third of PM’s responding to the survey said, “I don’t know.” Based on the low adoption of tools for post-release evaluation and reporting, you could interpret that as a sign that they aren’t measuring return on investment. So if you don’t have a good way to measure return on investment, the path of least resistance is to measure progress by how much stuff you’ve delivered. As proof of that, 70% of roadmaps most influenced by senior executives focus on communicating outputs over outcomes. A final cause of feature factories is a poor execution of your product strategy or lack of a clear product strategy. Ideally, your product strategy provides the tie between your business’ goal and objectives and your plans for your product. Suppose you don’t have that guiding north star. In that case, you’re more likely to find yourself whipsawed from one emergency feature release to the next to satisfy the loudest customer or the latest HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion). Feature factory, here we come. How to avoid the trap It doesn’t have to be that way. There are some simple ways that your product team can avoid the soulless monotony of cranking out features. To start, change how you communicate what you’re building and why. Talk more about the value you’re delivering and less about the specifics of the features you’re working on. Next, treat customer requests as feedback – Talk directly to your customers, and learn how to read into their requests to find the underlying problem. After all, customer requests are feedback, not requirements. Finally, give product teams a mission – a problem to solve – and let them figure out how to solve it. When the outcome comes from leadership, it should be clear they care about it, so your team will look to how well they’re solving the identified problem as your gauge of success. Want more insights like this? Check out our 2023 State of Product Management Report to get in-depth information about where product teams are now and where they’re headed. Download Our 2023 Product Management Report➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3606e408-64b7-428e-92de-d70da69b7d2a', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});

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

Let’s imagine you’re planning a trip across the country. You know where you’re departing from, where you want to get to, and what resources you have available (like the vehicle, budget, traveling gear, etc.), so all that is left to do is to map your way there. There are a couple of ways you can do this: you can plan your trip according to the time you have available (i.e., you need to get from point A to point B in x amount of days), or you trace your route based on the sights you don’t want to miss. Another option is to be more flexible, choosing the road you want to travel and picking the stops along the way. Product roadmapping frameworks work in a very similar way. There are a few routes you can take to achieve your product goals. As you choose which one you want to take, you must consider how you will allocate your resources along the way and set milestones to check off as you get through. Let’s map this out. Recap: What are Product Roadmaps? A product roadmap is a holistic visual document that outlines your product’s growth path. A stellar roadmap includes the release of new features, key dates, product updates, and the product vision – giving context to the product lifecycle. Product roadmaps are a good way for organizations to prepare for the future. If there’s a new product to launch, the tasks and timeframes will also be clear to everyone. Why is roadmapping important for product led-growth? In the era of product-led growth, the product roadmap is essential. Roadmapping helps you list all your competing priorities and narrow them down to what’s most important and relevant for the team and stakeholders. Prioritization is another crucial part of product-led growth. According to LIKE.TG’s 2022 State of Product Management Report, it’s the most challenging aspect of product management, with 22 percent of survey respondents ranking it as their biggest hurdle. Hence, besides electing the roadmapping framework that works best for your organization’s goals, choosing the right prioritization framework to help you determine the most important tasks and milestones along the way is also important. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '527dc6af-8860-436f-9ca6-ae2b71b0cc99', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); An effective product roadmap will: Support vision and strategy A product roadmap will outline how your product vision and strategy can become a reality. It should convey the strategic direction for your product and tie it back to the company’s strategy. But it should also be a source of inspiration, motivation, and shared ownership of the product and its successes. Guide teams toward success Sometimes we know what success looks like, but while managing all branches of product development, we can forget the actions needed to succeed. A product roadmap will keep you on track. Strengthen internal alignment Strong product-led teams have strong and well-oriented synergy between engineers, product leaders, marketers, customer support, and all other stakeholders. A product roadmap will serve as a guide to keep teams aligned and accountable for the same goals and milestones. Help communicate with external stakeholders and customers A strong