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The Role Roadmaps Play in Managing Product Design

In modern software development, product designers tend to be embedded on a cross-functional squad or scrum team. That team’s collective work is often represented, at a high level, as features on the product roadmap. The work of a product designer, however, is distinct from their developer counterparts. Also, the role of product design in designing great user experiences is both tactical and strategic. The Role Roadmaps Play in Managing Product Design As an organization scales, product design leaders and other executives need some way to track their team’s efforts. They need to ensure all teams are working in service of the same goal and user outcome. The roadmap can be a powerful tool in coordinating these efforts, including the product design team members. Avoid the Temptation for a UX Roadmap I sometimes hear of design leaders who use a roadmap to track the work of their designers. More often, their bosses ask for a UX roadmap to have visibility into the design team’s workstream and bandwidth. These use cases give me pause, as the UX Roadmap is an artifact of waterfall software development. As modern software development has adopted a more agile and lean approach, the design has become more integrated and in-step with the development team. In this practice, having a separate UX and Product Roadmap doesn’t make sense. Even if your team is still practicing handing up-front design to developers, that work is still ultimately guided by the product roadmap. In most cases, it seems the goal of a UX Roadmap is more for management to stay on top of what each designer is working on across several teams. For this, I would argue that a roadmap (which is more strategic by definition) isn’t the right solution. It would be more beneficial to somehow view and track tasks at a global level. I usually recommend tracking design tasks alongside development tasks in the same system. Capture Product Design With Your Existing Product Roadmap The work of product design is always in service of the product strategy. So, including design work on the existing product roadmap is a great way to provide visibility into their work. Understanding how design supports product initiatives also enables collaboration. Cross-functional leaders can better align and respond to schedules that inevitably slip. It’s generally recommended to have different roadmaps for different audiences. Representing design work, then, should be at the appropriate fidelity for the right audience. I recommend showing tactical design work on shorter-term roadmap views and more strategic work on longer duration views. Tracking tactical design Tactical design tasks include activities such as UX research, design sprints, prototyping, and usability testing. These activities are granular, which might be more information than executive leaderships care to see. They are, however, critically important to the team and the short-term view. For this reason, I recommend including these tasks on weekly or bi-weekly view roadmaps. Seeing those design tasks can be beneficial for audiences that need to plan and sequence their work. For example, on any given sprint, most teams are balancing current work with planning for work to pick up in the future. So, your current sprint might have a line on the team’s product roadmap for prototyping when, in the following sprint, the development work may begin. Similarly, at the beginning of the next sprint, there may be a line representing that team’s usability testing to validate what is being built. Tracking strategic design Much of the product design team’s work is more strategic than tactical. Some activities that might fall into this category include strategic user research or design audits. Design teams may also build playbooks and libraries that support the greater organization. This work is in contrast to design work that focuses on a particular team and/or initiative. For this reason, a design leader may want to advocate for their own lane to include these efforts on higher-level roadmaps. And high-level roadmaps tend to cover a longer duration (months or quarters). Visibility into strategic design work can be especially valuable for executives. For example, strategic user research usually looks out ahead to generate new product ideas or opportunities. More research follows the discovery of those ideas to validate their feasibility and business viability. These efforts serve the product and also inform the cross-functional roll-out efforts. In addition to informing what to build, user research also helps coordinate sales, service, and marketing efforts. Tracking design system work The outlier to the tactical vs. strategic design categorization is work done on the organization’s design system. The primary purpose of a design system is to enable design decisions at scale and across teams. It provides a system for designers and developers alike to pull their components and patterns from. Because it is an internal product, the design system requires the focus of a product development team to build. In this case, represent a design system that works the same way you would other product-related initiatives. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'bcf47ad4-3832-42c0-9ae8-1fd954c6be9c', {}); Use Product Design Roadmaps Only for Team Development By now, it’s clear that my strong belief is that product design work does not belong on a roadmap separate from the product team’s. However, in general, roadmaps can be a useful tool for all kinds of purposes for various roles in an organization. A marketing team might use a roadmap to plan their editorial calendar. Or a sales team might roadmap their strategy towards winning deals in a certain segment. In the same way, a product design leader may use a roadmap to communicate the strategy for growing their team and practice over time. For example, most design leaders make calculated investments to improve design maturity in their organization. A roadmap is an effective tool for illustrating and communicating that plan and how the organization might support those efforts. To learn more about tools experts use in product design teams, watch our recent webinar: 点击播放声音 @keyframes VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } @keyframes VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } .volume__small-wave { animation: VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite; opacity: 0; } .volume__large-wave { animation: VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite .3s; opacity: 0; } 55:49●●●●●●●AgendaBackgroundTeam StructureDesign ProcessArtifactsProduct ComparisonLive QA #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_75_wrapper .w-css-reset{font-size:14px;} #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_75_wrapper 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.w-css-reset-button-important{border-radius:0!important;color:#fff!important;} Continue WatchingFirst Name*Last Name*Job Title*Email*LIKE.TG is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy, and we’ll only use your personal information to administer your account and to provide the products and services you requested from us. 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For more information on how to unsubscribe, our privacy practices, and how we are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy, please review our Privacy Policy.#wistia_grid_75_wrapper{-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;box-sizing:content-box;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;height:100%;position:relative;text-align:left;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_75_wrapper *{-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;box-sizing:content-box;} #wistia_grid_75_above{position:relative;} #wistia_grid_75_main{display:block;height:100%;position:relative;} #wistia_grid_75_behind{height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;top:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_75_center{height:100%;overflow:hidden;position:relative;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_75_front{display:none;height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;top:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_75_top_inside{position:absolute;left:0;top:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_75_top{width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0;left:0;} #wistia_grid_75_bottom_inside{position:absolute;left:0;bottom:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_75_bottom{width:100%;position:absolute;top:0;left:0;} #wistia_grid_75_left_inside{height:100%;position:absolute;left:0;top:0;} #wistia_grid_75_left{height:100%;position:absolute;right:0;top:0;} #wistia_grid_75_right_inside{height:100%;right:0;position:absolute;top:0;} #wistia_grid_75_right{height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;top:0;} #wistia_grid_75_below{position:relative;} Another example where a product design roadmap might be useful is in team support and planning. A design manager might see an opportunity for filling skill gaps on a team, for example. A roadmap could help her map out a plan to educate existing team members and/or hire to fill those gaps. Additionally, a cross-functional roadmap could be useful for coordinating headcount planning across teams. Keep Design Work Visible Finding the right level of detail for a product roadmap can be tricky and is dependent on the audience. Product managers may not understand the value of including the design on their product roadmap. Collaborating with product managers on the roadmap is a great way for design leaders to communicate their team’s work. Product design work is uniquely different from development. Including design on the product roadmap provides visibility into how they support the company’s short and long-term efforts. Download Building Your First Product Roadmap ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'a81908bd-d7dd-4be2-9d7e-cb09f3f90137', {});

Getting Real about Customer Delight: The Strategy of Emotional Outcomes

It’s all the rage, and is often the reason we get out of the bed each day – we want to delight our customers in everything we do. I’d bet that at least 75% of those reading this post would say that “Customer Delight” is somewhere in the top 3 stated goals of their company for the year. So, each day, well-intended product teams across the globe rally behind delight as an outcome in their work, eagerly awaiting their customers’ reaction as a barometer for success. Getting Real about Customer Delight: The Strategy of Emotional Outcomes In my experience, however, these teams frequently lack a shared definition of what “delight” looks like in the context of their current initiative. Missing this up-front alignment inevitably creates dissonance between individual team members and their subjective interpretation of the customer feedback. The result is a team often in disagreement around when the work is “good enough” to move on to the next thing. The truth is, however, it’s likely that delight isn’t the goal. Delight as an outcome for every single feature or customer touchpoint is not only unnecessary and can be prohibitively expensive, and it’s also pretty close to impossible. Unfortunately, the phrase “customer delight” has lost its potency, as evidence that its definition seems to vary depending on the work context. But, before we indoctrinate the phrase into the swirling no man’s land of synergistic business buzzwords, I propose we reclaim it to portray the deeply emotional response for which it was initially intended. Rather than seeking to delight your customers at every corner, save it as a strategic outcome for the moments that truly matter. The Diluted Definition of Customer Delight Over 20 years ago, a business trend emerged suggesting that delighting customers was measurably more profitable than simply satisfying them. Foundationally, the idea breaks down these two important definitions: “Customer satisfaction is the process of achieving goals and consistently delivering the value you promised. Customer delight, on the other hand, is the “wow” factor. It proves to the customer that you intimately understand their needs and can proactively anticipate ways to improve their situation.” By definition, then, simply satisfying customers can have the same potential to deliver high value as delighting them does. But, for some reason, we don’t set goals around that outcome. Meeting expectations isn’t as alluring as exceeding them, and years of favoring words that foster inspiration and motivation among employees have eroded their meaning. And, trust me, words matter. Especially when it comes to setting clear goals that you want the intrinsically subjective humans in your business to align around. Add in the fact that we’re talking about emotions, which are difficult to measure, and you have a surefire recipe for misinterpretation and misalignment. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '57ff7e42-ccfa-4d9e-b5be-8a0f6ba69363', {}); Delighted by Relief For example, I once worked with a team that was finally picking up essential iterations of a feature MVP after over a year of customers begging for the full functionality. Being a team highly motivated by customer delight, they released small iterations and monitored the beta group’s feedback closely as their measuring stick for understanding when they’d met the need. Within two weeks of the estimated 4-6 week project, praise started rolling in from the beta customers. Customers inundated the team with gratitude and excitement, and since evoking delight was their metric of success, there was talk that they had solved the customer pain and could move on ahead of schedule and budget. Here’s the thing, though: The customer pain around not having the additional functionality was so significant that many had to abandon using the original MVP (a lack of engagement that triggered the business reason for prioritizing the work). When they saw the improvements, they were genuinely delighted. But in this instance, their delight wasn’t at all due to exceeding their expectations; instead, it was their reaction to the feeling of relief. Providing this relief was the emotional equivalent of giving a small bottle of water to someone stranded on a deserted island. The smallest sip of water will surely delight them with temporary relief, but that alone won’t save their life. So, in theory, we can delight our customers by merely starving them first. That’s not our goal and not suitable for business, but it demonstrates the ambiguity of setting goals for emotional outcomes without clarifying their meaning. After much discussion and deliberation, the team ultimately made the right call to keep working with customers on the iterations, and still finished ahead of schedule. Upon the full release, customers’ response didn’t delight as defined by “wowing” customers and exceeding their expectations. But simply satisfying their need made customers happy and saved several accounts that had threatened to churn. It was a massive win for both customers and the business. Return on Innovation as a Deliberate Strategy for Emotional Outcomes At the core of being misaligned on an emotional outcome such as delight is that emotions are personally subjective. Thankfully, there are some ways to help teams get aligned on these goals at the onset of a project and help them track progress against them over their work. In his 2015 LinkedIn article, Geoffrey Moore introduced three categories for innovation efforts: To differentiate, neutralize, or optimize. It has since become a simple and effective lens for businesses to look through to make conscious decisions about where and how to invest focus. These innovation classifications are also a great way to align product development teams on the intended outcome of a new feature or improvement and how to determine when the work is good enough to move on. 1. Delight to Differentiate First, to differentiate a product (or feature or service) means that customers get more value from it, then they could go anywhere else in the market. For product development teams, efforts intended to differentiate should far exceed any other solutions and require a high level of care and feeding to achieve that outcome. But differentiation isn’t just about checking more boxes than your competitor, instead of creating a response from customers that send them flocking to sign up and even pay extra for your solution. Differentiation is highly focused on the emotion, and in this case, we are truly talking about delight. This is the same psychology behind why people will buy a brand of food that’s twice as expensive as its competitor with the same ingredients or choose a bottle of wine based on the label’s design. It makes them feel good. 2. Neutralize to Meet Expectations Often product development teams are tasked with building a solution to neutralize a competitive one. Almost all feature development motivated by sales objections fit into this category, and it’s important work! Wowing customers is not the goal of neutralization efforts. In fact, more often than not, customers (or prospects) are already wowed with the product but find themselves in a predicament where they might need to use a different solution because yours is lacking. In the case of the story I shared earlier, the work that team was doing fit clearly in this category in retrospect. The goal was to keep the product usable and at least up to par with competitive solutions, so aspiring to delight customers here wasn’t all that practical and would have been unnecessarily expensive (in terms of time invested). Neutralization efforts are best poised to satisfy your customers simply: Deliver the value they asked for and expect. 3. Optimize to Improve Satisfaction Finally, Moore describes efforts that optimize as more internally focused – delivering the same value to customers more efficiently to save on costs. But providing the same value more efficiently is also a crucial customer-facing goal that product development teams can and should continuously prioritize. Looking at optimization from a value exchange perspective, many of these efforts are win-win for the company and the customer. From a customer’s emotional outcome perspective, I find this kind of work addresses functionality that was once exciting but has lost its luster, usability or performance over time. In these cases, the customers are less than satisfied, and the goal is to return them to equilibrium. Measuring Emotion I know what you’re thinking, “that can’t be done!” But, while it’s true that emotion is a complex and personal experience, there are some ways that product teams can gauge, normalize, and track their work against the intended emotional outcome. The most obvious metric is the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which asks customers how likely they are to recommend the product or service to a friend. Foundationally, NPS gets to the excitement a customer feels about your business and their drive to refer others to it. And, that’s right, excitement is an emotion. NPS is an excellent company-wide indicator of how customers feel about their business, but it does little to help teams hyper-focused on a specific solution. These teams can introduce a Transactional Net Promoter Score (tNPS) survey as part of the experience they are building that asks customers how likely they are to recommend the company based on this interaction. Another useful metric is the Customer Effort Score (CES). Originating from the realm of customer service and focused on how easy or difficult it is for customers to resolve issues, the intent is also highly applicable to product development in terms of user experience. Making tasks effortless to complete in your product leaves customers feeling confident and in control. Some studies show that reducing and simplifying customer effort can have a stronger correlation to retention and loyalty than delight. Asking customers how easy or difficult it was to use the solution you built is a highly valuable approach to validating your work. Finally, measuring perceived value via the Product/Market fit question gets at the core of emotions by asking customers how they would feel if they had to stop using the product, from very disappointed to not at all disappointed. Like the examples above, teams can ask this question specifically about a feature or improvement to understand how well it meets their needs as part of their build, measure, and learn feedback loop. I’ve seen teams successfully adopt these models to set goals that align with the emotional outcome they want to achieve and implement one-question surveys to track against that. The goal you will set will depend on the purpose of the work. For neutralization efforts, for example, a high tNPS goal would certainly be overkill, but ensuring that at least 40% of customers would be very disappointed to stop using the feature might be a more reasonable gauge. Customer Delight Still Matters! To those businesses setting delight as a high-level goal for the year, I say that is still an important strategy! But, instead of encouraging employees to seek delight in all of their work, be more explicit about the touchpoints and interactions where it truly matters. As a gut check, ask yourself if customers would be excited about the goal’s bullet points. Or, better yet, ask them.

