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Product Management 2019: Year In Review
What a year. There are so many changes happening in product management as I write this, and the evolution only seems to be accelerating.
Our LIKE.TG community of writers and speakers (and you) have led the charge behind these trends. With your support, we dove into the most result-driven strategies, popular frameworks, and groundbreaking leaders who changed the product management landscape.
And in 2020 we will more than double what we’ve done to keep up with all the changes.
As the year comes to a close, I’d like to reflect on some product management trends I’ve observed and reveal a few exciting things we’ll be writing about next year in the product management space. I’m excited to watch it all unfold.
Well-Defined Success Metrics are Key to Product Success
In 2019, most product managers are using metrics to make decisions. Sure, product managers need numbers to report up the chain to track progress around goals. And now product managers are communicating the strategy using data-driven roadmaps. Companies define the metrics that matter. Then they use them to determine whether or not a feature makes the cut. In our upcoming 2020 Product Management report, 34% of product managers said that their primary product success metric was business-oriented metrics.
The availability of data and machine learning is partially driving this movement. But what’s driving this approach is realizing that gut instincts alone don’t get you winning products.
We bring too many biases to the table. We make snap decisions based on our personal feelings and experiences instead of letting the data inform our choices.
Data allows us to calculate product and business metrics continually. Hypotheses can now be proven or disproven in days versus months. There’s no excuse to rely on a hunch when you’ve got metrics for everything under the sun.
This abundance of data also allows organizations to adopt OKRs to enlighten stakeholders. Each product enhancement and initiative has measurable, predefined objectives, and the key results can be tracked accordingly.
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Employing Blended Frameworks
Intuition-based judgment calls are still part of the planning process, but priorities are more often being informed with prioritization models. Ideas and projects can be scored and stacked against each other, merging quantitative and qualitative thinking.
We see increased usage of frameworks like MoSCoW, DACI, and RICE, but product teams also realize that one framework must not rule them all.
In our upcoming 2020 Product Management Report, we found that they’re relying on a handful of options depending on the scale and scope of the exercise and which stakeholders are included. There are so many choices, and product managers can experiment until they find frameworks that resonate within their organization.
Returning the Power Back to the Customer
Worrying about customers is nothing new for product managers. Meeting their needs, anticipating their desires, and increasing customer value is what the job is all about. But customer-centricity is being embraced now more than ever.
Customers are no longer “trapped” with vendors they don’t want to stick with because moving data between systems is easier. So companies are working harder than ever to build customer loyalty.
There are also more choices than ever. Cloud computing and technological advances make it cheaper and faster to bring a viable product to the market. Companies simply need to be more competitive and offer more value over time.
This means established firms must double-down on creating and maintaining a superior customer experience.
They’re realizing that customer experience goes beyond the product and customer support. Every interaction along the customer journey influences how a customer feels about the product and the company. So organizations are making customer-centricity a core value.
This is all culminating in organization-wide customer-centricity. It’s no longer relegating it to specific departments. It permeates every decision, making the entire company more sensitive to the impacts and benefits of their actions. They now strive for customer delight, not just satisfaction.
To ensure they put the customers first, companies are also investing more time and resources into gathering customer insights. They’re valuing the actual voice of the customer (not just what internal stakeholders “think” the customer wants).
The Growth and Specialization of Product Roles
Product management was once the domain of generalists. You needed to be good at everything, given their broad portfolio of responsibilities. But as the profession matures and establishes its importance, more discrete roles are emerging.
The primary factor is that companies now have product management teams versus only product managers assigned to specific products. C-level roles for product managers are more common than they were five years ago.
With larger groups, some product leaders are creating more specialized roles.
Technical product managers are common within larger organizations as one of the original subcategories of product management. But the rise of product ops has created a new class of product managers dedicated to this area of the business. There’s still plenty of debate regarding just how technical a product manager must be.
And while product marketing managers have been around for ages (often confusing people thanks to their title), there are now even product managers assigned explicitly to growth.
We’re Roadmapping Differently
With agile, the prioritization and roadmapping process may have changed, but the roadmap is still necessary in an agile world.
For product managers, this is more frequently meaning they shift away from date-driven roadmaps, especially those roadmaps that project a “known” future state several months out. These roadmaps are instantly out of date the moment they’re distributed.
We’re now seeing more roadmaps that are feature-less. Instead of spelling out exactly which functionality comes out when product managers are communicating their product visions and priorities. They’re relying on themes that aggregate features into a higher level, and we’re also seeing more product organizations using north star metrics to guide the way.
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Meeting the Needs of a New Landscape
At LIKE.TG, we’re in a great place to observe the evolution of product management. We track the trends shaping our profession.
We know the problems and challenges facing product managers are changing. Product managers embrace lifetime learning, so we’re producing valuable, informative content that isn’t just repackaged sales pitches. In 2019, we launched our Product Management Glossary, where we defined nearly 200 essential product frameworks, roles, and terms. We also created nine books and guides.
In case you missed them, we were proud to release:
2019 Product Planning Report
Career Guide for Product Managers
The Product Manager’s Complete Guide to Prioritization
How Agile Product Managers can Build Better Products
The Customer Interview Toolbox
From Product Manager to Product Leader
The Essential Feature Kickoff Checklist
The Power of Pricing Experiments
The Anatomy of a Product Launch
We also launched our email courses:
Prioritization
Roadmapping
Metrics Data
Building a Product Team
Putting Our Money Where Our Mouth is
As product people ourselves, we must walk the talk. All these things that we talk about in our content (best practices, company building, experimentation, building products that customers truly love, simplicity first) and promote as concepts in the product management community, we are actively working to incorporate ourselves.
We want to make the first-time user experience rewarding. We’re improving onboarding, so new customers get value from our products quickly. We’re also formalizing and improving this process, to ensure that every LIKE.TG user is positioned for success.
And as we build out our team and add more specialized roles to the organization, we’re importing even more expertise in building roadmaps. These folks are flush with best practices for communicating vision, setting goals, and aligning stakeholders… all the things we know you’re doing daily.
Setting a Course for 2020
Our roadmap for the coming year is focused on continuing to deliver great content and education while expanding the capabilities of our roadmapping software, so it’s even more valuable to you.
You’ll see even more activity around prioritization frameworks, growth product management, and customer-centricity. We know these are areas of great importance to our community.
We hope you’ll continue that journey with us as you create your own roadmaps for 2020 and beyond. And if you have any feedback you’d like to share, we’re always listening.
So on behalf of the entire LIKE.TG team, thank you again for a fantastic 2019. We can’t wait to see where you help take us in 2020.
Want to get ahead of the curve for 2020?
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The Key to Defeating Analysis Paralysis on Your Roadmap
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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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What Your Executives Want to See When You’re Presenting Your Roadmap
As a product manager who now sits on the other side of the table as an executive, I’ve had lots of experience both presenting executive-facing roadmaps and receiving those presentations. I understand how much thought (and possibly anxiety) goes into these roadmap presentations.
They’re the culmination of months of work, customer conversations, and experience. There’s no need to be afraid of your roadmap, either. They’re the capstone for a product manager’s vision and strategy. I want to share my thoughts from being on both sides of the process. I hope it gives you some inspiration to help you present executive roadmaps that align, guide, and facilitate the right conversations. And of course, to help you deliver a better product to your customers.
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Mistakes I’ve Seen When Presenting Executive Roadmaps
The most common mistake product managers make in the roadmapping process is assuming they know exactly what to build without building consensus first. Of course, you are the customer expert, but leading with the assumption that you alone know the ideal priorities has consequences that might sabotage your well-intended agenda.
The best way to overcome this is through curiosity and communication. Have informal discussions with executives and other stakeholders before the executive planning meeting. That way, you’ll present a roadmap with the right priorities and align those to the company’s business goals. It will help you to have a seamless review and approval process.
Another key mistake: over-optimism. Believing your team can deliver more done than is realistic sets everyone up for disappointment in future planning meetings. If you must create a roadmap with delivery dates, try to keep broad timeframes such as quarterly. Things are always more complicated and take longer than you and your team think, right? It will help your cause if you educate executives over time to know that you can only estimate fuzzy delivery dates and that priorities will certainly shift.
How to Present Your Executive Roadmap
Delivering a winning roadmap presentation to the executive team isn’t just about the hour or so you get in the conference room. It takes a combination of preparation, execution, and follow-up to get your plans blessed and leave a room of satisfied and confident stakeholders in your wake.
What to do before the roadmap presentation
With so much focus on the roadmap itself, many people overlook one of the fundamental secrets to success: laying the groundwork for when you present your executive roadmap.
The goal of a roadmap presentation isn’t to wow the audience of stakeholders. You’re not trying to knock them off your feet with bold new ideas and surprises. In fact, if stakeholders are seeing things for the first time during your presentation, you’re setting yourself up for failure and frustration instead of praise. A big reveal during a roadmap presentation puts everyone on the defensive and opens yourself up for a debate of whether it’s the right thing to build
Alternatively, prepare everyone in advance for what they’re going to see. Build enough support and consensus that the presentation itself is an official sign-off opportunity.
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Continuous communication and conversation
Remove the element of surprise and set the stage for broad acceptance and support by maintaining a dialogue with each stakeholder in advance of the presentation. You want each person to be familiar and comfortable with each item on the roadmap. Schedule time with each stakeholder at least a couple of weeks in advance.
You can most effectively get alignment by linking each item back to the overarching business goals guiding the prioritization and roadmapping process. Don’t tell people that something’s essential—explain why it’s crucial – why it will add customer value or delight customers in some way. Then justify its priority and a rough timeline.
Moreover, remember that these should be two-way conversations. The aim is to solicit feedback from your stakeholders at this stage. Again, curiosity goes a long way. Give them enough time to solicit feedback from their own organizations.
While you may not agree with everything you hear, you’ll have the opportunity to incorporate their suggestions when warranted. Ideally, any dissent or open issues are dealt with and resolved well before everyone gathers together for the actual presentation.
Set the agenda
The objective of an executive roadmap presentation is to get their approval. Your agenda should reflect that. Provide enough context about the strategic goals to set things up and then efficiently communicate the elements of the roadmap itself. Address any outstanding issues or questions that require the entirety of the executive team to settle. Finally, get a solid green light to move forward (or particular action items if they’re not yet ready to provide that).
Your slides or visual aids should move the conversation along accordingly, with a firm eye on the clock as you go. You only have so much time with the entire group assembled, so stick with the important topics and table everything else.
Scope it out
A quick way to reduce your credibility is to predict specific ship dates. As a product manager, you’re only one input into the development effort. You and your engineering team may also be unaware of dependencies that can impact a schedule.
Do your homework, huddle up with tech leads, and develop rough estimates for each initiative (and have an idea of the minimal version for each one). Preparing this information will prevent you from overpromising and under-delivering. Plus, it’s helpful when you’re prioritizing. It might also come in handy during preliminary conversations with executives (or during the meeting itself) if there’s a request to reshuffle some things.
During the Roadmap Presentation
The main event is all about meeting executives wherever they are. They are not obsessing over your product roadmap. They’re trying to figure out how to achieve the business goals and want to see how your roadmap helps get them there. Show them.
Keeping the strategic goals top-of-mind helps create and deliver a productive and successful roadmap presentation. Stakeholders want to walk away confident in the path you’ve plotted and excited to see your plans come to fruition.
The power of a visual
Using graphics and pictures to connect the roadmap to the rationale behind it is helpful. It ties the initiatives in the roadmap to actual customer value, business goals, and meeting real needs.
Big picture thinking
Executives have a lot on their plates and generally, try to stay as high level as possible. While you might want to take a deeper dive into the platform details with the CTO or the new messaging opportunities with the head of marketing, this isn’t the forum for those interactions.
Those more specific conversations can take place before or after the presentation itself. This meeting is all about consensus, buying in, and signing off. Sticking to the big picture avoids thorny topics or detours that might lose the audience or make them question if the plan is fully baked.
Levels of certainty
Product managers aren’t psychics, so every roadmap item sits somewhere on the spectrum between “definitely going to happen” and “definitely a possibility.” However, without the proper context, executives will view everything on there as equals when it comes to delivery expectations. Unfortunately, people hear what they want to hear.
Don’t be afraid to acknowledge that there are unknowns. Communicate your level of certainty for each initiative during the presentation.
There are two dimensions to this. The first is more prominent, in that the further out you go, the less certain things are for everyone. You can mitigate this by creating roadmaps that don’t extend as far into the future. However, beyond that, there may be uncertainties driven by things other than the calendar.
There may be unknowns lurking, such as dependencies, regulatory issues, expected new technologies, or customer commitments. If these could impact the roadmap and leave you less certain about some items, be sure to call that out. Product managers will often color code or identify roadmap initiatives based on how positive they are that it will all fall into place.
Tie everything to business goals
This audience cares about top-line business goals. While they may not embrace a “by any means necessary” mentality, they also don’t have time to worry about all the details.
Therefore the context of the entire conversation should be about the KPIs they care about and how the roadmap moves the needle in the right direction. For example, how does a particular feature accelerate growth or decrease churn? How does a roadmap initiative influence progress on a strategic objective?
Your presentation should both ask and answer those sorts of questions, as that’s what interests executives. Everything else is a detail.
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There will be questions
If you’ve done an excellent job beforehand, your presentation shouldn’t have a bunch of “gotcha” questions. You’ll already know the hot button issues before the meeting and will have addressed them in previous discussions or during the meat of the presentation.
You, of course, should be asking consensus-building questions during the meeting. And you will likely hear a few different types of questions from executives:
Clarifications and deeper dives. An executive may want to drill down on a particular element of the presentation. It’s OK to answer, but if it’s going to derail the momentum offer to meet with them later to discuss things in detail.
A direct challenge. Maybe you didn’t quite have the consensus you thought you did, or perhaps you had a holdout you were hoping would be won over by the crowd. Ask questions to uncover the real concern. Don’t be afraid to let an ally on the executive team chime in with their support.
An impromptu change request. Despite all your preparatory work, an executive may decide the roadmap review is the time to ask for something to be added, dropped, or swapped. It might be totally valid and based on new information, or it could be a bright shiny object that will fade under a more in-depth examination. In the end, it’s possibly a good idea, but it’s your job to educate them that there are other higher priorities.
After the Presentation
Follow up and follow-through
Chances are you walked away with some sort of to-do list. It could be sharing the roadmap with other parties, further research, providing more data, or clarifying something.
Don’t let those open issues fester; get on them as quickly as possible so they can be closed out. Closing the loop, maintains momentum and shows you’re responsive and were paying attention.
You can also formalize any final decisions by sending out a follow-up email outlining what was decided and the expected next steps. For executives, this is the “speak now or forever hold your peace” opportunity as they realize this roadmap is now ready for execution.
Changes to roadmap priorities are inevitable. Alert the executive team when these changes happen as part of your job. Also, if any of those disruptions require executive input, don’t put things off any longer than necessary. You don’t want to have that hanging over your head for the next meeting.
Finally, if it turns out some of the business goals that drove the prioritization and roadmap planning have evolved, be sure to re-engage with the executive team and grapple with their impact. Don’t assume you should stick with the existing plan.
Product management is hard. But presenting your roadmap to executives is your opportunity to shine and show why you were hired in the first place.
Learn how to build an executive-facing roadmap with these 8 tips.
4 Phases of a Successful One-on-One with Your Product Team
We are excited to welcome guest writer Carlos González de Villaumbrosia to the LIKE.TG blog. Carlos González de Villaumbrosia is the Founder of Product School, originally based in San Francisco. Product School was founded in 2014 and now maintains 20 campuses around the world where they offer certifications in Product Management. They organize events discussing innovations in the software and technology space.
It can be easy, especially within large businesses, to take someone’s skills for granted. From the outside, a Product Manager (PM) is a resolute individual responsible for completing a product’s development. This involves (among other things) careful data collection, design awareness, and business knowledge. But today we’re going to talk about one of the most important traits a product manager needs. Product management leadership requires an ability to support their teams to victory! This comes from a combination of collective management and individual relationships; every PM must be equally good at both.
You might be able to electrify audiences at the launch of your latest feature, but then find yourself struggling to strengthen relationships within your teams. This is a problem because stakeholder management work is very much bottom-up: it doesn’t come from your claim to authority but from a slow build-up of respect with each team and team members across the company.
One very good moment to establish or improve professional relationships with specific team members is on product team one-on-ones.
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What are the 4 Phases of a Successful Product Team One-on-One?
Phase 1: Look for the signs that your team communication isn’t working.
Silence in the room: Did you just propose a pretty radical change of direction and nobody said a word? That’s a sign your team needs better communication. A healthy team should at least wonder why you are doing it.
Lack of dissent: If you’re being knowingly tough on a particular project and nobody questions you, then you cannot learn or collaborate.
Unexpected pitfalls: Milestones are not reached, there are undetected bugs, and there’s an impossible deadline. A normal office should feel free to communicate these pitfalls in advance.
Putting out fires: Rather than acting, you spend a lot of your time reacting. Again, this is a sign of poor team planning.
Conflicting communication: You speak to your team, and everything’s good and normal. You speak with other teams or even superiors, and everything’s falling into pieces. This sort of mismatch calls for one-on-ones.
Open challenges: It’s one thing is to get constructive feedback. It’s something different to be contradicted in front of everyone. That’s a sign that something has gone wrong in your communication.
Individual isolation: If one member of the team seems removed from collective activities, operations cannot really function.
Every situation will be different. It’s not the same to work at a small startup compared to a big enterprise. It’s not the same to seek a discussion with a colleague you have known for a long time compared to a new hire. And it’s definitely not the same to hold a product team one-on-one during a normal check-in compared to a huge failure. Keep these different parameters in mind and apply some common sense.
To have the most successful product team one-on-one in all of these contexts, we recommend the following.
Phase 2: Prepare for your product team one-on-one.
Gather information and data that back-up your claims.
Situation, action, result. What’s the situation that you wish to correct? What‘s the action that this person can do to help you out? What’s the intended goal?
Be tactful. A private meeting with your Product Manager might sound intimidating. According to a study performed by Google, one aspect of their most successful teams is psychological safety. “The safer team members feel with one another, the more likely they are to admit mistakes, to partner, and to take on new roles.”
Open the communication stream both ways. Make it clear to your team that they can also use this time to voice their own concerns and ask their own questions. This is as much for them as it is for you.
Phase 3: Run effective product team One-On-Ones.
State the topic from the start.
Have an action point at the end of the meeting.
Begin with a positive discussion. Then, bring up “negatives” in a constructive way.
Listen, don’t anticipate. Clear your mind of what you’re expecting to hear, and really hear them.
Phase 4: Close the loop after your One-On-One.
Create a shared document that you both have access to and can edit.
Write down the key takeaways and actionable steps from the product team one-on-one immediately and share them with your colleague to make sure you’re on the same page.
Be patient. Many times, Product Managers lack the authority to act straight away. On the other hand, if this is something that you expect to become routine; share!
Put your insights together and find a common narrative that you can explain to the team.
Transform this qualitative information into actionable metrics. Set relevant targets from the meeting. Are you trying to decide on the need for future hires? Did a team member request further training to be funded by the company?
How to Know Your One-on-Ones are Working:
Teamwork and organizational trust are critical to operations, but as they are abstract concepts they can be difficult to measure. Paul J. Zak, the author of Trust Factor, came up with some simple metrics you can use to measure communication:
Energy: How much communication is happening. Are your Slack channels silent? Is the lunchroom full of people staring at their phones?
Engagement: What reaction do you get when you say something to your teams? If your messages are met with apathy and disinterest you may have a problem.
Exploration: Does your team talk to anyone outside of the project, in the company, or in the industry?
Now go forth and run your own one-on-ones with your product team. Read, 12 Traits of High Performing Product Teams, to learn more.
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How I Overcame Imposter Syndrome as a Product Manager
No matter how far into your career you might be, you’re never too old for imposter syndrome to make an appearance. Imposter syndrome is a feeling of inadequacy that persists despite the evident success, according to Harvard Business Review. ‘Imposters’ suffer from chronic self-doubt and a sense of intellectual fraud that override their feelings of success or external proof of their competence. Sound familiar?
So, to level the playing field. Even after years into my career as a product leader and founder, every so often, I too suffer from feeling like an imposter. We sometimes need to make decisions with imperfect information. Despite years of experience in this field, it still feels like I am taking risks as I lead LIKE.TG into the unknown.
For example, with a recent project, the data wasn’t playing out the way we expected. We had to decide whether to adjust or stand pat, with no clear “right” answer in front of us. As an expert, I should know how to do all this. However, at that moment, I felt like an imposter. However, I’m not — and neither are you.
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Why Product Managers are More Susceptible to Imposter Syndrome
Product managers (PM) are particularly vulnerable to experiencing imposter syndrome. The nature of our profession is nebulous. There a few reasons why product managers might be more susceptible to the feeling.
First, no one gets a degree in “product management.” You don’t train for it. There’s no set path to becoming one. There also isn’t a universal definition of success for product managers. With no pedigree or success validation, it’s natural to feel like an imposter.
Colleagues also look to their product managers to have all the answers. Of course, we don’t have them all—nobody does. But we’re expected to know just enough about everything that we can speak intelligently and have an opinion on nearly every subject. It’s important for our role. This creates very high expectations, which plant the seeds of doubt in our minds.
Product managers also wield power in their organization, even if it’s not always reflected in the org chart. We have an awesome job to decide what’s in and what’s out. Others have input, but view us as the gatekeeper. Unfortunately, that puts a target for blame if things don’t succeed. This fear of letting people down compounds, so we start to second-guess ourselves.
With the weight of the product on our shoulders, we’re the ones to say “no” to various stakeholders. We’ll say no to customer ideas or inform the CEO that their pet project won’t make it onto the roadmap. All while wondering who decided we’re qualified to make that call?
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How I Overcame Imposter Syndrome (and How You Can Too)
There’s no magic bullet, but I have found a few things that helped me get over the hump.
1. Humanize your counterparts
Everyone is in the same boat. We’re all human and we all have fears that we have to push through. That means regardless of how much success or failures our peers have had, they’re still putting on their socks one at a time. By humanizing your counterparts, it takes away the fear and intimidation that people are inherently better or more qualified to do your job.
2. Opportunity always comes again
Once it’s done, it’s done. Once a decision is made and acted on, then that ship has sailed. If it works out, great! If it doesn’t work out, there will be another chance to make another decision again. At that point, I’ll have learned from this mistake and be even better. There’s always tomorrow.
3. Nobody knows everything
As disheartening as it is to realize, I will never have all the answers. Nobody knows everything. We’re all always operating with an incomplete data set and no guarantees. That’s not a defense to solely trust our gut and wing it. However, it does mean you need to move forward and believe that you’ve done enough homework to make an educated decision. Inaction due to uncertainty doesn’t breed innovation.
4. Embrace collaboration
Embrace collaboration. The lone wolf product visionary that trusts no one, issues proclamation, and finds success is exceedingly rare. Most successful PMs learn fast that leveraging the knowledge, experience, and instincts of others makes things a lot easier. Not only are you operating with more information, but the decisions you make aren’t yours alone. Moreover, when others are involved in the process, they’re less likely to be resistant to the final decision.
5. Use data to make decisions
Metrics matter. You can use data to make decisions and convince others to get on board. This is a valuable tool for PMs. Not everyone is going to trust you. They might have their preconceptions and biases that you’ll be challenged to sway. However, with an argument based on facts instead of feelings, it’s much easier to build consensus, not to mention instilling confidence that you’re on the right path.
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6. Vulnerability shows you have humility
Honesty is the best policy. I prefer to be the person that is open and has good relationships with people versus the one who bulldozes their way through. No one likes a bully or a know-it-all. Don’t be afraid to tell people you’re not positive about something or are still seeking input from others. Others will appreciate if you expose your vulnerability, it shows you have humility.
What I’ve Learned from Overcoming Imposter Syndrome as a Product Manager
Everyone’s trying to figure it out, just like you. Once you realize and accept this, you can be much more empathetic to others. That forgiveness is contagious, and I’m certain will circle back to you.
The only way is to outgrow your doubts. It doesn’t happen overnight. But over time, as you have more successes under your belt and more positive experiences in your rearview, you begin feeling like you belong.
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It’s hard to do. But, try to stop caring about what other people think. When you’re confident in your abilities, you know you’re doing good work, and are treating people well then it becomes second nature. Now with all that free time you’ve created for yourself, you can do the fun stuff.
You don’t need that kind of stress. I’ve met plenty of older, successful people that are still racked with worry. Despite all they’ve accomplished, they can’t be content and convinced of their abilities. To them I say, “Relax, you’ve made it this far, and it wasn’t by accident.” Typically, this industry doesn’t put up with underperformers, so if you’ve made progress in your career, then you’re doing something right.
Let your guard down. People can tell when you’re forcing it, so don’t bother putting on airs. You are who you are, and you’ll do a good job or you won’t. Have humility, take the time to figure things out based on the input of others, and have faith that you’ll make the best decisions you can.
You can’t lead or even garner the respect of your development team, you have to believe in yourself. Not unreasonably or unwaveringly, but with general faith in your competence and abilities. Without it, no one’s going to have your back or want to follow you into battle.
Conclusion
Don’t let your insecurities hold you back! If your team didn’t think you could do the job, they wouldn’t work with you. Your requests for help are appreciated and not annoying.
Imposter syndrome is real and unhelpful to your career. Moreover, you can beat it. We’ve all been there. When you make mistakes, you’ll learn from them and be better for it.
Patterns of Pain: How Product Managers Solve High-Value Problems
The most successful product managers think of themselves as finders of pain, not finders of products.
In my experience launching LIKE.TG and prior products, I’ve learned that talking early with potential customers to identify pain can lead you to create better, more innovative solutions. Although it may seem obvious, that’s not how many companies start—they often start by building a product and then later seek out problems for it to solve.
It’s this “product-first” thinking that is at the core of many product failures.
When the up-front pain-finding doesn’t happen, products miss the mark and can waste countless hours in development effort. Unfortunately, I’ve witnessed this first-hand.
My philosophy: Find the patterns of pain first, and you’ll be able to create better products.
Ultimately, what you’re seeking is a market with a consistent problem area. Then, you can obsess about that problem. Thoroughly validate it and confirm it’s a problem you can solve. Moreover, if you find that solving this pain is at the top of your customer’s priority list, you have a much better shot at creating a winning product.
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Finding Pain through Customer Discovery
People buy products to reduce pain or create a gain. You can uncover this through customer discovery. Through customer discovery, you can learn what it would mean to a customer if you solved that problem.
Your goal is to uncover the value proposition of solving problems. A value proposition represents the value that the customer gets out of using your product. So a value proposition could mean:
Saving money.
Saving time.
Making money.
Lifestyle benefits or professional benefits such as looking good in front of your boss.
I believe a “product” is more than the product itself; it includes the pricing, services, the way it’s sold, and so much more. With this broad definition, you have much more room to discover frustrations that customers are facing with their current solutions or the way they’re solving problems today.
My recommendation: start by speaking with at least ten prospective customers. Even at low numbers, these interviews will give you incredible insight, especially if you start hearing a consistent pattern of pain.
Ask the Right Questions
One of the techniques that I recommend is asking open-ended questions. Open-ended questions allow people to include more information in their answers, including how they feel, which will lead you to ask questions you hadn’t considered.
“Why?” is by far the most powerful question you can ask, so ask it often. Rarely accept a customer’s initial response. By asking “why?” as a follow-up question, you can extract an enlightening answer and get to the crux of an issue.
Once you find a problem to solve, it’s essential to understand how high on the priority list this falls for your prospects. An even more basic issue to understand is whether the customer is aware that they have a problem. If you need to educate customers that they have a problem in the first place, that’s a sign it could be tough to create awareness and acquire customers in the future. And if they are aware they have a problem, is the problem big enough, pervasive enough, and painful enough that someone would be willing to pay you to solve it? Do they even have the budget and the decision-making authority to purchase?
If you’re solving problems that people don’t care about solving, or worse, they’re not willing to pay, then you don’t have a business model that’s going to work for your product.
Pattern Recognition
A lot of people think the validation of a new product is a scientific process. For instance, if you conduct 30 or 40 interviews, then somehow, you will achieve a statistically valid result that gives you the truth. But this process is subjective, and biases abound.
You have to read into the nuance of what people say, and that is anything but scientific.
When you conduct about 15-20 interviews, you will start to hear the same things again and again. You’ll hear patterns. So by the 21st interview, you’ll ideally hear something similar to what you’ve heard previously.
However, if you do not hear a pattern of pain after a dozen interviews, then there might not be a problem to solve.
There is no magic number for the right amount of interviews. However, for every additional interview you conduct, you’re incrementally lowering your risk of failure. You can conduct ten interviews and reduce your risk of failure somewhat, or 20 interviews and reduce it even further. After 90 interviews, assuming you’re asking the right questions, you can reduce your risk substantially. That is the main point of the process.
Also, as I interview, I pivot my questions and the pitch along the way. So my fourth interview is nothing like my first. Once I learn where I missed the mark, I adjust and move on. This flexibility is especially true if you’re validating a solution for a domain where you have limited experience. It can be a little awkward if you’re not speaking the same language for the field. If that’s the case, you’ll learn how to phrase questions, use the right industry buzzwords, etc.
How We Found Patterns of Pain at LIKE.TG
At LIKE.TG, we discovered pain around the product roadmap process by initially conducting 30 interviews with product managers from a variety of companies. Most of these discussions focused on their day-to-day challenges, and the pain they were experiencing planning, prioritizing, and communicating their product roadmap.
We discovered significant pain around product roadmaps. Product managers were spending hours every week on the roadmapping process, and they still weren’t able to prioritize effectively. There were disconnects communicating the roadmap with internal stakeholders.
They found it hard to get alignment within their organizations and found it challenging to tie the roadmap back to strategy. We also discovered that, because they wanted their roadmap presentation to look good, they spent valuable time making their roadmap look great for stakeholders and executives. The visual aspect mattered.
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Based on discovering this pain, we built and launched a product that hit the pain head-on. We didn’t try to solve every problem they had but focused on reducing the pain around product roadmaps. We also created a gain by helping product managers communicate with and align their teams better. Ultimately, we help them ship better products, and we help them look good with beautiful roadmaps.
We spent hours coordinating and conducting those initial interviews. By the time we launched the product, we had done over 70 interviews. But because of all of this up-front work, we got our roadmap software to market quickly, on a tight budget, and we made no significant pivots along the way.
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You can read more about finding patterns of pain and product-market fit in our book: Find Product-Market Fit Faster, Lessons for Product Managers
When to Declare Backlog Bankruptcy
A few years ago, I was the acting product manager at a startup, developing an enterprise software product. Building the product was hard: it was taking longer to develop than everyone expected (of course). The complexity of what we were trying to accomplish became more evident as each day passed.
The product backlog I managed grew daily. I heard requests from customers, domain experts, consultants, our development team, and internal stakeholders. And I diligently added the stories to the backlog. Feature request? Add it to the backlog. Bug found? Add it to the backlog. Corner case we needed to handle one day? Backlog.
Declaring Backlog Bankruptcy
I diligently prioritized and managed the epics and stories, moving them into the next two or three sprints in the sprint backlog. As the months passed, it became clear there was no way we’d be able to develop what was in the product backlog over the next few months. There was rising frustration from the whole team at the pace of development, partly from the perception that we would never get to everything.
And every day, my stress grew as the backlog ballooned.
What was the point of diligently managing the backlog when it would be impossible to accomplish it all? Especially when everything a few months in the future would likely be different?
So along with the CTO, I made a decision – we’d declare backlog bankruptcy.
Every story, issue, bug, and idea that we weren’t planning to release in a near-term sprint, I would delete. Clicking Delete was one of the harder things I’ve done. Over 600 items… gone.
But then something interesting happened. There were no repercussions from that decision. And I got a sense of relief after eliminating the cognitive overhead created by the backlog. And after ruthlessly prioritizing and limiting what we added to the backlog, we got the product to market faster. Starting from scratch felt GOOD.
The lesson declaring backlog bankruptcy taught me was that if an idea has high enough value for customers, it will come back. It will bubble up to the top. I no longer keep massive lists of all the ideas and things I want to do in the future. Sometimes the simplicity this creates in your product is a positive experience for customers.
It also taught me more about the purpose of the product backlog – it’s not a place for every future opportunity. We needed to have a process around what gets added to the backlog.
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What Does a Healthy Backlog Look Like?
Every organization doing agile software development does it a little bit differently. My approach isn’t for everyone, especially for organizations that need to have more certainty about their product roadmap more than a few months out.
For me, I’ve been a part of startups using only some variant of scrum. We plan the stories a few sprints ahead, guided by the epics and themes on the product roadmap. That’s typically enough for any product manager. Ideally, there aren’t hundreds of stories in the backlog.
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When the product backlog is too long, it clouds the vision and creates underlying stress of what’s not getting done. A shorter backlog frees you up to think about what’s most important. It improves creativity. Think in timeframes of perhaps three to six months out.
Think about your process for what gets added to the backlog. It’s not for every possible “future” idea that you haven’t necessarily committed to. Yet you still likely want to track ideas and inspiration you’re getting from customer interviews. And you might want to remember who asked you for a particular feature so that you have context. For those situations, I recommend creating a separate “future opportunity” list, so you have a place to add your learnings as you proceed with customer discovery on the idea.
After having been involved in launching multiple products over the years it’s clear to me that things you think are super important today aren’t as pressing a few months from now. So by adding every idea to the backlog, you’re doing yourself a disservice.
But the stories and epics that you believe will add lots of customer value in the short term go for it. Also, it’s good practice to include bugs, tracking them and peppering them into near term sprints.
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Warning Signs Your Backlog is Unhealthy
As a product manager, how do you know you’ve entered the dangerous territory with your backlog? Here are some of the things I’ve found to watch out for:
Your backlog has become a dumping ground for every random idea from every stakeholder. Sure, it feels good to be able to tell a vital stakeholder you’ve “noted” their opinion, but is the minuscule, incremental cognitive overhead worth it if you do that 100 or 1,000 times?
You’re adding ideas that you’d like to implement “someday.” This thinking is long-term, and because everything is guaranteed to change from a product, customer, and competitive standpoint, what’s the point? I suggest deleting anything in your backlog that is older than six months.
You’re spending hours every month prioritizing items that aren’t winding up in your short-term sprint backlog. Be thinking every day about what will provide customer value in the short term.
Sometimes You Need to Add More
Now, to be clear, there are many situations where you might want to add something to the backlog even if it’s not going into a near-term sprint. For example, if your CEO believes a feature has merit, and you want to validate the idea and at the same time let them know you’ve noted it in the product backlog.
If you absolutely must keep a long product backlog because it’s necessary from a corporate or process standpoint, try organizing it or grouping it by a theme, such as “near term” and “long term.” That might help a little bit with your sanity.
As I mentioned previously, you don’t need to track everything that goes into your product backlog. You can use a separate “opportunity” or idea backlog, such as the Table Layout in ProductPlan. This approach is a great way to capture ideas that you haven’t committed to, and that need further validation.
My decision many years ago to declare backlog bankruptcy has yielded so many lessons for me since then. By the way, out of extra caution, before I clicked Delete, I exported my product backlog. And I never went back to look at it.
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How I Learned to Embrace Uncertainty: Tips for Product Managers
I’ll admit it, in the past, I’ve wrestled with needing to control uncertainty.
For years I thoroughly planned most everything and felt the need to know the eventual outcome of decisions. I had expectations, and if the expectations weren’t met, I was disappointed.
Whether it was a product I managed or a vacation I took, I wanted to control the inevitable uncertainty.
Uncertainty is uncomfortable.
As a result, I found myself with a lingering sense that things were out of control. As a product manager, the uncertainty manifested in really detailed and lengthy Product Requirements Documents. I know I’m not the only product manager with this challenge.
Over the years, I’ve realized through observation and personal experience that the most successful and happy people are those who are willing to embrace uncertainty. They are the ones who make “risky” decisions without knowing 100% of the information. It’s especially true for product managers, entrepreneurs, and others who want to launch products or ideas.
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I’m much better now about letting things unfold without needing to know how the plan eventually will materialize. And yes, I get the irony that I’m the co-founder of LIKE.TG, software that helps product managers visualize their plan. More on that later.
The Psychology of Uncertainty
The fear we all feel from uncertainty – and the feeling that we can control it – can cloud our thinking. After all, research consistently shows that humans are wired for seeking comfort, safety, and loss aversion. Our inner cave-person wants to avoid getting eaten by the tiger.
A couple of years ago, our team read the fantastic book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize Winner in Economics. His research demonstrated that we choose options to avoid loss. We don’t behave logically when presented with the same choice framed in different ways.
In one example from the book, a disease that kills 1,286 people out of every 10,000 is considered more dangerous than a disease that kills 24.14% of the population. In studies, we believe the first disease to be more threatening even though the actual risk is significantly less than the alternative.
We also tend to overestimate our ability to control events – and this feeling that we can control a situation is an illusion. If we can stop for a moment and change our thinking that we’re not in as much control as we think, and surrender to it, we’re more likely to succeed because we’re open to change and opportunities we wouldn’t see otherwise.
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I’m not saying that we never need to plan. I think two ways of living can co-exist – it’s possible to have outcomes-based goals and, at the same time, take decisive action without knowing the exact path with certainty.
And I’ll add that it’s a lot more fun to work once I learned to live with the uncertainty.
Lessons for Product Managers
I think there are many lessons for product managers in this philosophy. Here are a few thoughts for how product managers – especially those in an agile development environment – can embrace uncertainty and live with the inevitable discomfort. Hopefully, these ideas will help you focus on what matters.
Make decisions based on outcomes
One way to live with uncertainty is to relax about the exact plan, and instead make decisions based on an outcome-driven goal. For example, rather than creating a list of arbitrary and disconnected features for your product, instead, focus on what your desired outcome is for customers – what is the goal you want them to achieve?
By focusing on an outcome-driven roadmap, you (and your team) have room to think about new possibilities, about different ways of achieving the goal.
Focus on today (and maybe a few sprints out)
There’s an expectation of product managers to spell out the vision for our products and what the product looks like one or two years down the road.
But it’s problematic if this planning is too detailed. One or two years out any plan is only a fantasy. There’s no way things will go exactly to plan, and the goalpost will probably change along the way. You’ll never achieve perfection. This detailed planning, unfortunately, sets an expectation in your head (and your stakeholders’ heads) that simply won’t come true. It sets up everyone for disappointment.
My advice: Don’t plan too far ahead. Focus on the big picture vision in broad terms. Then, focus on what is in your control today to meet that vision. For your product planning, a few sprints out are far enough.
Get comfortable with the discomfort
Stop spending as much time dwelling on problems at work and what-if thinking. You’re causing stress, which will affect you in all areas of your life. Spend more time working to solve the problems your customers are facing. Those are the fun problems.
For all the worst-case-scenario planners out there… cut the negative thinking. Why worry about all the endless gloomy scenarios that your (fearful) mind can conjure up? Plus, I believe that if you expect the worst, you’ll put yourself in a position of being close-minded to recognize new options and opportunities.
I’m not saying that you should avoid realistic contingency planning, but truly, the five percent chance of a worst-case-scenario is unlikely to unfold. Spend your brainpower toward an optimistic outcome. Positive thinking really does affect. And your nights will be more restful.
Embrace confrontation
Another tip: Embrace confrontation. Stop avoiding the conversations you know you need to be having. I’m not saying to pick fights, but rather address conversations directly. Rather than avoiding conflict, micromanaging, or trying to prove someone wrong (controlling), have an honest upfront conversation about the situation.
Incorporate stress reduction daily
The last bit of advice on another way I’ve found to embrace uncertainty at work and in life: give myself time for exercise and other mindfulness practices daily. I’m finding that when I prioritize this above other items, the rest of my day (life?) is happier, even when I get thrown a curveball I hadn’t expected.
Takeaway
In the end, will you be a product manager who embraces uncertainty or one who plays it safe and avoids unpredictability? While it’s not a guarantee of success, I think I know which one stands a better chance.
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I’m Predictable in an Agile Environment
“Being Agile” and “being predictable” may seem mutually exclusive, at least when it comes to product management. A good sprint cadence creates a predictable frequency of software releases but divining what’s actually in them feels harder. Isn’t the whole point of Agile that we can continuously adjust, making on-the-fly tweaks to seize opportunities? Contrary to some prevailing opinions, managing products in an Agile environment doesn’t mean surrendering planning to the whims of the development team. In fact, Agile can help you be more predictable in some ways. I say this speaking from personal experience. I’m predictable in an agile product environment.
Agile ≠ Chaos
Those unfamiliar with Agile often have some misconceptions about how it really works. Let’s start by dispelling a few Agile myths:
Agile is a free-for-all.
Developers don’t code what they feel like, and the software doesn’t just ship at random points of time. Agile is merely empowering the product development team to make iterative progress while adjusting to incoming data.
Product managers don’t have a role in an Agile environment.
Product managers are still prioritizing features, gathering and synthesizing customer feedback, defining a strategy and product vision, and offering input to the implementation process. None of these tasks go away. You’re no longer writing lengthy product requirements documents with the same exacting detail as before. But developers still both need and value your input.
Dates don’t matter.
Agile certainly embraces a more fluid approach to project management. But if something needs to ship by a specific date, there’s nothing in the Agile Framework preventing it. In fact, by iteratively developing the software over multiple sprints, chances are the desired functionality will ship with fewer defects. Unlike in the waterfall model, it’s reviewed numerous times during the process.
There’s no visibility into what’s happening.
With waterfall, there are often project plans detailing what every resource is doing all the time. Anyone can take a peek and know precisely what folks are up to and how things are progressing. This type of visibility may be murkier during the actual sprint, but that’s not the case before and after. Setting sprint goals before a single line of code is written, and retrospectives (or micro-retrospectives) provides an opportunity to dig into what transpired and improve things going forward.
Plans are useless as everyone chases the latest shiny object.
First of all, once a sprint begins, what the team is working on for those two or three weeks shouldn’t change. The sprint goals remain locked. However, if something new does come up, the sprint planning team (including the product manager) can decide whether it’s worth altering the course for future sprints.
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Applying Agile Values to Product Management
The Agile Manifesto has four core values. These Agile Values are the central tenets that drive everything else. Looking at each one, we can see their potential to make product management (and product managers) more predictable in agile environment.
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
At first glance, you may already be scratching your head. How does this make a product manager more predictable? But note that this value uses the word “over” and NOT “instead of.”
There is still plenty of room for tools and processes. Agile needs those to be in place to avoid developers idling and things from getting out of hand. But it also elevates the importance of communication and addressing stakeholder concerns.
By creating more frequent dialogue, there is an increased level of transparency; when people know what’s happening and why they can better predict what’s to come. There’s no black box, no guessing about when things might ship.
In an Agile world, things may change a little more often. But everyone will also know about changes much faster and understand any potential ramifications.
Working software over comprehensive documentation
By removing the requirement for, well, detailed specifications, teams can deliver updates and new functionality faster. This process shortens the distance from prioritization to ship date.
When there are fewer hoops to jump through and hurdles to clear, it’s easier to predict availability. After deciding to build, product managers should have a solid sense of when things will debut. They can then provide clear communication to coworkers and stakeholders.
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Customer-centric companies are committed to doing everything with the best interest of customers in mind. They’re continually processing user feedback and turning those requests and complaints into a better product.
Guess what gets in the way of that kind of responsive, ongoing progress? Having to renegotiate a contract every time something changes. When the lawyers get involved, there’s no telling how long things can get held up.
Removing those entanglements lets teams focus on building a great product. It removes this common source of uncertainty from the equation.
Customers need to pay for things, and a contract might be required. But Agile-friendly companies structure those agreements, so they don’t hinder innovation and iteration.
Responding to change over following a plan
Of the four values, this one seems the most contentious with our thesis. Plans make things predictable, don’t they?
Well, executing a plan properly is predictable. But while the plan’s elements are predictable, you can’t always predict what transpires after a product ships.
Adoption, usage, churn, reviews, net promoter scores… there’s no way to know what’s going to happen until it happens. If you’re operating with an inflexible long-term plan, it’s hard to adjust based on the product’s reception. When the cruise ship is chugging along, it’s tough to change course.
The best part of Agile is being able to measure, learn, and adjust. That means plans must be a little more dynamic instead of plotting out every single move for the next 18 months. That’s why roadmapping is a predictable product manager’s best tool for managing expectations and hitting target goals while still utilizing the benefits Agile has to offer.
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The Art of the Agile-Friendly Roadmap
One reason some product managers can turn negative toward Agile is that their “capstone” project (the product roadmap) might seem at odds with the framework’s fluidity. Well, if your product roadmap is chock full of particular features and exact dates, then you’d be well within your rights to be frustrated.
However, including that level of detail and specificity isn’t the only way to build a roadmap. We’d argue that approach isn’t doing anyone any favors, including product managers.
Feature-Less Roadmap
Instead, product roadmaps featuring goals and themes are usually a much better way to go. Themes illustrate what parts of the product will be worked on at different times, along with the desired outcomes of those efforts. You can escape the trap of promising features and dates—which are inevitably destined to change in an Agile environment—while still communicating the direction and priorities for the product.
If there’s concern that a feature-less roadmap is too vague and open to interpretation, add milestones as specific scheduling targets. This change doesn’t guarantee a particular feature will be available by a specific date, but it conveys that you’ll reach a goal by that time.
Remember, a roadmap’s primary purpose is communicating a vision for how the product strategy will become a reality. Implementation details and schedules aren’t required to build stakeholder alignment.
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Getting on Board with Agile
We get that Agile can sometimes feel like it’s taking control away from product managers and handing over more power and decision-making to the implementation side of the house. But wary PMs should take comfort in a few Agile principles that simplify their ultimate goal of delighting customers.
#1) Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. Customer satisfaction is the first principle of Agile. Not “building cool stuff” or “unshackling the creativity of our development team.”
#2) Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project. We used to throw requirements “over the wall” and see how things shook out. But the ongoing dialogue between product and development should result in products meeting expectations and delivering customer value. Moreover, you get the chance to stick your nose into things every day!
#3) The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face communication. We mean, you might need to attend daily standups. But it also means you’re not spending as much time writing lengthy documents no one ever reads. You can continually assert yourself as the business owner and voice of the customer.
You can be Predictable in Agile
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What is the Learning Center?
Our library of content helps thousands upon thousands of product people every month continue their education and understanding of the product space, thought-leadership, best practices, and trends, all for free. You’ll find over 500 blogs and articles, 250 glossary terms, 50+ webinars, 30 books/guides, 15 checklists, and counting live in the Learning Center.
Educating the product community has been a core tenet of LIKE.TG for nearly a decade, and we’re so excited to revamp the experience to empower you with better product education.
What is LIKE.TG’s Learning Center?
The Learning Center is the central hub of LIKE.TG’s content to educate the product community on best practices and industry trends. Similar to Google Search, you can search for anything product management-related. For instance, we have content on topics from product strategy examples to Agile, presenting a roadmap to stakeholders, change management, and so much more. Of course, if you seek best practices for using LIKE.TG’s roadmap platform, you’ll also find tips in the Learning Center.
You can find light, skimmable reading, more extended downloadable readings, in-depth webinars, and quick video tutorials. You can also filter by a category you’re interested in, like roadmap and roadmap management, product leadership, and Agile or development. Finally, you can also filter by your skill level (beginner, intermediate, and advanced) to elevate your educational journey.
What’s happening to the LIKE.TG blog?
The LIKE.TG blog is also still live. As such, you will find pieces on LIKE.TG’s culture, thought leadership, and product releases on the blog.
Our Most Popular Pieces of Content to Get Started
Dive in and explore the pieces that readers keep coming back to.
The 2021 State of Product Management Report
Product Roadmaps: Your Guide to Planning and Selling Your Product Strategy
The Product Strategy Playbook
From Product Manager to Product Leader
What is MoSCoW?
What is Product Development?
The Ultimate Guide to Product Management?
Learning Center Takeaways
Finally, the Learning Center hub is easy to navigate to find your favorite product management topics in one place. Let us know your favorite piece of content you’ve read in the Learning Center in the comments below.
Implementing an Effective Product Transformation Strategy for the New Year
The new year is right around the corner, and digital transformation continues to be the rage as companies evolve to seek relevance – modernizing systems, procedures, and mindsets for the modern world. CEOs tout the benefits and hype up their planning and investment. Product leaders swoop in to shepherd these efforts. Finally, customers eagerly await the benefits of the shift. Yet 80% of digital transformations fail. What’s causing so many failures? One key factor is a fundamental lack of understanding of product transformation relative to traditional operating models. Many leaders fail to realize that digital transformation must be synonymous with product transformation and the ability for an organization to be successful.
Remarkably, the COVID crisis accelerated the importance and availability of digital customer-facing touchpoints by five years. Companies that stayed on the sidelines face a major uphill battle when they decide to attempt a transformation strategy.
“The COVID crisis accelerated the importance and availability of digital customer-facing touch points by five years.”
For the small group of companies who successfully pivoted, will their product transformation continue or revert back to traditional ways of doing business? The global pandemic has taught us that businesses that remain agile and open to digital transformation will be successful, but that doesn’t guarantee changes in how a company operates.
Digital transformation and product development’s relationship
A strong response during a crisis isn’t a transformation but a reaction. And as soon as the dust settles, many companies risk going back to traditional ways of doing business. The status quo ultimately holds their transformation back. Why not leverage the new year to help your team adapt to this brand-new world?
First, break the mold of top-down management expectations
When facing intense adversity, successful leaders break the mold by loosening the reins and relinquishing their control in the name of survival. Yet top-down management styles quickly return to normal after a crisis. Most companies fail because they revert back to this leadership style.
“A strong response during a crisis isn’t a
transformation but a reaction.”
Gartner reports that 85% of organizations surveyed had adopted or intended to adopt a product-centric delivery model. Open collaboration and creative problem-solving in this delivery model dissolve traditional and rigid operating patterns. You need trust to establish product processes. A well-formed roadmap is your best ammunition to create space and respect.
Implementing an effective product transformation strategy
Fundamental product transformation requires a permanent embrace of effective management strategies and tools to achieve alignment. These strategies help organizations withstand a crisis. Team autonomy is an essential pillar of digital transformation. And many product and technology leaders and executives fail to embrace this concept.
Shift to a product-led mindset
Busting down silos via cross-functional teams and collaboration limits empire-building. C-level executives may not always be a fan-favorite of eliminating silos. Toxic leaders find it uncomfortable to empower individual contributors to make decisions independently.
To effectively manage this scenario, as a product leader, you should shift to a product-led mindset. Your organization can foster the development of an actual product management organization. The organization guides the process and changes the dynamic. A product-led mindset helps to diminish a toxic environment where diverse voices and opinions are pushed to the background.
Bottom-up strategy
Customer-obsessed perspectives drive change and alignment. It’s bottom-up from the customer to the product to the leadership; instead of a versus battle of egos and seniority. Product leaders should understand that the typical customer journey begins pre-purchase—a potential customer identifies a need, researches potential solutions, and ultimately selects a product. Companies are applying various digital tools to cut through the clutter and win customers at this critical stage.
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Digital transformation and Agile methodologies are one and the same
Understanding customers’ needs drive the conflict and set the stage to genuinely embrace Agile and embracing digital transformation. The market dictates what the company should build next. There’s no better way to address that quickly and efficiently than Agile practices. There’s less pushback when the benefits of a shorter time to market and quicker reactions and customer feedback are the impetus.
Iterative development accelerates learning, which is key to product transformation. Product and digital transformation are synonymous with one another. If you want to go through digital transformation, you need to introduce product management as a discipline.
Shorter feedback loops facilitate more efficient resource allocation. It provides early indicators of whether or not a given initiative is on the right track. Few companies have the runway to put all their eggs in one basket while also sustaining asymmetrical attacks from various competitors.
How to set the stage for success with stakeholders
To execute change without adding extra drama and resentment, it’s key to handle the current state properly. Who are the actual stakeholders, and how do they feel about things?
Many important stakeholders may feel hesitant to implement a digital transformation. To mitigate this issue, you’ll need to dig in a little deeper to uncover their pain points. Your product vision should help them see how the product transformation can resolve their pain points.
From there, a clearly articulated vision creates some boundaries and a destination for the process. Below we explore how roadmaps, understanding product transformation, and effective communication can address customer’s pain points and get stakeholders on board.
Roadmaps aid your transformation
In my experience, the best weapon to combat this backsliding and increase the comfort level for stakeholders is a solid product roadmap. This illustration displays the key steps the team will take to achieve strategic goals and objectives and provides a structure for leadership to wrap their heads around.
Complimenting this well-defined roadmap process for crucial product development ensures that things won’t become a free-for-all. Most product teams would rather have a flexible, responsive approach grounded in shared core principles, as well as an adequately socialized strategy aligned with key stakeholders.
The power of visual roadmaps
When a visual roadmap is focused on outcomes versus deliverables, strategy shines through instead of the shiny objects that distract stakeholders and the product team from their actual goals. The roadmap also drives home the transition from thinking about “projects” to focusing on “products.”
Although visual roadmaps may be light on the details, it’s much easier to get stakeholder buy-in, trust, and support when the plan is positioned in terms of themes and objectives rather than dates and specific features. Stakeholders may also relish the opportunity for additional measurables and metrics. They only work when the product is tied to strategic goals and objectives.
Understanding product transformation improvements
Product transformations themselves may also deserve a roadmap of their own. While these might detail the steps required to achieve success, they’re even more valuable by describing the progress these initiatives can make.
By describing both the current and desired state and the mid-transformation improvements along the way, stakeholders can better grasp the importance of this work and the benefits it brings. Each bit of progress must address stated goals for the product or current organizational and operational deficiencies. Rewarding those who greenlight the transformation with tangible, measurable gains.
Targeted transformational change
Product and organizational transformation need to be targeted. These improvements reduce customer support inquiries and increase recurring revenue. The shift speeds up onboarding and cuts down on churn. The shift can bring stakeholders on board and calms their fears about the digital transformation, which for them may seem like a radical change away from traditional manners of business.
Milestones
Regardless of which roadmap you’re working on, milestones are one way to make it real. They demarcate, passing from one gate to the next. Moreover, they provide a sense of accomplishment and achievement that doesn’t always shine through when everyone’s plowing through one sprint after the next.
Avoid communication breakdown during product transformations
So many problems and misunderstandings in organizations stem from communication breakdowns. When embarking on a product transformation, it’s more important than ever to keep folks in the loop and feeling included.
Keeping stakeholders informed
Less is seldom more in these cases since even the biggest proponents of product transformation may still have concerns about particular aspects of the change. Create consistent channels for sharing updates and make sure it’s a two-way street. You may not want their feedback and input, but it’s essential that everyone feels like they have a voice in the process.
If stakeholders remain hesitant about an overall digital transformation, you can ease the process by walking them through the transformation. Stakeholders may also find it helpful if you take the time to explain to them the importance of the Agile process.
Agile eases communication and helps everyone come to a single source of truth, especially stakeholders. Oversharing allows you to avoid having to clean up avoidable messes in the future that might damage stakeholder confidence in the new ways of doing things.
Throw away those outdated playbooks and embrace the future with a product transformation strategy
Change is hard, particularly when things don’t seem particularly broken. But even if a product or business is managing at the moment, digital and product transformation are necessary to survive and succeed in the coming years.
As you fight this uphill battle in preparation for the New Year, take solace in the fact that you’re not alone. Countless organizations continue to resist, dig in their heels, and count on past successes to continue.
Getting stakeholder holdouts to come around requires a multi-pronged effort. Benchmarking against peers and competitor points demonstrates that the old way of doing things holds the organization back. Meanwhile, product leaders can convince the old guard that getting from the current state to the desired destination won’t happen using the rigid top-down rules of yesteryear.
Organizations resistant to embracing product transformation may remain confident that their tried-and-true methods worked before, so they’ll work again. But there’s little evidence to support that. Industries and dominant players continually disrupt other companies willing to use these new tools and techniques. It’s only a question of when—not if—one will come gunning for them as well.
Ready to jumpstart your product transformation strategy? We’re here to help! Schedule a demo to connect with our team of product strategy experts.
The Key to Achieving Change Management Buy-In
Getting change management buy-in is not easy, but we’re only delaying the inescapable when we resist change. Whether it’s driven by economics, technology, politics, or the environment—those massive undercurrents can at best be held at bay before reality sets in.
Most organizations are resistant to change by default. Inertia, process, bureaucracy, and governance are often cited as the primary hurdles. But fear and uncertainty also play an often unspoken-yet-prominent role. The bigger the company, the harder it can be to make even the smallest fundamental shifts.
Yet, those same large organizations face the most risk by not adapting quickly and intentionally. Smaller, younger firms are by nature more agile, and it’s easier to get change buy-in. But small teams also have less to lose. It’s because larger, older companies have so much more at stake that failing to change can be that much more consequential.
For example, my mission in my previous role at a company with over 30,000+ employees was to create a formal change management process or track record to lean on for their CRM system, Salesforce.com, and create a center of excellence around optimizing the firm’s usage of this critical tool.
This wasn’t my first time helping an organization improve its Salesforce.com utilization. I’ve done this for multiple firms from a project management/PMO perspective. I’ve also had experience in change management, having spent eight years previously facilitating those.
Let’s look at the critical steps that can affect the fate of significant transformations for organizations and successfully change management buy-in.
3 Critical Considerations That Affect Change Management Buy-in
1. Intentional thinking from the start.
One fatal flaw many big change initiatives make is letting things “into the wild” before they’re fully baked. However, there might be a follow-on phase to tweak and tailor new tools and processes to the specific impacted groups. Employees won’t always wait until the paint is dry to begin using things.
I’ll use Slack as an example. The asynchronous communication tool can be a huge boost for efficiency and collaboration. But when left to their own devices, early adopters can create some bad precedents.
In this case, if you don’t create the correct channels and train staff how to use Slack properly, it can get out of control. This can both create bad habits and turn people off to the tool before it’s spun up. Yet, a productivity boon can end up as yet another system people use inconsistently.
2. Anticipating downstream ramifications.
Management often initiates changes. A CFO, VP, or a Director thinks there’s a better, cheaper, or faster way to do something. Then they issue an order, and everyone beneath them in the organizational chart deals with the consequences.
But managing change by edict is often a recipe for disaster on the ground floor. Executives frequently don’t have much insight into the day-to-day operations of various teams. Thus they can’t begin to recognize the disruption such a shift might cause.
The power of working groups is effective. People on the ground are the ones that know what’s going on.
Ideally, before a suggested change is even approved, the organization conducts a full forensic analysis of the implications for everyone impacted. That includes employees across the company, as well as strategic partners and even customers. The exercise might uncover potential unintended consequences.
Regardless of how big or small it might be, every change requires a proper communication plan. The key is figuring out how you’re going to engage with everyone, drive adoption, detail the benefits, and get everyone on board.
It should detail the rationale for the move along with any new or modified processes. If necessary, hold training or QA sessions to ensure the roll-out goes smoothly with minimal turmoil during the transition.
3. Centralized change management.
Another key to successful change management is running it all out of a single unit, be it an ad hoc team, a more permanent center of excellence, or a formal PMO. There are many benefits from this kind of organizational structure.
First, it breaks down silos in a way that’s often unattainable organically. This unit can both communicate across the organizational matrix and identify redundant efforts.
This also puts trained practitioners in charge of structuring and facilitating these activities. Since this is what they do, they have the skills, tools, best practices, and resources to make things as seamless and standardized as possible. They also possess the institutional knowledge and expertise to anticipate friction points in advance thus minimizing potential damage via education and well-documented processes.
Most importantly, utilizing a dedicated change management entity gives a holistic view of every major initiative. Regardless of where it began, keep in mind the entire organization and larger ecosystem during execution.
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4 Steps to Achieve Change Management Buy-in
These are the steps for starting things off on the right foot.
1. Survey the landscape.
Until you’re on the inside, it’s hard to know who the real players are. Nor do you know where the power centers lie and which baggage and political legacies influence projects. You see which names are being dropped, who people defer to, who made previous critical decisions or threw up roadblocks.
At one point, I conducted 40 interviews across various groups to get the land lay but could have done more. Once I’ve identified these stakeholders, then I can understand how to best engage with them.
I want to emphasize that it’s imperative to make sure you get things right when evaluating senior management. You need to know their motivations, concerns, and what they value most.
Emotional intelligence is such a key factor as a leader. You can talk about industry knowledge and business process. Still, if you don’t have the emotional intelligence of people around you and their drivers, then you can’t figure out how to motivate them in the best way.
Additionally, not everyone wants to receive information in the same way, nor do we all process it similarly. I make a point of asking key stakeholders right off the bet how they like to be communicated with, so I can try and meet them where they want to be.
2. Define and articulate a vision.
No one’s a fan of change for change’s sake, so the value and purpose of this new role must be crisp, clear, and concise. From the C-suite to the cubicles, everyone should understand why this is important, the steps required, and which benefits the result will bring.
Ideally, present tailored messaging for different audiences to connect with their pain points and address their concerns. But to do this, you need to know who you’re dealing with.
I use the Insights method. To follow this method, first place stakeholders along a color spectrum, and then based on that designation, you can see what triggers stress along with the best ways to remedy that state. I do this to create the best chances for a successful interaction by acknowledging their feelings and speaking to them constructively.
It’s also critical to not immediately dive into the details but rather to establish broader themes that the change will encompass. These themes might seem obvious at times, but a smart and accurate tagline for the initiative can become a helpful mantra and reference point for the project’s life.
3. Get change-buy in with a roadmap.
Significant changes have a lot of moving pieces and dependencies. To get change buy-in, a project or program roadmap can help illustrate exactly how everything will happen. Using a purpose-built roadmapping tool is the answer to keeping everything organized and a clear vision to stakeholders.
Using LIKE.TG, I capture every possible backlog item to ensure no requests or requirements get lost in the shuffle. In this central repository, we used LIKE.TG to prioritize initiatives. I categorize various things up for consideration before putting them into “buckets” to develop and ship together to create incremental value associated with a particular theme.
Then I use a cost and complexity versus impact method for evaluating which items should get to the front of the line, and are happy to slot the low-hanging fruit in the front of the queue to deliver more value to stakeholders faster.
With prioritized themes set, I build my roadmap. I use lanes for “containers” of specific items, which allows me to keep the roadmap clean and straightforward. Less is more about the level of detail presented to most audiences, but there’s always the option to drill down and get more refined information on a specific roadmap element.
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4. It’s all about people.
While tools, frameworks, and processes get a lot of attention, at the end of the day, what determines a significant change’s success or failure is how it is embraced and supported by the individual it impacts.
The key to change management buy-in is having a clear vision and structure people understand so they see the impact of what you’re trying to do and how it affects them. If you don’t think about how they’re going to go about it, it will never be successful. Without engaging with the people who will use it, that will be your number one failure.
Roadmapping with an IMPACT Mindset
The IMPACT approach to product management’s primary goal is creating the maximum value for the broadest target audience while remaining aligned with the company’s mission, vision, and goals. Filtering everything through the IMPACT lens can be extremely beneficial. It helps product teams level set every action, process, and decision to ensure they’re staying true to that objective.
But if there’s one part of product management that needs IMPACT more than anywhere else, it’s roadmapping. Roadmaps set the tone for the coming months and years. They typically direct dozens—sometimes hundreds—of people involved in the implementation and rollout of product releases. Not to mention they dictate what marketing and sales will be able to promote and sell going forward.
No one wants a plan for the future that isn’t exciting, inspiring, and positioning the product for growth and success. Yet far too often, bug fixes, custom client requests, and features of dubious value take up valuable bandwidth. These items snap up spots on the roadmap that would be better filled with innovative, value-added customer benefits and revenue-goosing enhancements.
Where trouble begins
Most product teams don’t set out to create lackluster roadmaps, but they’re often dealt a sub-par opening hand. You ideally begin with the company’s mission and vision. However, many organizations aren’t great at strategy, so there’s often a disconnect between those lofty ideals and reality. Senior leaders’ KPIs and metrics fixate on don’t always align with the long-range objectives and key milestones required to get there.
This leaves the next crucial steps up to product managers. Yet PMs are sometimes given little direction when it comes to setting priorities and goals. This doesn’t prevent them from being met with withering criticism or—even worse—deafening silence when coming up with and presenting a plan. So these roadmappers need a rubric to continually measure the overall impact of their blueprint for the product, and IMPACT can do just that.
Laying the groundwork for a roadmap with IMPACT
IMPACT doesn’t begin with the roadmap. It must be part of the process in earlier stages of product development, particularly during prioritization. According to its own impact, vetting and judging each potential roadmap item culls the herd and eliminates requests and ideas that won’t move the needle where it matters most.
IMPACT also shouldn’t be thought of as a component of the roadmap. There shouldn’t be any swimlanes dedicated to each letter of the acronym. Nor should “Clear” or “Actionable” appear in the legend.
IMPACT’s value comes into play in a few other ways. First, by utilizing the IMPACT scoring approach during prioritization, there will be far more confidence it consists of worthy endeavors stakeholders will agree on merit inclusion.
The roadmap’s overarching themes should also stand up to the IMPACT test. Each major goal and the desired outcome should meet the same criteria that any individual development items have already attained.
You can also judge the roadmap as a whole based on its IMPACT. Looking out six, nine, or twelve months, will the planned themes and projects deliver results that adhere to this credo? If not, what’s driving the prioritization of work that doesn’t improve things along these lines?
Staying true to a roadmap’s true purpose
Product roadmaps aren’t projected plans, schedules, or a laundry list of deliverables. Not that stakeholders don’t try to turn them into that occasionally. You can’t necessarily blame them—these folks are desperate for updates and information that they can use tactically to do their own jobs.
Despite this frequent bastardization of purpose, product roadmaps are supposed to be about why you’re doing something as much as they explain what it is and when it might show up. To shift that mindset, product managers must change up the internal conversations around roadmaps and evolve the organization’s product culture. And here’s one more opportunity for IMPACT to play a role.
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The roadmap is a canvas to tell a story, not a checklist or Gantt chart. And that story is laced throughout with IMPACT. Everything on there should fit the narrative, benefitting users while advancing the corporate strategy.
I personally structure our roadmap by value areas—the value we want to deliver to create that impact. I then structure the legend to reflect our differentiators. Before I actually put anything on the roadmap, its bones already indicate what’s most important for our business.
With that foundation, I can start looking at opportunities, resources, and investments. Combined with using IMPACT for prioritization within each area, I know the product delivers value in all of the most impactful areas.
Interesting
Roadmaps are a way to tell your story visually. They connect your audience with the journey, so they walk away with the most pertinent information. Regardless of what the roadmap contains, it all comes back to why you prioritize that work and tell a story that belies the successes and victories to come after implementation.
Meaningful
Tailoring your roadmap to specific audiences is key by leaving out anything that distracts from the narrative or isn’t relevant to each stakeholder. External customers need to see which problems you’ll solve for them in the coming year. And internal stakeholders want to connect the dots between what’s on the roadmap and their impact on OKRs and KPIs.
People
Put yourself in the shoes of the different people your roadmap is for. Next, customize it for their own areas of interest and concerns. With this relevance top of mind, decide which parts of the roadmap you want to share, how far into the future it should go, and which methods are most effective to communicate your plans.
Actionable
Every roadmap is “actionable,” assuming things are implemented according to that plan. But I tend to worry about what I expect the audience to do with the information they’ve just received? I’m looking for customer validation and feedback, sales and marketing to update their pitches and collateral, customer success to anticipate how they’ll roll this out to customers, and how the technical teams will determine feasibility and make things happen. That means my roadmap needs the necessary information and context to enable these behaviors and actions.
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Clear
Roadmaps should answer existing questions and not raise too many new ones—you’re shooting for generating excitement, not doubts. That’s why conveying the why is vastly more important than the what. Measure their engagement and comprehension based on the questions they ask.
Testable
Roadmaps can also be tested by trying them out on different crowds. Socializing your proposed plan with small groups can generate valuable feedback instead of waiting for a grand reveal and falling on your face when presented with a tough question. Creating that space for failure and challenges gives you additional opportunities to polish things up while also acknowledging that your course may vary based on an always uncertain future.
Impress them with IMPACT
If your roadmap holds up to the IMPACT test, you can confidently enter any presentation. You’ll know that even if everyone doesn’t agree or approve, they can’t argue with your rationale or reasons. You could still get overruled by an executive or a flagship customer, but you can still stick to your fundamentals even if a few wrinkles are thrown your way.
Most importantly, you’ll have value creation on your side as you lobby to retain the items you know will create the most impact for customers and the business. For more examples of how IMPACT can guide your product management endeavors, download the free IMPACT ebook today.
Watch Annie talk through IMPACT: Processes in the webinar below.
Meaningful Product Processes with IMPACT
After reading a blog or a book or attending a conference or talk on product management, I’m always excited to try out the new processes and frameworks I’ve learned about. I try to get my team similarly enthused about this endeavor. But when I check in with them in about a week, you can barely tell that anything had changed… mostly because it hadn’t.
We tend to fall back into how we were doing things before because that cool new process isn’t meaningful in itself. Without the context for why it’s the most important way to spend our time, it wasn’t worth investing in making a change.
So when I tried coming up with my own mindset and mantra for improving product management, I found myself elevating above the flowcharts and execution strategies, looking for something more universal. I wanted to tie together the entire ecosystem and to identify a unifying measuring stick. Something equally applicable to how we prioritize projects as it is to our own careers.
Most importantly, I wanted to invest our time in something that will stick and make us all more productive and efficient product teams. Thus came the genesis of IMPACT, where six words can create a lens to reexamine everything a product professional does to ensure it truly is creating an impact and maximizing the opportunity.
Meaningful Product Processes with IMPACT
Solving Interesting problems that are Meaningful to People, with Actionable plans that are Clear and Testable. That’s what IMPACT’s all about, and if we’re not infusing our processes with IMPACT, then we’re potentially spending our energy on the wrong things.
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Interesting
By making the problem interesting, we start to build momentum. People need a reason to care, so it’s imperative we tell stories and use our storytelling skills in everything we do.
By helping our audience—from sales and marketing to engineering and QA—connect with the customer problem, we will drive better outcomes. We all know that when we focus on value over features, everyone’s happier.
The processes with IMPACT that help ensure we’re working on interesting problems include:
Product discovery—Helps you better understand the customer problem and interestingly tell that story.
Ideation validation—Uncovers more meaning.
Market research—Reveals how others tell their stories and perceive the audience.
Customer feedback—A door into what’s happening and the trends and evolution in the market.
Community involvement—Take any opportunity you can to be where your customers are and get more chances to hear their stories and the challenges they face.
Event participation—Talk to people and learn about their lives outside your product for invaluable context.
Meaningful
Is your solution meaningful to the customer or the business? Remember that excitement about an idea doesn’t always translate to value. The real test is how much they’re willing to pay for it, which truly shows how much they value the solution.
Aside from generating revenue, it’s also important to check if the solution aligns with the business’s direction, vision, and values. These processes with IMPACT can help you articulate what’s meaningful to business:
Vision Mission—Although it’s often handed down from senior management, it still influences your work. You should be able to articulate how your solution aligns with the vision and mission. Then, prioritize things when necessary to create those connections.
Strategy/Strategic Alignment—It should include a definition of value that the product is trying to deliver and what success looks like.
Gracefully Saying No—If that really compelling idea doesn’t create meaning, communicate that to teams and customers ASAP, then move on.
Roadmapping—Include components of the meaning and value you’re creating, as well as why it’s the right thing to do.
People
You must figure out the pervasiveness of the problem you’re solving and how many people will care. What will solving this problem unlock in the market?
Alongside understanding your research in solving the problem with a specific solution, it’s also essential to know how that investment may accelerate other innovations or solve related problems. This can lead to exponential growth and new opportunities beyond the original scope and scale of the situation.
By using as broad a lens as possible, you can also determine if you’re making a big impact for a small number of people or a small impact for a big number of people… both of which are worthy and sound investments, assuming there’s a willingness to pay. These processes can help quantify things:
Competitive Analysis—Helps you understand which problems competitors are solving and how they frame them. Not to mention figuring out which ones they’re NOT solving.
Market research—Helpful, but determine upfront how much you need to know to be confident to move forward to avoid analysis paralysis.
Surveys—Determine who cares about this problem and how frequently it occurs.
Jobs To Be Done/Opportunity Tree—Another tool to assess the problem’s pervasiveness and how big a deal it really is.
Prioritization—Be sure you’re accounting for the people that will be impacted by value creation. Not catering to the whims of internal stakeholders or finicky edge cases.
Segmentation—Use this to define your target market and zoom in on the people who will truly benefit and appreciate the value of your solution.
Actionable
Coming up with a great idea is pretty easy. Go ask a first grader, and they’ll give you some amazing, innovative ideas… that are completely unfeasible. Your job is to narrow things down to what’s possible, reasonable, and probable.
You need to know you can deliver the solution, regardless of how big or important the problem is. These processes can serve as a reality check on what’s truly doable:
Squads/Team Composition—More effective teams, benefit the entire company. They must be constructed to get an optimal cross-section of talent and compatible personalities and work styles.
Product Development processes—Find time to evaluate feasibility and LOE as early as possible to avoid wasting cycles un impractical pathways.
Ideation/Validation—All ideas are welcome, but only those truly actionable given how the solution is framed should be pursued.
Dependency Analysis—Larger teams, create more dependencies. Those dependencies increase the odds that the market will pass you by while you sort things out.
Clear
To build consensus, generate enthusiasm, and win over skeptics, you must be able to articulate the value statement of the solution clearly. This not only will help you secure resources and support for the project, but it also has a downstream impact on sales and marketing, as well as eventually how customers react to the value proposition.
Some key processes contribute to making sure the impact of the solution is clear to everyone:
Roadmap/Road Show—You want to make sure it’s in front of audiences frequently enough that it’s current, accurate, and remains top of mind. This is especially key when there’s not yet a lot of trust in you or your ideas. It’s also crucial to ensure the roadmap presents the right amount of information for the specific audience. You don’t want to drown them in details or rush through the items they particularly care most about.
Alignment—You want to be sure you’re all using the same language, OKRs, prioritization, etc., so you’re all happy with the result.
Cross-Functional Collaboration—Evaluate how and when you interact with peers to be sure it’s frequent enough. These interactions should be in settings where they’ll feel heard and can have their concerns addressed.
Documentation—People don’t read (except amazing blog posts like this!). Is it accomplishing what you need it to do? Does it match the TLDR summary you included at the top?
Testable
Humans aren’t very good at knowing what they need, just articulating what they THINK they need. Therefore you must validate that the planned solution is valuable as early as possible.
Embrace the sunk cost philosophy early and often. Additionally, don’t be afraid to walk away or initiate a significant course correction at any stage. This is only possible by leveraging processes that put your ideas to the test:
Agile Product Development—Agile is about more than replacing waterfall; it’s how you can test, learn, and adjust. With Agile, you can forward efficiently while leaving room for learning moments and making corrections based on those findings.
Beta Processes—It’s never too late to learn and change. Set expectations internally and with customers while capturing feedback during beta tests. Thisisn’t just a dress rehearsal but rather a chance to get real-world experience on what you think will work.
Iterative Design—Boil things down to the smallest step you can take to deliver value. Then test, learn, and repeat.
Usability Studies—You need tools to test and verify. So watching real customers try to use your product is one of the best options there is.
For more insights into how you can apply IMPACT to your processes, watch the webinar or download the free e-book today.
Why Gender Diversity Leads to Better Products
In the 2021 State of Product Management Report, our annual collection of data designed to bring to life the trends driving product management, we found gender diversity, or lack thereof, a prime opportunity for product management teams to create more intentional inclusivity.
Let’s further understand where things currently stand with gender diversity in the product management space. Additionally, we’ll explore ways to move the needle toward greater inclusivity and, ultimately, better business outcomes.
Where are the Women in Product?
Today’s data indicates we have plenty of room for improvement if our sights are set on greater inclusivity. In the tech industry, men outnumber women, and in technical roles especially. In product management, men outnumber women almost 2:1.
Two key findings stood out to us in our 2021 report: men hold 65% of senior roles and, on average, earn 7% more than women in product management.
Let’s walk through the report’s data to understand better what the current product management landscape looks like in terms of gender inequality.
Currently, the product management space is predominantly held by 60% men, 37% women, along with 3% that either prefers not to disclose or identify as non-binary.
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This isn’t what the numbers showed just two decades ago when greater gender diversity in product management. Deborah Liu, VP of Product at Facebook, explains:
“In the early to mid-2000s, Product Management at tech companies had almost the same number of men and women. So they came up with the solution to filter down to technical PMs, [with] the requirement that they have a degree in computer science—or a related field like electrical engineering. Unfortunately, in 2005, women only earned about one in five CS degrees in the US, which continues today. I believe that the new technical requirement changed the pool of potential PMs to one which was heavily male-dominated and thus unintentionally led to the industry moving away from gender-balanced teams.”
Women in Senior Management
The impact of the years with fewer women in product, plus the higher churn of women in this role, is finding its way into senior leadership. Just 36% of senior product roles are held by women, compared to 64% held by men.
To compound matters further, churn in tech is much higher for women. According to a Harvard Business School study, 41% of women leave a decade after starting in tech, compared to 17% of men.
Of course, the global pandemic didn’t do women in the workforce any favors. On the contrary, it “set women’s labor force participation back more than 30 years.” As a result, nearly 3 million women dropped out of the workforce in 2020.
On the subject of gender inequality in senior management, Martin Eriksson, co-founder, and chairman of Mind the Product, writes:
“A University of Maryland study looking at 15 years of data from the SP1500 found that female representation in senior management brought informational and social diversity benefits, enriched the behaviors exhibited by managers throughout the firm, and motivated women in middle management. All of which resulted in improved individual and company performance – especially where the firm’s strategy was focused on innovation, in which context the informational and social benefits of gender diversity and the behaviors of more diverse teams had a bigger impact.”
Salary Earnings for Women in Product
Inclusion and innovation may go hand in hand, but women are still earning less than their male counterparts in nearly all occupations.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women’s annual earnings were 82.3% of men’s earnings in 2020. The salary gap is even wider for women of color.
Salary discrepancies between men and women tend to vary by the number of years of experience. However, overall, men make 7% more than women in product management. While there is certainly work to do, women in product management (and technology in general) have made strides in recent years to reduce this gap.
That being said, men, on average, earn a higher salary (based on years of experience) at every level than their female counterparts.
7% more for 0-2 years
2% more 3-5 years.
3% more 6-10 years
9% less 11-15
less than 1% more than 15 years
Not surprisingly, advanced degrees play a role in commanding a higher salary. In addition, data shows that men in product tend to have more advanced degrees than women.
Imposter Syndrome and Career Goals
Our report also found that women in product are 14% more likely to frequently or consistently feel imposter syndrome in their careers than men. For the lucky few that only rarely or never feel it, 19% were women, and 26% were men. Additionally, women are more likely to feel neutral or unhappy about their work compared to men.
Nearly half of product people say their 10-year career goals are to become a product leader. According to our report, both women and men see product leadership in their future. However, many women are looking at product leadership for more years of their careers. After a while, mens’ goals shift toward starting their own company—the second most voted category.
That’s a current snapshot of the state of gender inequality in product management. So how do we move the needle towards greater inclusivity?
Read what women bring to product management.
Inclusivity is the Future
The need for greater inclusion was never more top-of-mind for many product teams than in 2020.
Studies show that gender diversity in teams produces better results. Inclusion helps us perform better. Groups of diverse problem solvers outperform groups that share everyday experiences, backgrounds, and identities.
Put, more voices, experience, and perspectives in product development translate to better products out in the world. Therefore, prioritizing inclusivity is the way forward.
In “Why Diversity Isn’t Just Right, but Smart,” Eriksson asserts:
“A good product team needs a mix of design, tech, and business, a mix of genders and backgrounds, a mix of industry experience and product management experience, and a mix of skills from the visionary to the detail-oriented, from the data-hungry to the user research fanatics. This level of diversity is not just the best chance you have of representing your audience, but also ensures you’re always bringing the best experience to bear on any product challenge you face.”
Benefits of Gender Diversity Across the Organization
Gender diversity is linked to greater profitability and better customer experiences. It also helps companies attract and retain talented people.
Mina Radhakrishnan, the co-founder of Different and 1st Head of Product at Uber, believes that:
“The more identities, backgrounds, and experiences represented by founders and product managers, the more problems solved, the more user perspectives understood, and the more products launched by teams who have a handle on how the world will receive them.”
According to the Diversity Council of Australia, people who work in inclusive teams are:
10x more likely to be highly effective
9x more likely to innovate
5x more likely to provide excellent customer service
19x more likely to be very satisfied in their jobs
4x more likely to remain with their current companies
2x more likely to receive regular career development opportunities
Yet despite these compelling correlations between gender diversity and better business outcomes, gender representation only increased by 2% between 2015 and 2018.
Want to improve your sphere of inclusivity? Here are some of the women in product management you should be following.
Groups Driving Inclusive Policies and Practices
Several groups are actively discussing advocating for equal representation in product management.
The nonprofit Women In Product, founded in 2016, has a mission to “equip women to thrive in product management careers at all levels.” Created to connect women in the product field while also advocating for a more diverse workplace, it has 27 chapters worldwide, more than 33,000 community members. It hosts 125+ annual events to increase access to resources for skill development and offer exposure to opportunities with allied organizations that are “driving innovation through inclusive policies and practices that encourage mobility for women in product.” The organization’s vision is to ensure that “all people in product have equitable opportunities to build rewarding careers and shape the products of the future.”
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Similarly, the Advancing Women In Product (AWIP) organization is dedicated to providing members with “the right skill sets and executive mentorship” that women need to accelerate careers in product management. It also has chapters around the world.
Get inspired by these six fantastic product managers who also happen to be women.
Going Beyond Gender Diversity
We have to be careful not to view gender diversity as just another box to check. In the quest to achieve greater inclusivity, this can potentially become a pitfall.
In “Diversity in Product Management Needs to Go Beyond a Gender Agenda,” Amanda Ralph, co-founder of Product Women, urges product teams also to seek cognitive diversity:
“Good product managers know what many in social sciences are now evidencing – that effective teams not only have diverse backgrounds and experiences but importantly, are cognitively diverse and inclusive. Actively including and seeking diverse perspectives and thinking (cognitive diversity) leads to better outcomes.”
Ralph adds, “We must have a culture which is not only inclusive but which also actively mobilizes and leverages the different perspectives that diversity invariably brings.”
Striving for cognitive diversity in the workplace might sound like an overwhelming challenge. Thankfully, organizations like Inclusion Ventures help teams and companies develop strategies for decreasing bias and enhancing inclusion.
Learn how to recognize and reduce cognitive bias as a product manager.
Moving the needle towards greater inclusivity is a marathon. To make meaningful strides towards gender diversity, we first have to reckon with where things stand today.
The goal of any product team should be to build great products. Inclusivity can help shape this outcome. It attracts more voices, experience, and perspectives to your product team. And ultimately, the products you build and release into the world will be better for it.
6 Product Leadership Interview Questions and Answers
Every hire is essential, but a new product leader’s impact ranges far beyond their contributions. They’ll have a major influence on their team, which affects the colleagues they interact with the most. While also having a significant impact on corporate goals, priorities, and tactics. Before hiring a product leader, you need to ensure that you understand the most essential product leadership interview questions that can help better inform your hiring decision.
It’s like when you hire a new head coach. They bring in some of their assistants, put individual contributors into new roles, and utilize their terminology and playbook, giving them an outsized effect on the entire organization.
If you’ve done it right, a new product leader will make you a little uncomfortable. They bring in some diverse opinions and the stature to share and back those up. Additionally, they’ll probably have a skill set that makes you a little insecure about your resume.
Though you may feel insecure about a new product leader in the long term, the new hire will contribute to your product team. Ultimately, this uneasiness is what leads to growth and positive change. However, new product leaders do still need to fit in a little bit. Unless you genuinely want to rock the boat and shake things up in a big way.
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What Experience to Look for When Interviewing
Before you ever hop on the phone or a Zoom or meet in person with a candidate, you’ll already know plenty about their experience. There might be some career rehashing as part of the interviewing process. But they didn’t make it this far if their resume wasn’t a pretty good match for your needs.
So instead of fixating on their work history, get a feel for what makes them tick—your candidate’s motivations matter. You want to know what they like most and least about working in product to understand their passions and preferences.
“Product” roles vary so much from one company to the next. Make sure their skills and interests align with what your organization needs from them. It’s also crucial that they’re excited about addressing your customer base’s specific challenges and needs.
Understand How They’ll Fit with The Team
Envision what hiring them would mean for their team. Does the candidate address the underlying needs, and will they help the team grow?
Soft skills are the other area that can’t be explored by simply looking at their LinkedIn profile. You can teach some product management fundamentals and train them on tools and processes—but you can’t teach curiosity and passion.
You’re looking for examples of how they’ve used their passion for a product to get things done in challenging environments, built consensus, and delighted customers. You want specifics about how they’ve overcome obstacles and expanded their knowledge. Learning about the meaningful impacts on the lives of their users are the “juicy bits” you’re looking to extract from your time together.
Not Every Product Manager Should Be (or Wants to Be) a People Manager.
Good salespeople often make terrible sales managers because the skills that help you close a deal are entirely different from those that help you motivate your staff. While there’s a little more overlap on the product side, the same dynamic is also in play. Someone who loves immersing themselves in the details of their specific domain may not have the mental and emotional skills to add value across multiple products and product staff at a higher level.
With this in mind, it’s important to remember that people can climb the corporate ladder without necessarily taking on people management duties. Paying attention to how candidates answer some of your questions can help you steer them into the more appropriate track.
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Some people thrive on identifying problems, connecting with customers, and getting into the weeds to find new opportunities. These folks are best suited for individual contributor roles. They will likely find people management responsibilities unfulfilling even if they think that’s the job they need to advance their career.
Others thrive on amplifying their impact. While they’re still passionate about solving customer problems, they’re interested in building out skills and processes for the whole team. They’re able to trust others and delegate so they can focus on the big picture.
6 Product Leadership Interview Questions to Ask
In my experience, these are six of the most common questions that get asked. I’m also pointing out what you should pay attention to when they answer.
Question 1: Tell me a story.
The best way to prove someone’s storytelling chops is to ask them to tell you one. Crafting a compelling narrative is an essential tool in generating consensus and enthusiasm for ideas. Thus, you’ll want to see how they do.
I prefer a story describing an end-to-end production process and its results. So I’m looking for a few critical elements in their response:
Verb selection: Did they “direct” or “collaborate”? Were they echoing the voice of the customer or just writing up product requirements? Is there some heart and emotion in their retelling? Or is it a simple regurgitation of the facts and events that transpired?
Data: Do you think this was the right project for your team? How did they measure success? Product managers can’t always measure the success of a product. Many companies are lacking in this area, so I don’t blame them if it’s lacking. But I want to see at least some awareness of the value of using metrics and how they considered implementing them. Plus, I want to make sure they’re not just quoting proxy metrics with no apparent correlation to the customer or business goals, as that’s a warning sign as well.
Expansiveness and inclusiveness: How insular are they? Are they considering other stakeholders, departments, and customers in their processes? Product leadership is about more than bossing around your direct reports. You must also establish and value strong relationships with folks across the organization.
Question 2: Which products do you love?
This question provides you a little peek behind the shiny veneer candidates who are cloaking themselves in during the interview process. An exact answer will reveal something about what matters to them and what draws their attention. Keep in mind that something vanilla and obvious signals a lack of depth and creativity.
Besides just getting to know them as a person, it’s also a glimpse of what they appreciate as product professionals. Do they gravitate to generic products they use every day? Or are they more enthusiastic for brilliant technical or design solutions to tough challenges?
Their mentioned solutions truly energize the ideal candidate. Saying products that ingeniously yet quickly improve the lives of their customers while boasting a solid business model is critical. You have another opportunity to evaluate their storytelling skills.
Question 3: A question about your product.
They’ve seen the solution (the product they’re interviewing to work on), and now you want to know if they can identify the customer problem it’s solving. It’s time to flip the script and let them show off their product management skills.
It’s also a chance to see if they’ve done their homework and understand what you’re trying to do. I want to know that they not only understand the concept but that they get the actual application. If they weren’t curious enough to dig into the job they’re interviewing for, will the candidate go the extra mile to communicate with the team effectively?
Your product is a solution designed to address a customer challenge. How much of that customer problem could they intuit from the website or checking out the product itself?
We have an unfair advantage at LIKE.TG since product managers are our actual customers. So there’s no excuse here if a candidate isn’t familiar with the customer problems we’re trying to solve. I’ll often ask them more pointed questions given that familiarity, such as probing into what additional value we could provide their product management team or what other opportunities and challenges lie ahead for us given their intimate understanding of the space.
Learn how to grow a successful product team:
Question 4: Describe your ideal workflow/relationship with User Experience and Engineering.
Though there are no correct answers, you may find that there are also many wrong ones. Instead, this question puts a spotlight on their penchant for collaboration.
Everyone comes to the table with their strengths—product understands the customer problem, UX lives to delight customers and creates frictionless user experiences. Engineering knows the technical boundaries and opportunities at hand. I want product leaders who recognize our collective strength lies in the sum of these parts. They’ll check their ego in the interest of jointly creating customer value.
I honestly don’t care which processes candidates bring up, as long as they are logical workflows that incorporate stakeholder alignment and goal-driven outcomes. Making everyone feel like they’re an essential partner in the process is in many ways more vital than the process itself.
What matters most here is breakingdown silos, playing to people’s strengths to help them grow, and the flexibility to adapt to the situation at hand.
Question 5: How do you prioritize?
There are dozens and dozens of ways to tackle this task, and once again, I’m not seeking any particular framework or methodology. I’m using it as a lens to see how they process information from various sources and turn that into a coherent vision.
In particular, I’m always wary of candidates coming from places where it was a top-down, CEO-calls-all-the-shots vibe. That type of environment limits a PM to just executing things. I’m also not interested in someone when they’ve just bounced around priorities based on whatever their most extensive and newest customers demanded.
I’m looking for stakeholder alignment, rapid assessment of new developments, and (obviously) leaning on a solid roadmap to pull it all together. An objective element in the prioritization process (scoring, weighting, etc.) is also a big plus in their favor.
Question 6 – Show me your superpowers.
I rarely present an offer letter to a candidate that hasn’t illustrated how they work. While “test projects” have fallen out of favor, I still want to see their capabilities. To achieve this, I create scenarios to evaluate better how they’ll operate if they land the job. Time-box these so they don’t spin out into a lengthy assignment.
For example, I had a candidate with all the correct answers, yet they seemed more concerned about their own opinion than the necessary collaboration great products require. I created a scenario intentionally missing critical information. I was looking to see whether they asked questions or requested help instead of just barreling ahead without essential details.
Don’t be afraid to throw a curveball.
Throwing in a new piece of information halfway through a scenario is another excellent test of their mental agility. Product managers must deal with competitors launching out of the blue, unexpected customer requests, technical hurdles, and unanticipated market changes. How they adapt is a fantastic peek at their ability to remain strategic while remaining flexible in high-pressure situations.
Given the increasing number of remote teams—including our engineering team—not to mention the many companies that will remain remote until the last embers of COVID-19 die down, communication skills are at a premium. Navigating the communication styles and utilizing a product roadmap to ease communication amongst teams matters much more when everyone isn’t in the same room.
One scenario to test this is picking a near-term roadmap initiative and asking them to summarize who needs to be involved, when, and to what degree. A good barometer asks the potential new hire to pen a press release and an internal email.
While not everyone will be thrilled about any of these “tests,” you can explain that these exercises significantly shorten interview times. It would help if you let them do some of it asynchronously. And, if they have work samples that would convey the same aspects of their work style and output, you should welcome them.
Quality Over Quantity
Whether you incorporate all, some, or none of the above questions into your product leader interviewing process, I urge you to concentrate on fewer, higher-quality questions over a barrage of smaller ones. You’ll get more meaningful data on which to base your decision. Candidates will also get a better sense of the environment they would be entering if hired.
Creating Equitable User Experience for Your Customers with Brittany Edwards
Every individual has a unique way they perceive and interact with the world around them. Recent reports claim that diverse organizations outperform their competitors by 35%, according to a recent report by McKinsey Company. The report also concluded that gender-diverse organizations outperform their nearest competitor by 15%. McKinsey Company’s report proves that product managers need to create an equitable user experience for their customers.
Throughout life, we bring our preconceptions, biases, fluencies, capabilities to the table. As a consumer, that’s usually not a huge problem. We find ourselves judging our own experiences, purchases, and solutions. If a product doesn’t meet our needs, we can find something more suitable for our needs.
Of course, not all individuals have the freedom of choice. When your boss requests that you use the new ERP system, workplace etiquette requires you to follow up on the request. When the bus or subway, or train pulls up to the stop, we can’t request a different model that’s a better fit. We must do our jobs and get to our destinations.
So what happens when that ERP system uses terminology employees don’t understand? And what if the bus doesn’t have a lift for our wheelchair?
Unfortunately, users may find themselves in a precarious situation due to decisions made by a product team. Software that remains intuitive and self-explanatory to novice users remains the most accessible. Product managers who do not account for these may get left behind by a market inclined to buy a product from a fair organization.
What Is an Equitable User Experience?
You can’t expect to make everyone happy all of the time. Product managers know this self-evident truth quite well.
That’s why we define our target markets and user personas. Product managers understand that building a product that satisfies everyone remains impossible. Chasing after all those edge cases leads to ballooning costs and lengthy delays for increasingly diminishing returns.
Why is an equitable user experience important?
Our ability to dismiss different cohorts can drive us to whittle down our total addressable market. An effective manager who utilizes a product roadmapping tool to strategize with their product team maintains a viable product. Product managers ensure that the product supports the financial stability of the organization. Moreover, they rule out unlikely use cases and vertical markets that don’t align with our strategy.
As product managers, we have to make choices that narrow the usability of our products. These choices don’t end with unusual applications. A product manager’s decision can increase the degree of difficulty for usersProduct teams rarely set out to create a product for a small subsection of the population. Instead, we would like to provide our customers with the best product possible.
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Why should you broaden the scope of your product?
Understanding the scope of your product influences the downstream decisions. As product managers, we understand the importance of thinking about who out there could use our product. When we do not broaden our market share, we isolate many subsections of society.
We often don’t realize how limiting those decisions might be. When we look around at our peers, our friends, our neighborhoods, and our families, we only see a sliver of the full population. We design for the “average consumer, ”which remains a flawed concept. Product teams need to develop products for a range of physical, cognitive, sensory, cultural, and socioeconomic variances.
Furthermore, your product should create a fair user experience. Oftentimes product teams fail to solve use cases or accommodate everyone. A product’s financial viability may also cause issues. As a product manager, you might determine that costs limit your ability to create a full user-friendly experience.
Developing a More Equitable and Inclusive Product Experience
Brittany Edwards—digital product manager and co-founder of Incorp[HER]ated—believes product teams must think beyond the types of people they see in the office. Some of this comes with who we choose to hire into our product teams, to begin with.
“If you don’t have a diverse organization and you’re not sure about what you don’t know or aren’t ready to acknowledge it, then the research you do is where you’re comfortable,” Edwards said in a recent webinar on Product Management Trends.
Companies need to break free of this unintentional-yet-ingrained limited perspective. Product teams must make a concerted effort to venture beyond their comfort zones.
“It’s all about identifying who your customer base truly is,” Edwards said, “Really push the boundaries of your definition of your customer.”
Product teams set out to understand what their users find difficult within the context of the product experience. That means talking to people, conducting usability sessions, and adopting best practices. If you search for opportunities to improve, things can always get better.
Of course, this inclusiveness can only go so far while still being practical. “It’s okay to be somewhat exclusive,” Edwards continued. “But acknowledge that and the risks that are associated with it.”
Potential roadblocks towards inclusiveness.
With so many avenues to increase inclusivity, there’s no shame in using an ROI as part of your analysis. If you can increase your target market by a few percentage points, you don’t have to worry if it’s fair. Instead, view every effort as a net positive.
You need to expand your potential market by doing the right thing. You should work to ensure your “starting point” remains unbiased. Challenging assumptions and remaining thoughtful in the design process.
Yet this only happens when there is time, space, and permission given to think about these unconscious defaults. As a product manager, you need to unpack the processes that lead to exclusion in the first place.
Accommodations Get Used in Unexpected Ways
The American Disabilities Act has been shaping public life since 1990. Federal and state regulations mandate that buildings provide ease of access for those with disabilities.
These sets of regulations make life easier for those suffering from a wide range of physical and mental limitations. They’re not the only ones who benefit. Parents with strollers also use those ramps, as well as shoppers with arms full of groceries.
ADA-driven changes provide value to everyone who uses them. They’re also an important reminder that product decisions made to accommodate one part of the market can end up benefiting many more people.
Some product managers may view the inclusion-driven activity as a costly exercise. Yet, it can enhance the user experience for much broader swaths of customers. Providing an option to increase the text size can attract older users, as well as those who have vision problems.
Expand Your Product’s Horizons
Your inclusive design can sometimes cause more problems and slow down innovation. For example, your product team may have to add in speech-to-text interfaces or develop a VR system that has accessibility features for individuals with a disability.
However, every step taken to make your product more accessible increases its utility for a broader set of users, creating organic growth opportunities for your product. Consumers will continue purchasing from you if they feel that the product provides accessibility, as well as functionality. By innovating the accessibility of your products, you have the opportunity to push your competitors towards producing an equitable product.
Over time, inclusive design becomes routine. “What about this?” and “what about that?” become welcome questions during ideation, design, and development.
Take the next steps toward creating an equitable user experience by:
Hiring more diverse teams
Talking to a wider variety of customers and potential users
Creating space and time to hear about a broader set of concerns and issues
Ensuring usability tests include different ages, races, shapes, sizes, genders, sexualities, geographies, educational levels, income ranges, and physical and cognitive capabilities
Asking your teams what else can we do to make things simpler, more accessible, and friendlier to as many constituencies as possible
Inclusivity and equity are about more than paying lip service to vocal minorities or being politically correct. There are a billion people with disabilities. The LGBTQ community has $3.6 trillion in buying power. The U.S. population is more than 30% Black and Hispanic.
Lastly, it’s simply good business to broaden your target market, and the brands doing so are seeing positive returns on their commitments to this practice. Don’t be caught on the wrong side of history with a product designed to serve only a small array of society rather than a universal equitable user experience.
LIKE.TG Named Fortune’s Great Places To Work Top 100 Small Businesses in 2021
On behalf of the LIKE.TG team, we are excited and honored to share some exciting news. Along with the honor of getting certified as a Great Place to Work (May 2021—May 2022),we earned the recognition of Fortune’s 2021 Best (Small or Medium) Workplaces.
Although one of our team’s values is humility, I wanted to take a moment to say, “heck yeah!” Thank you to the entirety of the team for your efforts navigating this past year.
What Did This Year Look like for LIKE.TG?
Like many companies, we practically learned overnight how to manage our business differently with the onset of the pandemic. The process of placing our operating practices and guiding principles under a microscope allowed us to solidify what was working well and what we needed to improve.
In particular, we saw the need to be more intentional about how we build a great culture. LIKE.TG believes how employees act when nobody is looking defines company culture. We felt alignment become even more critical in a world where our team is all working remotely. We also know people want to work alongside people they trust.
Strong values alignment becomes even more critical as a company scales and growth accelerates. In the past year alone, our business doubled in size. We released several key product enhancements. Product organizations utilized these enhancements to help simplify the shipment of products.
What’s Our Secret Sauce?
So how did we win Fortune’s 2021 Best (Small or Medium) Workplaces over the ten thousand contending companies? We believe a key was really clarifying and subsequently living by those values that bind us.
LIKE.TG’s core values assist in recognition as one of Fortune’s great places to work.
Hustle: We’re passionate about what we’re doing. But we hustle to preserve time with our friends and family. We empower employees to own the outcome. We encourage them to want to win because it means we are making an impact as a whole.
Humility: We listen first and ask questions when we don’t have the answers. We approach interactions and problems with curiosity and adjust our course when needed.
Heart: We want our work to have meaning, and we care deeply for our team, our customers, and our society at large. We embrace the visible and invisible differences to create a place where people feel safe speaking plainly and being the best version of themselves.
“I’m really proud of how the team exemplifies Hustle, Humility, and Heart every day. We help our colleagues’ career paths grow and develop. I’ve loved getting to see team members get the chance to move into different teams and get promoted into new roles from a manager of customer success, becoming a product manager to a customer success manager, becoming a sales engineer. Seeing folks get the chance to spread their wings, try something new, and move forward is core to what I think Hustle, Humility, and Heart mean in our workplace.” – Diana Ciontea – Finance
“We work with real people. We’re not just numbers and jobs to be done. The team gets to know each other and spends time caring about each other’s interests, and there’s trust built there. I trust that my colleagues are putting in their heart, with humility and they’re hustling in everything they do that helps us remember that we’re all people behind the job.” – Nick Fields – Product management
[VIDEO on Heart Humility and Hustle]
Fostering Connection at LIKE.TG
After the Black Lives Matter protests, we came together as a company to openly share how people were feeling. It was particularly moving to hear people speak plainly about what this topic meant to them while also serving as a time to catalog our practices. These conversations inspired the creation of our diversity and inclusion task force. This cross-functional collaboration has spawned various initiatives, including mental health days, a fundraiser for disadvantaged children, and a fresh look at the hiring process.
LIKE.TG’s biannual “Fest.”
Another critical moment for our team was launching our first, all remote, teamwide gathering we call Fest. In the past, Fest represented a biannual event where in-office and remote coworkers would convene for social and educational activities. Activities included presentations from customers to lightning talks where employees volunteer to present on a topic of passion and trivia at a local brewery, to name a few. This event represented a great way to cultivate strong team alignment, especially since most of our team lives outside Santa Barbara. As we all know, large in-person gatherings weren’t on the agenda this past year, so we had to improvise.
The process of building a weeklong schedule to support a 100% remote Fest helped flesh out many of the lingering habits ingrained from in-office work that didn’t support remote workers. While we all look forward to a face-to-face Fest again, we believe the emphasis on learning how to do remote work well sets us up for longer-term success.
Inspired by feedback from our team, we have since launched a mentorship program and a Culture, Collaboration, and Connection (CCC) monthly meetup. At CCC, in a small group setting, we tackle various topics ranging from the company’s long-term strategy to learning more about each other’s interests outside of work.
Trust and Strategy at LIKE.TG
Some of us may have worked in lower trust or what some may call ‘political’ environments. People often expend unnecessary energy in the wrong areas. Also, those environments tend to stifle open communication among teams. We believe that the best ideas can come from anywhere. Consequently, it is incumbent upon our organization to ensure processes amplify and encourage the sharing of information.
A great example is how information our team gathers from customers finds its way into our product prioritization process. The bulk of our team is talking with our customers every day. Harnessing insights from these conversations is foundational to our strategy especially given how quickly the product management space evolves.
Trust, or a lack thereof, is something we know product managers often grapple with internally. Often, they feel frustrated conveying to stakeholders how and why things need prioritization. Ultimately, we see our role at LIKE.TG as helping our customers instill greater trust within their own organization.
“It feels like my input is valued here. We work hard, but we love the work we’re doing because we know it’s positively impacting on ourselves, our customers, and the world.” – Sierra Newell – Marketing
“I know when I come in, I can be my authentic self. I’m welcomed and valued for that. I can walk in the door and don’t have to be a different person. I can be who I am, and everyone respects and values me at ProductPlan. I can flourish and be happy and fulfilled because I can be myself at the end of the day. – Damon Navo – Customer Success
Final Thoughts on Fortune’s Great Places to Work
Being recognized as one of Fortune’s great places to work is a tremendous honor, especially in light of the challenges brought about over the past year. We also believe much of our success is still in front of us. We’re excited to continue our journey to help product organizations simplify the product life cycle and build organizational trust.
Check out our Careers Page if you are interested in a role at ProductPlan.
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Conduct Better Roadmap Communication with Shared Legends
You may have experienced issues when combining more than one roadmap into a single view. If so, you know how difficult it is to ensure that multiple product portfolio views have a standardized legend.
However, maintaining a consistent structure and vocabulary can improve a business’s ability to communicate strategic goals. The solution? We’ve added a new Shared Legends feature to the LIKE.TG roadmap app.
I spoke with hundreds of roadmap users at large organizations. They told me how challenging it is for admins to maintain workflows and standardize multiple roadmaps. The time investment to have each team member update and standardize their roadmaps was a burden for them.
Here are some of the most common challenges that may sound familiar to you. I’ll also explain how the Shared Legends feature can support better roadmap communications within your team.
3 Ways Shared Legends Can Help Improve Your Roadmap Communications
1. “I need to be able to lock down legends across roadmaps.”
One admin described the frustration of creating a legend and asking roadmap owners across the company to use it—only to find some were changing colors or modifying the text.
Using a consistent legend across roadmaps is essential for clear communication when accessing the portfolio view. If a company decides to use the legend to present strategic objectives, it doesn’t want roadmap editors to add new or modify labels. If an initiative doesn’t align with an existing strategic purpose, it probably shouldn’t be on the roadmap right now.
Solution: Admins are the only ones who can modify a shared legend.
Shared Legends allows admins to limit edit access. If editors use a shared legend for their roadmaps, they will have to use the legend labels and other details as-is, ensuring consistency across company roadmaps.
2. “We want to make a legend change once—not 30 times.”
As another LIKE.TG customer explains, “Following up one by one with 30 PMs isn’t scalable. When we make a change to the legend, we need that change to impact all roadmaps using that legend.”
When a product leader needs to make a small change to legend text or color before a big presentation, there are many roadmaps to update when they could be doing other things like preparing for the presentation itself.
Solution: Shared legend modifications are automatically reflected across all roadmaps using the legend.
When an admin updates a shared legend, that update will automatically populate across every roadmap using that shared legend.
3. “We need to make the portfolio view easier to configure and read.”
As a result, we built Shared Legends to address this common challenge that we heard from our enterprise customers. They have many active roadmaps at any given time that different owners manage. Admins at larger companies often find that creating a roadmap portfolio view requires manual work.
One product team labeled its development work with a blue bar and called it “Development” in the legend, and another assigned it red and called it “Dev team.” Merging these roadmaps would require the admin to review the details of both, reconcile the red-blue discrepancies, and then create a standard label for the development work, which could take hours.
Solution: Shared legend for portfolio views.
The admin can now use LIKE.TG’s Shared Legends feature to create a consistent legend convention for each roadmap and roll those roadmaps into a portfolio view requiring manual legend reconciliation.
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The New Shared Legends Feature in LIKE.TG’s Roadmap App in Action
Shared Legends automates the process of standardizing legends for the entire company. Here’s what it means for each type of roadmap user:
Admins can create a standard legend in the LIKE.TG roadmap app to make it accessible to roadmap owners across the company. If you’re an admin on your company’s roadmaps, this means you can create consistency and alignment on roadmaps across your company. Moreover, you won’t need to update every roadmap whenever your team makes a change manually.
Editors can apply the shared legend to their roadmaps, saving them time from creating their own and ensuring their legend reflects the vocabulary, color-coding, and other details agreed on by the company. If you’re an editor, this also means you can get up and running with a standardized legend quickly with the confidence that you’re adhering to best practices established by your team leads.
Viewers of the company’s roadmaps will have a consistent experience analyzing each project’s strategic goals and status on each roadmap. If you’re a viewer, this means you’ll be able to quickly understand any roadmap across your company because you’ll be familiar with the legend conventions.
Conduct Better Roadmap Communication with Shared Legends
The Shared Legends feature in LIKE.TG’s roadmap app is a first of its kind. When your team deploys this feature, your roadmap admins and editors will know that:
The terms used to describe your goals, priority levels, project status, and teams will always be consistent with other roadmaps across the company. (No more duplicate labels or confusion about terminology.)
The spelling, grammatical details, and color-coding of your roadmap legend will perfectly match the company’s different roadmaps. (No more manually fixing your labels to match other roadmaps before rolling into a portfolio view.)
The legend you create will merge seamlessly with the legends of your company’s other roadmaps when you combine them into a single view. (No more manual work to align legends when rolling roadmaps into a portfolio view.)
If you maintain several roadmaps or work on a team with many product managers, this will be a timesaving game-changer.
Try out shared legends today, and let me know what you think in the comments.
How to Retroactively Measure Product Vision Success
A 2020 study conducted by Clutch surveyed over 500 businesses. Only 5% of companies identified that they accomplished all their goals in the past fiscal year. Moreover, the survey results established that 65% of those businesses completed at least half of their goals. Clutch’s survey proves that you need an effective product management strategy to measure product vision success.
As a product leader, your product vision anchors everything you communicate to your team. The concept provides your organization with the ideal product.
First, you must realize you need to test your product vision before developing a product strategy. Much like the agile process, your picture gets better as you build, measure, and learn. As such, your product vision becomes the product narrative you, as a leader, tells.
While looking back at your vision, you’ll need to make sure your team remains proactive. Remember, your product vision may be an idea or an aspiration. To help your product team get there, you’ll need to learn from your actions.
You’ll need to put your head down to gather information and then sell the rest of the company on your vision. Your product vision reflects the big picture and helps you, your team, and your peers make long-term decisions. Your informed decision-making drives your culture and moves the business forward.
The vision may remain stagnant, though. Even after you write it, the product strategy needs to evolve. Adjustments lead to significant improvements.
The end of the fiscal year can provide your team with the time to adjust. Let’s talk about answering the question:
How did I do last year?
Product Vision Exists In The Work You’ve Done.
Metrics are crucial. When it comes to vision, you can’t count clicks.
That is where proxy metrics come in. Proxy metrics are variables that can help you understand something unobservable. So when it comes to vision or leadership, having great proxy metrics is essential.
Proxy metrics help you gain visibility into how you operationalize that vision. That’s where goal frameworks come into play.
Proxy metrics, even far removed from the leadership level, can give insight. Let’s take a goal framework and go a little deeper into what they can tell you, even if it’s four levels down.
Objective and Key Results (OKRs) are popular these days. When they work well, they function as an excellent proxy metric. Why? They can help a leader see how aligned the team is via something as simple as a spreadsheet.
A good question to ask here is, are the objectives you see aligned to that ideal vision?
If those objectives aren’t, there is no better time to think back to what caused the misalignment to the vision.
Did something change?
Are teams getting the correct information?
Do teams feel safe enough to ask questions?
All good things to think about as you judge how close you are to those product ideals: now, how about a particular measurement to keep alignment?
Tracking A North Star Metric Helps Tie Movement To Vision
Another tool to help set alignment is a north star metric. As John Cutler mentions on the blog, an effective north star metric keeps alignment. It’s important to remember the key characteristics of an influential North Star:
North star helps focus on customer value and the exchange of value. For example, daily active users (DAUs) don’t tell you anything about the value exchanged.
The metric represents your unique product strategy.
Moreover, it connects the customer value you are trying to create as a product team. The executive team cares about this connection the most.
As a north star becomes real, this is a great time to look at the initiatives to see if they moved your north star by looking at the significant projects shipped to see how they affected your north star.
Did you see spikes in your proxy metrics or North Star?
How about any dips?
Did you make any bets in your product strategy that would affect the North Star? How did those bets pan out?
Remember, things don’t always go to plan. The releases that happened during the year may have had an adverse effect. Ignore this at your peril.
Failures Are Essential, Too
Success is helpful for team morale. That said, analyzed failure is more beneficial for team growth.
Let’s be clear. Failure on its own isn’t helpful. Don’t fall into the trap of lionizing failure for the sake of loss. Spend time analyzing the failure so that teams can understand how to make better choices in the future and learn how to prioritize their time better around the demands of product planning.
Why? Product development doesn’t always go to plan. In fact, as a product leader, if things always went how you planned, you aren’t paid enough. Sometimes, taking a risk, or force de jour, bad things happen.
The bad news is failure doesn’t feel good. The good news is once you’ve had some time to recover, there are lessons in failure. Those lessons can help you and your team get even better the following year.
Embrace Your Product Failures
Write them down. Do not hide those failures. Failures come in different forms.
A quick note: it’s easy to point out the vast failures. The ones that create ripples in the organization are substantial to note. They are drama-filled, and your strategy may change forever. Make sure, though, that you capture the less noisy failures. These look different but can be as deadly long-term.
You need to judge features by the return on investment as much as the noise they create.
The project went “according to plan” yet didn’t make a splash in the marketplace. It’s a slack integration that didn’t move the north star. You invested in a product team for a quarter, and nothing changed.
These failures are silent at the moment but cost the company millions. But when you catch them, offer a great chance to look at the process.
The failure is an opportunity to look at your process:
Was our discovery process unclear?
Was this a me-too feature – something we saw our competitors do and copied?
Why was this prioritized?
Things don’t always go to plan. Your team will go through trials, and those trials are unavoidable. What separates the product visions that evolve from those that wither? Product teams use what they go through as fuel.As you judge the year, it’s a great time to look at those failures and see what you can learn. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"});
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Facing the Consequences of Your Product Vision Decision
Your failures, and successes, for that matter, don’t exist in a bubble. The company that supports your product vision is an organism. The organism adjusts to what happens.
After an event happens, something happens afterward. That “something” is a “second-order effect.”
Second-Order Effect refers to the idea that every action has a consequence. Then, each result has a result.
In other words, a single decision can start a series of cause-and-effect. The results can lead to shifts in culture.
There are bound to be shocking things, some of which felt “out of nowhere.” That is likely the second-order effect of an outcome.
Write those surprises, and like you did with team failures, investigate them.
Let’s take that Slack integration we talked about earlier. The feature had a specific purpose. But, the lack of impact could have had some downstream effects.
Was there a particular decision that led to a shift in something unrelated?
Did our communication patterns change?
Were there any culture changes that caught us by surprise?
Writing down what took the team by surprise can help you draw a map of those second-order effects. If you create clarity there, you can use them to fuel your growth into next year.
How to Utilize Customer Segmentation
You’ll find that the issues you have will not apply to everyone. When taking a look back at the year, it’s a tremendous opportunity to ask yourself the question:
Do we care about these people?
It doesn’t seem warm-hearted, but our vision can’t do everything for everyone. When teams spend time on customers that don’t fit with the business, they waste time.
When you build for someone you don’t intend to serve, you are stealing from valuable customers. Stealing time may seem harsh, but that is an outcome of a lack of focus.
So, who are your most important customers? Now is the time to take the time to talk to your team and look at the data:
What customers drive revenue?
Who are the customers that drive stickiness on the platform?
Of those customers, how happy are they?
Net Promoter Scores (NPS) are helpful here. NPS is a survey question that asks how likely you are to recommend this product on a scale of one to ten. The number has limited use, but it can signal the health of a segment in the total.
NPS is powerful when you segment your users.
If you segment your users, you have a great way to understand who likes your product and those who don’t. The promoters (9-10), like it, represent an opportunity to get case studies. The detractors (0-6) are the canary for potential issues.
They present themselves as opportunities to learn. Understanding what drives those users to that score will help strengthen the vision. There is also an opportunity to see what is impactful, especially as you get scores over time and see where the most significant shifts happen.Download Product Success Metrics ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '18f5a8aa-393b-4397-9fd4-f7758c1edf55', {"region":"na1"});
Themes and Trends for the Product Vision
When looking at all the data and segments, you are looking for themes. Vision isn’t about one change or another that works for lower-level strategy. You are looking to impact as large of a swath of your business as possible.
When you digest the data, you’ll want to take a step back. Let the data dance in your head for a while, and you’ll notice a few prominent themes.
Something else should come with those themes. The business isn’t stagnant, so the data you see will be moving. These are the shifts we mentioned earlier.
Combining both will give you something to communicate to the rest of the business. Themes are great to take back to the c-suite; it’s at a level you can discuss without getting too much into the weeds. It will color the business for them. The trends will give them the numbers to help you and the rest of the company to act.
If this sounds familiar, it should. Themes and trends are qual and quant working together. You need to sell the vision. Have solid and explicit themes and trends will help you do that.
As you take a look at the themes and trends, you’ll want to know the following:
Are these themes impactful?
Will they cover a material part of the business?
Are the trends clear?
Are they tied to metrics that are proxy metrics to the health of the company?
Do the themes and trends match?
We need to tell a story.
Looking at the changes for the year isn’t enough. You’ll need to tell a cohesive story to the product team and the rest of the business to sell your vision again.
Measure Product Vision with Your Product Roadmap
Product isn’t linear, and neither is our vision.
Your vision mustn’t become stale – business moves fast. As a product leader, you’ll need to ensure that you don’t make the mistake of assuming the vision is evident.
Taking the time to go over the last year is essential. You need to check in on the changes, north star, failures, and segments. It would be best to sell what you see to the rest of the business with themes and trends.
The end of the year provides an excellent time to reevaluate what your team has accomplished.
Your roadmap, driven by LIKE.TG, is a great way to tell the story. That is why it is best to support that roadmap with a vision to drive organizational change.
Remember, your vision is a tool to help people understand. Take the data from this research to find the connective tissue past the features and tell the story.
Your vision is the big picture, and taking time to reflect on reinforcing your product story is valuable. As a leader, it’s a skill that will be useful throughout your career.
So take advantage and set yourself up for looking forward over time. Get up and see the potential around the corner.
Discover what LIKE.TG has to offer. Then let your vision lead the way.
Effective Use of Product Roadmap Software to Align Your Product Strategy
Vital to delivering successful products at Clickatell, an effective product roadmap can quell the confusion and missteps that often derail well-meaning product delivery organizations. Roadmaps provide the required context to understand how individual initiatives combine to meet strategic objectives. They also paint a clear picture of how it all comes together.
An effective product roadmap lists the many deliverables and deadlines. However, most importantly, it tells a story. The roadmap guides and informs everyone involved with the product from ideation to market. Furthermore, the alignment creates a cohesive organization around the same core objectives.
Using Your Product Strategy and Product Vision to Plan Your Roadmap
Product strategies must be rooted in the overall vision of the company and product. This ensures organizational alignment and support. When each product initiative advances, the product vision is easy for everyone to be on board. Some product teams may find themselves challenged by the individual whims of sales staff, executives, or even their product managers.
The product roadmap then reflects that strategy. It illustrates the product team’s approach to making their product vision a reality. The linkage prevents the product from straying into uncertain territory. An effective product roadmap can provide your team with a mission and vision into actual functionality and deliverables.
Anything that doesn’t directly service the overall vision of the product roadmap needs reevaluation. Strategic and effective product roadmaps provide independent product managers and implementation teams time to focus on what really matters. They can then produce their desired outcomes. Teams can then ensure a product-led company arrives at the desired destination.
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The Product Roadmap’s Key Role in the “Triad”
Product management, product development, and user experience comprise the “triad.” Moreover, these disciplines are essential to delivering great products. Every organization strives to find the sweet spot for these collaborations. The results are products that delight customers while also solving their problems.
[Source for reference of the “triad”]
Product roadmaps serve as the golden thread that weaves these three disciplines together. When roadmaps align with the product strategy, all three key disciplines are working off the same plan. The alignment creates a secure buy-in from stakeholders regarding its contents’ viability, feasibility, and desirability. Moreover, it creates a true partnership that can’t reach a common goal without working in sync.
The Importance of Storytelling and the Roadmap’s Role
Humans respond much better to stories and narratives than bulleted lists of talking points. Positioning your product in terms of stories helps people communicate its value and helps keep all teams on message and consistent.
While the specifics may be highly dependent on the product’s and company’s maturity and scale, the logic and sequence of the roadmap’s contents should always make sense. I believe every product strategy needs a storyline and a timeline.
Product storyline
The storyline explains the “why,” typically presented verbally with a few slides to support the presentation. The timeline denotes the order, with sequences and key milestones best expressed in a visual roadmap created with purpose-built tools like ProductPlan.
Storylines introduce concepts and create consistent naming conventions that ensure everyone in the business can associate with. This narrative device provides input to concepts reflected in the roadmap. Storylines help underpin the product’s vision and mission.
A solid visual roadmap pulls the story together. It provides documentation of the narrative. The roadmap’s timeline can serve as a preview of how and when that story will expand and get even better over time.
6 Roadmapping Best Practices
Roadmap’s key value exists in sharing data in a digestible, consistent format. It serves as the record reference for anyone building, selling, supporting, or using the product. But the best roadmaps have a few key elements that increase their utility.
1.) Know your audience
Not every crowd wants or needs the same thing from a roadmap. The storyline and timeline should remain consistent. The level of detail and emphasis get tailored to different sets of stakeholders. So it puts the focus on what’s meaningful to them. Don’t make the rookie mistake of thinking the only audience that matters is product development or the C-suite.
2.) Choose an appropriate tool
Visual roadmaps are the best way to convey your product’s story. Don’t rely on tools that lack the flexibility and ease of use required to create a compelling visual roadmap. It will evolve as the product strategy matures and new features and functionality ship. Other teams would never settle for subpar tools, and neither should product management. Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint do many things well, but roadmapping isn’t one of them, and neither do a collaboration or issue tracking tools. Pick a purpose-built roadmapping tool.
3.) Static is for suckers
Roadmaps are living resources that demand regular updates. Create a cadence for updating and socializing the latest versions of the roadmap, so stakeholders expect and look forward to their natural evolution. Slide decks and screenshots don’t do roadmaps justice – rather, use a specialized and interactive tool put in the hands of competent roadmap owners to mitigate the danger of outdated documents remaining in circulation.
4.) Consistency is crucial
Regardless of how roadmaps get built in your organization, they should always look and read the same. Relying on templates, standard terminology, and consistent visual elements avoids stakeholders’ confusion and prevent product team members from reinventing the wheel. With a roadmap strategy guide, everyone can focus on the substance and less on the format.
5.) Take a portfolio approach
No roadmap is an island in organizations with multiple products and product lines. With a consistent approach, it’s easy to roll up various roadmaps for different products into a portfolio or master view. The portfolio approach creates a cohesive roadmap ecosystem, even with diverse global teams working on product strategy and execution. Project managers, developers, testers, sales, and marketing must make sense of each product, how they interact, and any interdependencies.
6.) Build for a remote and distributed world
Roadmaps provide a reference regardless of the location or time zone, especially in Agile environments where rapid iterations and learnings are the norms. Since far-flung teams get so few overlapping time slots when they can work together, roadmap consistency allows those meetings to be more productive and efficient, fostering increased collaboration.
Get Your Free Roadmap Template Guide ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'aade5d3d-4c0b-4409-b1c0-31d727a356aa', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});
Make Roadmaps Work for You
Humans invented tools to accomplish more, not so they could spend their time fooling around with the tools. Product managers should view roadmaps as a valuable tool. They should invest enough time in them to maximize their benefits.
Product managers are the keepers of one of the most important artifacts in the entire company—the product roadmap. Understanding what roadmaps can do and continually improving and updating them makes them more helpful for challenging conversations and negotiations between product teams and stakeholders.
Roadmaps do well to limit noise and distractions. They focus on the core of the vision and leave the shiny objects on the sidelines. Consequently, they are the “chaos shield.” We all need to deliver value and delight to our customers while at the same time appeasing our internal stakeholders. Finally, their accuracy creates credibility, which will give them more utility moving forward.
Read the Strategic Roadmap Planning Guide ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '06f68ad8-23a4-4d4e-b15a-e578f0f8adaf', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});
Employ an IMPACT Prioritization Strategy to Your Product
What drives product professionals? They are driven with a hyperfocus on doing things that matter. Product professionals talk to customers and stakeholders to understand what’s important to them. They unpack their pain points to get to the root cause. They know the importance of a prioritization strategy and seek out opportunities to improve upon it.
We conduct customer research and stakeholder alignment so we can figure out what matters. Then we identify what we can do in our products that make an impact, be it on the lives of our customers, the growth of the user base, or the bottom line of the business.
However, we usually have far more ideas and options than bandwidth and resources. Thus, we realize a real need for prioritization, ranking and sorting, and culling the list. We can then choose a few items worthy of making the product roadmap rise to the top.
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The Downsides of Prioritization Frameworks
Because a prioritization strategy is of crucial importance to any product’s success, many different methods exist. Dozens upon dozens of frameworks stand ready for product teams looking for a new way to figure out the best ideas to pursue first, from buy-a-feature to MoSCoW analysis.
These frameworks aim to maximize windows of opportunity and optimize product development. It’s a testament to just how tricky, and complex a prioritization strategy can be.
Not only do these frameworks have lots of different names and acronyms, but they also require varied inputs. Some rely heavily on customer surveys, while others need a well-structured strategy or clear key performance indicators (KPIs).
While these tools often help, there’s an inherent risk to them as well. Product managers may feel forced to ignore critical data points due to the limits of the overall framework.
Product managers face limits due to the lack of a solid strategy. Their strategy should align stakeholders on a consensus moving forward. That must be in place well before plugging numbers into a framework. How else can you assess the significance of any item on the business making progress toward its goals?
IMPACT sets the stage for better prioritization conversations, moving the team past the “why” and focusing on specific trade-offs and expected outcomes.
Watch our webinar on IMPACT:
Applying an IMPACT Prioritization Strategy
As I’ve covered in many other blog posts, webinars, and our free ebook, IMPACT is a mindset for ensuring you’re doing things that matter. And there’s no domain where that matters more than prioritization.
So let’s run through the six elements of IMPACT and see how they relate to this essential aspect of product management:
Interesting
Not all problems are created equal. Framing and Context provide stakeholders with an idea of how pressing the issue is. Product management must act as a storyteller to engage their colleagues instead of just giving a dry recounting of the facts.
Folks get excited and influence how things get ranked. At this stage, the solution must take a backseat to the prevalence and significance of the problem.
Meaningful
The problems you opt to solve must both move the business forward and provide customer value. You can’t do either without an agreed-upon vision and strategy as well as a quantifiable benefit to the customer.
People
The focus must remain squarely on the customers, in this case, how many benefits and how significant is the improvement, which creates an apples-to-apples comparison and shifts distractions and edge cases to the parking lot.
Actionable
Prioritization must consider the realistic chances of solving the problem. Putting something impossible at the top of the queue—despite its possible value—wastes everyone’s time. That requires a little homework with engineering to consider feasibility and level of effort to ensure a balance between resource allocation and weight.
Clear
It’s tough to consider and adequately rank potential development items without a comprehensive understanding of the problem. Don’t prioritize things until the research is complete and the ideal solution is already in hand.
Testable
How will you validate that each prioritized item worked once it ships? Without a measurable definition of success, no one knows if it was worth it or if similar projects warrant resource allocation in the future.
Did you solve the problem? Is the value clear to end-users and prospects? User feedback confirms those assumptions—or sends you back to the drawing board—so the sooner they chime in, the better.
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An IMPACT Prioritization Strategy in Action
For an additional lens incorporating IMPACT into a prioritization strategy, you can rank each item being considered based on the six tenets of IMPACT. For each of those six pillars, the team can rate each item on a five-point scale.
When evaluating a potential development item for “People,” for example, it might look like this:
1 – This only helps a minimal number of users in our target market.
3 – This allows lots of users with a particular characteristic/within a specific market segment.
5 – Everyone reaps significant benefits, and it expands the pool of potential customers.
Each item’s IMPACT is an objective countermeasure to the inertia that plague prioritization. The goal is to make the most of each development cycle, and the work with the most significant IMPACT is the work worth doing first.
To learn more about how IMPACT can influence this and other aspects of product management, download the free ebook today!
Finding Your True Career IMPACT Within the Product Field
Product professionals get paid to manage products and services. Delighting customers and creating innovative solutions for their problems dictates our priorities. But this single-minded focus on helping others often leads to a lack of focus on ourselves and our career impact in the product field.
And, unlike our products, no one’s getting paid to manage our careers on our behalf. Without intentional and thoughtful strategizing, years and decades can roll by, shifting and stalking our career trajectories while we worry about the success of others.
Applying the IMPACT mindset to your career can help keep that career impact trajectory on track by ensuring each move you make gets you closer to where you want to go.
From Individual Contributor to Director of Product➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '9110b373-1b93-491b-8f83-5fc4b63b4b89', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});
Being a Selfless Generalist is a Good Thing
A selfless approach based on customer empathy and satisfying stakeholders is an asset on the job, but less so for ourselves. We suffer from imposter syndrome and deprecate our value because, as generalists, we don’t command the same respect and awe as our more specialized coworkers.
But our selfless generalist approach is a superpower in its own right. Seeing the big-picture vision and possessing versatility enables product managers to impact, even when the spotlight falls on others instead. We check our egos at the door because the job demands it, and we don’t want a blindspot to punish the customers we care about.
Though it may not grab as many headlines or turn us into “influencers” in our respective industries, it builds the proper habits and work ethic to succeed in our current roles… and our next ones. Unfortunately, this means a scant opportunity to promote ourselves leads to personal “brands” that seldom extend beyond our companies’ walls (physical or virtual). Thus comes fewer opportunities to be “discovered” or headhunted or recruited as we continue operating backstage and behind the scenes.
Variety is the Spice of Life and the Bane of Product Management Careers
Anyone in product for a few years quickly notices no fixed definition of product management from one company to another. Some view Product as an equal peer to Marketing, Sales, and Engineering, while others tuck it away under a VP of Product Marketing or a CTO.
One organization may crown us “CEO of the Product” while another views us as an annoying check on runaway innovation. There appears to be a lack of shared understanding of what Product has to offer and why it’s so necessary. But the net result is seemingly random locations on organization charts, daily duties that differ significantly from one company to another, and product managers hailing from many walks of life.
The diversity presents challenges when attempting to:
Identify growth opportunities and spot which areas you must improve upon.
Translate a written job description into what it would mean for your career aspirations and how it maps to your current experience.
Tailor your resume, cover letter, and personal pitch to fit a particular job opportunity.
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Putting IMPACT to work for your career
The IMPACT approach can help you optimize your career impact by assessing yourself in order to improve your career prospects and how you position yourself when you’re actually on the hunt for a new gig.
Optimize yourself with IMPACT
Whether you’re desperate to change companies, are angling for a promotion, or want to be the best you can be, IMPACT provides a structure for identifying your strengths and weaknesses while identifying areas to work on.
Interesting
Product managers need an exciting story. How you got to your current role, the career path you took, and where you’d like to go are essential to shaping how others view you. Resumes list the jobs, the degrees, and a few details in bullet points but don’t always recount a compelling story.
In a vacuum, your resume or LinkedIn profile might leave people with more questions than answers:
Why did you leave Microsoft for some startup that failed?
Why did you quit your job at a unicorn and throw in with a medium-sized firm?
What made you stay at the same company in the same role for six years?
How come you were once a Director, but now you’re a Senior PM?
Why did you bounce around between product marketing and product management?
To you, those moves all make sense, given the full context of your life and career. But job titles alone don’t do your narrative justice, ergo the need for a story that weaves them together. Connect the dots, find themes and common threads, and spin a tale that leaves others wondering what the next chapter holds in store.
Meaningful
Product managers do a lot of different things, many of them decidedly necessary. Listing out your responsibilities conveys competence with these tasks and obligations but camouflages your most impactful work.
Why you did those things and how you prioritized them is far more relevant. What did those accomplishments mean to you? To your company? To your users and customers?
When reviewing your experience, the emphasis must be on how they solved pain points and helped the company reach its overall impact goals.
People
A product manager’s relationships and interactions with coworkers are fundamental to their success. Those soft skills may not be measurable, but they are essential traits of your current future employer’s values.
Are you a good teammate that people enjoy working with? Do you make life easier and better for your colleagues? Are you a great mentor or a devoted protégé?
Those skills also come into play when interacting with customers. Can you speak in a language they understand and connect with them where they’re at? Can you engage them in deeper conversations to uncover the root issues and not just the surface-level gripes and wish lists?
Talent, intelligence, and creativity aren’t enough for a successful run in Product. You need to be a people person, too.
Actionable
When listing accomplishments, it’s important to deviate from the laundry-list approach and instead emphasize anecdotes or success stories where you either took action or set the stage for stakeholders to do so. You need to explain beyond merely discussing the completion of a task and what you did with the results.
You didn’t just “survey users,” you used that survey data to make recommendations, and one of those recommendations improved a KPI or led to a big deal, which better illustrates the meaningful impact of those actions, not that you just took them.
Clear
Keep things short and sweet while focusing on real-world examples of how your accomplishments made an impact. Showing off your skills and touting what they’ve done for you in the past are both keys to convincing folks you’re worth adding to their team.
Did you bridge gaps and build consensus by creating clarity among stakeholders. Have you inspired the masses with your oratorical prowess? Did you slice and dice the data and create dazzling visuals or unignorable metrics that won people over?
Testable
The dull, repeatable, everyday elements of your job aren’t the best measures of your competency. You need to get uncomfortable in an unfamiliar situation before knowing if you’re up to the challenge.
Push yourself to try new things, learn new skills, and dive into new areas of interest. Measure your faculty with this new material and see if you’ve got the resilience to power through when things get tricky.
Watch the full webinar below:
Putting IMPACT Into Action On a Job Hunt
With your elevator pitch nailed, the next part of advancing your career is assessing new opportunities. Once again, IMPACT can help by weeding out postings that won’t be a great fit while zeroing in on the good ones.
Job descriptions aren’t just ads; they’re problem statements you’ve yet to unpack.
What problem is this company trying to solve?
Where can someone add value and make an impact?
Are they mentioning customers and data?
Which verbs do they use?
Are they super specific in what they’re looking for or searching for an athlete to grow into the position and evolve with it over time?
Of course, what they say they want isn’t always what they need (or want), but it is a sneak preview of how they view product management today. It might be wrong and negotiable, but it provides a good glimpse of their current mindset.
With this as a starting point—and the remainder of the interviewing process as a series of additional opportunities for further digging—you can better ascertain the expectations for the role, your fit for the opportunity, and whether it will provide you with enough chances to make a true career impact. You want a job where you’re motivated to succeed, not just happy to collect the paycheck.
A Position with Purpose
The product offers us the opportunities to change lives, fuel businesses, and transform organizations. The problems we solve may be trivial or life-changing, but they all have the chance to impact our product’s users and customers.
Finding impactful opportunities throughout our career means more than just a job we enjoy or a product we’re passionate about. It gives our entire lives purpose and adds to the story of our career, adding new chapters with every step we take.
To learn more about how IMPACT can help with your career and other dimensions of product management, download the free ebook today.
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5 Ways LIKE.TG Helps Standardize Your Roadmaps
Sometimes you don’t know you have a problem until something breaks. Young companies are often scrappy by design. Their product teams are small and agile. Perhaps the team consists of a few product managers. These professionals can easily communicate, stay aligned, and present a cohesive product strategy to the team. Many teams fail to understand the importance of a roadmap. They fail to understand how it can help standardize and align their team.
The scrappy methods that worked in the past can lead to inconsistency and disorganization as the company scales. There are more features to build, more roadmaps to maintain, and more stakeholders to satisfy. Without standardized processes to maintain uniformity, tiny inconsistencies in how each product manager approaches their work are magnified over time. This results in miscommunication, redundant work, and errors.
Whether you’re a product manager or a product operations person for a large enterprise organization, we want to help you. Our roadmap software can help you create streamlined processes that scale along with your company. Our roadmaps can improve efficiency, reduce redundant work, and establish best practices. Here are five ways LIKE.TG helps you and your product team standardize roadmaps.
Create a Roadmapping Process that Grows as You Grow
Adopting roadmapping software alone goes a long way toward establishing the organization-wide processes that allow your team to scale. Without a tool built for roadmapping specifically, many product managers rely on square-peg, round-hole solutions. For example, spreadsheets and slide decks, neither of which make it easy to maintain uniformity.
Product roadmaps should be consistent in the way they present information. They can be pretty complex, packing tons of data into a visual format that spans months. Moreover, roadmaps illustrate various work across teams. To make sense of this information, a viewer needs to know where to look. They need to know what the colors on the roadmap mean and how roadmap lanes get organized.
They also need to know that the roadmap they’re viewing isn’t outdated.
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Choosing the right tool
Tools like Excel and Powerpoint open the door for too much variability when creating a roadmap. These tools fail to build effective roadmaps, so product managers must customize them to work for their needs.
It’s a minefield of possibility that’s difficult to reign in as your organization grows. The style and structure of your roadmaps evolve organically in different directions and become challenging to comprehend and combine. Coupled with the lack of version control, and your roadmap process becomes a roadmap mess.
Using native roadmap software, like LIKE.TG, provides immediate structure to how your team roadmaps. Think of a roadmapping tool as a pre-built foundation and frame. The frame gives your roadmaps reliability and strength while also still leaving room for customization and creativity. By adopting a roadmapping tool, your roadmaps will all live in a single space. They will follow a consistent style and structure.
Standardize the Style and Structure of Your Roadmaps
Roadmap legends help you visually communicate strategic goals. With just a pop of color, you can organize your roadmap by initiatives that increase customer satisfaction. You can create more revenue opportunities or enhance your product’s performance.
It can be difficult to keep these legends uniform when you have a team of product managers who each create and maintain their own roadmaps. If every roadmap uses a different visual vocabulary for communicating the same information, the result is a set of roadmaps that require time and energy to learn to read, and worse, can’t be compared or combined into a high-level portfolio view without a lot of work to remedy inconsistencies.
Many of our customers have felt this pain firsthand. It’s why we built Shared Legends, a way for you to standardize the style and structure of your roadmaps.
With Shared Legends, you can create a centrally managed legend that can apply to any existing roadmap with just a few clicks. Rather than developing legends themselves, your product team can easily follow best practices and use the legends agreed upon by your organization.
Even better, you only need to update your shared legend once to cascade that update to every other roadmap using that legend. Instead of hounding your product team to make the same update countless times, you can rest assured that everyone on the team is following best practices and using the same legend.
Standardize the Information Included in Your Roadmap Details
You don’t want to create consistency in the style and structure of your roadmaps. You also want to predict the kinds of information people can expect to find when they go to your roadmap with questions.
Within the details of every roadmap bar, we provide a space for you to include additional information to help roadmap viewers understand “what” the product team is building and why they’re building it, who they’re building it for, and other essential information.
If left to their own devices, product managers will likely provide the information they deem most relevant. They perceive this through the information they care about the most. On the other hand, they can determine by asking themselves the questions they’ve most often received from others. Either way, it’s unlikely that the information provided within each initiative will be the same across your team. Product managers need to find a way to properly align expectations.
Custom Fields
With LIKE.TG’s custom fields, you can designate a space for the information you want your product team to include on every roadmap bar. Maybe your team needs to keep track of the success metrics tied to each initiative. Or perhaps your senior leaders want to see the budget allocated for each priority.
Rather than answer these questions individually over and over, you can direct team members to your roadmap and allow it to speak for you. Over time, team members will build a habit of checking the roadmap first rather than interrupting work. The assurance will provide you and your team with more time to focus on strategic initiatives, speaking with customers, launching new products, exploring new market opportunities. The freed-up time will allow product managers to work on addressing things that need quick prioritization.
Standardize How Your Team Decides What to Build Next
Prioritization can be a painstaking process. There are so many inputs to consider, from a mountain of customer feedback to features that your executive team believes will drive the business forward to your ideas around what innovations could attract entire markets of new customers.
Without an agreed-upon way to decide what to build next, it’s easy to fall into the trap of reacting to what others ask for rather than what your product strategy dictates. It’s even easier for each product manager on your team to prioritize something different based on their assessment of what’s essential and what’s not.
We want to help you bring standardization to how you prioritize roadmap initiatives. The LIKE.TG prioritization board allows your team to objectively score opportunities based on a customizable set of benefit and cost categories.
Maybe your company has a business goal to increase revenue from a particular segment of customers. With the prioritization board, you can easily include that consideration as a benefit. You can then customize how to compare to other initiatives and consider how they might factor into deprioritization. For example, operational costs or the amount of development work required can also add to your prioritization framework as a cost.
The prioritization board helps your product managers stay laser-focused on your company’s most important priorities. It also provides new product managers on your team with an accessible template for learning what should be top-of-mind considerations when deciding what to build next.
Standardize Your Roadmap to Communicate with Different Audiences
LIKE.TG’s tags are an easy way to categorize and filter your roadmap based on custom information. Indeed, not every initiative on a roadmap will be relevant to every kind of audience.
Tags aren’t helpful if they aren’t implemented consistently across your various roadmaps.
Tags highlight particular stories about your product strategy. For example, your customer success team might want to know which features support a specific set of customers. Your marketing team may need a release overview for August so they can plan their go-to-market strategy. Tags add these additional details to your roadmap and then filter your roadmaps by this information.
Unfortunately, without standardizing how your team uses them, tags can quickly become a source of disorganization and confusion. In an attempt to create an August release overview, your product team might unintentionally create multiple variations of the same tag. Some roadmap items might be tagged with “Aug” while others tagged with “August Release.” Anyone who wants to see an overview of everything releasing in August will need to be aware of these variations.
Centralized Tag Manager
You should be able to keep your tags organized and avoid redundancy, confusion, and error. If you’re a Professional or Enterprise customer, we provide you with a place to do this. We call our centralized tag manager.
With the LIKE.TG tag manager, you can easily manage the tags used to highlight product owners, dependencies, release statuses, and more. The manager defines which tags pertain to which kinds of information, merge similar tags to avoid confusion, and deletes any tag your team shouldn’t use.
It may sound obvious, but making it easy for your audience to access the information most relevant to them is critical in keeping your team aligned, delivery schedules on time, and your roadmaps in use. Without a way to readily view this information, many will either rely on inefficient methods of getting the information they need – like asking the same questions of your product team over and over again – or move forward in ignorance. Neither of these outcomes is acceptable, especially as your organization scales.
Streamline Your Product Roadmap
Ultimately, roadmaps that have a standardized style and structure communicate information in the same way. They use a common vocabulary to express goals, identify priorities, highlight dependencies, and more. When you take the time to create consistent processes for building and maintaining your roadmaps, you reduce the cognitive load these tasks require. The freed-up time allows your team to focus on more important things, like speaking with customers, drilling into market research, and otherwise working on ways to improve your product.
It’s important to understand that standardization is an investment. It requires more work upfront to create less work overall over time. Unfortunately, many organizations realize the need for standardization too late, often when existing processes break down as the organization scales.
With LIKE.TG’s roadmapping platform, you can create a foundation of guidelines that build consistency and predictability within your organization over time. Our suite of standardization features ensures your roadmaps are produced by the best practices you’ve established, making it easy for your team to stay aligned, work efficiently, and gather the information they need to be better at their jobs.
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Your Product Team’s Communication is Making or Breaking Your Product
Effective product team communication is not about talking to your team more often or providing them with more granular tasks. You want to make sure your team understands why what they’re doing matters.
As a product manager, you need to create an atmosphere that keeps the lines of communication open. Not just from you to your team, but from them to you, and to each other. You also want to communicate not only your tactical requirements but the strategy and vision for the product.
Why Poor Product Team Communication Can Kill Your Product
Industry surveys reveal that product managers view communication skills as the most important.
In our most recent annual survey—The 2021 State of Product Management Report—we found that product professionals rate communication #2 on the list of skills they believe their coworkers lack most.
And don’t assume this means product managers let themselves off the hook when it comes to their communication abilities. More than half of our 2021 survey respondents admitted they have room to improve. The improvement came in their process of articulating strategy to their product team.
What is this data telling us? Product professionals understand that clear, effective, and frequent communication among their team can affect whether a product succeeds or fails in the market.
But what does that mean? Simply stating the abstract phrase, “We need to improve product team communication,” doesn’t illustrate the problem clearly. So, let’s talk specifics.
When your product team is not communicating effectively that miscommunication can derail your product.
1. Your development team might take away the wrong success criteria.
You can generate what feels like consensus in a meeting with your cross-functional team. Everyone on the team might nod their heads as you say: “We want to create an intuitive, streamlined experience that solves the XYZ problem for our user persona. In actuality, everyone might have a different understanding of what to prioritize first. Moreover, this may affect how your team builds out the functionality.
2. Your marketing team might develop the wrong messages for your user persona.
Your marketing team might hear your goal to solve the XYZ problem, but do they know why it’s a problem worth solving? Do they know your target user or buyer—what that person needs, wants, fears?
You want your marketing coworkers to understand your product and customer so well that they feel enthusiastic as they develop your product’s marketing messages and campaigns.
That can’t happen if you don’t regularly communicate with your marketing team, show them the market data you’ve compiled, encourage them to sit in on your developers’ demos, etc.
Without that deeper understanding, your marketing team will parrot the terms and phrases you’ve given them. That’s no way to unlock their expertise and develop the most compelling messages possible.
3. Your sales team might focus on benefits that don’t resonate with prospects.
You can hand your sales department a bunch of collateral when the product is ready for launch: demo videos, slideshows, sales sheets, prospect emails.
But will that be enough to turn your reps into an army of enthusiastic, knowledgeable advocates for the product? Almost certainly not.
If you want your sales team to have a deep understanding of the product they’re offering—and the customer they’re offering it to—you need to give them enough of a sense of your product’s value that they become evangelists for it.
4. You might not hear that your development team isn’t equipped to realize your vision.
Remember, product team communication needs to go in every direction. That means you need to be listening to your coworkers and hearing what they’re telling you.
If you’re not willing or able to do this, you could build your entire plan around a development team trying to let you know they don’t have the resources, skillset, budget, or understanding to deliver what you want.
The team might not want to disappoint you, so they offer noncommittal responses to your feature requests and timeline. And if you’re not truly listening, you might miss those signals.
For these reasons—and a thousand more like them—you need to prioritize clear and open communication among your product team. Now let me give you a few tips for incorporating this strategy into your process.
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5 Ways a Great Product Manager Creates Effective Product Team Communication
1. Answering questions around priorities.
As you begin to translate your high-level product vision into a strategic action plan, you can expect to hear questions, concerns, and challenges from your cross-functional team. Your action plan will require work from them, of course, and they might have questions about what should come first.
A great product manager is ready for these challenges with evidence, strategic reasoning, and, above all, patience.
Every question you hear from your cross-functional team consists of two parts—the spoken question and the unspoken “why” behind it.
Pro tip: Start your answer by providing the why behind the question and see if your team can get to your answer before you reveal it to them.
2. Explaining the product story.
Well-told stories are memorable and influential. That’s why we still remember fairy tales and parables we heard in childhood.
A great product manager can turn the details of a product concept into a story that’s clear, engaging, and fun to hear. A compelling product story can make it easier for your team to communicate the product’s value to each other—because they remember the story.
Imagine: You’re trying to develop a financial app to let parents give teenagers an allowance and monitor their spending habits. Rather than start by telling your cross-functional team all about the product’s features or what types of coding the app will need, you can give everyone a brief story:
“Charlie’s parents are done handing him cash every week, asking him a few days later what he’s done with the money and hearing, ‘I forgot.’” Our app is going to put Charlie’s spending on the grid. We’re going to relieve mom and dad of the head-bashing frustration of trying to decide every week whether to send Charlie’s allowance into a black hole. We’re going to help these well-meaning parents give their son some independence… with limits.”
Everyone on the team can now keep this memorable story as a reference while working on the product. If the product team gets stuck or confused, the team can ask themselves, “Is this going to help us help parents give their teenage kids independence and financial limits?”
3. Listening to the team.
Great product managers don’t just talk. They listen.
As I noted above, listening means paying attention not only to what your team is saying but the implications behind it.
If your developers ask why you have prioritized an initiative, they ask because they don’t understand its strategic value? Or is it because they don’t think they can complete the project but are uncomfortable saying so? Is there a different reason altogether?
When you receive questions or challenges from members of your team, you should not assume you’ve effectively resolved the issue just because you’ve answered. You also need to make sure your coworkers understand your reasoning and agree to whatever you’re asking of them.
Every person on your cross-functional team comes to their work from a unique perspective, with a fantastic set of skills and hopes, and challenges. They all have something valuable to contribute to your product’s success—even if it’s something you’d rather not hear, such as a warning about resource levels or your timeline. The only way to give your product the best chance of success is to listen to your team’s unique insights.
4. Staying available and accessible.
Fortunately, we’re in the digital and mobile era. Staying accessible to your product team is easier than it’s ever been. You can set up Slack channels or an MS Teams environment to chat with your team anytime.
Great product managers make themselves approachable to their cross-functional team, and they respond to questions and requests with enthusiasm and a positive attitude.
You don’t need a 24-hour policy where you promise to answer any text within 15 minutes. But you do want to send your coworkers the signal that you welcome their feedback and questions throughout the product development process.
5. Sharing a clear, up-to-date roadmap.
Finally, a great product manager builds and shares a roadmap that answers the team’s strategic questions.
For a product manager, this means including, wherever possible, your strategic reasoning alongside every theme and epic you add to your roadmap. Suppose your sales team popped open your roadmap and saw that your next priority was to develop an Android version of your app. Could they also know the evidence for why you chose that as the product’s following significant enhancement?
As you can see from the above LIKE.TG screenshot, you can quickly drop in a note about why you’ve decided to work on each item on the roadmap with our app.
This is another reason to use a purpose-built roadmap app instead of building out your product roadmap in a spreadsheet. All the extraordinary product managers are doing it these days.
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Building a Team of Effective Product Managers (and a Path to Product Leadership)
I hope you’ve found my reasoning for effective product team communication persuasive and that my suggestions can help you get there. But I want to leave you with one more thought.
As a product leader for years and a product manager for years before that, I can tell you from firsthand experience that building a solid communication foundation for your team can also create direct benefits for your career.
First—and this is true primarily with larger companies—you’ll be building a model for the other product managers in your organization to follow. And there’s a good chance your company’s executive staff will notice what you’re creating as well. They’ll want the great chemistry, the positive team conversations, the good outcomes that they see happening with your cross-functional product team.
A second related benefit: When you’ve demonstrated that you can build a streamlined product team where everyone is speaking the same language, you’ll be adding a solid skill to your arsenal, one that often leads to product leadership.
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