customer and stakeholder relationship is one that acts as a partnership. Achieving that requires a transparent line of communication that can paint a picture of the company’s evolution and future. With a customer-facing roadmap, you ​​can address common questions from your customers like: What is the company working on right now? What new features and updates are coming next? Why is the company doing what they are doing? What to avoid when building a product roadmap A common and unfortunate mistake made by SaaS product teams is to treat the roadmap as a static, archival document developed early in the product development lifecycle. A successful product roadmap evolves alongside your product. Traditional roadmapping methods like spreadsheets and Gantt charts can be impractical for the team as they focus primarily on task management rather than setting actionable milestones that center on product success. A visual and collaborative roadmap can be more effective in communicating and tracking progress. Who is Responsible for Roadmapping? Creating a product roadmap is primarily a responsibility of the Product team, but it is also a group effort as it concerns all internal stakeholders. This combination of collaboration and discrete ownership gets stakeholders onboard while maintaining informational integrity and avoiding a free-for-all atmosphere. Product management begins with a clear understanding of the product’s and the organization’s strategic objectives. Then, with the desired outcomes in mind, product management creates the key themes for this portion of the product’s lifecycle. Tip: Chameleon has an excellent guide to Product Management frameworks that can help you strategize your growth path. In a remote-first world, collaboration can become somewhat of a challenge. However, there are frameworks and tools that can facilitate successful collaboration, like LIKE.TG’s dynamic roadmapping tool that offers key features that enable collaboration: Custom views: show stakeholders exactly what they need to see Roadmap level conversations: hold and document conversations within the roadmap Integrations: connect your roadmap with your tech stack to track progress, status, and completions. Watch our webinar: Working Better Together: How to Collaborate in a Remote World 3 Examples of Roadmapping Frameworks Let’s go back to the cross-country road trip analogy at the start of this article. If you’re starting to map your trip out, you typically ask yourself the following questions: Where am I beginning my journey? What is my final destination? What resources do I have? How long do I have to get there? What are the routes I should consider? Who else is involved in my trip, and what are their goals? As you answer these questions, you’ll better understand your goals and what roadmapping framework makes the most sense, given your resources, constraints, and priorities. We’ve selected three frameworks that work well for product teams. Timeline roadmaps If you’re working on a new product release and have it tied with a specific date-based event in the future, the best strategic move is to use a timeline roadmap. This type of roadmap outlines every task and step your team members need to take to achieve the final goal and the timeframe to complete each milestone. The timeline roadmap is a visual representation of a strictly time-constrained workflow. That said, this type of roadmap would suit a Scrum workflow within sprints. To make it easy to understand, you can include the upcoming tasks that need to be completed and attach key dates and other relevant information. Share the roadmap across the teams in your organization to ensure everyone is on the same page. Here is an example of a Release Plan Template Swimlane roadmaps On the other hand, if your product or feature release is not explicitly connected to a specific date, you can exclude the dates from your roadmap. Instead, you could make it quarterly-based with an overview of the planned product lifecycle development. The swimlane roadmap is also a good choice for emphasizing what is planned, what’s in progress right now, and what has already been completed. Here’s a template to help you build a roadmap aligned with your product development Flexible roadmaps Flexible roadmaps are another way of organizing the roadmap for your next product or feature release. It can be a release-based, an outcome-based roadmap, a roadmap based on customer requests, or any other type that suits your needs that aren’t strictly related to a specific timeframe. Besides that, in our guide to flexible roadmaps, we also talk about the value that lean, feedback-oriented roadmaps can bring to your team – and your customers. You can use in-app surveys to evaluate customer satisfaction, include them in feature ratings or request voting, and collect feedback to make better-informed decisions. Use the insights you gain to validate your feature ideas and further iterate your roadmap. Product landscapes vs. roadmaps While a roadmap answers the questions of “what” and “when” to build, a landscape answers the question “why”. In other words, a product landscape gives a broader picture of the product’s context. It includes the product mission, go-to-market strategy, and the overall position of the product in the market, along with the desired vision of where the product is going. Tools for Successful Roadmaps Alright, now that you know what framework works best for you, it’s time to build your