How to Shift to Product-Led Growth, Featuring Wes Bush

Building Your Sphere of Influence, Featuring Roxanne Mustafa

When you’re new to a product management role, you enter the situation with minimal credibility, name recognition, or trust beyond your hiring manager. When your entire job is to define a direction for the product and convince everyone else it’s the right one, that clean slate isn’t helpful. For this role, it’s essential to grow your sphere of influence. You need to win people over and give your ideas and suggestions a fair shake. Do this by convincing colleagues that your strategic decisions are based on sound data, adequate deliberations, and keen insight. This is why you need to establish allies and supporters early on and before you try to shake things up. 6 Steps to Building Your Sphere of Influence in Your First 90 Days A constant theme for new product managers is managing their sphere of influence. If you are new to the role or new to an organization, your starting months are critical. During a recent webinar hosted by The Product Stack entitled “Your First 90 Days as a New Product Manager,” Roxanne Mustafa, Design Lead at VMware, and Pivotal Tracker provides advice to new product managers. 1. Play the “newcomer card.” You only get to be new once. Don’t miss your chance to let your newness pay dividends. For a few months, you get to ask whatever questions you want. Explore assumptions and delve into the product and organization’s history with honest curiosity. Ask fundamental questions that you won’t be able to later. Probe in a non-confrontational way. Challenge ideas before the legacy of previous PMs clouds you. Learn the history, but don’t resign yourself to relive it. This will help you understand how and why things ended up where they are. Remember, you’re on a fact-finding mission. Your mission is to understand the tribal knowledge and what things were already tried and failed. To understand how failure was defined in the first place. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '8bd83652-2868-48a8-9b9c-ebb8e0b9c945', {}); 2. Utilize one-on-ones. Mustafa says the most important thing you must do is figure out who you must talk to and what conversations you should be having. The best way to do this is to start scheduling intimate meetings withstakeholders across the organization. Starting with the product owners. Stay in listening mode as much as possible, using the various insights you gather to slowly build up your opinions. Be sure to see whose names keep getting dropped. This way you get a sense of where the power centers are and who are the key influencers, then add meetings with those individuals to your calendar. Make sure you get on any relevant email lists, Slack channels, or standing meeting invites. Ask how each stakeholder and team defines “value” and “success.” This may not be consistent across the organization. Knowing which benchmarks and preferences each team has are useful. Particularly in understanding product managers’ views. Keep your one-on-ones on the shorter side to be respectful of their time. Thirty minutes should be plenty for those initial getting-to-know-you sessions. Follow up after the initial round when needed. 3. Demos, demos, and more demos. Any product manager should be familiar with their product and value propositions to give aproduct demo at the drop of a hat. As someone new to the product, demos can play an instrumental role in understanding the product. Seeing what different stakeholders think about it, and emphasize is important. So is showing existing colleagues that you’ve digested what the product has to offer and how to position it. To do this, schedule sessions with multiple people or teams individually. You’ll want to see sales, engineering, and the existing product team demo the product in isolation. This way their commentary and presentation aren’t influenced by whoever else is in the room (or on the Zoom). Each demo will vary in what they show off (versus gloss over) and what language they use. Seeing how sales sell the product versus what engineering believes is essential can be eye-opening. This gives insight into what each group prioritizes. You can document the gaps. Once you’ve witnessed everyone else’s take, it’s your turn. Your demo will not only illustrate that you’re now quite familiar with how the product works and the key talking points. It can also synthesize the different messages you picked up from your colleagues to give a more holistic view of things. 4. Ride shotgun with sales and support. Salespeople and support staff are the folks having the most interactions with actual customers and users. Sitting in on their calls can be very illuminating. Not only will you get a heavy dose of the voice of the customer and reinforce your commitment to customer-centricity, but you’ll also get a sense of your new coworkers. Don’t try to jump in and take over, although you can occasionally interject with a question or clarification. The real opportunity for interaction is when the call is over, and you can debrief with your colleague. These interactions can help build a report with them and show them you’re an inquisitive, thoughtful product manager. Not just some new person with a pile of opinions and assumptions. You’ll also be able to spot low-hanging fruit for some quick wins when the time comes to start prioritizing items. Be sure to ask whether anything that stood out on the call was an outlier or something they encounter. This will help you categorize what you hear as anecdotal or pervasive. 5. Search the archives. Can’t get enough forthcoming team members to talk? Support tickets and the support team can be another great resource. Reviewing these gives you insight into the current state of your customers. From there, you can review the product backlog. Note which stories were accepted in the past, the key milestones used, and how releases were packaged. You can peel back the onion even further by reviewing the conversation logs. This helps your understanding of how decisions were reached. In addition to what variables got a lot of attention, and who were the key players. Retrospectives will give you a sense of morale and feelings. If there were minutes or action items from previous retrospectives, these could be mined for details. If you’re able to attend (or even facilitate) a retrospective of a recent release, you can witness it all in real-time without any prejudices or skin in the game. Just be sure to stay in “listening mode.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); 6. Take a holistic approach. When you’re first learning the ropes, it’s natural to stick close to the other product team members. Or devote much of your time to building your relationship with engineering, but Mustafa warns against this. It’s important to expand in order to create your sphere of influence. Instead, she recommends taking a 360-degree view of the organization. Getting input and making connections with every department will help you get a fuller, less-biased picture. This will help you to forge connections with the organization’s broader swath and develop your sphere of influence. You never know when that will pay off, and it will certainly help you build cross-company support down the line. Make sure you also know what you’re accountable for. If the executive team expects a weekly dashboard or monthly update at an all-hands, find out and get ahead of it. Takeaways It can be hard to avoid speaking your mind and fixing obvious flaws as soon as you notice something awry. Reserving your opinions until later in tenure is the right move. You don’t want to suggest new ideas or try to impose any new methodologies until you have a solid baseline of understanding and discretely vet your ideas among a smaller, friendlier audience. If you come out shooting, many of your good ideas will be ignored or forgotten. At least until you’ve built up a stable of allies and established a favorable reputation throughout the organization. While your first 90 days isn’t your only opportunity to build your sphere of influence, it’s a great opportunity can set you up for an easier path to ship great products moving forward. Read the Career Guide for Product Managers hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '51f4627c-aefd-4981-92a8-41fe12455dbe', {});

The Journey from Customer Success to Product Manager

There are many roles where your career path is clear. But, product management is a different story. People have transitioned to successful careers as product managers (PM) from every background. I know this experience firsthand and I’m thrilled to say, LIKE.TG itself recently made a similar hire: from customer success to product manager. That new PM is me. The Journey from Customer Success to Product Manager If you’re in customer success and want to make a jump into product management, I’ll share some of the practical lessons I learned and tips on how you can make a similar move in your career. Why LIKE.TG Was the Ideal Place to Make the Transition from Customer Success to Product Management Let me make one caveat up front. Your best chance of finding a direct path from customer success to product management is within a company that is customer-centric. I don’t mean an organization that includes the phrase “customer-centric” on its website, although that can’t hurt. I’m talking about a company that lives this philosophy. A company that treats solving customers’ goals as a top priority. Why is this so important? A company that evaluates its customers’ success as a key metric for its own success will be more likely to understand the value a customer success manager can bring to the product team. Fortunately for me, LIKE.TG is such a company. (I’d even go so far as to call this team customer-obsessed if you promise to keep that between you and me.) A relentless focus on the customer has always been a core element of LIKE.TG’s culture. Nobody here gets points for a feature or an upgrade because it looks cool. Every update we make to our roadmap software product first has to provide a satisfactory answer to the question: How will this improve the lives of our customers? It’s this relentless focus on the customer that allowed my colleagues to see the potential in bringing a CSM over to the product side. As the company’s first Customer Success Manager, I’ve spoken with at least as many LIKE.TG customers as any other member of the team. LIKE.TG is customer-focused and understood that this gave me a real insight into our customers’ needs and priorities. With that in mind, let me share the best lessons I learned from making this move. 5 Lessons for Transitioning from Customer Success to Product Manager 1. Understand that product management is customer success A great first step is understanding that these roles are not as different as many people think. Yes, your job description and your day-to-day activities will change. But think about the purpose of both roles. Aren’t customer success managers and product managers after the same thing? Aren’t they both trying to help customers succeed with the help of the company’s products? When you understand the similarities of both roles, you’ll feel much more comfortable taking the steps to make this career move. You’ll also be less likely to fall victim to imposter syndrome and give up. Most important of all, you’ll have the confidence to explain to your employer why your CSM experience could make you a valuable addition to the product team. 2. Try to make the move within the same company A big part of my value to the product management department at LIKE.TG was the fact that I had gained so much first-hand experience supporting users of LIKE.TG’s product. Had I applied for a product manager role here as a CSM from another company, I wouldn’t have developed as much relevant expertise or value. When you want to go from CSM to product manager, try to make the move within the same company. Bonus tip: Another advantage I had working for LIKE.TG was that this company has a long history of hiring from within. I’d also recommend you start by looking for a CSM role in a company known for hiring internally. These are the employers most likely to give you a chance to prove yourself in a new role. 3. You need to really care about your customers As a customer success manager, my favorite part of the job was positively impacting a customer’s day. Usually by helping them solve a tough problem. I realized that a product job would allow me to have an even greater impact on our customers. That’s one of the things that appealed to me most about this role. If you find a similar sense of satisfaction and accomplishment in helping customers, then product management might be for you as well. In fact, this is one way in which CSMs can make the best PMs. It’s important to remember that as a product manager, your focus should always be on serving your customers. The products you develop are a means to that end. Customer success professionals understand this as well as anybody. If you’re motivated to move into product management because you’d like to stop working directly with customers, then you’re going to find your new role disappointing. Outstanding product management isn’t just about heads-down brainstorming with a tiny team and tinkering with prototypes. It’s also about speaking with as many customers and prospects as you can, so you can build products that make their lives better. 4. Voice your interest in product management When I started at LIKE.TG, our CS team consisted of… me. The company was so small, in fact, that I got the chance to help out in many departments—marketing, sales, and product. As the company grew and the teams all expanded, I knew there would eventually be an opportunity in product. I voiced my interest early. Recognizing that I was a serious candidate, our Director of Product, Annie Dunham, began giving me product management tasks while I was still in customer success. By the time an opening arose on the product team, I was in a great position for it. It might seem obvious, but don’t overlook the value of letting your product colleagues know that you’d be interested in contributing to their team. You’ll need to be patient. Eventually, you’ll find an opening. 5. Start honing your product management skills now You’re already using many of the skills every day that you’ll need to be a great product manager. But we can always improve our skills. Given that these skills are going to come in handy in your product management career, I’d highly recommend honing them right now: Become a great listener Pay close attention to what your customers are actually saying, not what you assume they’re saying because you’ve heard similar things before. Hear every customer out fully. Ask open-ended follow-up questions, draw out as much detail as you can. Learn how to say no Practice this by being a great listener. Give the other person a chance to fully express their request or idea or complaint, and then answer. Sometimes saying no can even mean saying “Yes, but not right now because of XYZ.” A lot of times, giving a customer or a colleague a chance to be heard is enough to satisfy them. Get organized Develop routines for your daily activities—work or personal. Whether you’re a CSM or a product manager, you’ll find the firehose of information never seems to slow down. You’ll want strategies and tactics to stay on top of the inflow of new data, rather than allow it to drown you. The sooner you start building these habits—making lists, breaking complex projects into actionable tasks, etc.—the more prepared and successful you’ll be when you start your first job as a product manager! I highly recommend the Ultimate Guide to Product Management Resources for more help. LIKE.TG has some other great interviews with other PMs who took non-traditional routes into the field, including: Engineer to product manager Corporate finance to product manager IT operations to product manager Consulting to product manager If you have any thoughts on how to transition, leave them in the comments below. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"});