roadmap. Here are a couple of tools to help you in the process. LIKE.TG: Build your roadmaps LIKE.TG is a roadmap platform that aligns team members in a visual, dynamic, and intuitive interface that concentrates your roadmapping efforts in a single, customizable space. Chameleon: Gather user feedback Chameleon is a Digital Adoption Platform that allows you to create code-free and native-looking in-product experiences that boost product activation and adoption. You can run in-app surveys to gather contextual user feedback and use it to inform your strategy. Choosing the Right Framework Whether you’re starting your roadmap from scratch or revisiting and updating your existing one, we hope this guide will help you choose the right framework. Before you get to it, let’s just recap some key points: Use your product strategy and vision to guide you in the roadmapping process. Prioritize tasks and milestones that will get you closer to your ultimate goal. Avoid static roadmaps that do not evolve alongside your product. Leverage collaboration in the process of building your roadmap. Use different SaaS tools to optimize your roadmapping process. See you at the end of the road! hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'd3fa5225-9b84-4eae-8910-23016a8b8f99', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});

We are excited to welcome guest writer John Cutler to the LIKE.TG blog. John is a product coach with Amplitude, where he collaborates with internal teams, customers, prospects, and the broader product public. Product teams are no stranger to the ever-changing and continuous demands of consumers and executives alike. When you create and update a particular product, it’s important to make sure the product does “things” that people need it to do. A list of available features holds obvious value to a customer—you can see in one quick bulleted view what the product has to offer and how it will fit your needs. But are features truly the only beacon of light for high-impact product work? Do the constant feature requests (and the ongoing efforts to communicate progress on those requests) distract developers and product managers from being able to create a more sustainable and meaningful product? We asked those questions, and more, in a recent interview with expert panelists Abbie Kouzmanoff, product manager for Amplitude, and Jim Semick, veteran product manager and one of the founders of ProductPlan. What are the pitfalls of focusing myopically on features while creating and communicating roadmaps? How do you avoid feature-fixation, and instead use themes and “north stars” as the guiding light for creating long-term value not only for customers but for product teams as well? Features and Inertia Feature-based roadmaps have long been the norm of product development, they put product managers in the hot seat to “deliver” the roadmap “to plan.” While in many ways it makes sense to first answer the question of “what are we building, and in what order?” the key is balancing that need against the upside of taking a less prescriptive approach. Certainty and surface-level predictability come at a cost. Once the team has converged on a specific feature—or set of features—it can be difficult to change course. We become less likely to respond to new information, and we don’t work in ways that elicit new information. We all have difficulty counteracting inertia, confirmation bias, and escalation of commitment. For example, Jim shared a past experience where his team helped develop software in the property management industry that would help property managers move tenants into their apartments faster. They created a roadmap based on an idea about what they were going to build and all the features it would encompass. Unfortunately, they were overly optimistic and got stuck. It took a long time to deliver that first feature. With this feature-based roadmap viewpoint, it was very hard to shift priorities along the way. Alternatively, Jim noted, “Had we created a theme-based roadmap, we could have delivered value to customers a whole lot faster. We could have learned faster. We could have introduced features more iteratively to our customers, and it might have re-prioritized what we did.” It’s really important to be able to test the riskiest assumptions first before committing to specific features. Instead, Abbie recommends, it’s better to treat features as options and give yourself the time for iterative learning—testing out and learning what features will have the biggest impact and save time in the long run. The end game is outcomes, rather than outputs. You might have an idea for a great feature to build, but that feature doesn’t necessarily create a business outcome or solve a customer problem. And in the end, as Abbie asserts, “[A feature-based roadmap] doesn’t set you up for really evaluating yourself once that feature has actually gotten out there.” So what is the alternative? hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '53ae44b5-ec4d-4ff8-9d1c-56626297bb4c', {}); Product Themes and North Stars Themes and the North Star framework can be used by themselves or in tandem to address the traps above. Importantly, both can still be used even if your roadmap is currently feature-based. The key goal is coherence and shared understanding. Themes With a theme, features connect to an overarching idea for that work. Themes are a great nudge to see the bigger picture, link to a particular strategy or companywide objective, and allow for stakeholder buy-in. You can create a theme-based roadmap in several ways. The important part is tying together your theme with certain features to illustrate the benefits. A theme does a couple of things. It helps you earn stakeholder buy-in because—ideally—it is tied to the objectives of the company, in addition to the outcomes that you want to create for customers. Talk with your stakeholders about themes first and come to a consensus together. Then you can begin to plug your features into that theme. It helps you stay strategically on track. Jim notes, “You’re going to get distracted. You’re going to get distracted by a loud customer. You’re going to get distracted by the next shiny object. Someone’s going to come to you with a fantastic idea, and that idea is often phrased in terms of a feature.” With a theme, you are less lured by flashy ideas because the feature inevitably requires alignment. That way, even if you get distracted by a fantastic idea, you can decide whether to put the effort into it if it doesn’t fall in line with the theme.” Think back to the property management feature-based roadmap example, had Jim and his team started with a theme, they would have created a more innovative product. “If our theme was about moving in renters 50% faster, we could have started to measure our progress against that. It’s a lesson that I learned along the way and one that I would encourage you to do.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '527dc6af-8860-436f-9ca6-ae2b71b0cc99', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); North Star Framework In contrast, a North Star Framework represents your product strategy with a primary (North Star) metric and a series of inputs. Together, this “tree” of metrics serves as an effective way of capturing assumptions, beliefs, and known causal relationships between different components and subcomponents of a product strategy. For example, Amplitude’s North Star, Weekly Learning Users (WLUs), has three inputs related to activating customers and encouraging users to create and share their insights. Each input is a key facet of their team-focused, learning-focused strategy. Zeroing in on the right North Star metric can be a bit of a challenge. However, it forces you to ask hard questions related to your product strategy. How can you tell if you’re on the right track? Here are the key characteristics of an effective North Star, according to Abbie: It focuses on customer value and the exchange of value. For example, daily active users (DAUs) don’t really tell you anything about the value that was exchanged. It represents your unique product strategy. It is not generic. It connects the customer value you are trying to create as a product team with the business impact that the executive team in your company ultimately cares about. Once you have a strong North Star in place, it has an exponential impact on decision-making. With WLUs as a guide and reminder, Abbie’s team was able to take a routine feature request (the ever-popular in B2B “Bulk Editing of Records”), and ask “How does this impact learning and WLUs?” By asking that question, they’re able to see past the surface request to understand the deeper impact on how teams create and share insights. Abbie explains, “It’s a tool to communicate and say, ‘Hey, we still want to solve this customer pain, but we all know that we’re working toward this metric. This alternative path will really get us to that metric faster.’” Themes North Stars At a high level, both Themes and North Star Frameworks are tools for alignment and sensemaking. They are complementary. A team might use the North Star Framework to create alignment around a product strategy, and then attach Themes to North Star “inputs.” Themes are flexible and can be used to describe any number of dimensions related to the work. The job you’re hiring both to do is very similar: inspire aligned autonomy, encourage the best solutions and decisions, and foster a shared language. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '5894a003-79ce-4ea3-9804-dae280a96106', {}); How to Get Started Wondering how to integrate themes and a framework like North Star Framework into your roadmapping process? Here’s where to start. Have lots of conversations, brainstorms, and “testing.” See if your proposed themes and/or North Star metric and inputs withstand extra scrutiny, like the “yeah buts” and “what ifs.” These tools will only be useful if people can actually use them, so they must be “usable,” even if that means a little less theoretically correct. Buy-in is one of the biggest hurdles to adopting a feature-less roadmap. Abbie and Jim recommend that your first goal be to establish themes alongside your entire team—not just the key product decision-makers. Get everyone from design to dev on board with your themes and see where the journey takes you! Above all, keep the “why” in mind. Don’t remove features from a roadmap just to scratch a dogmatic itch. The reason you do this—along with Themes and North Stars—is to inspire better decisions. This, in turn, delivers more value to your customers and leaves your team happier and more proud of their work. Check out the webinar to learn more about feature-less roadmapping. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); John Cutler shares more of his product leadership thoughts in Spotlights: John Semick “The most daring thing I’ve done is shut up and observed”, below.