3 Reasons You Should Hire a Senior Product Manager

Once you’re blessed with the opportunity to expand your product management team with a new hire, you have options to consider. You can hire a senior product manager who will bring their years of real-world experience and savviness to the table, or you can bring on new talent you can mold and mentor yourself. Of course, there’s a little more to this decision. When hiring a senior product manager, their compensation is greater. They are more difficult to find, recruit, and win over. Also, they may have firmly-entrenched ideas about how things should work. Meanwhile, a junior product manager will be a more affordable investment. You might even be able to get two for the same price as one senior PM. But they’ll likely require handholding and closer supervision. They won’t start off with much credibility and could turn out to be the wrong fit for the job. In our 2020 Product Management Report, we found that 23.5% of respondents planned to hire a junior product manager this year. Compared with 48.2% expecting to add a “regular” product manager. Directors of Product and Chief Product Officers were less likely to be hired (at 9.8% and 4.8%, respectively). In our 2021 State of Product Management report, hiring was one of the primary focuses of product leader’s budgets. So why should product team leaders favor experience versus potential? 3 Reasons to Hire a Senior Product Manager 1. You get what you pay for. When you hire a senior product manager, the cost is greater, and there’s no getting around that truth. Someone with years of experience knows their worth and commands a higher salary. A senior product manager can hit the ground running. They won’t be new at being a product manager. They’ll still need to make the rounds getting to know key stakeholders, sit in on some customer interactions, and bone up on the product and its market. They’ve already learned the basics of the job and gone through all the invaluable steps required to take on this role at a new company before. Besides possessing a fundamental grasp of what the role entails, a senior addition to the team brings their specific experiences and expertise. They can begin making keen observations and suggestions predicated on what they’ve dealt with elsewhere. Most importantly, product leaders should start handing off real responsibilities to a new senior hire quickly and with confidence. Their learned experience will shorten the time between their first day on the job and their first days of actually adding value. Getting things off your plate is one of the main perks of expanding your team, so the sooner you can confidently make that happen, the better. 2. Great time investment. Mentoring, coaching, and showing newbies the ropes can be incredibly rewarding. For some managers, it’s their favorite part of the job. But it’s also incredibly time-consuming. Instead of delegating and focusing on something else, you’ve got to keep a close eye on junior staff as they get their sea legs. It’s important to avoid any costly missteps or indirect damage to your own reputation. While building up a bullpen of talent may be a strategic goal for your organization, it’s not expected to come at the expense of delivering fantastic user experiences and increasing revenue and profitability. If you’re spending too much time grooming and nurturing, that means your product’s evolution and growth could suffer. 3. Strong performers elevate teams. Some product leaders worry that bringing on a talented, experienced product professional could come back to haunt them, primarily by outshining their own performance. Bringing on strong performers and positioning them for success is part of being a leader. The benefits these senior staff members bring should raise the profile of the entire product team. There is evidence that the best leaders hire people who are smarter or better than them. Why wouldn’t you want the best players possible on your team? Exceptions To The Rule Are there fresh-faced product professionals that can run circles around established PMs despite their lack of experience? Sure! It’s possible you could luck into an overachieving product savant. One that outperforms their salary and brings incredible value to the organization. But there’s no way to know that before they’re on board until they are in the thick of things. Even then, they’ll need some basic training and additional coaching as they come up to speed. Betting on a promising undiscovered talent can pay massive dividends if they pan out. However, when you only have a small number of hires to make during your tenure, do you want to risk it? This isn’t to say that you should never hire an associate product manager with minimal experience. It’s a longshot; you’ll see the same returns as you would from someone with a proven track record. Addressing Specific Needs Additional headcount is usually intended to serve a specific purpose as few companies add personnel for the heck of it. That’s why it’s important to remember you’re not building an abstractly ideal organization. Instead, you’re actively filling a role that’s desperately needed. The specifics of that need should be the primary driver for the job description and whom you select to bring aboard. Before you stock up on junior product managers to build your mini-empire and celebrate your new staffing budget, take a step back, and consider what will actually be helpful for you and the product organization: Business Analyst Need help with reporting and sorting through reams of data to make informed product decisions? A business analyst could fit the bill, or you could build out a separate analytics team. Product Owner Does the development team need so much attention that there’s no time to think about strategy? Maybe aproduct owner would be the right fit. They would free staff members to focus on their roles while the product manager deals with the day-to-day issues during implementation. Group Product Manager Are there too many products with their own separate schedules, priorities, and customers to supervise? A group product manager can take some of that load and provide the mentoring and attention to detail required. This would help create a consistent approach to product management processes and a single point-person for senior leadership. Senior Product Manager Launching a new product and want to give it the attention it deserves and requires? Hire a senior product manager. Put them on the project and remain confident they won’t have to learn on the job for this important new initiative. Product Onboarding Manager Are you struggling with your product’s successful adoption (s) and need to shrink the time to value? A productonboarding manager can take on a holistic approach to improving this critical stage in thecustomer journey. They do this by improving the KPIs the executive team is counting on. Product Operations Manager Maybe the day-to-day processes and operations are becoming overwhelming in their own right. Do you want someone to own those and take the reigns for those issues? Bringing on aproduct operations manager can manage the tools and processes required to make the product team hum. Invest Wisely in Strategic Staffing You will only have so many opportunities to add headcount to your team, so be sure you’re making the most of each chance you get. Closing gaps in your organization’s collective skill set and bringing on trusted lieutenants will allow you to hit the accelerator and bring better products to the market with fewer missteps and minimal delays. Ask for what you really need, hire the best, and position your team to successfully seize the available opportunities while those windows are still there. In today’s competitive marketplace, you can’t often afford to incubate potential future superstars when you need a solid player today. Watch our webinar, Hiring and Growing a Successful Product Team, to see what product leaders look for when hiring new team members:

Gathering Feedback From Unengaged Customers, Featuring Brian Tan

Customer feedback is the lifeblood of customer-centricity. It’s impossible to create and improve products without understanding customers’ experience, especially when customers have unengaged and do not provide feedback. Customers don’t buy or use your products, so they have an opportunity to tell you what they think of them. They’re using it because it helps them get their job done, makes their life easier, or brings them a little joy. While some customers may be quite vocal, sometimes customers aren’t engaged. Often customers are unwilling to jump on a call or participate in a user forum. But you can’t limit your feedback collection to the customers who are proactively offering it up. You want to avoid a heavily biased view due to the combination of effusive superfan and complaining detractors dominating the conversation. Instead, to gauge your user base’s temperature, you need to hear from a wide variety of users. That will take a little extra effort. However, a more representative sample will legitimize the feedback you receive. It will paint a truer picture of the user experience. 3 Ways to Gather Feedback from Unengaged Customers During our “Supercharge Your Product Roadmap with Customer Feedback” webinar, Brian Tran, Director of Product Management at UserTesting, urged product managers to figure out why customers/users are less forthcoming with feedback. He also outlines his suggestions on how to get input from unengaged customers. 1. Lean into the pain points when gathering feedback from unengaged customers. Brian Tran suggests leveraging tools that allow you to follow up with users immediately. Especially those who just had a bad experience and might be unengaged. “You can grab them at the point when they’re at their highest level of frustration,” Tran said. “And that’s actually the most valuable time when you want to talk to them and get their feedback.” It’s not always pleasant, but the feedback from these unengaged customers is what you and your team need to hear. When users hit a wall and can’t complete a task, they are at high risk of abandoning your product or decreasing their usage. The wall they hit will provide reduced value in their eyes, which can also impact your ability to monetize the product down the line further. Offering up a channel for quick, instant feedback at these moments can offer many benefits for product teams. First, you’ll get a sense of which friction points are coming into play most often. These points give you ammunition to prioritize addressing those areas in upcoming product releases. Second, you’ll get more information about what the specific issue is. Is it a technical problem? Poor communication or messaging? Faulty business logic or process? Third, you (and your customer support team) will have the opportunity to potentially “rescue” some of these users. You do this by coming to their aid and expressing empathy during their moments of frustration. Instead of finding out the hard way when they quit, and you’re stuck dealing with churn feedback instead. Be sure to keep these pain-point feedback collection exercises as brief and, well, painless as possible for the user. They’re already unhappy. A 12 question form isn’t likely to generate a high response rate, so try sticking to a brief, focused email template. First, ask one or two questions to categorize their issue. Then offer an opportunity for them to provide further details and vent if they’d like. You can always follow up later with a call, email, or survey to dive deeper into their concerns. Read the Customer Interview Tool Box ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '7f735619-2494-4c81-b86b-cf6e764a20c3', {}); 2. Create an incentive. Whenever you’re thinking about soliciting unengaged customer feedback, put yourself in their shoes. They already bought your product or downloaded it, or saw your ads. What’s in it for them to spend their precious time making your job easier? Tran says the trick here is providing a good reason for unengaged customers to spend some of their time giving feedback. Most value rewards. Whether it’s cash, a gift card, an exclusive experience, or even a discount on your product if these folks are getting this “for free.” They’re more likely to give you the time than if you asked them nicely. However, it would help if you made it clear that even though you’re compensating them for their efforts, you still want them to be brutally honest with you regarding their product experience. To avoid any “quid pro quo” scenarios, Tran emphasizes that how you frame things can make a massive difference in the accuracy and transparency of the responses you’ll receive. Be very upfront that you want to hear honest feedback, regardless of how unpleasant it might be. Remind them that your goal is to improve the product, not solicit compliments. If they tell you what’s problematic for them, there’s a better chance that they’ll have a superior experience themselves in the future. So, it’s in their best interests as well to take part and be truthful. 3. Find alternative strategies for collecting feedback from unengaged customers feedback. When a customer isn’t open to participating in a feedback session despite the lure of a reward, it’s time to get creative. You can offer alternative feedback methods, such as surveys since they’re asynchronous. Another tactic is inviting customers to participate in a customer advisory board. Participating in an advisory board will give them a sense of ownership and a stake in the process, far beyond a one-off call or meeting. You can always leverage existing relationships the customer may already have with other folks at your company. Try to find which salespeople or account managers they’ve established a good rapport with and piggyback on those interactions. This rapport could get you an “in” with a customer that has otherwise frozen you out. Alternatively, you could have the colleague they’re close to asking your questions on your behalf. Put It All to Work After all that effort to extract tidbits from unengaged customers, you certainly don’t want to let the feedback all go to waste. Ensure you’ve already set up a practical framework for capturing, organizing, and evaluating customer feedback and putting it to good use during this process. Additionally, it’s always a huge plus to follow up with customers that offered up their opinions and experience and let them know when something they asked for or complained about has been addressed in the product. You can even recruit them to be a beta user if they’re so inclined. Make them more open to future feedback sessions and maybe even get them to provide it proactively. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'd16e75f0-0601-4ef3-909a-e2b4f61f0c9a', {});

Getting to Know Jim Semick

I met Jim Semick the first day I started ProductPlan. We took a walk outside the office to talk about the values that drive the company directly from the mind of one of the founders. Outside of the LIKE.TG team, Jim Semick’s energy and passion for learning have cemented him as one of the product community’s leading voices. This year alone, he sparked conversations in the product community from blogs like this one on imposter syndrome to this one on declaring backlog bankruptcy. Most recently, with his recent book on being an essentialist product manager. The book itself is a must-read that you can download for free below. Download The Essentialist Product Manager ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'be753440-dc4d-40c5-9808-cad744d00a28', {}); Getting to Know Jim Semick Jim Semick and I chatted over Zoom to discuss his interests and what the product community can expect from him. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Semick: I’d say my entrepreneurial journey is unique, spanning from product manager to founder. I’m okay with uncertainty. It’s who I am. I am okay with not knowing what the future holds. I haven’t always been that way, but that’s who I am today. I can take reasonable risks, which makes it possible to launch new products or a startup. I like to have fun too — Why bother if it’s not fun? Throughout my career, it’s been imperative for me to pursue my curiosities and challenge myself. I want to learn—whether it’s entrepreneurship, life, or even studying Roman antiquities. With each piece I collect, I’m curious to know everything about it. Where did it come from? What are the stories that came with it? What do you enjoy sharing with the product community? I believe that great products don’t happen by accident—it’s exceptional leadership and customer engagement that genuinely makes a difference. As such, I’m passionate about sharing my experience with future product leaders to build successful products that solve real customer problems. There are quite a few topics I’ve explored over the years. It started with my top passions of market validation and product-market fit. When I’m talking with customers, I’m driven to understand what problem we’re solving and figuring out all the levers that startups can experiment with to make a successful product. I’ve conducted hundreds of validation interviews with customers and prospects for different software products I’ve helped launch—I love sharing some of the techniques I’ve learned about conducting great customer interviews. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'ad657ba8-be75-4be1-a163-e71ff5498018', {}); Validation of products, customers, and markets is a skill that not many product managers and entrepreneurs know much about. It’s frustrating to see new startups and products fail. I know that failure is sometimes necessary but often avoidable. The risks that teams take without doing the validation breaks my heart. You could pinpoint the start of the failure to not understanding the customer’s problem or misinterpreting the customer’s need. That frustration a few years ago inspired me to start writing and speaking on the topic at conferences and lecturing in various programs at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The Feature-Less Roadmap: Using Themes and North Stars to Ground Your Product Roadmap If I can help in some way to improve a company’s success in some way—I want to. Lately, I’ve been writing and speaking a lot about essentialist product management, entrepreneurship, and building winning software products. In the last few years, I’ve also written books on SaaS pricing, product roadmaps, and product leadership. They’re available to read here: hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'fe899f95-5814-4253-9ac2-4cb78e40ef2a', {}); hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3aa6cb5b-cf9b-4527-a6f0-4492930dea99', {}); hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'c6a78b23-a2f3-46e3-bc23-4578f7506068', {}); I enjoy guest authoring for various publications and talking on numerous podcasts. In addition to speaking, I also mentor and invest in my community in Santa Barbara, California. I love to travel, paddleboard, and read as much as I can. Tell us a bit more about your career. Semick: For almost 20 years, I have taken new disruptive software products from concept to market launch. I’ve perfected a recipe for building and launching great products that have a greater chance of succeeding in the market. My current company, LIKE.TG, creates software used by thousands of product teams at the world’s leading companies to power their product roadmaps. I started LIKE.TG as part of my entrepreneurial journey. With my co-founder Greg Goodman, we started the company with the end in mind and reverse-engineered the company to align with our objectives and values. I talk about this in the book Product-Market Fit. I’ve previously helped validate and launch some of the earliest SaaS products, including GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, and AppFolio. What can a reader expect from Jim Semick? Semick: Writing and sharing my message has flowed seamlessly from my passions. I write a lot about topics that mirror the stage and lifecycle that LIKE.TG is in. I would talk about start-ups, lean-market validation launching, product discovery, and uncovering problems in the early days. That was my mindset. Then my talks evolved to be about product roadmaps. They then transformed into conversations on how we communicate. I’m always learning new product management things (product ops, product growth, decisions through metrics). You can definitely expect to hear more about how product managers can use the philosophy of essentialism to focus on what matters and get more meaning from their work. I’ve spoken about essentialism for various product management groups and am conducting workshops. I owe it to the community to keep providing new ways to look at how we’ve been doing things. Takeaways Jim is open to speaking engagements and connecting with product leaders on LinkedIn. Sometimes, it’s easier to put a face to the name. Hear more about Jim in his Product Leader Spotlight: Jim Semick, below. You can also read more about Jim’s speaking topics and writing at JimSemick.com.

Strategy is Important But It Isn’t Everything

In an ideal, data-driven world, every product, project, and program would come gift wrapped with its own precise set of goals, objectives, and KPIs. There would be no bad strategy. The rationale would be crystal clear, as would measuring its success. Bad Strategy Happens The world is a messy place. There are many occasions when half-baked ideas get greenlit, fuzzy concepts are approved, and individual initiatives are largely disconnected from the corporate strategy. If one even exists at all. These are not the stories we like to tell ourselves, but they’re far too often the realities we face. A lacking strategy or bad strategy is nothing to celebrate. However, it’s not necessarily a forgone conclusion that it will all fail. In fact, it may even be an opportunity for the lucky/unlucky soul who has one of these incomplete ideas dropped on their desk. But it will require a little research and detective work, some insightful analysis, and a dash of storytelling savvy to bring it all home. 5 Product Strategy Tips from a VP of Product If and when you find yourself inheriting something with no concrete, measurable connection to the business’s desired outcomes, it’s your job to connect the dots and ensure the product actually ends up being helpful in the end. Here are some pointers for making lemonade from that bag of lemons. 1. Get to the why. First and foremost, you must figure out why this product matters to the business. The executives who lobbed it your way might have their stated reasons, but those should be taken with a big ol’ grain of salt. Instead of blindly following orders and assuming there must be a good reason to build what was requested, take a giant step back. Create two columns, and in the first, jot down what’s important to the company. If there are shared goals, objectives, targets, etc., use those as a starting point. But don’t hesitate to peel back the onion and get to the heart of the matter. Treat this just like you might a customer request for something specific. You must understand why they’re asking for it in the first place. To start, list out everything that matters to the business. In the other column, start coming up with everything this particular product could do for the business. Do this even if they don’t immediately line up with those corporate goals. It’s not yet time to rule anything out. Just get all the possibilities on the table. For example, let’s say someone asks you to build out user review capabilities for an e-commerce site. But the only reason they gave was that “everyone else has one.” While keeping up with competitors is a valid rationale, user reviews could obviously offer more benefits than simply checking another box in your competitive analysis table. In this case, one additional benefit would be increasing confidence for potential buyers. This could lead to increased gross sales, more new conversions/customers, or better search results. Those could then be linked with existing (or even unstated) business goals. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '1f74539e-d4fc-4cb3-97c6-fd86de2bf62e', {}); 2. Define your own version of success. If you’ve found yourself with no targets, KPIs, or other measures of achievement, it’s time to draw up your own. While this might feel daunting, it’s a unique opportunity to define your own goals for a change. Your homegrown KPIs should make sense in the context of the larger business. If the revenue model is based on subscriptions, then “increasing page views” is a lousy thing to track. However, it’d be excellent for an ad-based model. So concentrate on what you can measure that really matters. At the same time, you want to be sure you’re measuring things relevant and actually influenced by the product in question. While the company’s goal might be landing a strategic set of clients, for instance, your product probably can’t do it by itself as that’s really a sales effort. Ensure anything measuring product success is within the control of the product itself. Luckily, you don’t have to start from scratch in this area. There are well-established metrics that products and companies rely on. Ones that you can crib from, borrowing what’s best for your situation and dodging anyvanity metrics. Download Product Success Metrics ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '18f5a8aa-393b-4397-9fd4-f7758c1edf55', {}); Then, once you’ve decided what you’re going to measure, it’s time to pick some targets for your product metrics. They should be a stretch but attainable and realistic. Quantitative measurements are always easier, but a dash of qualitative might be appropriate as well. You’ll eventually need to secure buy-in from other stakeholders. But now you’re giving them something to react to and OK versus asking them to figure it out themselves. Even if you’re wrong, you’re going to end up with more information than you had before. For a busy executive, this mode of interaction is often preferable. Even if it’s not exactly the most rigorously researched method. 3. But track everything. Even if you have a pretty good handle on which metrics matter for the product and the business, you never really know what the future holds. Tracking absolutely all data and everything is absurd, but tracking what’s reasonable to the goal will ensure you have flexibility. It’s always a good idea to be sure the reasonable instrumentation is in place for every reasonable data point. This way, instead of answering “I don’t know” when someone throws a curveball at you, you can at least counter with “we’ll have to run a report on that.” You may even get curious yourself about something that wasn’t originally on your radar, so the more available data the better. However, how much information you’re communicating and socializing should remain narrow and relevant to those previously identified goals. You don’t want to open yourself up to second-guessing by churning out reams of reports no one ever looks at… until someone does and you’re caught on the back foot. 4. It’s OK to be wrong. Figuring out what success looks like for a new initiative is an ongoing process. At the start, you’re mostly operating on assumptions. Over time, you can course-correct based on what you’re seeing once real people begin interacting with the product. But kicking things off on unsure footing can be an extremely uncomfortable feeling, especially if you’re still trying to establish your credibility. So come right out and say that you’re unsure if these are the best ways to measure success. You’ve got to start somewhere, and over time there will be many opportunities to adjust the goals and measures of success. Making this a collaborative exercise versus trying to perfect it all yourself can also help. Not only are two heads (or more) better than one in this case, but you also create some cover if a higher-up is less than pleased with your proposal. 5. Make a plan to circle back Since you’re going to market with less than 100% confidence, it’s key to acknowledge this reality and formulate a timetable for revisiting it. Confirming your strategy’s efficacy, the relevance of your metrics, and the alignment with corporate objectives should be a standard operating procedure. But in these cases, it’s optimal to acknowledge the elephant in the room and establish a cadence and process for how things will be evaluated on an ongoing basis. Not only does this keep you from barreling in the wrong direction for too long, but it also lets everyone else involved know they’ll have ample opportunity to assess and chime in early and often. This openness to feedback and nimble approach can make any foray seem a little less risky. Bad Strategy isn’t Unusual A temporarily aimless product or company might seem like an anomaly, but it’s far more common than you’d think. Old or bad strategies can die off before new ones are happened upon. Business models can fail without the company folding. We’ve seen far too many examples of companies rising like a phoenix from the ashes of a mediocre existence. In the late 1990s, no one would have pegged Apple to turn into the juggernaut it is today, despite its early successes and subsequent stumbles. And there are just as many cases where a product’s original purpose fizzled out, but an “off-label” use case turned it into a success, such as bubble wrap, which was originally intended to be wallpaper. You’re also not alone. When we asked product managers how they felt about strategy, plenty of folks didn’t think their company was killing it. 60% sought more clarity regarding their company’s vision, while 40% felt their current strategy communication was pretty average. A lack of strategy isn’t the same as being saddled with a bad one. You don’t have to fight against inertia and momentum heading in a bad direction. You need to kickstart things and give them a push toward what you hope and believe is a success. Adopt a growth mindset. Establish a culture that prizes experimentation. Prepare for and accept that failure, missteps, and setbacks may come your way. Most importantly, start somewhere and push forward—you don’t know where you’ll end up until you get there. 点击播放声音 @keyframes VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } @keyframes VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } .volume__small-wave { animation: VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite; opacity: 0; } .volume__large-wave { animation: VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite .3s; opacity: 0; } 1:00:16●●●●●●●●●●●Meet the PanelAgendaPoll #1Product KPI vs. Strategy KPIProduct Strategy GamePoll #2How do you identify early adopters?What does a good strategy look like?How do you communicate strategy?Live QAThank you! #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_71_wrapper .w-css-reset{font-size:14px;} #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_71_wrapper 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LIKE.TG vs. Roadmunk

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

If You’re Hitting All the Dates on Your Roadmap, You’re Doing It Wrong

Imagine a product team out for dinner and drinks. They’re celebrating a big win. The product manager, development team, product owner, maybe even a couple of company executives are there. They must have achieved something significant, right? A revenue milestone? Important roadmap deadlines? Reaching a target number of customers? A positive product review in a major industry publication? What if I told you the team is celebrating the fact that they released the new version of their product a day before the internal deadline on their roadmap? That might be cause for celebration. But maybe not. Pushing out a new feature or product—even if you do it on time—is only one way to measure team success. And it isn’t the best way, not by a long shot. Before this hypothetical product team starts raising their glasses and making toasts, they might want to wait for the answer to a far more important question. Will our customers be enthusiastic about this new product release? Themes—Not Dates—Are the Stars of Your Roadmap A product roadmap conveys the strategic direction and goals of your product. I like to think of a roadmap as a brief, clear story of how and why a product will impact the market. That’s why you want to arrange your roadmaps into themes—those big-picture goals your team sets out to achieve. You want your team to focus first on product strategy, not deadlines. When stakeholders view the roadmap, you want them to easily grasp the story behind your planned work in the coming months. For a B2B software maker, those themes might look like these: Enable a self-serving buying experience online Create a free trial download Develop a scaled-down product at a lower price to attract single-license users That tells a story. It depicts a company that’s thinking strategically. The themes on this roadmap show the product team is trying to find new ways to reach customers, doing business with them more conveniently, and reposition their product to find new markets. But what if, instead of themes and strategies, the most prominent elements of your roadmap were dates and timeframes? Imagine if what stood out on your roadmap were these: Complete in Q2 2021 Release March 17 Push live by the end of January Where’s the story behind this roadmap? Where’s the vision, strategic thinking? What is this company even building? Your product roadmap should be a strategic guide, not a calendar. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '5894a003-79ce-4ea3-9804-dae280a96106', {}); 点击播放声音 @keyframes VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } @keyframes VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } .volume__small-wave { animation: VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite; opacity: 0; } .volume__large-wave { animation: VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite .3s; opacity: 0; } 1:00:49 #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_43_wrapper .w-css-reset{font-size:14px;} #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_43_wrapper 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To put this another way, let’s say Microsoft adds a feature to its Teams collaboration app. Unfortunately, the new tool falls flat with users. Now imagine that the product team launched this new feature by the internal deadline they set for themselves. In a year, is anyone in the company going to say, “Well, that Teams widget was a disappointment, but at least our product team released it on time”? Yes, Dates Are Important to Product Success At this point, you might be wondering if I put much value at all on dates and deadlines. Absolutely. Product managers always have limited resources—including time. You’ll need dates and deadlines for several strategic reasons, including: Helping your team weigh which items it can work on over a given timeframe Giving your developers a sense of how to structure and schedule their work Keeping your team on pace with relevant events, such as tradeshows or holidays Gauging your effectiveness at driving products forward according to plan So Why Shouldn’t We Hit All Roadmap Deadlines? If you can achieve everything you want strategically for your product and still meet every deadline on your roadmap, you might be ready to think bigger. Empowered product management teams are constantly adjusting course to meet their customers’ evolving needs and the market. A product roadmap should be somewhat aspirational. Its themes should include at least some stretch goals that may not be clearly defined and require creativity and lateral thinking. Creating a roadmap with space for learning and insights means you will be ready to take advantage of new opportunities. It also means you can regularly question if your original roadmap delivers the most value to your customer. This is why I’m skeptical about any team’s ability to set those big strategic goals for their product but still get all of their projects done on time. And if you have to choose between these two competing goals—aiming big with your product or hitting all of your roadmap deadlines—I’d highly recommend you choose to aim big. A Deadline Culture Has Nasty Side Effects Becoming date-focused on your product roadmap is dangerous not only because it can take your team’s attention away from the strategy they should be focusing on. The risks are much greater than that. Here are some of the negative side effects of prioritizing roadmap deadlines over themes: 1. Focusing on deadlines assumes you have nothing to learn. When planning your roadmap, you have a good idea of the problems you are looking to solve, whether framed as jobs to be done, business objectives, or even features. You likely have some hypotheses about how you will solve them and even the technical challenges, but you should be prepared to learn along the way. Reserve space for additional validation and discovery, and be open to learning that you need to make some changes. You may find the problem isn’t worth solving or that it’s no longer the highest priority due to market trends. Alternatively, you may find that to solve it well, and you need to do much more than you planned. If you are focused only on meeting the deadline, you are not delivering the best solution possible. 2. You might set deadlines later than necessary to make sure you hit them. In a company culture that treats deadlines as its prized metric, product managers will undoubtedly be tempted to set their roadmap deadlines out as far as possible. What better way to ensure “success,” as the company defines it? But when you take this approach, you also under-use your developers, product owners, project managers, and other team members. You might not be allowing your team to function at top capacity and do all the great work they’re capable of. 3. You might aim too low because you’re afraid of upsetting stakeholders. A date-obsessed product team also runs the risk of playing it safe, under-promising, to hit their deadlines. This often happens in organizations whose executives focus on deadlines over other success metrics. But your senior leadership’s obsession with roadmap deadlines can’t be your excuse to limit your strategic goals or vision. As a product manager, it is your responsibility to show your executive stakeholders that you have big goals for your product. You’ll need to persuade them that achieving those goals will be more important than whether you hit your roadmap’s deadlines. 4. You might prioritize work, not for its strategic value but because it seems easiest to complete on time. And what an innovative and impactful product that will be! Failure can be a powerful teacher. If you set aggressive deadlines for a project and miss it, that can still yield some successes. For example, it can help you discover important details about your team’s capacity and pacing and any shortcomings of your processes. But even more important, building a culture that allows for a degree of failure—such as missed deadlines—also encourages more innovation and risk-taking. Both are keys to building products that make a positive impact on your market. How to Deal with Roadmap Deadlines Having said all of this, I do believe deadlines can play a useful role in your product roadmap. After all, I’ve overseen the development of the date-based milestone feature on LIKE.TG’s roadmap app. But you need to make sure your team treats roadmap deadlines with the proper amount of weight. Your team shouldn’t ignore the deadlines on your roadmap, nor should they think their success rests on meeting those dates. Here are a few steps I’d recommend: Build a team culture that emphasizes product quality first (even above deadlines). Set a success rate for hitting deadlines that you’ll be happy with. It should be a high percentage but below 100%. When your team fails to hit a roadmap deadline, please don’t treat it as a reason to reprimand your coworkers or to hang your head in shame. Instead, learn from those misses. As a Product Manager, Your Real Goal Isn’t on Any Calendar As you drive your products’ development and continuous improvement, you’ll want to hit your deadlines whenever you can. That’s one way to measure how effective you are in your product management role. But it’s not the end in and of itself. The goal behind any product management effort—releasing a new feature, for example—is to benefit both your customers and your company. Remember: Your primary role as a product manager is to solve real problems for your market. It’s not to deliver those solutions on June 11. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'fce9ff32-fc97-45d5-a22b-8ac8e9c76cb2', {});