Product teams are as diverse as the products they help bring into existence. While backgrounds and experience can vary broadly, all product managers come to work with a similar core foundational skillset that organizations rely on to build successful products. Product leaders (e.g., CPOs, VPs of product, head of product, etc.) have the weighty challenge of bringing these diverse PMs together to form a cohesive team with a unified vision and aligned goals. Of course, not all product leaders are created equal. Some stand out from the rest as exemplary in the role. What separates the average product leader from the superstars who energize their teams and provide the right leadership, support, and space to enable teams to create and steer products to successful outcomes? In this post, we’ll explore some of the key skills and qualities that elite product leaders share, and we’ll also identify what separates the standouts from the status quo. What elite product leaders have in common Truly great product leaders share ten key attributes we’ll examine more closely here. 1. Driven to lead Elite product leaders are natural-born leaders. They are driven to lead. Not only do they know what needs to be done, they know how to get it done. They make prioritization look easy. But they also trust their team and nurture their people to lead. Leadership in and of itself is a core value. Bill George, the former CEO of Medtronic and senior fellow at Harvard Business School, knows a thing or two about cultivating an environment of leadership. (George wrote several books that explore leadership: True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership and Discover Your True North.) “The role of leaders,” he contends, “is not to get other people to follow them but to empower others to lead.” 2. See alignment as a cornerstone An elite product leader stays firmly aligned to vision, strategy, and an organization’s goals. The alignment of all three is considered sacred and unshakeable. But more important: this alignment is shared. And it becomes the glue that unites the product team. “It’s no longer good enough to build products customers love. Elite product organizations must work across multiple dimensions, building products customers love, that achieve the company’s objectives at the lowest cost and best use of resources. Elite product leaders are the multi-dimensional connector across teams, functions, and all levels of the company hierarchy.” (Connie Kwan, How to Run an Elite Product Organization) hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'c6a78b23-a2f3-46e3-bc23-4578f7506068', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); 3. Powerful storytellers A product leader holds a strategic and visible spot for the product team within the company and has a great deal of power in setting the tone companywide. An elite product leader understands the power of effective storytelling and why getting the story right and telling it well are so important for product teams. They use stories to simplify, engage emotions, and be memorable. And when these three boxes are checked, that story becomes shareable–an ideal outcome for a product team. In Building a Storybrand, Donald Miller suggests that the job of product is “not simply getting products to market, but also communicating why customers need those products in their lives.” Without a strong story that persuades and sticks in people’s minds, even the best products can be drowned out in a crowded marketplace. 4. Seek meaningful engagement Elite product leaders know how to motivate members of their team by meaningfully engaging them. They also encourage, support, and mentor their team members. They understand their people and know what makes them tick. And they see team members as individuals who bring unique skillsets and experiences to the group. Elite product leaders understand that building a great product begins with building a great product team that scales alongside product vision and goals. 5. Offer ongoing connection Product leaders are often responsible for hiring. Building the right team culture begins here but doesn’t end here. It’s an ongoing, intentional effort to cultivate the right culture. That intention might take setting a weekly goal for customer interactions or a daily time to check in on product usage. (Note: Elite leaders use their products.) Building a truly great team must be as intentional as building a truly great product. Elite product leaders know that “great product teams don’t build themselves or come together by chance or accident. Instead, it takes a dedicated leader to envision, shape, and nurture the team and its members so it can grow and scale with the products they manage.” 6. Intentionally build community There are many ways to generate an intentional product community. The easiest way is to relevant read books and articles and listen to podcasts. Join groups that create an external product bridge. Connect internally within the product group by launching a book club or setting up a casual monthly or biweekly meetup to talk shop. Merge internal and external communities by attending conferences together. 7. Data-driven (but not data-obsessed) Data is essential for a product team to make informed decisions. But sometimes, there’s so much data coming at the team; it’s challenging to know what to focus on or how to manage it so that it can be useful. Elite product leaders can skillfully balance the flow of data, get the right systems to manage it, and identify what’s most important. 8. Extraordinary communicators It really can’t be overstated just how essential strong communication skills are to the entire product team, but especially product leaders. Elite leaders can strike a strategic balance in knowing what to say, when, how to say it and to whom. Getting it right (or wrong) can make or break a product. 9. Amplify efficiency Increasing efficiency across product teams and organizations is the hallmark of product operations. To elite product leaders, this means long-term sustainability and effectiveness. This efficiency stems from “implementing standardization around metrics, infrastructure, business processes, best practices, budgeting, and reporting.” Further, it means enabling product teams with the tools and processes they need to do their jobs successfully. 10. Customer-driven (borderline customer-obsessed) Being customer-driven is a hallmark of a successful product organization. That being said, an elite product leader might be seen as more customer-obsessed. They take customer feedback and the customer experience very seriously. And they use this feedback to inform strategic product decisions about which goals to pursue. How do elite leaders view mistakes? Elite product leaders are not superhuman. They certainly make mistakes along the way. But they don’t bury those mistakes or distance themselves as quickly as possible from their mistakes. They circle back and poke at them, dissect them, and hold them up to the light to learn from them. Mistakes become teachers. Mistakes provide valuable insights. Leaders know this, embrace this, and put this value into action. “Failure is not the opposite of success. It’s a stepping stone to success.” Final Thoughts Effective product teams that build great products are a direct result of an elite product leader. Download How to Structure Your Product Management Organization for Success➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '5a8c45d2-3eb5-402a-ac48-fe7597dd4d69', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});

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"});

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"});

Thanks to the Internet, there is no unfindable fact. As information is always at the ready, there’s no excuse not to check sources, find corroborating evidence, and research every decision. Our well-instrumented products are delivering a steady stream of data ready to be sliced, diced, and analyzed — leaving many of us with a bad case of analysis paralysis. We can learn from others, quantify opportunities, and calculate results. We can experiment, tweak, and modify whenever we’d like; gauging the effects based on hard numbers instead of guesses and anecdotes. But the challenge is sorting through it all. With so many inputs relentlessly adding to our data, it’s hard to know what’s valuable. We could analyze 24 hours a day and never “finish” anything. You Have Analysis Paralysis Our job as product managers requires us to make decisions, prioritize, and plan. While we could theoretically analyze forever, our employers need us to make up our minds and move forward. But how do we know when enough is enough? When do we need to make up our minds instead of conducting another round of research and review? How do we balance backing up our recommendations with data and making those recommendations? Despite everyone telling you not to, sometimes you DO need to listen to your gut. Listening is one of the under-appreciated skills of the trade. How did we get into this situation? Analysis paralysis is a bit of a self-inflicted wound. For decades, thought leaders, investors, and board members have been championing getting out of the office, talking to customers, and performing extensive market research. Thanks to analytics packages, we also now get reams of real-time data on exactly how customers are using our products. We can see how users navigate, their dwell times, and where they click. We can tie back behaviors to conversions and purchases. We can cross-reference it all with demographics, personas, and more. And don’t forget our newfound love of testing and experimentation. We’re no longer restricted to focus groups. We can unleash A/B testing on the masses to measure real-world reactions to various messages, features, and visuals. We’ve armed ourselves with this supporting data to make our cases bulletproof and overcome imposter syndrome. We don’t want to make mistakes, we want everyone to be happy, and we never want things to be our fault. No one would scrap these tools to go back to the old days of crystal balls and analyst reports. But it has had some pretty significant side effects. Our workloads have grown when it comes to sifting through all the available data. Plus there’s now an expectation that every move we make has statistical evidence predicting its impact. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '5894a003-79ce-4ea3-9804-dae280a96106', {}); How Analysis Paralysis Negatively Affects You When too much data breeds indecision, it takes a toll on your ability to be an effective leader and get your job done. It reduces your confidence. Once upon a time, you felt sure of yourself. Now you only feel prepared if you show up armed with a PowerPoint chock full of charts and graphs backing up your ideas. It slows you down. When challenged, you retreat and pledge to “look at the data” even when the answer is obvious. When there’s a crisis requiring immediate action, your quick-twitch mental muscles have atrophied. As a result, you’ll either make poor decisions or no decisions at all. It presents too many options. There’s a time for data, and a time for common sense. Narrowing the field down to a few choices shouldn’t take long, but overanalyzing things makes this a far more daunting task than necessary. It leaves you unsatisfied. But if you’re always seeking the best solution, you’re never positive there’s not an even better choice still out there. Although there may still be room for improvement, this can rob you of both decisiveness and happiness. How Analysis Paralysis Negatively Affects Your Roadmap When you’re trapped in this unfortunate state, roadmapping becomes an unproductive grind. Instead of using rational, logical thought, you begin scrutinizing everything. You poke holes in perfectly adequate decisions. You are obsessing over the details. Once you get in the habit of analyzing everything, it’s hard to take any shortcuts. Yet the demands of the job require you to use your time wisely. If you divert too much energy toward items with minimal impact, you either won’t finish, or you’ll give important things short shrift. It simply isn’t scalable. You are aiming for perfection. There’s no point trying to create a perfect product roadmap because there’s no such thing. Even if you somehow manage to do it, that perfection will be short-lived as we know things will change. Shoot for “pretty good” and don’t sweat the small stuff. You are leaving everything on the table. When your backlog is overflowing with dozens (or hundreds) of items, it’s not easy to whittle things down. But quickly dismissing the undoable, unrealistic, and unnecessary items lets you spend more time on stuff that has a shot of making it on your roadmap. You are damaging your credibility. While you should leverage data where appropriate, you’re also supposed to be an expert when it comes to your product. If you’re unable to be authoritative about your domain, you’re sowing doubts amongst colleagues and stakeholders. Read the Strategic Roadmap Planning Guide ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '06f68ad8-23a4-4d4e-b15a-e578f0f8adaf', {}); The Key to Defeating Your Roadmap Process Analysis Paralysis is Intuition Shepherding your roadmap along takes a combination of critical thinking and visionary instincts. Here are some tips to keep you from drowning in data by utilizing your intuition. Take baby steps. Roadmaps are not built in a day— at least they shouldn’t be. A roadmap breaks down the steps to create the ultimate vision of the product, and your roadmapping process has levels of its own. Make them as small and manageable as possible. By notching incremental progress, you can bust through those mental blocks and build momentum in the process. Save in-depth analysis for the big stuff. Not every decision requires the same level of rigor and research. Data should inform critical strategic moves. But smaller items with limited ramifications can be made without exhaustive study. Lean on your product vision. With well-defined goals and objectives, many decisions about prioritization should be no-brainers. Don’t make things harder than they need to be. Referring back to themes and North Star metrics can also help. Eliminate bad options quickly. Don’t waste time considering things that you know are bad ideas or unrealistic. Sorting through viable choices is hard enough as it is! Embrace deadlines. While roadmapping shouldn’t involve split-second decisions, it shouldn’t drag on needlessly. Allocate a limited amount of time for each phase of the process. Force yourself and your stakeholders to make up their minds and move forward. Get out of your head. Sometimes it’s hard to break the cycle of self-doubt and panic about making the wrong decision. So take your quandary to a colleague or trusted friend and bounce it off them. An outside opinion can help you snap out of it and push things along. If you’ve got a team under you, you can also try delegating decisions while retaining veto power. Mitigate the impacts. Don’t put all the available development resources onto a single initiative you’re not quite sure about. Hedge your bets and get to an MVP with a skeleton crew. This way, if it doesn’t pan out, you haven’t gone “all in” on a questionable call. Remember, nothing is permanent. Near-term items on your roadmap are pretty likely to play out according to plan. But after six months it’s a fair bet that things are going to get shaken up. You’re going to be frequently reviewing and updating your roadmap again. There’s less need to shoot for perfection for those longer-term items. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); Trust yourself. You talk to customers all the time, so you know their problems. Don’t couch statements with “I think.” Command authority and be decisive based on what you know from those conversations. Free Yourself from the Analysis Paralysis Trap When you’ve reached a decision standstill, take a step back. Contemplate whether you genuinely need more information, or if you need just to make a judgement call with your gut and move on. Don’t fear making the “wrong” decisions on your roadmap. Pivoting will happen whether you do all your research or hardly any at all. Need more help deciding what to put on your roadmap? hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '555f9324-4b50-4d5c-90fa-38516ce6484a', {});