Growing Sales in a Product-Led Company

The move towards product-led growth is on the rise, in part because potential customers increasingly prefer to experience a product or service first-hand before committing rather than read about (or be told by sales or marketing) the perceived value. Of course, customers heading straight for the product have a pretty significant impact on sales organizations. Growing Sales in a Product-Led Company Traditional Sales Models Let’s walk this back a bit. In a traditional sales model, prospects work directly with salespeople. But it’s sales folks who do the bulk of the talking. They assess what a prospect is looking for, what problems need to be solved, and the potential purchase’s overall context. They also tend to educate the prospect about a product’s features, functionality, and benefits. Sales act as a go-between between prospective customers and the product. Marketing-led Approach And in a marketing-led approach, prospects start their relationship with a product’s advertised perceived value. These values are strategically marketed in well-orchestrated campaigns. Still, they run a fairly high risk of creating a costly value gap with customers when the promise of perceived value doesn’t align with a customer’s real experience with the product. When this happens, relationships break down fast. Disappointed prospective customers lose trust. Sometimes they even walk away. “Statistically, 70% of online businesses fail due to a less than optimal usability. Users expect meaningful experiences that ‘show and don’t tell,’ with the products that they are going to buy.” Product-led Growth However, in a product-led model, prospects lead the charge. They take an intentional and active role in looking for a solution, exploring various options, researching, and ultimately experiencing the product first-hand before they buy. Experienced value seals the deal. And although prospects initiate and hold space for the conversation, it’s the product itself that does the bulk of the talking, for better or worse. But because prospects experience a product for themselves, see how it works, and eventually make their own decision whether to convert their trial to purchase or upgrade to a paid tier of service, the sales organization plays a less direct, different role in the overall sales process and ultimately in closing deals. Which Companies Are Following a PLG Model? What is Product-led Growth (PLG?) When done right, it can boil down to a value proposition that is simultaneously well-communicated and well-executed. In other words, you build a great product that delivers on its promise. OpenView Venture Partners The entity that first coined the term “product-led growth” describes PLG as follows: “Product led growth (PLG) is an end user-focused growth model that relies on the product itself as the primary driver of customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion.” So who’s following a PLG approach to sales? Calendly is, for one. According to Oji Udezue, VP of Product and Design at Calendly: “Product-market fit is achieved when you have a product with a clear value proposition that resonates with customers whom you know how to reach and convert. In other words, build a great product that solves a real problem—and make sure you have a way to get it to the people who need it.” So who else? Expensify, Slack, SurveyMonkey, Grammarly, and Dropbox are just a few SaaS companies that use PLG as the main driver of acquisition, retention, and expansion. LIKE.TG’s Approach to Product-Led Sales Growth According to Jim Semick, co-founder and chief strategist at LIKE.TG, “we discovered really early on that [people] don’t want to have their hands held, especially by a human,” preferring instead to figure the product out for themselves and letting the product speak for itself. Semick attributes his own company’s organic growth within existing customer organizations to offering free viewer licenses, which has expanded exposure of LIKE.TG’s roadmaps and planning boards more globally across customer organizations. When the product leads the charge, there’s less hand-holding with potential customers. As a result, company overhead costs go down. The sky’s the limit on growth scalability—a wider top-of-funnel (i.e., customers enter your funnel earlier in their journey) and a rapid global scale (i.e., instead of onboarding new sales reps, you can ramp up the onboarding experience of customers). With product at the helm, customer acquisition costs also go down due to faster sales cycles, higher revenue per employee, and a better user experience. Growing Sales in a Product-Led Growth Company But how do you build and scale in an organization that is highly collaborative internally and hyper-focused on figuring out if our product can help its customers? Jeff Horn, VP of Sales at LIKE.TG, approaches building his product-led sales team this way: “I focus on finding empathetic, curious people.” Building a core group of like-minded people then influences and forges the culture of the rest of the sales team. “What’s important to me as a sales leader is to be empathetic and committed to ongoing learning and growth. In a sales org, I want loyalty, heart, and grit,” adding that a team embodying these characteristics will provide an excellent experience for customers. The LIKE.TG sales team is well known for its curiosity, drive, and, most important—its empathy-first mindset. “We get to know our customers,” continues Horn. “We recognize that we are in the same boat and can’t be profitable if our product doesn’t fit our customer’s needs. Revenue will come on the heels of an amazing product and a sales organization committed to figuring out the impact of the customer.” Best practices for Building a Product-Led Sales Team: Traditionally, sales team people ask: “Tell me about how you ranked against your quota. Stack rank yourself. What number are you?” Those questions are important, but you can find the answers on LinkedIn. Culture first, history of excellence second. At LIKE.TG, we never deviate. Start by hiring those who will lift others and help them improve. A person can be a top rep and still offer best practices to peers. And once you have a core group, it will attract others with similar character and focus. Be an architect of culture. If you aren’t intentional about defining culture, you’ll end up accepting the culture defined for you. A high-performing sales rep who doesn’t embody any characteristics of your culture lowers the bar and brings down the team’s entire culture. You don’t want a customer to churn, so don’t set up a pressure-driven process. Give the customer the time they need to make the right decision. We have a sales process that we follow. There’s a responsibility on both sides, as well as accountability with both sides. Doing what matters and creating a meaningful culture aligned with that belief are two non-negotiables at ProductPlan. Putting product first and placing a high value on heart, humility, and hustle are the building blocks of a successful PLG company. Other non-negotiables include team focus: empathy, commitment, grit, loyalty, humility. “Grit is important,” asserts Horn. How to Link Sales and Product to Solve User Pain To be successful, a PLG company must follow three fundamental steps: Understand its product’s value. Communicate the perceived value to prospects. Deliver on its promise. Easy, right? According to Intercom, provider of a business messaging tool that enables companies to communicate directly with customers in an online context, 40-60% of people who sign up for a free software trial use it once and never come back. Building a great product that delivers on its promise without a sales team to talk a prospective customer through the process must be approached thoughtfully by working with product managers to understand users and solve real end-user pain. Horn explains: “The interesting challenge is in a space like this, the potential client is using nothing more than a simple spreadsheet. How do we help that customer evaluate and understand the cost of not going with LIKE.TG—of continuing to work the way they are currently?” He adds, “The client has to be open and willing to examine their process. Where are the inefficiencies? What’s the cost? We can find the value gap. There’s a cost if you’re working late and you’re not with your kid. How do you assign a value to that?” Here are four tips to keep in mind to ensure that sales and product teams align in that goal: 1. Customer Centricity Product-led companies place the customer in the middle of every decision.Read 6 tips to keep customers front and center. 2. Communication Ongoing and consistent communication is essential, but it also needs a structural component. Regular communication between leaders, the front-line sales team, and the product team needs to be built in. “Product managers are expected to have a diverse set of skills that are considered soft and hard. Year after year, we’ve asked the most important skill in product management on a day-to-day basis? Communication skills always take the cake.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '35d36a84-b157-43a1-acb7-b972dcb1d1ad', {}); 3. United Teams Keep silos at bay by holding regular meetings. Create opportunities to have fun together (e.g., book club organized by the sales team to bring in customer service team members to get to know each other better). 4. Retention This is a big focus at LIKE.TG and other PLG companies because it shows that the product is becoming embedded. What Does Product-Led Forecasting Look Like? Forecasting sales in a product-led company can be challenging without traditional engagement with salespeople and traditional sales stages. Derek Skaletsky, the founder of Sherlock, writes: “The emergence of the self-serve, product-led model has turned much of the traditional software operation on its head — and it’s completely upended revenue forecasting. Traditional forecasting models are dependent on a salesperson’s interaction with a prospect. But a pure-play product-led model is designed to eliminate the sales interaction.” Product engagement plays a central role in product-led forecasting. Skaletsky continues: “In a true product-led motion, how a trial account is engaged with the product during a trial is the biggest determinant of their Likelihood to Convert. If they see value with your product, the more likely they are to pay for it.” Product managers need to understand that a PLG model changes the customer acquisition model. But whether or not a company is a PLG business shouldn’t change the focus. Building a great product is still the goal. Is product-led growth the right fit for your company? This blog post featuring Wes Bush of Product-Led Institute explores this question and how to shift to product-led growth.

The Key to Driving Alignment is Remote Collaborative Exercises, Featuring Isabelle Berner VP of Product

Collaboration” and “remote work” may not seem like a perfect match. But teams can’t skimp on group work because the days of everyone being in the same room are a distant memory thatmay never return in quite the same way. There’s still no real replacement for real-time, dynamic discussions and exercises to foster stakeholder alignment. Asynchronous apps have their place, but sometimes you need everyone to debate and sort through things together. According to Isabelle Berner, Director of Product Management at Def Method, the secret is intentionality. She shared her suggestions and tips during our recent webinar “What’s in Your Product Stack: Collaboration.” Berner, 12-year product management career included stints at Pivotal and Betterment, joining the software development consultancy specializing in Lean and Agile. She is a true believer in the importance of working together on these fundamental product issues. As a consultant, Berner has seen a wide range of collaboration challenges. But she firmly believes “collaboration is the foundation upon which great products are built” and that product managers can be effective catalysts for this activity. “The role of facilitating a lot of remote collaboration conversations comes to the product manager. Often product managers have been part of a lot of different teams, and so they maybe have a better read on where collaboration is flawed.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '57ff7e42-ccfa-4d9e-b5be-8a0f6ba69363', {}); To Drive Alignment, First Look at Your Team Establishing rapport and respect. An essential ingredient in successful remote collaboration is creating familiarity, comfort, and trust with colleagues before attempting true collaboration. “It’s good to spend time with each other one-on-one. Even if it’s on work-related items so we can appreciate each other as human beings,” Berner said. “I love to do walking one-on-ones. Just moving in a direction together and talking about something—it’s nice to stretch your legs and really good for building rapport.” Berner also finds standups can be another forum to get teams more comfortable with opening up and talking about important issues. “I started seeing the value of standups when I worked at Betterment,” Berner said. “Being tuned in to what everyone’s working on and being able to air any challenges that we’re up against quickly. I’ve carried that with me and never stopped doing standups whenever I’m on a project.” However, standups come with their own risks to the team dynamic, especially when they become placeholders that morph into some of the larger meetings and conversations the team should have in a more intentional and dedicated forum. “Something to mitigate that is to have someone in your standup that’s responsible for putting a pin in those conversations and making sure that they happen because they’re important,” Berner said. “But keeping the standup short and moving along is essential.” Creating a feedback-friendly culture. Being open and honest in a work setting doesn’t always come naturally. People don’t want to step on any toes or offend anyone, both out of civility and protect their own careers. But an environment that encourages authentic dialog is essential to avoid groupthink-driven disasters. Organizations need people to challenge assumptions, ask “why” more often, and voice their opinions. And while a suggestion box or an “open door” policy might try to set that tone, people need to walk the walk as well. “A great way to establish a culture of giving and receiving feedback is to ask for it. Ask for some specific feedback. Then listen to it and hold yourself accountable to respond to that feedback and show the team how you do that. That’s an easy way to show that feedback can make a big difference.” Berner is a big fan of Team Speedback. This one-hour activity is for everyone on the team. Each person writes down a piece of feedback for every other member. They then share that feedback one-on-one in a speed-dating type of format. “You have an opportunity to give and receive feedback with every single member of the team. ” Berner said, adding that holding these once every month or two “sets the expectation that this is an OK thing to do, and it makes it a lot less scary if you’re doing it regularly.” Conduct a Stakeholder Analysis ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3eb23c05-aee3-46a4-9662-df983ee6cc53', {}); Drive Alignment with Stakeholders Remote Collaboration Exercises Define goals and anti-goals. A lack of alignment on the objectives of an initiative creates a shaky foundation for any product team. But if the group hasn’t put in a concerted joint effort to build a consensus, chances are team members are operating under various assumptions. One of Berner’s favorite exercises to ensure everyone agrees on what they’re trying to do (and not do) is defining Goals and Anti-Goals. “This is a very tactical piece of collaboration. But it really sets teams up to collaborate effectively and build on that if they have an obvious understanding of what their goals are and also a sense of ownership of those goals,” Berners said. The very act of going through this exercise together and putting in the work also strengthens the team’s bonds. This co-laboring creates a stronger consensus since they all witnessed and took part in the process. “Working together to achieve a shared objective and a shared set of goals is important towards driving that ownership of goals,” Berner said. “That ties into group idea generation and how to facilitate collaborative conversations.” Have a remote collaboration group meeting. This group exercise takes about an hour and requires no preparation. Get the team, and any stakeholders get in the same real or virtual room. This meeting’s goal is for everyone to agree upon what they’re trying to accomplish in the next three-to-six months. First, give each attendee their own color sticky notes to write down what they understand to be goals. They should also add what they don’t consider essential for this timeframe. This is why it’s essential to establish those dates upfront. Then after everyone’s scribbled ideas down, the group shares their goals or anti-goals round-robin style. This way, each person has an opportunity to share what they think is most important. “If people have something similar, group other people’s stickies in that category. And you end up with a series of categories for things that might be considered goals.” Berner said. “Then, from a facilitation standpoint, you can take these goals, summarize them, refine them, and then ultimately vote on which ones are most important as a group.” Get Buy-In and Budget Approval on Your Product Stack➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'c4f7dcc8-378e-4b20-9c16-637fcb9589a5', {"region":"na1"}); Include ownership The benefits of this exercise go far beyond alignment. Inclusivity in the process also creates a sense of ownership. “Being part of the process of coming up with the goals is really empowering for the people on your team,” Berner said. “They’ll understand the goals a lot better because they’ve had these conversations, and they’ll care about them a lot more because they had a hand in choosing what was most important to accomplish.” Anti-goals Agreeing on the anti-goals is also sometimes even more valuable than the goals themselves. “What is something important down the line or something that might be seductive and distracting but that isn’t actually the most important goal for us right now?” Berner says calling out these out-of-scope goals brings additional clarity and focus for everyone and might be the most important discussions of all. “When someone in the room thinks an anti-goal should be a goal, surfacing and bubbling up this misalignment and then being able to talk through it and to talk about the relative priority of goals and then make a decision together that something that one person thought should be a goal is actually an anti-goal,” Berner said. “This is where the trickier, more sensitive conversations happen.” The final step is each participant “dot voting” on how to prioritize those categorized goals. “You want to have clarity about not just what your goals are, but what your most important goals are,” Berner added. If this sounds hard or even undoable in a remote or distributed environment, using a virtual whiteboard such as Miro can recreate the actual pen and paper feeling. As an added benefit, there will now be a “permanent” digital record of the exercise’s outcome for newcomers to the team or when someone wants to revisit a decision. That isn’t usually possible since someone else will need the IRL whiteboard for the next meeting in that conference room. What’s at stake is what matters. By collaboratively aligning around goals, this common understanding filters down into every other aspect of product management. They can even show up in user stories tying small, incremental work to the big picture and laddering up to the business and user value. Berner also cited product roadmaps as another instance where this coherent vision can play a role. “Focusing on outcomes versus outputs, but really telling the story through your roadmaps of what those outcomes are, what they mean to your users, and how they benefit the business helps with that communication and connecting people with what they’re building and why it matters.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '5894a003-79ce-4ea3-9804-dae280a96106', {}); It’s also wise to revisit things regularly. Priorities and goals might change or evolve but not automatically flow down through the rest of the organization. Berner recommends using stoplight check-ins to keep everyone on the same page. “Have your stoplight check-ins, or just your ten-minute ‘is this on-track/off-track and then address the things that are off-track,” Berner said. “I’ve seen goals sit and get dusty in a corner, and it’s not pretty.” Berner also recommends excluding stakeholders from these stoplight check-ins and retrospectives. “You want the team not to have to worry about any repercussions if a goal is off-track and just be able to have transparent, problem-solving conversations about getting it back on track,” she said. Spending 15 minutes per week every week or two isn’t much time to confirm things are still headed in the right direction. Other Tips for Remote Collaboration Challenges Replacing the natural interactions that occur in a physical workplace doesn’t happen by itself. Creating surrogates for watercooler time requires some real effort. Berner’s biggest concern is that a distributed workforce isn’t celebrating wins like they usually would, which can impact morale and take some of the fun out of working on an exciting project with peers you like and respect. “Getting everyone energized and excited about what’s being accomplished is important,” Berner said. At Def Method, they’ve carved out time in their weekly company meeting for that and have also madelittle gestures of gratitude, such as sending contributors a care basket after completing something big or putting in the extra effort. To learn about other ways remote collaboration teams can work together, you can watch the entire webinar for free.

Shifting Your Business and Product Strategy During a Crisis, Featuring Adrienne Tan

In March 2020, many organizations found themselves suddenly plunged into crisis. A global pandemic sparked radical, immediate shifts with lasting effects. Companies had to shift their product strategy. Some floundered, while others adjusted, pivoted, and persevered. For Brainmates Co-founder and CEO Adrienne Tan, the sixteenth of March was the day when everything changed. She still remembers everyone gathered in the office. A creeping sense of dread as clients contacted them to cancel training and in-person meetings. “It was a very somber day,” Tan recalled. “We could tell there was a real shift in the environment.” Just as jarring was the suddenness of it all since things had been going well right up until that fateful moment. “We had an amazing January and February, but March was decimated, and we were just stunned.” But Tan and her team had no time to mourn or reflect. Brainmates was forced to spring into action immediately since they had a face-to-face meetup scheduled for that evening. They had to shift their product strategy. They scrambled and switched it to an online event on the fly. “We had never run a meetup digitally. So one of the first things we did as a team that evening before going home was to run our first digital event with a few hundred people,” Tan recounted. “It was only the next day when we started trying to figure out how to rescue our business and our team.” The COVID-19 outbreak drove the experience for Tan and Brainmates. But crisis management is an unfortunate part of any company’s lifecycle. An invisible virus may not always be the instigator. Yet, how Tan handled the situation offers valuable lessons for other leaders who face a crisis. We’ve also explored resilient leadership with LIKE.TG’s CEO, as well. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '42645f4c-eb13-476a-ad53-55b55e8a9092', {}); Assess and Defend When things get turned upside down, leaders must take strong and decisive actions. But before they get too far, they first need a solid understanding of where things stand. For Tan, that meant shifting her attention from innovative product leadership to financial analysis. “The first thing we had to do was be defensive,” Tan said. “I started to plan out our cash to understand where we were economical.” Tan also realized that navigating this crisis required her to focus fully on the business itself. Thus, she began delegating her consulting-focused client interactions to the rest of the team. “My role was definitely more of a CEO role,” Tan said. “It was a clear decision to say hey, during this time, I won’t be a consultant. I’m going to have to take on that more focused leadership role, put a strategy in place to steer us out of this conundrum.” But while her focus was on the bottom line, Tan didn’t completely change her “cheesy” personality. Instead, she structured her firm’s survival and rebound around three hashtags: #safetyfirst Ensuring employee safety and helping them set up functional remote work arrangements. That includes raiding the office for chairs and monitors #extendourrunway With a core commitment to retain the team and continue paying them, cash became a central concern to keep things afloat. #liftoff Rebuilding the business for a new economic climate. The most immediate change for Brainmates was delivering their training, workshops, and other events virtually. “We were fortunate that we had clients who stuck with us and said ‘hey, we love the face-to-face training, but we’re prepared to go online,’” Tan said. “So we changed all our materials, and now we run our training remotely privately for clients as well as publicly, which is nice, but it’s been a massive shift.” Investing in the Roadmap Instinctually, when one encounters scarcity, there’s a natural tendency to hoard resources. While that’s a good strategy at the outset, sticking with that plan for long is also a recipe for long-term decline. “Once you’ve done that initial check, once you understand where you sit as a business and once you understand what you can kind of manage in terms of cash, in terms of current revenues and costs, once you’ve done that, then it’s time to shift back to investment,” Tan said. “OK, I’ve taken stock of my business and where my product is. What’s the path forward?” she continued. “I think that if you always stay in a point where I’m still holding onto my cash, I’m too worried to invest, that locks your mentality, that locks your business.” So, after shifting Brainmates’ product strategy to a remote delivery model, Tan wasn’t content to stay in a holding pattern until conditions improved. Doing so might save a few dollars, but it would ultimately lead to the business fading into irrelevance as the market evolves and moves on from the pandemic mindset. “There’s a seismic shift in your roadmap because you didn’t expect this thing to happen. ” Tan said, adding that “If you can see a path forward if you can project forward—and we have—I would continue to invest in your roadmap if you can.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '527dc6af-8860-436f-9ca6-ae2b71b0cc99', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Investing in the Future For Brainmates, the arrival of a new Chief Product Officer in April catalyzed looking toward the future and not just the present. Instead of postponing this expensive hire during a precarious financial period, they moved forward to shift their product strategy. “If we didn’t invest and we didn’t put some of our revenue into future investments, it would be a challenging time trading out of this,” Tan said. “We wouldn’t have products for the new future, for the new consumer.” Brainmates performs the same delicate balancing act that many other companies are attempting during this tumultuous time. “We’ve got an eye on the existing product and making it better,” Tan said. “but we also have an eye on the future and bringing out new products to new customers.” To hear more from Tan and how other leaders have piloted their product teams and companies and shift their product strategy through unexpected ups and downs,watch the entire webinar “Resilient Leadership During Challenging Times” for free now. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '1f74539e-d4fc-4cb3-97c6-fd86de2bf62e', {});

Lean Market Validation: 10 Ways to Rapidly Test Your Startup Idea

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

A Product Manager’s Guide to Roadmapping as an Essentialist

I’ve been talking with product managers lately about how the concepts of “essentialism” can help them focus their efforts on what matters. I distilled the advice a few months ago in my book The Essentialist Product Manager and have recently been giving talks and workshops on the topic. This article tackles one of the areas that gets the most interest from product managers: how can they use an essentialist approach to create and communicate better product roadmaps? First, let’s recap what essentialism means. The concepts were popularized in the book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. According to his book, an “essentialist” lives by design, not by default. An essentialist isn’t reactive but rather makes choices deliberately by separating the few most important things from the hundreds of other less-important things. To achieve this, an essentialist must say “No” a lot. As a product professional for over 20 years, this philosophy resonates with me. And it’s resonated with other product managers too. We already know that it’s not about getting more things done; it’s about getting the right things done. To ensure you’re adding the right features and initiatives to your product roadmap, I’ve outlined several suggestions here.

The Roadmap Revolution: A Chance to Hit “Reset”

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

How Do You Know You’re Hiring a Good Product Team Member?

Product leaders don’t often get many chances for hiring product team members. It’s not overstating things to label bringing on new talent as critically important. Additions to the product team must ramp up quickly. Then they are entrusted with varying levels of authority and autonomy to add value and allow the organization to scale. There’s no perfect resume recipe or qualifying exam for product types. So hiring managers must assess candidates based on a few interactions, a curriculum vitae, and some reference checks. That leads to some big bets based on incomplete information. So, how can a product leader make sure they’re onboarding new hires with a good chance of success? Criteria for Hiring Product People During Each Stage of Interviewing Here are some ways I vet product management candidates to weed out poor fits and spot the diamonds in the rough. Stage 1: Reviewing the applications A candidate’s resume will always tell you a lot about what they’ve done. But I’m just as interested in HOW they did it and their overall approach versus a long list of accomplishments. This starts with the language they use in their resume. How did they participate in projects? Did they “run” a project or “collaborate” on it? Was the emphasis on completing something or its actual impact? Just like a product roadmap shouldn’t simply be a list of to-do items, I’m looking for outcomes and objectives in this context. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '57ff7e42-ccfa-4d9e-b5be-8a0f6ba69363', {}); Are they passionate? When hiring product team members I’m also looking for adjectives and verbs that convey patience, curiosity, and a humble style. I want a sense of the methods and tactics they employed to achieve those goals, not just that they ticked the box. How do they measure success? Similarly, the impact should be measured in more than dollars and cents. While it’s great that the product made a few million bucks, what I care about more is how many problems it solved. How many customers are satisfied because of specific decisions and actions made by the applicant? I’ll take a highNet Promoter Score over a short-term revenue spike any day of the week. Are they team players? I also want to hire team players. Look if their resume emphasizes all independent decisions made versus the processes they used to solicit feedback and garner stakeholder buy-in. If this is the case, it could be a sign they boss people around and don’t listen to opinions or leverage data-driven decision-making. Do they commit? One red flag for me is frequent job-hopping. It can mean they didn’t care about their customers, weren’t performing well, and had to leave, or they didn’t do their homework ahead of time and signed on for something that wasn’t sustainable. While sometimes things don’t work out or a new opportunity springs up, you have to jump on it. If it’s a trend, then my “spidey sense” starts tingling. But it’s something I’m definitely going to dig into if they make it to the interviewing stage. Stage 2: The phone screen Before going through the hassle of bringing a candidate with a promising resume in for an in-person session, a phone screen can fill in many gaps. This opportunity can give you a better indication of whether they’re worth the time and energy. I want to be sure they have enough of the necessary skills on day one to add value quickly. I have a checklist of things I want to make sure they’ve done before and can do for me. Do they have soft skills? This spans from the tactical to the interpersonal. Soft skills are just as essential as the ability to develop a persona or comprehend new technology. I’m looking for best practices they rely on, anecdotes from previous experiences, and other signs that they’re true practitioners. How much did they pay attention? It’s also an opportunity to see if they’ve fully digested the job description. I want them to prove that they understand the situation and assess the problems I’m looking for them to solve. Not regurgitation, but the ability to listen, digest, and translate into something actionable. I want to come away with a sense of who they are, how they work with others, and whether they’re empathetic and a good listener. If they can’t show me that over the phone and forge a connection, they won’t be able to do it with customers who don’t have as much invested in the conversation. Stage 3: During the interview Test their abilities. Once I finally get a chance to be in the same room with a candidate (or at least in the same video call), I rely on a go-to set of topics to ask them about to get a well-rounded picture of the potential hire before me. Then I ask them to do some of the things they’ll have to do on the job. Write a spec, reply to a customer complaint, that sort of thing.It’s a quick way to assess their ability to think on their feet and do the day-to-day work of a product manager. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'a6df8971-315b-4e8c-ad02-5e133239bfda', {}); What part of the job do they care about? I’masking questions to uncover what they care about and where their passion lies. What parts of the job excite them? Is it the customer interactions and interviews, solving problems and collaboration, or finding valuable use cases for new technologies? Are they quick on their feet? Another test is whether or not they can think on their feet. I’ll frequently change subjects and see if they can keep up. This isn’t to trick them but rather to see if they’re up for the multitasking onslaught of context-switching that product management demands. What do they do outside of work? I also like to consider the “full human being” I’m talking to and not just the product professional side of their personality. I ask them what they like to do for fun and how they de-stress, which is important since product management can be pretty demanding and all-consuming. What do they care about? Finally, I want them to articulate what it is about the role that appeals to them. Why do they think they’ll like the job, and what about the company and position interests to them. This may seem obvious, but what they focus on and articulate can be insightful. For example, a generic response indicates they may not be that invested in the opportunity. What do they ask? But what I ask is only half of it. The other part is seeing which questions they ask me. I’m looking for candidates that have an innate curiosity. If that doesn’t emerge during these sessions, it’s unlikely I’ll move forward. I’m actively hoping they’ll surprise me and take me out of my comfort zone. Questions I can’t answer or haven’t even thought of indicating they’re engaged and might bring a fresh new perspective to the team. And it’s all the better when they ask me a personal (yet appropriate) question. This shows they can connect on a human-to-human level and are trying to get a better feel for what it will be like to work for/with me. Not to mention it’s a good proxy for how they’ll fare conducting customer interviews. Do they think of the big picture? While the hiring process is all about filling a specific open role at a particular moment in time, we all know that situations change over time. Serious professionals aren’t only concerned about their next job, but the one that comes after that. That’s why I always touch on their career path during our interactions. I explain the current role, how it fits into the overall organization, and that even though they may not have direct reports, it doesn’t mean they’re not a senior team member. I also don’t base compensation on whether they’re managing other folks. The goal is product excellence and customer delight, not empire-building. Beyond that, I touch on where they could grow within the organization. On how this job will prepare them for future opportunities beyond this company. Although we’d love our product hires to stick around for decades, I’m not naive about how mobility plays into career development and am open about how this job positions them for long-term success. Of course, what I’m really looking for is the candidates to ask these questions as well. While bringing this topic up might make them a little uncomfortable, I also don’t want product people with no ambition or drive. As long as they’re not too aggressive on this front, I welcome them to consider their own future as they consider the job at hand. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '8bd83652-2868-48a8-9b9c-ebb8e0b9c945', {}); A Good Use of Everyone’s Time When hiring product team members reviewing, screening, and interviewing potential fits takes a while if you’re doing it right. But if a lengthier process yields better fits for the organization that is likely to stick around for a while, it’s well worth the extra effort. A bad hire is a sunk cost, but it’s also a missed opportunity. The months wasted onboarding them, the negative customer experiences, and the problems that didn’t get solved are far costlier than taking more time to bring the right person in the first time around. The best candidates will share your team’s values, complement the staff already in place, and augment the group’s overall capabilities. It’s one of the few times when being extra picky and diligent is worth a potential delay. Watch our webinar, Hiring and Growing a Successful Product Team, to see what product leaders look for when hiring new team members:

Why I Switched From Spreadsheets to a Roadmap Tool, Featuring Product Director Jay Hum

Not every product manager is lucky enough to work with a purpose-built roadmapping tool. But those that do seldom return to their old methods of managing the product roadmap. The great benefits outweigh other roadmapping options such as spreadsheets and presentations. When we asked Jay Hum, Director of Product for Autonomic, the first open cloud-based platform for connected vehicle data, about his experiences during a webinar ‘‘What’s in Your Product Stack: Roadmaps,” he expounded upon the pros of creating and maintaining roadmaps in a tool designed for the job. Not only does it make his job easier, but he sees how it helps the entire organization. The 5 Key Pros of Switching from Excel Spreadsheets to a Roadmapping Tool A purpose-built roadmapping tool is seldom among the initial investments a company makes. They typically only realize there’s a true need for this solution after finding cobbled-together workarounds lacking. Starting out with the pain of long roadmap spreadsheets and presentations. Hum’s experience at Autonomic was the same when they found the old way of doing things didn’t scale as the company grew. “We started with PowerPoint and decks and of course Excel, which is the universal tool that does pretty much everything for everybody,” Hum said. “When I started at Autonomic we were a small, scrappy little startup and we’ve grown in terms of people and numbers of teams and spread out across geography.” Hum found that even though Google Sheets were easy to share, thelimitations of using a spreadsheet for roadmapping started to impinge on the company’s ability to execute and forced him into labor-intensive ongoing maintenance. Finding a new roadmapping tool that is easy to maintain. “It was really tough to communicate a really rugged and overall strategy across several teams and different offices, as well as to be able to quickly react to some of the changes that were coming up both from a number of these teams and with the customer,” Hum continued. “The last thing that anybody ever wants to do—specifically product managers—is go back and update roadmap spreadsheets every single week or every single month, and it is immensely painful.” Startups and product managers can be the most resistant to investing in a roadmapping tool because it’s not where their attention lies. “They tend to focus on action, the building, the writing of the stories, the testing, and the designing, like all the ‘fun, sexy stuff’ of being a product manager coming up with ideas,” Hum said. “Planning and looking at dependencies, it’s a grind, it’s tedious, it’s not the sexy stuff that everybody reads about in the blogs.” Eventually, many organizations find their lack of a comprehensive tool leads to disconnects. There are too many inefficiencies when things get too big to keep all in your head or a spreadsheet roadmap. “There’s a point of no return, where they’re building and moving quickly, but then the teams start getting misaligned because teams get bigger or they’re more spread out. Or there are more things they need to prioritize,” Hum said. “They need to go to a tool that’s more flexible and will actually help them drive the discipline to elevate the planning and the strategy and the communication thereof as a very, very high priority.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'c7d13196-bc0a-4522-8c86-b1fd59c56fb0', {"region":"na1"}); Pro 1: Building Alignment Getting everyone on the same page is an essential task for product management. A well-designed roadmap can expedite this ongoing need. “New product development, especially in startups, it’s messy, it’s ambiguous, it’s unpredictable, Hum said. “The roadmap or roadmapping tools really provide that North Star, not only where the company’s going but where the teams are going.” With a roadmap providing the desired end state, the rationale, and the target audience, product management can loosen the implementation constraints and not be so prescriptive. “You just want to show the high-level goal and get the hell out of that team’s way,” Hum said. “As long as you’ve given them that high-level goal and they know where to go and potentially when it should be delivered, that’s all you need to do, and let them go.” Ideally, a roadmapping tool can elevate the product strategy to something inspirational. “If someone comes to you with a roadmap that is fairly defined for the next three-to-six months, then I see that as very inspiring to the team because you know where you’re going or where your angle is, what success looks like,” Hum added. “It allows the team to understand how either the product manager or leadership is thinking strategically and then how that’s broken down to allow them to execute methodically.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '04400104-0283-44c3-92be-cf2464e248d5', {"region":"na1"}); Pro 2: Saving Time Now that Hum has a purpose-built roadmapping tool at his disposal; he doesn’t actually spend too much time using it. Every Monday morning, he holds an Iteration Planning Meeting, with the roadmap tool open alongside Pivotal Tracker. He can make sure everyone knows the high priorities and whether they’re working on them, then dig into any refinements in Pivotal Tracker as needed. Other than that, he only spends time on the roadmap once per quarter for more strategic planning and prioritization. Not only has the tool cut down on manual tasks, compared to roadmap spreadsheets, but it’s saving him time in other areas as well. Cutting down on meetings. “It’s cut down on meetings and communication because, within the tool, I can really put in the cross-dependencies,” Hum said. “We have a number of different teams across a number of different offices and time zones, so sometimes just being able to jump on a call is very hard.” Now he can tell them to go into the tool and add their comments to see everything and coordinate asynchronously. There’s less room for interpretation and lower chances of things descending into chaos with things written down. It also gives him more time to spend on more valuable tasks. “Creating and communicating a roadmap is a high-level task in terms of thought process,” Hum continues. “But manually going in with these small little steps is not a high-value task, and having a dedicated roadmapping tool allows product managers to leverage their time much, much better.” Working across multiple teams. Hum cherishes the flexibility roadmap tools provide, as well as how quick it is to make changes. “I work very closely with engineers, and we’ll get into the nitty-gritty details, but then half an hour later I may turn around, and I have to give a presentation to the leadership around what is our Q2 and Q3 objectives,” Hum said. “Being able to quickly go into a tool and change the view and hide stuff where I know they don’t need to know about or I don’t want to show them because they’re going to ask me irrelevant questions for a particular thing is an excellent advantage of having a dedicated roadmapping tool.” Pro 3: Single Source of Truth Deciding what item goes into scheduling or the backlog can be a major source of contention within a business. Everyone has good intentions, but a lack of clarity can lead to factions, mistrust, and doubt. Humuses the roadmapping tool as a single source of truth to minimize these issues. Issues idle in the parking lot before a prioritization exercise, which includes weighting via customer feedback in the tool itself. This leads to greater transparency in the entire prioritization process. “It’s important to figure out the ‘why’ of what makes it on and what doesn’t and really communicating the matrix or weighting system,” Hum said, emphasizing the importance of having that context come through in the roadmap. “A roadmap will allow you to show that visually, and most tools will allow you to drill down just by clicking on it, and you can add little notes or the rationale behind a certain priority.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '9e6140b2-e382-45fd-ace0-16435228cf7b', {"region":"na1"}); Pro 4: Adapting for Different Audiences According to ourmost recent product management survey, 56% of product managers are unhappy with their process for communicating product strategy.Finding that Goldilock’s sweet spot for a roadmap presentation requires a solid understanding of what your audience cares about. Give them too much, and they’ll be bored or derail the conversation with detours, but if it’s too skimpy, they won’t have enough context to assess its merits properly. “When you’re talking to the executive level, they’re thinking more in quarters and the three big objectives that you’re trying to achieve,” Hum said. “They don’t really need all this fine-grained detail.” In contrast, crafting these customized versions of roadmaps in spreadsheets can take up hours and produce outdated artifacts before the meeting’s even over. “We work very closely with external partners and customers, and we want to be very transparent with them,” Hum continued. “As we go higher up concerning the seniority, we are summarizing more and more of our roadmaps.” However, not every presentation warrants exposing the audience to the roadmapping tool itself. “We’re looking just to hit the really high notes or the big epics or big features that we’re trying to do within a particular quarter,” Hum explained, referring to why he sometimes uses other presentation tactics. “That’s why it would just be two or three bullet points in a deck or just showing quarter out where the big features will land.” Pro 5: Empowering Engineering Hum’s product management approach is based on the simple premise that “alignment enables autonomy.” His goal is to empower individuals so they can make their own informed decisions and execute. That means they need three things: What: What are we building Why: What is the purpose of this thing we’re building, and what that end state means (i.e., users saving time, the business increasing revenue) Who: The target customer “Engineers want to go off and solve the hard problem,” Hum said. “So you provide that independence and, obviously, you’re working with a lot of smart people, so get out of their way. Let them work on what they need to work on because they’re all aligned. They have that North Star.” Proving the context behind the product story. This runs counter to more traditional product management. This is not where a product manager writes many user stories and schedules each feature release. “If they don’t have the proper context, they may go off and blindly build something because this is what they’re supposed to do. They’re supposed to go build,” Hum continued. “But if you give them the proper context and end goal, you’re allowing the engineers a bit more freedom and a bit more creativity to think about how they would actually approach the problem that they are trying to solve without you being too prescriptive.” But that freedom only comeswhen engineering is aligned with the business and understands the rationale behind product managers’ direction. Hum says many product managers make the fatal mistake of thinking that they’re responsible for the solution, but he doesn’t see it that way. “I’m responsible for the problem… I’m just defining the problem. You go figure out which way you want. Here’s the outcome that I want. The rest is up to you,” Hum continued, adding that while he may provide ideas and feedback, that’s not the main part of his job. “My whole goal as a product manager—and especially with roadmapping—is to lay out that grand vision, where we go and what’s aspirational,” Hum said. “I’m not here to draw out every single little path and dot to get there. That’s not our job as product managers.” Download Get Budget Approval on Your Product Stack➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'c4f7dcc8-378e-4b20-9c16-637fcb9589a5', {"region":"na1"}); Listen to the full webinar here: 点击播放声音 @keyframes VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } @keyframes VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } .volume__small-wave { animation: VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite; opacity: 0; } .volume__large-wave { animation: VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite .3s; opacity: 0; } 55:32●●●●●●●AgendaWhy Roadmap Tools?Current Tools ProcessesUnderstanding the Why: Selecting a Roadmap ToolSpeed RoundLive QAAdditional Resources #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_43_wrapper .w-css-reset{font-size:14px;} #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_43_wrapper 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How Leadership Can Foster an Authentic Virtual Event for Your Employees

At its most basic level, a customer-led product strategy means that your customers are the top priority at all times. Sounds pretty obvious, right? But creating a truly customer-centric business model means balancing a lot of different factors, not just customer service. All too often, customers are losing out to more influential stakeholder groups and other priorities. One report found that80 percent of customers said the experience a company provides is just as important as its products or services. Therefore, it makes total sense to look at the products you offer from the customers’ perspective. Ensuring your products and services bring joy to customers at every stage of their journey will help grow your business, helping it survive even in tough times. Putting Customers First Any time you launch a new idea, a new product, or a new system, ask yourself the following questions: #1 Who will this serve? #2 How will it benefit the people it serves? #3 What are the company’s goals for this product or service? By asking – and answering – these questions, you can create something that people truly value. Anticipating the kind of products customers need and making sure they get them will lead to deeper brand loyalty and customer retention. But first, you need to know exactly what the customer wants to deliver it. Making use of key customer insights and then implementing them is vitally important. For example, if you discover that most customers want to receive their purchases in the fastest possible time, you could use retail inventory management software to speed things up. Remember that81 percent of consumers are willing to increase their spend with an organization in return for a better experience! Read the Customer Interview Toolbox ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'd7d86cbd-164a-46c9-8c8f-f15fee88bc7f', {}); Looking at the Data You might think you’re pretty hot on knowing what your customers want, especially if you’ve been running a successful business for many years. However, here’s a sobering statistic: 80 percent of companies believe they are delivering a superior customer experience, but only 8 percent of customers agree! This proves that you shouldn’t claim to be customer-centric if your products and services don’t reflect that. Digital technology means there are now more avenues for observing customer behaviors and spotting crucial insights – and statistics suggest thatinsight-driven customer experiences help businesses retain 89 percent of their customers. By blending data from customer surveys with qualitative and observational insights, you can build a detailed profile of your target users and see their needs. It’s also helpful to note what your competitors are up to and look at non-competitors to get an idea of best practices. You don’t have to copy their approach, but you can tease out the best bits and blend them into the perfect strategy for you. Creatinga partnership with a competitor can actually aid the customer journey in some cases. If you cannot offer a product or service that your customer really wants, put your rivalry to one side and team up with a company that can! Making a Plan Once you’ve taken a look at the improvements you could make, it’s time to produce your plan of action. This framework should always put the customer front and center while ensuring any changes are viable within your overall business model. Product roadmaps are useful in planning and development and can be used to create alignment across the organization. Start with the product vision statement, then set out your goals and initiatives. The customer-led product strategy must be ingrained at every level of your company, so all your employees need to understand who the product is aimed at, what its unique selling points are, and what the long-term goal should be. Having your customer service and marketing departments work together is a good way to boost the customer experience. Hiring the right people, who truly believe in your vision, is crucial – as is keeping them up to date and motivated. Using video conferencing software can help maintain face-to-face contact with those in other sectors of the business. Download the Guide to Roadmap Software ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '4bf8579a-d29b-4f68-83a0-dff66a99d470', {}); Adapting to Change The digital environment has created a definite shift in customer behavior, meaning that customers become more discerning and impatient in the products and services they choose. They now have higher expectations and more choice than ever before – so if you don’t meet their needs, they can just as easily go elsewhere. New technology might make it easier for you to communicate with customers, but it’s also easier for them to complain! Older businesses, in particular, can struggle to adapt to the new pattern, compared to newer companies and start-ups with millennials at the helm. But it’s basically a case of “adapt or die.” Companies that consistently find innovative ways to develop and market their products will succeed in the long run. Tapping into Technology One prediction is that by 2021, there will be over 230 million digital shoppers in the United States. The role of technology affords many opportunities to provide a superb customer experience and gain customer insights at all the different touchpoints. The automation of customer service is one such element, and we’re seeing businesses introduce improvements like a call recording service to make life simpler for both customers and agents. Meanwhile, the rise of artificial intelligence can give extra insights into the customer experience using smart chatbots and analytics. Technology will only increase in importance, but you should make sure it is always useful to the customer and helps rather than hinders their journey! For older customers and more traditional businesses, the latest tech may not necessarily be the best solution for booking appointments, where it has advantages and disadvantages. Making it Personal A customer-led product strategy means learning which products appeal to customers and viewing them as much more than mere transactions. However, just offering them excellent products and an enjoyable, hassle-free experience isn’t enough. Personalization is the real key, as it makes customers feel like they are genuinely valuable to the business. Finding ways to personalize both the product and the overall journey will boost customer retention – and a happy customer will share their positive experiences with others, thus enhancing your rating on product review sites. It goes without saying that you should deliver a great omnichannel experience as standard. Still, it also helps to give customers personalized support as they browse and hopefully make a purchase. Customers appreciate little details, such as adding extra filters to narrow down browsing choices and save time. A customer-facing product roadmap can be used to let individual customers know what you’re up to and how you’re implementing their feedback, helping you to build a deeper relationship. You can encourage employees to develop empathy for the customers by talking to new service users and regular visitors if a customer has decided to switch to a different company, try to find out why – and see if there’s a way to tempt them back in. 点击播放声音 @keyframes VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } @keyframes VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } .volume__small-wave { animation: VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite; opacity: 0; } .volume__large-wave { animation: VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite .3s; opacity: 0; } 1:09:25●●●●●IntroCustomer Feedback and Your Product VisionDeciding What to BuildHow to Use Metrics to Align Product Strategy...Questions Answers #wistia_chrome_37 #wistia_grid_103_wrapper .w-css-reset{font-size:14px;} #wistia_chrome_37 #wistia_grid_103_wrapper 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.w-css-reset-button-important{border-radius:0!important;color:#fff!important;} Complete the form to access the full webinarFirst Name*Last Name*Job Title*Email*LIKE.TG is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy, and we’ll only use your personal information to administer your account and to provide the products and services you requested from us. From time to time, we would like to contact you about our products and services, as well as other content that may be of interest to you. If you consent to us contacting you for this purpose, please tick below to say how you would like us to contact you:I agree to receive other communications from ProductPlan.In order to provide you the content requested, we need to store and process your personal data. If you consent to us storing your personal data for this purpose, please tick the checkbox below.I agree to allow LIKE.TG to store and process my personal data.*You may unsubscribe from these communications at any time. For more information on how to unsubscribe, our privacy practices, and how we are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy, please review our Privacy Policy.#wistia_grid_103_wrapper{-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;box-sizing:content-box;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;height:100%;position:relative;text-align:left;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_103_wrapper *{-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;box-sizing:content-box;} #wistia_grid_103_above{position:relative;} #wistia_grid_103_main{display:block;height:100%;position:relative;} #wistia_grid_103_behind{height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;top:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_103_center{height:100%;overflow:hidden;position:relative;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_103_front{display:none;height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;top:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_103_top_inside{position:absolute;left:0;top:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_103_top{width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0;left:0;} #wistia_grid_103_bottom_inside{position:absolute;left:0;bottom:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_103_bottom{width:100%;position:absolute;top:0;left:0;} #wistia_grid_103_left_inside{height:100%;position:absolute;left:0;top:0;} #wistia_grid_103_left{height:100%;position:absolute;right:0;top:0;} #wistia_grid_103_right_inside{height:100%;right:0;position:absolute;top:0;} #wistia_grid_103_right{height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;top:0;} #wistia_grid_103_below{position:relative;} Maintaining Momentum A customer-led product strategy means you need to be proactive instead of reactive. Make sure you ask the necessary questions before the customer embarks on their experience, thereby keeping in control of the process. Once a customer has been convinced to create an account, the onboarding system is crucial in executing your product strategy. You could keep them coming back by creating personalized messages or offering free trials or discounts on products you’ve learned that particular customer would like. The importance of website maintenance cannot be overstated if you want customers to choose you over your competitors. Ensure your whole online presence is optimized to give all users the best experience on whatever device they use, including personalized product suggestions and plenty of up-to-date, relevant content. The eventual aim is that happy customers will keep returning, so you won’t have to spend so much on marketing and sales activities – especially great news for smaller businesses. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '1f74539e-d4fc-4cb3-97c6-fd86de2bf62e', {});

Why It Is Essential to Put Customers First with a Customer-Led Product Strategy

Is It Time to Dump Your Product Frameworks?

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

6 Rules of Product Design According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

As a product manager at LIKE.TG, I’m particularly proud of our new integration with Zapier because of the impact I know it can make. My appreciation of Zapier’s capabilities started years ago when I worked inCustomer Success here at LIKE.TG. Back then, we used Zapier to automate how we shared NPS feedback across the company. It was empowering to reduce the time I spent in spreadsheets, and I felt a connection with our customers who had similar pain points. I remember thinking how much time they could save by integrating Zapier’s app with LIKE.TG’s roadmap platform.The Challenge With SpreadsheetsSpreadsheets are a natural part of my and many product managers’ workflows. Yet, the manual work they require can be at the detriment of my more strategic work.During my research and customer interviews, I continuously heard conversations like the following, “I have 40 product managers in ProductPlan. I need to quickly and reasonably see what everyone is doing entirely in ProductPlan. Yet, a lot is still happening in Google Sheets and requires a manual transfer, which is time-consuming.”This type of scenario is where setting up the Zapier integration fits seamlessly. The automatic updates will support the workflow of product managers much more cohesively (including my own). So the choice becomes: do you spend the afternoon populating a spreadsheet or unshackling your roadmap data and syncing it effortlessly across your organization?Moving roadmap data automatically with Zapier feels I have my own personal product management assistant.Before I geek out further on the benefits of having Zapier automatically working with my roadmap, I want to be clear; it’s not an end all be all ‘magic solution.’ You still have to make intelligent decisions for Zapier to connect all the data dots into your roadmap effectively.Do the work properly, and with the help of Zapier, you will stress less about how you’re going to organize your work.4 Ways Zapier Can Improve Your Work1. Less manual effort, more time and energy.The number of product stack apps is growing every day. Getting your data moving from one place, like a project management tool, to your roadmap can be a lot of manual effort. You can export and import using spreadsheets, but that involves much data reformatting and room for error with each manual input. If both tools in question have an API, you could use that to keep data in sync, but that will usually require engineering resources.Despite your best efforts, data in your roadmap becomes static. I could spend my time manually updating and reimporting regularly—but that’s counterintuitive to the nature of roadmaps.I know from speaking with my peers, this manual workflow left us unsure that the version we were sharing with our key audience was, in fact, the latest and greatest. There’s always the looming question, “What if changes are being made elsewhere and not reflected in LIKE.TG?”The time and energy I spent on remedial tasks felt so ingrained in my work but ultimately took away from the time and energy doing more important tasks, like talking to our customers.2. Confidently manage a standardized, single source of truth.I’m constantly plagued by the feeling that as a PM, there can be a constant influx of information from various sources, all organized differently—Slacks, emails, research, talking to customers coming from everywhere. Sure, I can track it all in a notebook or my head, but to get it into a presentable format, I need to organize it manually. With the Zapier integration, standardizing your input sources is much easier to maintain. Inputs from Slack and email are funneled through Zapier into the LIKE.TG roadmap and repository format: ideas, descriptions, sources, and where those ideas are coming from all in the same formatting. Zapier, the dubbed product management assistant, has it all done for you in one central place automatically.I can export and import, prioritize, and share my roadmap. Then, the Zapier integration spits it out in a format that’s easy to manage. What are the critical decisions I can make because of this information? Previously, standardizing my work would take me an hour or two on a Friday afternoon. The beauty is you have Zapier, an execution tool, efficiently collaborating with, LIKE.TG, a more high-level tool.3. Rethink how you execute things.Take a moment to ask yourself, what are the time-consuming or frustrating tasks that you can offload? The Zapier to LIKE.TG integration helped me rethink my work in many ways, but here are two examples.We use Pendo to track NPS. I used to export the feedback into a spreadsheet every week. I’d read through all of the input. Not anymore. Zapier automatically culls through keywords and pulls out the scores I’m looking for.We started using Zapier for our Sales “Deals Closed” announcement to unify the team and foster excitement and celebration when deals were closed. Slack’s post included how each deal closed, with a summary paragraph that mentions the feature or product use case that won the deal.Here’s another example that I heard from customers. They have a Google Form on their website for requests. Once a week, they would export, review, and then manually transcribe it into the roadmap—spending about an hour every week doing this.Zapier and LIKE.TG’s integration automatically combs through the requests. It reformats them in a way you want. Hop in the roadmap, see who sent the form, what plan they are on, and who they are. All that information is in real-time on your table.I am executing the action of data entry. That time spent thinking about those feature requests and prioritizing those requests was manual overhead.hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '4077b305-9bcc-4a5a-a982-aad75ee06c23', {"region":"na1"});4. Support collaboration with your broader team.Last but not least, this integration empowers me. I’m not a technical person. I can’t build something with an API. Yet, with Zapier, I can skip the phase of sheepishly asking one of my developers for help to build an API. This opens up so many possibilities.At larger companies, it can take forever to get things done. Some of the work I’ve done in Zapier would take months to get done at a larger company. From securing engineering resources to actually building the sync, you could easily spend a quarter just trying to get the data you need instead of focusing on your core responsibilities. If a bunch of processes bogs you down, then you can’t achieve the job you’re actually trying to do. Do the thing instead of waiting.Any product manager can set this Zapier to LIKE.TG integration in a matter of minutes and not dedicate all your resources. That way, you have a quickie proof of concept with Zapier, and you’re not pulling engineers off of something more substantial.When I develop a plan with the rest of my team, Zapier will help me execute that plan with the tools that other teams, like marketing and sales, are using. This opens up possibilities for folks outside of the product. When we have feature requests, it can automatically pull these into our table view and comments through Slack, bringing visibility to anyone. It’s picking things up for me from all of my apps while working on my roadmap.TakeawaysZapier is a productivity tool. It’s a means to an end, but not a solution itself. Before, there was a disconnect between the ever-revolving cast of tools and our roadmap platform. Zapier integrating with LIKE.TG won’t make you a better product manager; you still have to make good decisions. What it did for me was change how I think about where I’m spending my time. Whether you use Zapier or not, I hope these examples help people think about how they can automate tedious processes or think about how they can be more efficient in their day-to-day tasks.

Zapier: My Personal Product Management Assistant

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

3 Tips to Make Your Product Manager Resume Stand Out From the Rest

According to LinkedIn, interest in product management has doubled in the United States in the past 5 years. LIKE.TG’s State of Product Management Report revealed that 72% of product managers are mostly happy or extremely happy in their current role. It’s a dynamic role with a lot of room to grow, so it is no surprise that we see an influx of product managers looking for advice to stand out. If you take away only one idea from this post about improving your product manager resume, I hope you’ll remember this: Highlight the impact of your work, not just the work itself. In my years as a product leader, I’ve reviewed a lot of product managers’ resumes. If I had to point to the most common shortcoming in these documents, it’s that their authors told me only what they did. They didn’t tell me why (or if) it mattered. Why is that so important? I’ll explain below. Then I’ll offer a couple more ideas to give your resume a better chance of standing out from the pile on product leaders’ desks. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '1a581ef6-fb4d-4638-afef-da3652feefb6', {}); 3 Tips to Make Your Product Manager Resume Stand Out 1. Show us why your work mattered. Why this works: It shows not only that you’ve done things (which doesn’t mean much) but that you’ve made a difference (which means everything). Product management isn’t about crossing items off of to-do lists. Nor is it about filling your day with tasks, meetings, and commitments. You’ll succeed as a product manager only to the extent that your work makes a positive impact on your company and your customers’ lives. Let’s say I’m reviewing a product manager’s resume, and I see bullet after bullet like the following. Established KPIs for the product team Coordinated with several departments across the organization Responsible for maintaining the strategic product roadmap Held regular meetings to update executives and other stakeholders Conducted customer surveys to gather product feedback I have no way of knowing whether or not this candidate is an effective product manager. I have no reason to feel confident that this person even knows what product management success looks like. It’s definitely not showing up in those bullets. A related point: When I suggest that you highlight your work’s impact, I don’t mean only in terms of revenue or other inward-looking metrics. Product leaders—or at least this product leader—will want to see evidence that you empathize with your customers. That’s the key to success in product management. It’s also lacking in nearly all of the resumes I’ve ever read from product managers. Here’s how I’ll be evaluating those bullets in product managers’ resumes and why. Not good: “I created product ABC.” This tells me nothing about the impact product ABC had—or didn’t have—on anyone. Better: “I created product ABC, which earned $X in revenue.” With this statement, I at least get a sense that the product resonated with some users. But I’d be disappointed if the product manager didn’t also think to describe—even briefly—how the product positively affected those users. Best: “I created product ABC, which helped improve the daily workflows—and therefore, in a small way, the lives—of more than 10,000 users.” Now we’re talking! That statement accomplishes so much. It highlights the product’s impact. It demonstrates the product manager’s empathy with their user persona. And it shows humility by acknowledging the product helped to improve lives “in a small way.” A resume built around these principles is going to get attention. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '57ff7e42-ccfa-4d9e-b5be-8a0f6ba69363', {}); 2. Show us how you bounced back from a mistake. Why this works: It demonstrates you’re able to learn, adapt, and solve problems. While interviewing product managers over the years, I remember several times uncovering a candidate’s most impressive attributes only after some prodding. Sometimes it happened entirely by accident. The details didn’t appear on their resumes. In fact, the candidates often seemed reluctant to share them with me at all. I think I know why. One of the most valuable skills in product management is the ability to course-correct after the original course proves unsuccessful. But to show a hiring manager that you’ve proven capable of finding a new solution after a failure, you have to acknowledge that past failure. How many times have you included on your resume a story about a disappointment or mistake in a previous job—and how you adapted to overcome it? I’m guessing none, and I don’t blame you. We’ve all been conditioned to believe our resumes should show only success after success. Back to those interviews I mentioned above, where I had to pull this information out of a reluctant candidate. Let me describe how it would happen because it usually happened the same way. I’d have the candidate’s resume in front of me, and I’d ask them to elaborate on something they’d written, such as: Implemented several best practices at the company. “Give me an example,” I’d say. I could tell they wished I hadn’t asked. “Oh, well, I introduced a few new processes to the product team when I started with the company. But honestly, they didn’t work out well. So, I tried a different approach. And those processes were really successful. In fact, we ended up sharing them with other departments in the company. They became best practices.” Talk about burying the lead! This is the type of story product leaders want to hear from product management candidates. We know you’re not perfect. Nobody is. But we want to know how you’ll react when you make a mistake or suffer a setback. Besides, the information in that story illustrates so much more than a “mistake,” if that’s even the right term. It shows growth, a problem-solving mentality, the ability to admit a mistake, and the ability to change direction when necessary. Also, product managers should be effective storytellers. Everyone loves a great comeback story. Including a “How I bounced back after a setback” anecdote will definitely give your resume a competitive edge over the rest. Watch our webinar, Hiring and Growing a Successful Product Team, to see what product leaders look for when hiring new team members: 3. Show us who you inspired… not what you ran. Why this works: Product leaders want to see your ability to persuade, build chemistry, and help a team succeed. Product managers don’t actually “run” anything. All of the teams you’ll work with as a product manager—in development, design, marketing, etc.—report to other people, not you. As we’ve written here at the LIKE.TG blog, two of the biggest lies product managers tell themselves are: “I am the CEO of my product” and “All product decisions need to go through me.” Running a team isn’t your job as a product manager. Your job is to persuade, inspire, and lead a team by earning its trust. Product leaders know all of this, of course. So, when you describe your previous product management role as “running” a cross-functional team or major product initiative, you’re not revealing anything unique or interesting to the hiring manager reading your resume. The real question is: Can you bring together several groups of specialists from across your company, make them feel like a team, get them working toward a shared goal, and give them the support they need to do their best work? That’s what a product leader wants to learn about you while perusing your resume. We want to know about your ability to: Build team chemistry Inspire your colleagues Collaborate and get along with all sorts of personality types Keep a large group of professionals, many in different departments and even different geographic locations, all pulling in the same strategic direction. If you can demonstrate those abilities in your Product Manager resume—heck, if your resume even demonstrates that you know the value of those abilities—you’re going to stand out among product management candidates. And if your resume reflects the principles I’ve outlined above, please send it my way. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '8bd83652-2868-48a8-9b9c-ebb8e0b9c945', {}); Read more of my conversation on this topic here: