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5 Ways LIKE.TG’s Table Will Make a Product Manager’s Work Easier
TLDR:
The Newest Version of LIKE.TG’s Roadmap App, with an Enhanced Table Can Be Your All-in-One Roadmapping Solution
With the new and improved table, roadmap owners can reduce their reliance on static spreadsheets and own the data behind their roadmaps. Now they can create, edit, and share ideas, strategic thinking, plans, evidence, and other details right in their roadmap software platform.
The Problem: Roadmap Data Lives in Too Many Places
It’s a challenge just about every product manager faces. Maintaining and updating roadmap details requires hopping back and forth between various apps and keeping track of several static files.
Most product managers use a spreadsheet to capture ideas, feedback, usage data points, and other product details. Then they have to reproduce the high-priority items in a different app—usually PowerPoint—to create a visual roadmap.
Whenever priorities change, or they need to add new information, these product managers have to update two static files: the spreadsheet and the slide deck. Even more frustrating, they need to make these updates separately in each file every time.
It’s not an ideal workflow.
The Solution: LIKE.TG’s Updated Table Creates an All-in-One Roadmapping Platform
We created LIKE.TG’s roadmap app to help you simplify the roadmapping process. With our latest release, which includes major enhancements to our table, you now have an all-in-one platform for your roadmapping tasks.
If you already use LIKE.TG, our new table will help you finally move your data out of a spreadsheet and into a live tool. Or if you haven’t started using a roadmapping app, you’ll find LIKE.TG creates an easy, intuitive way to manage the data behind your product strategy.
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We’ve made it easier than ever to create, view, edit, and share your roadmap data right in the LIKE.TG app. Here’s how.
5 Ways Our Updated Table Improves Your Workflows
Here are five quality-of-life enhancements in our new and improved table that can streamline your workflows, save you time and frustration, and help your team build better products.
1. See all of the data you need and none that you don’t
With the new table, you now have more control over how you view and edit your roadmap data.
You can see all of your bar details at once in the table. We’ve also included the ability to add or subtract which information is exposed, by toggling items in the Edit Columns dropdown menu.
If you’re used to relying on a spreadsheet to make updates and then manually pulling them into your roadmap, this can save you an enormous amount of time. It can also help you drill down into the information that’s really important—and hide what isn’t.
2. Switch into ‘roadmap update mode’ with ease
Sometimes you need to review your roadmap’s details for accuracy and make updates where relevant. Perhaps you need to add a new strategic objective, modify the tags associated with a roadmap item, or change up which team is working on which initiative.
You’ll find that all of these details are now housed within your table. By clicking into any field, you can make edits on the fly without needing to bounce back and forth between apps. Make all of the edits you need in one place.
3. Keep your planned and parked items close, but separate
The table offers two linked but separate sections: Parked (for your idea backlog) and Planned (for the items up next for development).
You can easily move features between Parked and Planned with just a click.
You can also add bars or containers directly to the planned section of the table, which is perfect for those instances when a new initiative is accelerated and needs to go directly on the roadmap.
4. Keep features in one place from creation to conclusion
Just because an idea evolves into a planned initiative doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to manage it from one interface. The new table makes it easier than ever to create, track, and update each product initiative throughout its entire lifecycle.
Whether you add new initiatives to your Planned or Parked lists, you can easily update each item in your table as it moves through development. You can also easily move an item to Prioritization in the score column.
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5. Automatically populate your table updates in the visual roadmap
When you update roadmap details in your table, the app will automatically transfer those updates across your roadmap.
No need to switch back and forth between views, or manually visualize initiatives in a tool like PowerPoint.
Note: For stakeholders who are more comfortable with spreadsheets than a visual roadmap, you can always present your product roadmap in table. This allows you to avoid the hassle of exporting CSV files, and provides control over what you present to who. Simply click the Edit Columns dropdown menu and select which information you would like to share with them.
What These Workflow Improvements Look Like in Practice
Let’s say you’re a product manager and need to organize and analyze a lot of data. Before prioritizing anything on a roadmap, you have to sort through feature requests, customer feedback, stakeholder priorities, and more.
With a more powerful table, you won’t have to constantly move between your spreadsheet and your LIKE.TG roadmap. You can now create, update, and maintain these roadmap details all within the LIKE.TG app. What if you’ve already built out your data in a spreadsheet? No problem. You can easily import your spreadsheet into your table without losing any of your formatting column orders or header names.
Seamlessly transition from creating roadmap data to visualizing roadmap data.
Takeaway
With LIKE.TG’s new and improved table, you now have one unified space to create, update, and maintain your roadmap details. You’ll be able to see everything at-a-glance, edit details inline, and find the information you need.
Improve Your Workflows with Our Improved Table
Try the Product App Free >
Taking the Leap: Why Product Managers Make Better Entrepreneurs
I’ve spoken with so many product managers who have a dream of becoming an entrepreneur or launching their own product one day. Every one of those conversations is exciting because that was my dream too.
After a decade of working with others to launch successful SaaS products, I took the plunge to launch a startup in 2013. As I continued to help launch products, I realized that I was prepared to dive into entrepreneurial life myself.
Our surveys at LIKE.TG support this trend of product managers (PM) desiring the entrepreneurial life. In LIKE.TG’s 2021 State of Product Management Report, we learned that 27% of product managers said they wanted to start their own company in the next 10 years.
The Evolution of Product-Led Growth
The evolution of product-led growth may seem to be a recent trend at software companies, but the underlying concepts have been in full force for years.
Being product-led is a path to success: we’ve seen consistently that product-led companies achieve faster growth once they achieve scale. Companies like Slack, Zoom, Calendly, Hubspot, and Dropbox are often mentioned as examples. But there are thousands of others that have achieved faster growth through similar methods.
I’ve had the fortune of working on teams launching some of the early SaaS products going back almost 20 years. All of them baked product-led growth into their business models.
In this article, I’ll give you some examples of product-led growth from my own experience. And I’ll additionally provide a few thoughts on where it’s all heading.
But first I’ll quickly explain what I mean when I say “product-led”. To me, it means that the company is thinking product-first and is focused on the customer experience. It means they use the product itself to drive growth through new sales and expansion revenue.
In my experience, the best companies build the business model to help the product achieve faster growth without adding a commensurate number of salespeople to the mix. Rather than the previous generation of software companies with high friction sales models, in a product-led company the customers themselves foster the growth.
My Experience with GoToMeeting: Growth Built-In
In 2004 I helped launch GoToMeeting, one of the earliest web-based products with a SaaS model. The product was acquired by Citrix, and later by LogMeIn. I was on the team conducting market validation and I led the early customer discovery interviews. I then wrote the product requirements that outlined the features, value propositions, and business model.
We took our learnings from launching two earlier products at the same company and created a model integrating several characteristics that, while we didn’t call it product-led at the time, clearly were product-led. These characteristics helped create a wildly successful product and a model for future companies:
Self-service model. Customers could use the free trial and purchase one or a few licenses with a credit card. We experimented zealously and continued to optimize the purchase flow and experience. While this seems like a no-brainer for so many software companies today, at the time it was an uncommon approach and helped our rapid growth.
Easy to get started. The product was easy to get up and running without any training.
Viral licensing model. Participants could join the meetings for free. This allowed viral awareness within organizations because it was so easy to get started. This then fostered growth as participants decided to host their own meetings and purchased a license.
Customer-focused pricing model. Our “all you can meet” pricing model was innovative at the time and was so appealing to customers who were used to the unfriendly meeting models such as per-participant / per-minute
Product-Led Growth at LIKE.TG
My company LIKE.TG launched our product roadmap platform in 2013 and we baked in product-led growth from the very beginning. In our early market validation, we discovered that product managers wanted to try the product on their own before buying. For that reason, we launched with a completely self-service model and didn’t hire our first salesperson until years later in 2016.
Here are some of the characteristics of LIKE.TG that make us product-led.
Educational focus with inbound marketing. Our low-key educational approach to content allows product managers to learn about us through high-quality articles, books, webinars, and other content. They choose to engage with a trial when they are ready.
Fully-functional Free Trial. Product managers can sign up for a free trial without a credit card and get access to all the features in our entry-level plan.
Easy to get started. Product managers could build (or import) their first roadmap in minutes – our interface is laser-focused on getting started fast. We deliver value in minutes, even before purchasing the product.
Self-service purchasing model. Since we launched in 2013, customers have been able to purchase licenses without contacting us. This makes it possible for product managers and others in larger organizations to “go rogue,” and purchase LIKE.TG (sometimes using their own credit card). This approach helps plant the seeds within an organization for future growth.
Free viewer licenses. When a product manager shares their roadmap for free to others (including executives), awareness within other teams grows – they are then inspired to purchase their licenses to create and edit their own roadmaps.
Easy to add more licenses. For our basic plan customers can add more licenses without contacting us – as awareness grows internally it’s easy to add a license so new people can get started immediately.
Network effect. As adoption grows within an organization, the value of LIKE.TG increases. As more product teams adopt the solution, we’re seen as a platform and the need for standardization across the organization becomes important. The standardization included in our enterprise plans evolves to be a requirement. These features provide even more value for larger organizations and an upgrade path for additional recurring revenue for us.
I’m not saying that we’ve nailed product-led growth. We have a lot more to learn and do. And our model continues to evolve. Today we have an enterprise account management team and more options for trying the product, including coordinated team trials, but our core product-led approach is still there.
Core Principles Going Forward
What I’ve described so far are a few basics from my experience that companies can adopt to become more product-led. My opinion is that we can focus on a couple of core principles to become more product-led in our companies. A couple of my favorite products can provide some insight.
The first core principle is to deliver an outstandingly positive user experience. A great example of this is Slack. Like many of you, we’re a customer, and it was their thoughtful focus on creating a simple and fun way for our team to communicate that created rapid and enthusiastic adoption.
The other core principle is some kind of viral growth built into the business model – often accelerated by existing customers. I’ve been a customer of Calendly’s meeting scheduling tool for a while now because it makes it so easy to find meeting times. I chiefly use it for scheduling calls with customers. It’s the virality of their product that fascinates me—every time I send an invitation to someone to find a meeting time, I’m essentially sending an email to a new prospective customer for them. The product doesn’t need an overly aesthetic UI to have product-led growth. It’s so easy to get started that this product gains fast adoption.
For those of us in the software world, most of us want to evolve to be product-led. By looking at these examples you hopefully are inspired to build growth levers into your product and business model. Have other examples? I’d love to hear what you think.
How to Hire with an Impact Mindset
When prioritizing items for our product roadmaps, we sort and select them based on their ability to influence key metrics, achieve strategic goals, delight customers, and generate revenue. In evaluating possibilities, we choose the initiatives that maximize ROI and make the most of the available time and resources. In short, we’re trying to create a positive impact, and one lens to deploy for these exercises is the IMPACT mindset I’ve written about in our new free ebook. But the decisions we make as product leaders extend far beyond which themes and enhancements cut the next release. In this blog, I want to talk about hiring with an IMPACT mindset. Deciding which roles our team needs and who should fill them exercises muscles product leaders don’t use that often. It’s not like we’re hiring new product managers every few weeks like some of our engineering counterparts might fill out their vastly larger ranks.
Product management hires at all, but the largest companies are relatively few and far between. And because we don’t get many opportunities, that makes these decisions that much more critical. We can’t just hire another if the first turns out to be a dud without navigating painful human resources processes. Plus, we have to find someone else to do the work while restarting another lengthy recruitment and hiring process. There’s usually a decent appetite for experimentation, ongoing learning, and trial and error in product development. But not so much when it comes to staffing. This makes our hiring decisions in many ways even more impactful than some of the choices we make around our products themselves.
Why hiring product managers is so hard
I don’t need to tell anyone in product management that finding good talent is tricky; anyone who’s ever had the opportunity knows that resumes and cover letters don’t give you a full sense of the candidate. Plus, you tend to get a flood of highly unqualified applicants you still need to sift through.
But why is a product hire so much harder than finding another engineer or salesperson, or customer service rep? It’s because we ask so darn much from product management at every level. No other job requires you to do many different things with a high level of competence and mastery.
In addition to being asked, forced, and blessed to wear so many hats, there’s also no preferred path to a career in product management. Our ranks include former developers, marketers, analysts, and customer success reps. They all bring unique experiences and skills to the table. But comparing candidates with such diverse professional backgrounds can be challenging. Especially since they may all have their own ideas about what product management actually is and what the day-to-day job looks like.
Product management also requires a broad slate of soft skills to succeed. These aren’t binary, checklist items that a hiring manager can surmise from a glance at their C.V., and your HR department typically can’t offer much assistance in this department either. It requires probing interview questions and reference checks that try and uncover the real person you’ll be working with and relying on if they join the organization.
Using IMPACT to Choose the Right Product Hire
We know product management hires are important and that it’s hard. Luckily we can apply IMPACT to this process to help ensure we make quality hires that increase productivity and cut down on turnover.
IMPACT comes in handy from the very first step—writing a killer job description—to making the final decision. Each pillar gives us something to think about and consider as we seek out additional team members.
hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '76387af0-7ef4-49da-8b36-28e99e4f5ba3', {"region":"na1"});
How to Hire with IMPACT
Interesting
You want to work with interesting people—you’re going to spend a lot of time with them, after all—so you can look for candidates with backgrounds you find intriguing. A clone army is not the goal for product teams, as every new person brings a new perspective and lived experience to the table.
More importantly, you want to hire people who are interested in things. You want people that always have another question and are lifetime learners. They should be intrigued by customers and their stories, always inquisitive but not seeking to impose their viewpoints on others until they’ve done their homework. If they’re not curious, they’re not likely to be an excellent product manager.
Meaningful
Even the most junior product manager has a lot of leeway in how they spend their time. Since you don’t want to spend all your time babysitting your staff, finding candidates that are instinctually focused on important things is key.
Their resume and how they talk about their past achievements can be indicatory in this department. Using language about “improving” or “enabling” things and “delighting customers” resonates with me far more than simply “increasing revenue” or “delivering” lots of projects.
I’m looking for a strong moral compass and recognition that they have the ability to make a difference in people’s lives through their work… even if it’s on something relatively mundane.
People
Product management is a team sport, even if you’re the only one with “product manager” on their business card. No one in this role can succeed if they don’t work well with others. So, naturally, I’m seeking evidence of past success in this area and an awareness of its importance.
“Collaboration” and “partnering” carry much more weight than simply “leading” or “running” things. Candidates must truly value the importance of working with others and creating alignment and consensus.
Actionable
Coming up with ideas is easy. Coming up with good ideas that are actually doable is a lot harder. I’m looking for team members that don’t let “perfect” be the enemy of “good.” This means actually getting things done. I also want individuals who identify doable opportunities and not just pie-in-the-sky ideas.
By ensuring candidates are grounded in reality, I know they’re going to gravitate toward opportunities that are practical and possible. It necessitates a 360-degree-view of the situation, collaboration with technical stakeholders to assess how actionable things are, and a focus on incremental progress toward goals.
I also want product managers who don’t just present information and problems. I want them to have a clear ask or solution to go along with it. This is happening, this is what it means, and this is what we need to do now.
Clear
Communication skills are one of the top requirements for successful product management, and I’m looking for clear, concise communication from candidates from the get-go. This starts with their own “elevator pitch,” as I expect them to entice me and sell me on them quickly.
This isn’t to be mean or overly judgmental. Rather, it’s an indicator of their ability to command the room and convey the essential information—and do so in a convincing way. Product management is always competing for the time and attention of stakeholders. So I want to know they’ve got what it takes to thrive in those environments.
Testable
The job application and interview process is really one big series of tests and questions. Have they checked enough boxes to warrant a phone screen? Do they still seem interested after learning more about the job? Did they conduct themselves well during interviews with myself and colleagues and distinguish themselves positively versus the other candidates?
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I’m also testing for my comfort with the hire. What do they bring to the table, and how will it positively (or negatively) impact the combined skills, experiences, and talents of the overall team. Is it filling a need or duplicating an existing strength?
But for a product management role, I will also literally put applicants to the test. These should be reserved for finalists out of respect for their time (and mine!). But for such a key hire, it’s important to see their work output and the tactics and strategies they utilize to do it. I have several examples of these test exercises in my book.
Hire with IMPACT at Every Opportunity
More than anything, incorporating an IMPACT approach into your hiring philosophy is all about making the most of the limited chances managers get to augment and improve their staff. Who we hire will have a massive impact on both the products in our portfolio and the teams we manage.
We want assets instead of liabilities, high performers, and not needy neophytes. This requires scrutiny, inquiry, judgment, and a healthy dose of gut feel (which we normally try to tamp down in this line of work).
At the end of the day, we want employees that share our values and work ethic. They should be worthy of our trust and not clash too much with our style. Using IMPACT is one way to ensure our choices match that intent.
An Alive Strategy vs. Dead Strategy
When prioritizing items for our product roadmaps, we sort and select them based on their ability to influence key metrics, achieve strategic goals, delight customers, and generate revenue. In evaluating possibilities, we choose the initiatives that maximize ROI and make the most of the available time and resources. In short, we’re trying to create a positive impact, and one lens to deploy for these exercises is the IMPACT mindset I’ve written about in our new free ebook. But the decisions we make as product leaders extend far beyond which themes and enhancements cut the next release. In this blog, I want to talk about hiring with an IMPACT mindset. Deciding which roles our team needs and who should fill them exercises muscles product leaders don’t use that often. It’s not like we’re hiring new product managers every few weeks like some of our engineering counterparts might fill out their vastly larger ranks.
Product management hires at all, but the largest companies are relatively few and far between. And because we don’t get many opportunities, that makes these decisions that much more critical. We can’t just hire another if the first turns out to be a dud without navigating painful human resources processes. Plus, we have to find someone else to do the work while restarting another lengthy recruitment and hiring process. There’s usually a decent appetite for experimentation, ongoing learning, and trial and error in product development. But not so much when it comes to staffing. This makes our hiring decisions in many ways even more impactful than some of the choices we make around our products themselves.
Why hiring product managers is so hard
I don’t need to tell anyone in product management that finding good talent is tricky; anyone who’s ever had the opportunity knows that resumes and cover letters don’t give you a full sense of the candidate. Plus, you tend to get a flood of highly unqualified applicants you still need to sift through.
But why is a product hire so much harder than finding another engineer or salesperson, or customer service rep? It’s because we ask so darn much from product management at every level. No other job requires you to do many different things with a high level of competence and mastery.
In addition to being asked, forced, and blessed to wear so many hats, there’s also no preferred path to a career in product management. Our ranks include former developers, marketers, analysts, and customer success reps. They all bring unique experiences and skills to the table. But comparing candidates with such diverse professional backgrounds can be challenging. Especially since they may all have their own ideas about what product management actually is and what the day-to-day job looks like.
Product management also requires a broad slate of soft skills to succeed. These aren’t binary, checklist items that a hiring manager can surmise from a glance at their C.V., and your HR department typically can’t offer much assistance in this department either. It requires probing interview questions and reference checks that try and uncover the real person you’ll be working with and relying on if they join the organization.
Using IMPACT to Choose the Right Product Hire
We know product management hires are important and that it’s hard. Luckily we can apply IMPACT to this process to help ensure we make quality hires that increase productivity and cut down on turnover.
IMPACT comes in handy from the very first step—writing a killer job description—to making the final decision. Each pillar gives us something to think about and consider as we seek out additional team members.
hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '76387af0-7ef4-49da-8b36-28e99e4f5ba3', {"region":"na1"});
How to Hire with IMPACT
Interesting
You want to work with interesting people—you’re going to spend a lot of time with them, after all—so you can look for candidates with backgrounds you find intriguing. A clone army is not the goal for product teams, as every new person brings a new perspective and lived experience to the table.
More importantly, you want to hire people who are interested in things. You want people that always have another question and are lifetime learners. They should be intrigued by customers and their stories, always inquisitive but not seeking to impose their viewpoints on others until they’ve done their homework. If they’re not curious, they’re not likely to be an excellent product manager.
Meaningful
Even the most junior product manager has a lot of leeway in how they spend their time. Since you don’t want to spend all your time babysitting your staff, finding candidates that are instinctually focused on important things is key.
Their resume and how they talk about their past achievements can be indicatory in this department. Using language about “improving” or “enabling” things and “delighting customers” resonates with me far more than simply “increasing revenue” or “delivering” lots of projects.
I’m looking for a strong moral compass and recognition that they have the ability to make a difference in people’s lives through their work… even if it’s on something relatively mundane.
People
Product management is a team sport, even if you’re the only one with “product manager” on their business card. No one in this role can succeed if they don’t work well with others. So, naturally, I’m seeking evidence of past success in this area and an awareness of its importance.
“Collaboration” and “partnering” carry much more weight than simply “leading” or “running” things. Candidates must truly value the importance of working with others and creating alignment and consensus.
Actionable
Coming up with ideas is easy. Coming up with good ideas that are actually doable is a lot harder. I’m looking for team members that don’t let “perfect” be the enemy of “good.” This means actually getting things done. I also want individuals who identify doable opportunities and not just pie-in-the-sky ideas.
By ensuring candidates are grounded in reality, I know they’re going to gravitate toward opportunities that are practical and possible. It necessitates a 360-degree-view of the situation, collaboration with technical stakeholders to assess how actionable things are, and a focus on incremental progress toward goals.
I also want product managers who don’t just present information and problems. I want them to have a clear ask or solution to go along with it. This is happening, this is what it means, and this is what we need to do now.
Clear
Communication skills are one of the top requirements for successful product management, and I’m looking for clear, concise communication from candidates from the get-go. This starts with their own “elevator pitch,” as I expect them to entice me and sell me on them quickly.
This isn’t to be mean or overly judgmental. Rather, it’s an indicator of their ability to command the room and convey the essential information—and do so in a convincing way. Product management is always competing for the time and attention of stakeholders. So I want to know they’ve got what it takes to thrive in those environments.
Testable
The job application and interview process is really one big series of tests and questions. Have they checked enough boxes to warrant a phone screen? Do they still seem interested after learning more about the job? Did they conduct themselves well during interviews with myself and colleagues and distinguish themselves positively versus the other candidates?
hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '6dfa8cf7-7fd5-4e22-8d7e-edacfc23154a', {"region":"na1"});
I’m also testing for my comfort with the hire. What do they bring to the table, and how will it positively (or negatively) impact the combined skills, experiences, and talents of the overall team. Is it filling a need or duplicating an existing strength?
But for a product management role, I will also literally put applicants to the test. These should be reserved for finalists out of respect for their time (and mine!). But for such a key hire, it’s important to see their work output and the tactics and strategies they utilize to do it. I have several examples of these test exercises in my book.
Hire with IMPACT at Every Opportunity
More than anything, incorporating an IMPACT approach into your hiring philosophy is all about making the most of the limited chances managers get to augment and improve their staff. Who we hire will have a massive impact on both the products in our portfolio and the teams we manage.
We want assets instead of liabilities, high performers, and not needy neophytes. This requires scrutiny, inquiry, judgment, and a healthy dose of gut feel (which we normally try to tamp down in this line of work).
At the end of the day, we want employees that share our values and work ethic. They should be worthy of our trust and not clash too much with our style. Using IMPACT is one way to ensure our choices match that intent.
5 Things Your Product Leader Doesn’t Want to See on Your Roadmap
Product managers can find inspiration for their products everywhere, and that’s great. But those inspired ideas can’t go straight onto the roadmap. A product manager first needs to subject a new concept to a process that involves making the case. For example, they can do this through research and weighing the idea against other items already on the roadmap. And perhaps most importantly, before you add or remove anything, you should gain leadership consensus.
As someone who has worked for years as both a product manager and a product leader, I can tell you this from firsthand experience (some of it learned the hard way). Do not let your product leader see any of the following on your roadmap.
1. Surprises
Don’t make your product leader ask, “What’s this?”
Let’s say you’re working on a mobile app, and someone in your office mentions that connecting more deeply with Facebook would increase app engagement with specific segments of your user base.
That sounds like a great idea. And we all know how thrilling a product manager can find discovering an excellent idea for their product. (It’s one of the best things about this job.) Also, let’s assume you trust the judgment of the person who suggested it—a sales manager or a product manager who handles a different suite of apps. So, you immediately add “Implement Facebook Integrations” to the roadmap.
Then your product leader sees it and says, “Huh?”
It would have helped to discuss this with your team, including your product leader before the integration epic appeared on your roadmap.
Worse, you didn’t subject the idea to the full vetting before adding it to the strategic timeline. When your product leader asked about it, you weren’t ready with the answers to all the necessary follow-up questions, such as:
Which persona will these integrations resonate with, and why?
What will the anticipated increases in engagement do for the bottom line?
How are we going to measure success with this initiative?
A great idea alone can’t earn a spot on a product roadmap. Only great, vetted, and agreed-upon ideas can.
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2. Items that raise more questions than they answer
Don’t make your product leader ask, “How is this going to work?”
Now imagine that for a different item you’re adding to the roadmap, you’ve cleared the first hurdle above. You shared the idea with your product leader and the rest of the team, and it won’t take them entirely by surprise when they see it on the roadmap. Heck, the team may even agree in principle that the idea had merit.
And now you’re thinking: Everyone sounded enthusiastic about this idea. Why not give it a slot on the roadmap right away? So, that’s what you do.
Then your product leader sees the initiative on the roadmap and says, “Wait. Did we all agree on this? Does our development team have the expertise to build it? Have they agreed to the timeline I see here? Did we get the budget?”
Again, you’ve created friction with your team by short-circuiting the process of building alignment. You’ve also undermined your product leader’s trust in your judgment and your ability to guide the team successfully through development.
If I saw an initiative suddenly appear on one of my product managers’ roadmaps—and it raised more questions than it answered—here’s what I would be thinking: If I can’t count on you to gain team alignment around a new item before you slap it on the product roadmap, what else should I be concerned about?
3. Items that have disappeared without explanation
Don’t make your product leader ask, “Where’d that epic go?”
Assume your product leader and other executives will notice any change you make to your roadmap. If you decide to shelve an initiative that your team had been expecting to build, you first need to complete two strategic steps:
Step 1: Build and document your case
When you drop a feature or epic from your roadmap, your product leader will need to know why. They might have shared the item with the rest of the executive team or discussed it with sales and marketing. You don’t want to pull the rug out from under everyone now, and not without good reason.
Your development team, which may have already begun breaking down the initiative into stories and tasks, will also expect to know why it’s off the roadmap. If they have spent time and resources delegating tasks and creating a schedule, you owe them an explanation for why you’ve decided to change plans.
Step 2: Have the conversations
It would help to let your team know about your plans to table the initiative. Your first call (or Zoom or Slack or drop-in) should be with your product leader, and you’ll want to share your reasoning and then seek agreement.
If your product leader agrees, it’s time to update the rest of the team. That means having the conversation with development, sales, marketing, customer success, and any other people who could be affected.
Even if you don’t need their approval or agreement, you still want to offer everyone on your team a thoughtful explanation about why you’re making this change. It can ease the frustration of anyone who has already started working on the now-tabled initiative.
It will also show that you respect your coworkers and believe that they have a right to know not just what’s happening but why. That will help you strengthen these meaningful relationships with your cross-functional team.
Purpose-built roadmap app
By the way, this is reason number 7,329 to use a purpose-built roadmap app, rather than trying to maintain your product roadmap in a static file like a spreadsheet or slideshow. A native web app will let you make changes like this on your roadmap much more quickly and easily.
For example, with the LIKE.TG app, you can easily switch any initiative from Planned (where you publish in-flight items on the main roadmap view) over to Parked with just a click.
Also, you can—and should—add a comment beside the Parked item to explain why you’ve chosen to park it.
If your product leader or other execs open your roadmap and notice something missing, they can easily find it in the Parked section, along with a brief explanation of why you moved it.
Better still: Before removing any strategic initiative from the roadmap, have that conversation with your product leader.
4. Technical details that fail to tell a story
Don’t make your product leader ask, “Why should we care about that?”
Your roadmap isn’t the place for technical specs, and it’s there to tell the compelling story behind your product.
Let’s say you’ve prioritized making your enterprise software more secure to meet customers’ regulatory needs in industries like healthcare and financial services. One project that came out of your research is to beef up your apps from 32-bit to 64-bit encryption. Offering that level of security will stop your software from getting eliminated from these customers’ searches. Solid plan.
But then, when you add that epic to your roadmap, it looks like this:
“Upgrade enterprise apps to 64-bit encryption.”
And your product leader says, “Why should we care about that?” Fair question. The encryption enhancement itself isn’t the goal, just a step toward achieving that goal.
The epic should read:
“Enhance app security to acquire more healthcare/FinServ customers.”
That tells a story!
With LIKE.TG’s app, you can even add a blurb explaining your reasoning, which you can hide in the epic and make available by clicking on it. That description might read this like:
“Our research suggests health/financial markets are choosing our competitors because their regulators demand higher levels of encryption than we offer.
Remember, your roadmap should communicate your strategy and plans. Any technical details that fail to advance your big-picture story will only slow your readers down and make them ask, “Who cares?”
5. Lack of clarity about where the product stands now
Don’t make your product leader ask, “Where are we today?”
Anyone who opens your roadmap should be able to quickly figure out what strategic initiatives you’re working on now, the status of those items, and what projects are up next. But with the tools that most product managers use for roadmaps—spreadsheets, slideshows—conveying this information is difficult.
It would be best to keep that in mind when you build and share your roadmap. The roadmap should clarify and illuminate the details of your progress—not confuse your audience. When your executives review the epics on your roadmap, how will they know whether each one is complete, in process, or not started?
One simple solution—and reason number 7,330 to use a purpose-built roadmap app—is to create your roadmap using software that lets you update the percent complete of any item on the roadmap. The right roadmap software will also integrate with your project management apps. That way, you can sync the progress of each roadmap item with the relevant tasks your team is working on and tracking in their project management app.
In the LIKE.TG app, that looks like the screen below. Those with access to the roadmap can click into a theme or epic, allowing them to see how much progress the team has made.
The key takeaway here is when you present your roadmap, or if you publish it live and invite the company to review it anytime, you always want to be able to answer—clearly and with data—the question, “Where are we today?”
Successful Roadmapping Always Comes Down to Communication
The common thread among all the pitfalls I’ve discussed in this post is lack of communication. When it comes to creating and maintaining a product roadmap that will benefit your company, the key is communicating with the relevant people every step of the way.
When you present the roadmap to your product leader or when people in other departments log in to your roadmap online to see where things stand, you want them all to find it clear, compelling, and consistent with their expectations. You don’t want to give anyone a reason to say, “Huh?”
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Kicking Off a Greenfield Project: What Product Managers Need to Know
Kicking off a greenfield project can be one of the most challenging tasks a product manager ever faces. Greenfield projects present different risks from other types of product development. Bringing these products to market requires a different strategic approach. And the process can be downright scary.
I’ll walk you through a few strategies I’ve found work well for turning a greenfield project into a successful product.
What Is a Greenfield Project?
First, let’s make sure we’re on the same page about this concept.
The term greenfield gets its name from the construction industry. It describes a project that builders will be starting from scratch. That is, they’ll be building on a green field with no infrastructure already in place. Adding a science lab to an existing college campus, by contrast, would be a brownfield project.
In product management, greenfield projects refer to products developed entirely from scratch. For software companies, this would mean that the solution your team plans to kick off does not have:
Existing codebase for the development team to build on.
Current user base to leverage for usage statistics and feedback.
Market history to estimate adoption rates, revenue, or customer lifetime value.
Company familiarity with the value proposition or user personas.
Constraints on how to proceed (which might be the most challenging aspect).
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There’s Greenfield, and Then There’s Greenfield
There’s a spectrum in terms of how green the field is among these projects. For example, a product idea might be new to the company thinking about building it but already available from a competitor.
Then there are projects where the concept itself is new to the market (think Uber a decade ago). The truth is, any greenfield project is going to be challenging. But for a product concept that doesn’t have a comparable on the market, you’ll find even more obstacles.
From this point on, let’s use the latter definition of greenfield. Imagine your team wants to build a product that is genuinely new to the market, has no direct competitor, and which your target users don’t even know they’re missing.
Let’s start with an example of such a product idea. Then we’ll walk through a few strategic steps that can increase your chances of market success with this greenfield project.
Hypothetical Greenfield Product: A Chat-based Hiring App
First, let me briefly discuss the difference between a brownfield project and a greenfield project. An online job site that decides to build an instant-messaging feature into its platform is creating a brownfield project. The company already runs a job site with a wealth of usage data. And they can work with existing users to validate the idea of adding a chat feature.
But let’s assume that’s not your situation. Instead, imagine your company is a startup. And you want to create a brand-new hiring app built as an AI-based chat platform. You’ll be creating the solution from the ground up. Since there are no other chat apps on the market that connects job seekers and hiring managers—you have a true greenfield project.
How the heck are you going to pull this off? Here are a few thoughts.
1. Prepare to spend months on research.
Because you are starting literally from scratch with this idea, your team will need to front-load your research work.
With no competitive chat-based hiring apps to investigate, you’ll need to get creative. Your research might involve activities such as:
Talking with representatives of each of the app’s personas: job seekers, recruiters, company founders, department leaders, and HR managers.
Learning from these key personas about their current hiring processes. Find out what tools these people use today. Understand how those tools help and where they fall short. Know where these personas struggle in the process, and what solutions they wish they had. The more information you gather, the better.
Validating your idea with your key personas. Note: Market validation is more than your focus group liking the idea of an AI-based chat app for hiring. They also need to confirm that they would be willing to pay to use it.
Investigating other business areas to discover if any of these areas have successfully improved their processes by using messaging. The investigation could give your team a sense of the workflow improvements that your app can offer the industry.
Researching the existing online job sites and other digital tools used to connect candidates and recruiters. Here, you’ll want to learn whether these platforms use messaging in any way. If so, need to find out how people use these tools and how they affect the hiring process.
2. Start educating your market on the problem.
Let’s say you’ve confirmed with your personas that there’s a market out there for your app. You’re confident you’ve hit on an ingenious idea that’s going to cause an earthquake in the recruiting industry.
That’s great. You’ll need to maintain that enthusiasm and share it across your company. But you also need to remember that nobody cares outside the walls of your organization. Nobody knows your product is on the way. And because the market has never introduced such an app to them, your personas don’t feel like they’re missing anything.
Education is a critical component of thought leadership.
Because you are building this app from scratch, you can anticipate a longer timeframe for the initial development. Your product and marketing teams can use this time wisely to create content discussing the problems your personas face today.
Start a public conversation about the many drawbacks
Again, you’ll be facing a similar challenge here in terms of being able to show direct data. You can’t demonstrate that chat-based recruiting tools speed hiring time by XX days. Or that it reduces the number of interviews required to fill a job by XX%. That data doesn’t exist yet.
But you can plant the seed in your future customers’ minds about the inefficiencies they’re living with today. You can base your claim on the existing apps available to customers. For example, you might be able to find data showing:
Most hiring managers and job seekers feel unsatisfied with the traditional job interview format. Both sides wish they could engage the other using less formal communication.
The average time to hire using traditional online job sites is XX days. It is XX% longer than recruiters would prefer.
The average number of interviews per hire is X, which is XX% more than recruiters would prefer.
HR managers say that the hiring process consumes XX% of a typical hiring manager’s time.
3. Share the vision with your company, and evangelize the heck out of it.
Your coworkers won’t know why your product team is bouncing off the walls with enthusiasm, either. So you’ll need to persuade them to start bouncing too.
You will need to spread your enthusiasm across the company—and you need to start right away. For example, you’ll want to:
Make sure your engineering team understands the app’s objectives, use cases, and value proposition. Engineering is a true strategic partner as they build from scratch. Product and Engineering can work side by side on all coding decisions. The more your engineers can envision the power of this product, the better decisions they will make.
Walk your marketing and sales teams through your strategic vision for the app. At this greenfield stage, your plans and ideas are all abstractions. You need to help your marketing team understand the value proposition and market opportunity. Without that information, marketing can’t do its best work.
Make your evangelism an ongoing project.
Remember, bringing your greenfield project to market will take many months. Therefore, you need to keep the momentum and enthusiasm levels high for as much of that period as you can. You must encourage ongoing communication. You need to regularly check in with each team. And most importantly, you need to share all insights that show this new app will be awesome.
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What LIKE.TG’s Integrations Can Do for Your Company
TL;DR
LIKE.TG integrations help your team extend the value of your roadmapping app. The integrations help you automate the flow of data across your most essential product management tools. This post will show you what some of our key integrations can do for your company.
Your Roadmap Doesn’t Exist in a Vacuum.
We built the LIKE.TG roadmapping app to simplify product management. Historically, most product managers—including our founding team—were stuck building and updating their roadmaps in spreadsheets and presentation files. We wanted to give product professionals an easy-to-use web platform to let them build and share visually compelling roadmaps. Customers can easily update those roadmaps with drag-and-drop ease.
But product roadmaps don’t exist in a vacuum. The information on a roadmap is interconnected with data in other apps used by stakeholders across the company. If your roadmap app does not connect with these tools, your product team could perform a lot of manual re-work and app hopping. For example:
As your development team closes out user stories in Jira, you might need to update the status of your roadmap’s initiatives manually.
When your product team wants to add backlog items to your Roadmap, you might need to re-enter those items from your original backlog source manually.
If you want to walk your stakeholders through your Roadmap but can’t get them all together, you might need to explain your Roadmap over and over as each stakeholder becomes available.
If you want to keep up with the progress of roadmap initiatives, you might need to review these details in your development team’s task management app.
When you make changes to your Roadmap, you might need to send out the update notifications to stakeholders manually.
Soon after we released the LIKE.TG app, we went to work building integrations to connect our customers’ roadmaps with the apps and data sources their stakeholders use every day.Download the Essential Feature Kickoff Book ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '28f87cb3-284f-41bb-aa69-525372e559e0', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});
Add Value to Your Roadmap with the Right Integrations
Let’s look at how a few of the many LIKE.TG integrations can help streamline your workflows, improve alignment across teams, and help everyone in your company make better product decisions.
The LIKE.TG Jira integration: sync the development team’s progress to your product roadmap.
After you’ve communicated the strategic plan for your product, your development team will break those projects into discrete tasks. They will likely assign and track those tasks in another software development tool, such as Jira.
With the LIKE.TG Jira integration, you can 2-way sync fields between Jira and your roadmap so updates to your projects in one tool are reflected automatically in the other (and vice versa).
The dev team breaks up an epic into five separate user stories in Jira and assigns an equal number of points to each story. You can associate all five stories with the relevant epic in your Roadmap. And as the developers mark each task complete in Jira, your Roadmap will update the “percent complete” field to reflect the good news. When you click into the epic in your Roadmap, you will see the status of each user story in Jira—either complete or in progress.
Key benefit
You can save time and stay better informed by monitoring the progress of both your dev team’s tasks and your strategic projects—all without leaving your LIKE.TG app.
You can also use your bar’s percent complete feature to show the overall status of the epic based on the total story points the dev team has marked complete in Jira.
Note: We also offer an Azure DevOps integration if that’s your jam.
The LIKE.TG Confluence integration: make it easy for your stakeholders to stay up-to-date on your product strategy.
The LIKE.TG Confluence integration is an example of how our integrations can help you keep stakeholders across your company better informed about your product strategy and progress.
This integration lets you embed a live version of your LIKE.TG Roadmap into the Confluence workspace your developers, marketing department, or other teams use to get their work done.
Your developers or marketing team spend most of their time collaborating and working in their Confluence wiki. Perhaps they won’t want to log into your Roadmap each time they need to view the latest version or remind themselves about the objective behind an epic or theme. With this integration, they won’t have to.
You can create a page in Confluence for these teams to view the current version of your Roadmap without having to leave their favorite workspace or even log into ProductPlan.
Your stakeholders can also interact with the Roadmap from their Confluence environment—including adding a comment or question for you.
Key benefit
You can make it easier for stakeholders to check in on your product roadmap, which will increase the chances they refer to it when needed. The result will be that your cross-functional team stays aligned and up to date on your product’s strategy.
Oh, and one more big benefit: Implementing integrations like this, which make life easier for stakeholders across your company, will also help you build a sense of trust, respect, and teamwork among those stakeholders.
The LIKE.TG Slack integration: automatically send notifications to stakeholders whenever your roadmap changes
With a simple web link, you can invite stakeholders to view the latest version of your product roadmap anytime. But the LIKE.TG Slack integration makes it even easier to keep your stakeholders up to date.
With the apps linked, you can program LIKE.TG to send an automated notice to the relevant Slack channel when someone updates your Roadmap.
Imagine you have a Slack channel of stakeholders contributing to your product launch: people from the product team, dev, sales, marketing, customer success, and an executive sponsor. Anytime you add an item to a container, change the timeline of an initiative, or make other updates to the Roadmap, LIKE.TG will send a message through that Slack channel.
Also, if a stakeholder adds a comment or question on the Roadmap, LIKE.TG will send that exchange to the Slack channel.
Key benefit
By automatically pushing roadmap-update notices through Slack, you accomplish two objectives. First, you increase the chances of stakeholders seeing a notification they need to know about because you won’t be relying on them checking in with the Roadmap. Second, you eliminate a lot of work for your team, sending out update alerts manually anytime something changes on the Roadmap.
Nor are these the only ways this LIKE.TG integration can improve team alignment around your Roadmap. Check out our recent article to discover more ideas for communicating your Roadmap with Slack.
Note: We also offer a Microsoft Teams integration if that’s your jam.
LIKE.TG Integrations… Thousands of Them
We wanted to make sure LIKE.TG integrates with any of the roadmap-adjacent apps and data sources your team uses. That includes tools for task management, DevOps, spreadsheets, team collaboration, analytics, marketing automation, customer relationship management, team chat, etc.
So, in addition to the many native integrations we’ve built, LIKE.TG also integrates with Zapier. This integration makes it easy for you to connect your Roadmap to any of the 3,000+ apps in the Zapier library.
Want to integrate your Roadmap with Salesforce, Google Docs, Asana, Zendesk, Dropbox, GitLab, etc.? No problem. Just turn on your LIKE.TG Zapier integration—and start extending the value of your Roadmap across your company.
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Your Digital Transformation Program is Wasting Your Money
The amount of money invested in “Transformation Programs” is staggering.
In the past 20 years, we have seen Digital and Agile Transformation Programs grow and swell to $1.3 trillion dollars in 2020 alone. According to the HBR, 70% of that spend is wasted.
Many companies miss a key component in their Transformation Program.
How will a Product-Led Transformation be Different?
You only have to whisper the word “transformation” and the next thing you’ll see is people scurrying away.
It’s a word that isn’t commonly favoured by the Product community because Transformation Programs rarely allow Product Teams to autonomously decide how they’ll achieve their mission. The term “transformation theatre” reflects how new practices are perceived after a Transformation Program. Organisations arbitrarily issue new role titles such as Product Owner, Agile coaches are bussed in, and teams are organised in “squads”. This seems to be the extent of some Transformation Programs from a Product Manager’s perspective.
Rarely, do we hear of Product Teams given the space and time to conduct Problem and Solution discovery properly. Instead, Product Teams are normally given features to develop, not outcomes to achieve.
But, Transformation Programs incur significant costs.
There are various sources which suggests that the spend on Transformation Programs are astronomical. Some of which are;
Harvard Business Review states,
$1.3 trillion that was spent on Digital Transformation last year (2018)
Digital Transformation is not about the Technology
According to CIO magazine,
Global spending on digital transformation technologies and services was $1.3 trillion in 2020.
What is digital transformation? A necessary disruption
And Barry O’Reilly argues that,
By 2023, an estimated $7 trillion will be spent on these initiatives annually.
The Metrics Of Digital Transformation: Small Steps to Outcome-Based Innovation
According to the HBR,
70% of that spend is wasted.
Digital Transformation Is Not About Technology
As you can see, the amount of money invested in Transformation Programs is staggering.
Unfortunately, Product People are normally the overlooked recipients of Transformation Programs rather than actively involved change leaders. As Product People, we should not only deeply care about the dollars spent on Transformation Programs but we should find ways to participate and lead the program. These programs affect our practice directly. They affect our ability to do our jobs. Sadly, they can also badly affect our ability to meet our promises to our customers.
Transformation is such an important, emerging topic in the global Product community that we are focusing on it at LTP Digital 2021 | APAC.
The burning questions that we want to consider at the conference, and afterwards, are:
How can Product People participate in company-wide Transformation programs, and extract more value from these initiatives?
How can Product People design and initiate Product-Led Transformation programs that enable their organisation to continuously discover, design and deliver products to the right market at the right time?
What is Transformation?
Transformation is about embracing a new way of operating – an alternate way of living – for organisations and the people in the organisation.
According to Innosight,
“What businesses are doing here is fundamentally changing in form or substance. A piece, if not the essence, of the old remains, but what emerges is clearly different in material ways. It is a liquid becoming a gas. Lead turning into gold. A caterpillar becoming a butterfly.” The Transformation 20: The Top Global Companies Leading Strategic Transformations
A lot has been written specifically about Digital Transformation as,
“The integration of digital technology into all areas of a business, fundamentally changing how you operate and deliver value to customers. It’s also a cultural change that requires organizations to continually challenge the status quo, experiment, and get comfortable with failure.” What is digital transformation?
Digital Transformations challenge current operating models and architecture, allowing organisations to be more adaptable to market fluctuations. It means the introduction of:
Agile SDLC Practices
Continuous Delivery
Simplified Governance Model
Continuous Funding Approach
Team Performance Management Indicators
New Roles Career Paths
Integrated Digital Technology
Innovative Products
What Do We Mean by Product-Led?
“Product-Led” means aligning all your business activities around modern Product Management practices, by:
Continuously identifying markets and customers with unsolved problems,
Acquiring and or developing a feasible and sustainable solution to solve these problems,
Exchanging measurable value by delivering a timely, desirable and intuitive solution to the market.
“Product-Led Transformation” means re-focusing your business on the fundamentals of real value creation, while embracing the benefits of the faster engines that digital and Agile practices have delivered.
Product-Led Transformation is more holistic than other transformations, because it begins with the customer. The outcome of a Product-Led Transformation is an organisation that is aligned first and foremost towards discovering and quantifying customer problems before designing solutions.
It is about changing established mindsets and practices to ensure that organisations stops throwing random features into their product mix, and hoping that somehow the good will emerge.
Why Should We Care?
Product-Led Transformation creates an environment for companies to build more successful products.
The evidence resoundingly shows that
“Product-Led companies yield better financial results.”
“These companies perform better than other companies including those organizations built for the Sales Marketing-Led era. Today there are 21 large public companies with a Product-Led model. These companies have a combined market capitalization of $208B and are performing better post-IPO.
Exemplary Product-Led organizations are Zoom, Datadog, Slack, Fastly, Pagerduty, Elastic, Surveymonkey, Pluralsight, Smartsheet, Docusign, Dropbox, Twilio, Atlassian, Shopify, New Relic, Hubspot, and others.”
What is Product-Led Growth? How to Build a Software Company in the End User Era
Being Product-Led also means using Product-Led growth techniques which reduce the reliance on sales and marketing to drive growth. The product itself is designed to motivate customers to subscribe to the product.
The Difference Between Digital Transformation and Product-Led Transformation
One of the key differences between a Digital Transformation and a Product-Led Transformation is that Product-Led Transformation focuses on introducing:
Better, more holistic Product Management practices, and
More strategic, effective Product Management roles.
What often happens after the implementation of a Digital Transformation program is that leaders continue to frame their plans as a series of features, instead of ‘problem’ or ‘outcome-driven’ plans. This leads to two commonly seen challenges:
The organisation succeeds in feature delivery, but not necessarily customer-value delivery.
They become good at ‘building the thing’, but are not asking ‘is this the right thing to build?’
Teams are so focused on delivering features that they become mere order-takers, who are not entrusted to focus on tackling the real problems, and delivering the right solutions.
This is not to argue that Digital Transformations aren’t valuable. In principle, they are worthwhile. But often these programs run for far too long, and at the same time don’t go far enough. The intent of Digital Transformation is to improve the organisation. In practice, however, the Programs do not allow the right teams to participate, and to provide their insights as to the best ways to deliver value to the organisation, as well as to customers. Product-Led Transformation builds on the Digital Transformation mindset but provides additional capacity and tools to convince an organisation’s leaders to let go of dictating what gets built.
Product-Led Transformation teams do not start by focusing on delivering features. They start by focusing on solving problems, which ultimately delivers more genuine customer and business value. Another key difference between Product-Led and Digital Transformation is the approach to change. The Product-Led Transformation approach is a “minimal viable digital change program, delivered by a semi-autonomous Lean and Agile product innovation team.”
It is Time to Stop the Waste
Seriously, stop wasting billions on Transformation projects. Instead, apply smaller incremental changes in the organisation, to test and learn if these changes make a positive difference. Consider learning more about The 7Ts of Product-Led Transformation.
Want to improve your company’s chances of Transformation success by learning how others transformed their companies and teams using Product-Led techniques? The evidence shows that Product-Led organisations yield better financial results.
LTP DIGITAL 2022 | USA is a one-day conference that is all about how to become one of those organisations.
The Product Trust Communication Curve
There’s a concept in business called the trust communication curve. It states that the more trust between people or teams, the less one-on-one communication they’ll need to align on goals. If you graphed that curve, it would look like this.
The product trust communication curve follows the same logic. As trust increases, product managers can rely more on communicating information. They can even refer people to the roadmap, rather than repeating twice.
And according to the data we’ve collected, product managers want that ability. In LIKE.TG’s 2022 State of Product Management Report, we uncovered interesting data points on this topic.
First, most product professionals (62%) share product information with internal stakeholders by hosting live meetings. That is more than 5x the number who said they refer people to the product roadmap and ask them to review it themselves (11%).
But when we asked how they would prefer to communicate this information, our survey respondents voted strongly in favor of asking stakeholders to review the product roadmap.
As you can see from the response percentages here, many product professionals (45%) would be happy to host a meeting with stakeholders. They don’t mind communicating product strategy, plans, or other details to everyone. But they don’t want to repeat answers to the same people asking the same questions repeatedly.
Download the stakeholder analysis guide ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3eb23c05-aee3-46a4-9662-df983ee6cc53', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});
Why It’s Valuable to Understand the Product Trust Communication Curve
The sooner you establish trust across your company, you can reduce your time repeating yourself to stakeholders.
The more they trust the product team, the more your stakeholders will feel confident finding the answers to their questions. In other words, boosting trust with stakeholders is a great way to save your product team a lot of time.
In the next part of this post, I’ll offer suggestions for improving your product trust communication curve.
What Improves Trust Between Product Managers and Stakeholders?
Unfortunately, the first factor that increases trust is one you can’t manipulate: time.
I’ve worked with hundreds of product professionals in my career. I have also had the chance to work closely with customers. In my experience, I have found that more seasoned product people tend to trust their processes more. They and they also enjoy more trust from their colleagues. Both factors enable senior product professionals to communicate information once, and they can refer stakeholders to the roadmap instead of answering the same question twice.
Some of the trust you’ll earn as a product manager comes only with time and experience. But the good news is that there are things you can do today to improve your company’s product trust communication curve. Yes, even if you’re a newbie to product management.
4 Tips to Improve the Product Trust Communication Curve at Your Company
1. Invest in relationship building.
One key to building trust is to build familiarity. Your developers can’t trust you if they don’t know you. Time spent together—even just chatting in the lunchroom or exchanging fun GIFs over your chat app—can go a long way to establishing that level of comfort that leads to trust.
Also, the more time you spend talking with stakeholders across the company, the more you can develop a common language to ensure everyone aligns around product strategy, goals, and vision. Every department has a unique shorthand, and your role as a product manager includes uniting all stakeholders around a shared language.
2. Keep your roadmap accurate and up to date.
Trust goes both ways. Suppose you want to feel confident that your stakeholders will always be able to find the details of your latest strategy, timelines, and priorities. In that case, you’d better make sure that the roadmap is always current.
If your stakeholders trust you—but they don’t trust the roadmap will always be up to date—you can expect them to come to you with their questions every time.
And that’s one more reason to use native roadmap software. When your roadmap lives on multiple stakeholders’ computers as static files (XYroadmap-v3-new-FINAL-updated-v2.xlsx), someone could quickly be working from an outdated version. But if you have a purpose-built roadmap app, you’ll have one version—online, to which you can easily invite stakeholders—and updating it will be as simple as drag and drop.
3. Present your product information consistently
The details on your product roadmaps will change over time, and you’ll include different information from one roadmap to another. But to build trust, you’ll want to create as consistent a process as you can to present that information each time.
For example, if you add an epic or feature to the roadmap, you’ll want to explain how it supports the strategy. That process builds trust because it helps you show stakeholders the strategy behind your decisions. But here’s the key: Include that strategic reasoning every time you add an epic or feature.
Using purpose-built roadmap software, you can drop a strategic statement just below the epic in the same bar. What’s important is that your stakeholders learn to find that strategy in the same place each time they see a new initiative added to the roadmap.
To the degree your stakeholders have a consistent and predictable experience reviewing your product roadmap, it will enhance their trust in the process—and in you—and make them more self-sufficient.
And remember: the more your internal stakeholders become more self-sufficient at staying current on your product strategy, goals, and responsibilities, the less time you and your team will have to explain—and repeat those details.
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How To Build a Customer-Facing Roadmap That Communicates Your Product Vision
At LIKE.TG, we are revolutionizing how a company delivers products to market by elevating product organizations to the heart of strategy and execution. This vision holds true with our own organization as well. It is a very meta experience to build the LIKE.TG platform as a go-to central hub for everything product management-related. As we help our customers overcome challenges, we’re using the same product we deliver to customers to overcome our own challenges. It’s a win-win situation!
This year, we focus on the major priorities that help us achieve our vision while maintaining an easy-to-use, delightful, and flexible user experience. Through this effort, we created a very exciting and strategic annual roadmap.
With so many impactful initiatives planned out for the year, we knew it was important to communicate with our customers and keep them updated on our product strategy. And what better way to do that than a customer-facing roadmap?
Why we built a customer-facing roadmap
Our customers are one of the major driving forces behind what we decide to build. Their thoughts and feedback are an incredible source of information for our product team. In fact, customer interviews play a key role in what gets prioritized and put on our roadmap.
The purpose of our customer-facing roadmap is to communicate the vision of LIKE.TG and, at a high level, show the steps we’re taking in 2022 to realize our vision. And by creating a customer-facing roadmap, we can address common questions from our customers like:
What is LIKE.TG working on right now?
What new features and updates are coming next?
And most importantly, why is LIKE.TG doing what they are doing?
Through this exercise, we have uncovered helpful best practices and tips for creating your own customer-facing roadmap. Keep reading to learn more!
How we built our customer-facing roadmap
When we began building our customer-facing roadmap, we thought about a frequently referenced metaphor for prioritization:
In this metaphor, you have a jar, rocks, pebbles, and sand. The goal is to fit the most important items into the jar. However, if you start with the sand and pebbles (the less important stuff), you quickly run out of room for the rocks. Instead, you start with the rocks, then the pebbles, and finally the sand. In that order, everything perfectly fits into the jar. The rocks leave gaps that the pebbles can fill, and the remaining gaps fill with sand.
So how does this translate to building a customer-facing roadmap?
We started with the rocks—these are the major items that we’re tackling to achieve our vision for the year. These are the product features that will have the greatest impact on our customers and therefore need to be on the customer-facing roadmap.
The smaller items (the pebbles and sand) typically don’t impact our entire customer base, and we don’t necessarily plan our development sprints around them. We can get more done when we properly prioritize these items according to importance.
The roadmap is designed to be dynamic and evolves over time. This can play out in a multitude of ways, but a great example is when we refined our filter functionality based on customer feedback. Thanks to the flexibility of our roadmap, we were able to accommodate this update.
Organizing major items on the roadmap
Once we decided on our “rocks” or major initiatives we planned for the year, our next focus was organizing this information into a roadmap that would make the most sense for our customers.
We organized four categories into columns from left to right on the roadmap to give our customers an insight into our plans. The four columns are:
Recently released. The containers and bars in this column help our customers understand what problems we’ve recently solved.
Now. Bars and containers in this column are problems we’ve committed to solving and are actively being built.
Next. We’re currently researching bars and containers in this column and plan to build solutions for these problems next.
Future. Bars and containers featured in this column represent items we recognize as an opportunity to invest in research but have not committed to building yet. The information here gives our customers insight into what we are thinking about long-term.
Below, is a mockup of what this kind of customer-facing roadmap can look like.
We also break down our product vision using bars, containers, and lanes:
The Legend represents how we will execute our vision for the year. So everything featured in the customer-facing roadmap lines up to specific items in the legend.
Lanes represent areas of investment. These areas are how we spend our time and help us ensure we can organize our resources towards our specific goals throughout the year.
Containers organize bars and provide additional context.
Bars feature details about specific features that contribute to the overall objective.
Our roadmap does not include everything we have planned for the year. It would be way too overwhelming if that were the case. So the smaller items, our pebbles and sand, don’t make it on the roadmap because they are lower priorities. Instead, we include them in our regularly scheduled release notes.
Take a look at the mock-up below to see how changes and updates to the container and bar details can be communicated in the Highlights section.
It’s important to note that we restart the roadmap each year, so we focus on the specific vision and goals that we set for that year.
How we share our roadmap
Our roadmap is a tool for starting a conversation with our customers. It is also an opportunity to learn more from our customers. Their feedback from conversations where we share the customer-facing roadmap helps us inform and refine our plan.
Our customer success team is trained on the ins and outs of our customer-facing roadmap so that we can have these important conversations at scale. With this training, our customer success team can speak confidently to the problems we are solving, they provide the product team with more insightful customer feedback, and it is a great way to develop deeper relationships with our customers.
As an added bonus, our roadmap also serves as a great training tool for our customers so they can build their own customer-facing roadmaps.
Looking to the future
We’re so excited about all of the major enhancements and updates planned for the year. Additionally, we’re looking forward to continuing our work with our customers to achieve our vision of revolutionizing product management.
Lessons from a Product Launch: Rivian
Lessons from a Product Launch: Rivian
Ask any product manager, and they will tell you that product launches are equal parts daunting and exciting. “Go, go, go” is the mantra, as all team members kick into high gear to get the first minimum viable product (MVP) out into the world.
Launching a product should be an exciting time for product managers and key stakeholders. However, it is often a daunting task because there are a lot of moving parts throughout the launch process. It includes running customer validation interviews and developing team sprints, communicating updates with internal stakeholders. And so much more!
It’s a lot to manage, both at a macro and a micro-level. Pretty daunting, right?
A successful product launch provides a sense of accomplishment and excitement, despite how chaotic it first appears. That’s the situation Zack Suhadolnik, a Senior Product Designer, found himself in at Rivian—an American electric vehicle automaker and automotive technology company. “It was pretty chaotic; I’d say,” he mused. It is completely understandable, considering Rivian was simultaneously going to market with the first-ever EV truck, gearing up for their IPO, and grounding its new brand.
Zack was gracious enough to sit down with us to share his first-hand experience with Rivian’s R1T electric truck launch. We came away from the discussion with some fundamental principles that can benefit any product person managing their own respective launches.
View Chaos as an Opportunity
Chaos—it’s a state of being that evokes images of complete disarray and a lack of process. It is a natural byproduct of a product launch of any size. Yet, we should view chaos as an opportunity to create order by streamlining the product launch process.
“I personally thrive in the chaos [of a launch]. It’s really easy for me to pump something out fast, and I get inspired when we’re just like, ‘All right, we gotta stand this up as soon as possible.’ It sparks creativity for me.”
During launches, Zack noted that things need to get done and get done fast. The need for speed sparks and generates inspiration that would not exist otherwise.
“Creativity comes out of those less structured chaotic projects. For designers, the beginning of a project is where it’s the most fun. As soon as a project starts to get very organized and you’re starting to implement things is when I think creativity drops off.”
When Zack joined the team at Rivian, there were some initial structures in place for his team, but also room for creativity. This unique freedom—given to everyone in the organization—was a boon to a designer like him.
“If you look at a lot of other automotive industry companies, their design is all very similar, very templatized. It is clean, and it probably converts really well, but it lacks character and any sort of voice that’s different.”
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Stay Open, Come Together
Complete freedom and collaboration did not just happen organically at Rivian. It’s their core principle, embodied in the mission statement, “Stay open, come together.”
At all levels of the company, there is a shared vulnerability that encourages employees to reiterate on ideas to make them better. Coworkers have a pride-driven “fight” instinct to redo initial versions of products. The company firmly believes everyone should have pride in their work.
While collaboration is encouraged at every company, during Rivian’s launch, they took it a step further. Zack references the “storming” phase of Tuchman’s stages of group development to describe research and ideation at Rivian. During this phase, leadership and individual teams leverage as many creatives as possible to solve a problem, produce the best ideas, and prioritize the right items.
“It’s really hard for some people to accept this strategy, and I think it takes a certain personality type to thrive in that sort of ambiguity and uncertainty. But you get to make sure that everything’s on the table, and then you can start to narrow in on what’s feeling right.”
Zack admits that this is a unique approach to Rivian, not in execution but the executive buy-in. They allow teams to bring in people early and often at the beginning of ideation and even intentionally cross-pollinate teams on the creative side. As a result, the process allows each team a broader view of their options and opportunities and keeps fresh perspectives at the forefront of their projects.
Collaboration Doesn’t End with the Launch
What happens after the product gets launched? At Rivian, they pump the brakes. Then, each team carefully works in a cross-functional way to smooth out any leftover rough edges from the launch.
“For me personally, it’s been a very new way of working. I’ve always been so used to just owning everything. So to be vulnerable and open up has been hard, but I think it really leads to better design in the long run.”
Groups that got siloed came together to foster further collaboration. Their goal is to move forward and align on what worked and what did not retroactively.
3 Key Takeaways from Rivian’s Product Launch Experience
Rivian’s product launch has several key takeaways from a product perspective:
1. Embrace the chaos of the launch, and use it to your team’s advantage.
Tap into that mix of creativity and independence to get a bird’s eye view of the problem at hand, ensuring that you have a higher chance of executing the right decision.
2. Collaborate with anyone and everyone at the early stages of a launch.
Early collaboration ensures that you have good coverage on all ideas for your side of the product. Additionally, it ensures you plant the seeds of cross-functional teamwork to deal with possible siloes later in the launch. Executive buy-in can be another way to ensure the success of this collaboration.
3. Conduct a retrospective and reach out to siloed teams post-launch.
The retrospective process allows your team the opportunity to align with others from a process perspective and take stock of what worked and what didn’t during the launch.
No product launch will turn out perfectly, but there are important learnings to be had from each launch, even those outside of a traditional software product launch. Take these findings and apply them to your next major launch!
P.S. Have a great product launch story to share? We’d love to hear it! Send a brief overview of your product launch tale to [email protected], and we’ll be in touch.
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Product Managers Give Too Much Context
Information overload is a pre-existing condition these days. In our personal lives, we have endless streams of news stories and social media updates to scroll through. Our workplaces also overflow with facts, figures, and anecdotes that, in theory, empower us to make better decisions.
Yet, we can only absorb so much at once. We have programmed ourselves to tune out whatever seems irrelevant. This allows us to maintain our sanity.
We must balance between providing too little and too much information. Our stakeholders need just enough information to make informed decisions. And unfortunately, we’re going overboard far too often.
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Making your case
As product management professionals, our success depends on our ability to convince our stakeholders to pursue particular paths. We’ve prioritized these options based on what we’ve learned from our customers and the marketplace. From those findings, we align those insights with the business’s strategic goals.
To move forward, we must make compelling and convincing cases to support these ideas. Without solid information, we can’t secure buy-in from our peers and superiors. We know hunches, emotional appeals, and personal preferences must take a backseat to data-driven decision-making and cold, hard facts.
With the best of intentions, we want to give these stakeholders context. They require a full appraisal of the situation, the various dynamics, the ramifications of action or inaction. We want them to reach the same conclusion we’ve already reached. Though, we shouldn’t assume they need the same data and learnings we used to get there.
At the same time, we want them to be independent thinkers. They should use their own autonomy to confidently reach conclusions they themselves believe in. This forces us to create a delicate balance, keeping the pendulum from swinging too far in either direction.
Less is more when it comes to context
We hear all the time that “context matters,” but there can be too much of a good thing. When we inundate stakeholders with information, a few bad things can and often do happen:
They don’t see the forest for the trees. Context comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s easy to focus on the elements you agree with or find interesting or seem problematic. When presented with an extensive buffet of contextual elements, stakeholders can miss the big picture or give certain areas disproportionate attention and weight.
They get distracted by something non-essential. Shiny object syndrome can strike anywhere, and some stakeholders can easily latch onto a certain detail and zoom in when they should be zooming out. This might be because they’re desperately trying to poke a hole in your case because they’re not personally a fan or maybe they’d just rather go down a rathole than actually make a decision. Regardless of why, these tangents stretch the entire process out, make meetings take forever, and squash momentum.
They mentally check out. People don’t listen when there is too much information. Humans can only take in so much at once, especially when they don’t think they’re getting enough real value or benefit. When their eyes glaze over or they pick up their phone, you know you’ve lost them. After that, they’re unable to process what they’re seeing, hearing, or reading and just go through the motions, relying on instincts and previously held beliefs rather than the new information they’re receiving.
With these dangers in mind, we must instead adopt an essentialist approach to context.
Understanding Your Audience and Your Objective
Bearing in mind the risks of overwhelming your audience, the key to deciding what, how, and how much context to provide is working backward: Who is your audience and what do you want from them?
Each stakeholder, whether they’re a busy executive, a marketeer, or a seasoned sales rep, has a unique set of priorities, interests, experience, and preferences to account for. You can use a little stakeholder analysis to figure these things out and try to see the situation from their perspective.
Next, determine what it is you need from them and pre-define what constitutes success. It might be buy-in or approval for a roadmap or change request or funding, but you may also need them to actually do something new or in a different way.
If you don’t know what you need your audience to do with this new information, how can you expect them to? They must know why this matters to them and impacts their job since people also don’t listen when they don’t know how to put that context to use.
Choose Wisely and Select with Intent
From this point forward, every portion of context you dole out should be with the sole intention of getting them closer to making that decision of instituting that change. Anything extraneous only works against you.
Your product development team doesn’t need to know your buyers are price-sensitive, but your sales and marketing team do. And the executive team likely doesn’t need detailed statistics about how many people use your app on a tablet versus a smartphone, but that’s some invaluable context for the UX team.
What we edit and leave out is in some ways more important than what we leave in. As we tailor what we share and how we share it based on our different internal audiences, we must strip things down to only the crucial bits of context for that particular crowd and the business need at hand.
While this applies to discrete meetings, presentations, and emails, it extends all the way to the dashboards, reports, and automated updates we provide stakeholders. If we’re hitting them with too much irrelevant context on the regular, why should they start paying attention now? By creating limited, filtered views of data that actually matter for each cohort, we keep them focused on the most pertinent details.
Finally, you must create accountability. You can’t just give them a market overview or a tour of personas or an update on a new technology. You must set the stage before presenting all that context by explaining what they’re supposed to do with that information and then finish up by reiterating the action items and deadlines.
Tell Them with a Story
One way to limit context overload is to present information as a story. But we’re not writing a novel or meandering fluff piece, this is a straight-to-the-point fact-rich account with a clear call to action.
Relying on the inverted pyramid structure, the most important information is always first. Since the reader might stop at any point (not to mention an editor lopping off the end of the story for space or brevity), storytellers don’t get the luxury of tossing in colorful anecdotes and descriptions or sprinkling in interesting but non-essential asides. There’s still a narrative, but after a few paragraphs, everyone gets the gist and knows what comes next.
Consider sharing your context with the same ruthless approach. What must they know to make an informed decision and what’s expected of them next? If they want more details, they can ask for them, but you need to keep it short, sweet, and simple.
It might feel like you’re depriving them of immersing themselves in all you’ve learned. You may also be concerned you’re not giving a hard enough sell. But in reality, you’re giving them just enough to grant them informed autonomy, facilitating the decisions and actions the product needs without bogging them down with extraneous embellishments.
With this stingy-but-sufficient approach, each stakeholder has the context they need to decide or act and you get the results you set out to achieve. Save the rest for the water cooler.
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Launch Management: A Tour of LIKE.TG’s New Solution for Bringing Products to Market
The ugly truth is product launches are a messy business. At times, they can be overwhelming, impossible nightmares. There are launch activities to track, expectations to manage, and stakeholders to hold accountable. Product teams carry this burden alone without the help of proper tooling.
Launch Management is a first-of-its-kind tool for product teams that helps you wrangle the chaos of a product launch. We are incredibly excited to show you how you can guarantee launch readiness, all within a single platform. For more, check out our guided product tour of Launch Management functionality provided below.
Today our Launch Management solution enters General Availability as an exclusive Enterprise Plan feature set. For our LIKE.TG customers, if you have questions about our pricing plans or want to see a demo, you can reach out to your Customer Success Manager, or you can schedule a demo here.
Or, if you’re new to LIKE.TG and want to try everything we offer, including best-in-class roadmapping and tailored launch planning, you can also sign up for our two-week free trial.
But first, let us take a step back and explain how we realized the opportunity for launch management.
So why did we build Launch Management?
Ask any product manager about their launch process, and you will likely hear something like this: “It’s a nightmare. There’s no standard process for go-to-market. It’s confusing for everyone.”
Or maybe something like this: “It’s a nightmare. I’ve never worked for a company that had an airtight GTM process. There’s always a stakeholder who wants to be more in the loop and says there isn’t enough communication.”
Or even this: “Lol, what launch process?”
Disclaimer: These are all actual statements our customers made when we spoke to them about their launch process!
Product managers are some of the most organized people in the world. They must be to rally their entire organization around the product strategy successfully. So it’s telling that such a critical piece of the product strategy—its execution—is described as a trainwreck.
However, it’s not their fault. Launching a new product or feature requires the complex orchestration of multiple moving pieces. It extends beyond the product and engineering teams to include marketing, sales, customer success, legal—the list goes on. It’s one of the few instances where an entire organization collaborates to do a single project simultaneously. Of course, it’s a mess.
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What challenges does Launch Management solve?
Many of our customers spoke candidly about their challenges with inconsistent and disorganized launch processes. Our research discovered three core challenges at the heart of the problem.
1. Lack of visibility across teams
There is no single place to check the status of an upcoming launch and any deliverables it requires. Instead, that information is often scattered across documents and minds, spanning teams and, at times, entire departments. To uncover what needs to be done next is to go on a scavenger hunt. The result is wasting valuable time and fraying nerves.
2. Building manual, time-intensive reports to access launch progress
Many product managers are stuck building manual, time-intensive reports to assess launch progress and identify loose ends. Time spent here is time spent away from work product managers want to be doing: talking with customers and collaborating with their dev teams to build new cool things.
3. Inconsistent and disorganized launch processes
And finally, the ad hoc, figure-it-out-as-we-go nature of these proceedings means no two launches follow the same process. Instead, launches are inconsistent and disorganized. Repeating successful launches isn’t easily done. Failed launches have no easy answer to the question, “why didn’t this work?” And every new launch must start from scratch.
In many cases, stakeholders involved in the launch aren’t clear on expectations and therefore default to peppering the launch leader with the dreaded “so what should I do next?” question. Instead of distributing mutual ownership of the launch among all relevant stakeholders, the lion’s share of the responsibility rests with the product team. If the product team doesn’t make sure it happens, it simply doesn’t.
The problem with status quo solutions
These challenges haven’t had great solutions. Yes, you can build a launch process on a house of cards using spreadsheets, slide decks, and a jumbled array of documents. But that leaves you chasing the work when you’d rather be directing the strategy.
To make matters worse, there are no purpose-built tools for launching a new product.
There are plenty of tools that help you organize a project. They might allow you to plan deliverables, assign owners, and create due dates—all of which are useful in planning a product launch. But it’s rare for tools like these to be managed by the product team, and they never live alongside other important pieces of the product puzzle, like the roadmap.
A launch process that’s severed from the product strategy is a dangerous thing. It encourages messy handoffs while creating unintended silos.
Ideally, your product vision will carry from your roadmap to the launch plan. You want every deliverable created—whether a marketing asset, a sales talk track or a customer support article—to demonstrate a firm understanding of the “why” behind the product. If you create these deliverables in a silo, it’s less likely they will leverage important pieces of product knowledge. They may not empathize with key customer pain points, for instance, or show little understanding of the target audience.
The cost of a bad launch
It’s difficult to overstate the cost of a bad launch. There is, of course, the opportunity cost to the product team when things break down. Instead of doing more important work, they must play the role of project manager and hold things together for their go-to-market team.
Occasionally, a launch cobbled together on the fly like this is a success. Even if the road was a painful one. The cost of product diverting their attention to wrangle the chaos might not be felt until later when it becomes clear other opportunities slipped by the wayside while the product team had their hands full.
But more likely, a bad launch means, well, a bad launch. That means your product isn’t being pushed by your enablement team or sold by the sales team because there was no clear direction or ownership over key deliverables. A bad launch might result in poor customer awareness of the new thing you’ve built or, perhaps worse, a betrayal of customer expectations. A bad launch can also result in a delayed launch, meaning less time on the market, generating revenue for the company.
Overall, a launch that flops is painful for everyone involved. It takes a cut from sales expectations. In addition, it hampers the marketing team’s ability to bring in new leads. It steals a vital tool away from customer success in their fight against churn. This reflects poorly on the product team, who tragically may have built the perfect product. The launch just didn’t do it justice.
Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be this way! Let’s dive into an overview of LIKE.TG’s new Launch Management solution.
A guided tour of Launch Management
To ensure every launch is a winning launch, you now have Launch Management. With our solution, you can:
Create thoughtful launch strategies that your entire team can get behind
Build tailored plans for each launch, assign due dates, and assess progress
While creating shared ownership of your go-to-market process
The Launch Dashboard: Ditch the hassle of weekly launch reports
Welcome to the Launch Management Dashboard. This is your 10,000-foot view of all upcoming launches in a single place. We designed the Dashboard to wrangle together all the important details you need to see at a glance about every launch you have planned.
Use the Dashboard to see all upcoming launches and their respective launch dates. You can also use the Dashboard to track progress on individual launches, which is calculated automatically according to the percentage of completed deliverables in the Launch Checklist (more on that later).
Based on the progress of your launch and its launch date, you can assign each launch a status: low risk, medium risk, high risk, or launched.
While the Launch Dashboard is fantastic for helping you and your team stay organized in your go-to-market planning, it’s also the perfect place to send executive stakeholders whenever they come sniffing around asking for an update. It houses everything the curious senior executive needs to feel “in the know” about your launch strategy.
And as a bonus, it allows you to sidestep having to create manual, time-intensive reports every week.
The Launch Checklist: Manage the launch strategy, not the work
The Launch Checklist is where a product launch comes together. A successful launch includes a tailored array of deliverables. In some cases, the list may be small. It might only include release notes, a new section in a product support article, and a slide for the sales team.
Other launches might require the kitchen sink. In either case, for a new product or feature to land successfully in your customers’ laps, you need other members of your organization to pitch in and help support.
We designed the Launch Checklist for this purpose. Many product people we work with described how the handoff between the release of a new product and its launch often felt like tossing items over a fence, hoping others would be on the other side to receive them and run. You have complete visibility into every task required to see a launch through to success with the Launch Checklist.
The Launch Checklist has a few purpose-built tools to help you do this. Each item added to the Launch Checklist has a place for a brief description, a due date, and an owner. So, you can assign anyone in your account (both editors and viewers) as a deliverable owner. Upon assigning, that person receives an email alerting them to the required task.
The goal is to create co-ownership of the launch. We’ve heard many horror stories of the one-person launch, where someone on the product team ends up holding the launch together through sheer force of will (likely complimented by a disorganized flurry of ad hoc meetings and one-on-one Slack conversations).
These kinds of launches unravel quickly and come at a significant opportunity cost to the product team, who end up playing project manager and dealing with all the questions from confused stakeholders.
Instead, the Launch Checklist can be your central place to plan a launch tailored to the released product or feature and get buy-in early from your cross-functional partners. And if you give your cross-functional team editor permissions, it’s also a great best practice to have them help you determine which deliverables you commit to as a team.
Consider delegating the customer communication plan to a marketing or customer success person. Have your sales engineer come up with any deliverables needed to train your sales team on how to demo a new feature. These are great ways to encourage others to feel a sense of ownership over the launch. You’ll need their expertise to help guide your new product to market.
All this might beg the question: what should go into your Launch Checklist? There are no hard and fast rules. Every launch will be different and depend on the product itself, your customers, and your organization’s makeup. That said, you can find 20 great ideas for your next product launch checklist here to help get you started.
Connect your launch plans to your roadmap
One of the benefits of having your launch plan in the same platform as your roadmap is it helps ensure your product vision influences your go-to-market deliverables. We make this easy with the “Features Included in the Launch” module found to the left of your Launch Checklist.
Your roadmap houses all kinds of helpful information about your product. Many of our customers use their roadmap to document their roadmap strategy (what they’re building and when) and the why behind the features they prioritize. They will add context to the descriptions within their bars and often link to essential assets like objective documents or customer-facing collateral.
This information is gold for anyone planning a marketing campaign or coming up with sales talk tracks to support the launch. Adding features to your launch allows cross-functional partners easy access to what is on deck for the release and the vital context fueling it. It also encourages team members outside of the product team to read your roadmap because the information there is now actionable.
The connection works both ways. From your LIKE.TG roadmap, you can also assign an individual bar or container to a specific launch in Launch Management, allowing you to quickly switch between your strategy and your execution plan with a click.
Try Launch Management today!
Launch Management is available as a part of our Enterprise plan and our two-week free trial. If you’d like to learn more, schedule 45 minutes with us, and we’ll tailor a demo to your unique launch goals and challenges.
We’re looking forward to turning your next product launch into a success!
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Roadmapping Frameworks: How to Set Goals for Growth
Let’s imagine you’re planning a trip across the country. You know where you’re departing from, where you want to get to, and what resources you have available (like the vehicle, budget, traveling gear, etc.), so all that is left to do is to map your way there.
There are a couple of ways you can do this: you can plan your trip according to the time you have available (i.e., you need to get from point A to point B in x amount of days), or you trace your route based on the sights you don’t want to miss. Another option is to be more flexible, choosing the road you want to travel and picking the stops along the way.
Product roadmapping frameworks work in a very similar way. There are a few routes you can take to achieve your product goals. As you choose which one you want to take, you must consider how you will allocate your resources along the way and set milestones to check off as you get through. Let’s map this out.
Recap: What are Product Roadmaps?
A product roadmap is a holistic visual document that outlines your product’s growth path. A stellar roadmap includes the release of new features, key dates, product updates, and the product vision – giving context to the product lifecycle.
Product roadmaps are a good way for organizations to prepare for the future. If there’s a new product to launch, the tasks and timeframes will also be clear to everyone.
Why is roadmapping important for product led-growth?
In the era of product-led growth, the product roadmap is essential. Roadmapping helps you list all your competing priorities and narrow them down to what’s most important and relevant for the team and stakeholders.
Prioritization is another crucial part of product-led growth. According to LIKE.TG’s 2022 State of Product Management Report, it’s the most challenging aspect of product management, with 22 percent of survey respondents ranking it as their biggest hurdle.
Hence, besides electing the roadmapping framework that works best for your organization’s goals, choosing the right prioritization framework to help you determine the most important tasks and milestones along the way is also important.
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An effective product roadmap will:
Support vision and strategy
A product roadmap will outline how your product vision and strategy can become a reality. It should convey the strategic direction for your product and tie it back to the company’s strategy. But it should also be a source of inspiration, motivation, and shared ownership of the product and its successes.
Guide teams toward success
Sometimes we know what success looks like, but while managing all branches of product development, we can forget the actions needed to succeed. A product roadmap will keep you on track.
Strengthen internal alignment
Strong product-led teams have strong and well-oriented synergy between engineers, product leaders, marketers, customer support, and all other stakeholders. A product roadmap will serve as a guide to keep teams aligned and accountable for the same goals and milestones.
Help communicate with external stakeholders and customers
A strong customer and stakeholder relationship is one that acts as a partnership. Achieving that requires a transparent line of communication that can paint a picture of the company’s evolution and future.
With a customer-facing roadmap, you can address common questions from your customers like:
What is the company working on right now?
What new features and updates are coming next?
Why is the company doing what they are doing?
What to avoid when building a product roadmap
A common and unfortunate mistake made by SaaS product teams is to treat the roadmap as a static, archival document developed early in the product development lifecycle.
A successful product roadmap evolves alongside your product. Traditional roadmapping methods like spreadsheets and Gantt charts can be impractical for the team as they focus primarily on task management rather than setting actionable milestones that center on product success. A visual and collaborative roadmap can be more effective in communicating and tracking progress.
Who is Responsible for Roadmapping?
Creating a product roadmap is primarily a responsibility of the Product team, but it is also a group effort as it concerns all internal stakeholders. This combination of collaboration and discrete ownership gets stakeholders onboard while maintaining informational integrity and avoiding a free-for-all atmosphere.
Product management begins with a clear understanding of the product’s and the organization’s strategic objectives. Then, with the desired outcomes in mind, product management creates the key themes for this portion of the product’s lifecycle.
Tip: Chameleon has an excellent guide to Product Management frameworks that can help you strategize your growth path.
In a remote-first world, collaboration can become somewhat of a challenge. However, there are frameworks and tools that can facilitate successful collaboration, like LIKE.TG’s dynamic roadmapping tool that offers key features that enable collaboration:
Custom views: show stakeholders exactly what they need to see
Roadmap level conversations: hold and document conversations within the roadmap
Integrations: connect your roadmap with your tech stack to track progress, status, and completions.
Watch our webinar: Working Better Together: How to Collaborate in a Remote World
3 Examples of Roadmapping Frameworks
Let’s go back to the cross-country road trip analogy at the start of this article. If you’re starting to map your trip out, you typically ask yourself the following questions:
Where am I beginning my journey?
What is my final destination?
What resources do I have?
How long do I have to get there?
What are the routes I should consider?
Who else is involved in my trip, and what are their goals?
As you answer these questions, you’ll better understand your goals and what roadmapping framework makes the most sense, given your resources, constraints, and priorities. We’ve selected three frameworks that work well for product teams.
Timeline roadmaps
If you’re working on a new product release and have it tied with a specific date-based event in the future, the best strategic move is to use a timeline roadmap. This type of roadmap outlines every task and step your team members need to take to achieve the final goal and the timeframe to complete each milestone.
The timeline roadmap is a visual representation of a strictly time-constrained workflow. That said, this type of roadmap would suit a Scrum workflow within sprints.
To make it easy to understand, you can include the upcoming tasks that need to be completed and attach key dates and other relevant information. Share the roadmap across the teams in your organization to ensure everyone is on the same page.
Here is an example of a Release Plan Template
Swimlane roadmaps
On the other hand, if your product or feature release is not explicitly connected to a specific date, you can exclude the dates from your roadmap. Instead, you could make it quarterly-based with an overview of the planned product lifecycle development.
The swimlane roadmap is also a good choice for emphasizing what is planned, what’s in progress right now, and what has already been completed.
Here’s a template to help you build a roadmap aligned with your product development
Flexible roadmaps
Flexible roadmaps are another way of organizing the roadmap for your next product or feature release. It can be a release-based, an outcome-based roadmap, a roadmap based on customer requests, or any other type that suits your needs that aren’t strictly related to a specific timeframe.
Besides that, in our guide to flexible roadmaps, we also talk about the value that lean, feedback-oriented roadmaps can bring to your team – and your customers.
You can use in-app surveys to evaluate customer satisfaction, include them in feature ratings or request voting, and collect feedback to make better-informed decisions. Use the insights you gain to validate your feature ideas and further iterate your roadmap.
Product landscapes vs. roadmaps
While a roadmap answers the questions of “what” and “when” to build, a landscape answers the question “why”. In other words, a product landscape gives a broader picture of the product’s context. It includes the product mission, go-to-market strategy, and the overall position of the product in the market, along with the desired vision of where the product is going.
Tools for Successful Roadmaps
Alright, now that you know what framework works best for you, it’s time to build your roadmap. Here are a couple of tools to help you in the process.
LIKE.TG: Build your roadmaps
LIKE.TG is a roadmap platform that aligns team members in a visual, dynamic, and intuitive interface that concentrates your roadmapping efforts in a single, customizable space.
Chameleon: Gather user feedback
Chameleon is a Digital Adoption Platform that allows you to create code-free and native-looking in-product experiences that boost product activation and adoption. You can run in-app surveys to gather contextual user feedback and use it to inform your strategy.
Choosing the Right Framework
Whether you’re starting your roadmap from scratch or revisiting and updating your existing one, we hope this guide will help you choose the right framework.
Before you get to it, let’s just recap some key points:
Use your product strategy and vision to guide you in the roadmapping process.
Prioritize tasks and milestones that will get you closer to your ultimate goal.
Avoid static roadmaps that do not evolve alongside your product.
Leverage collaboration in the process of building your roadmap.
Use different SaaS tools to optimize your roadmapping process.
See you at the end of the road!
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6 Tips for Building Your First Launch Checklist in LIKE.TG
Launching a product is not for the faint of heart. So many things, both large and small, can go wrong. In 1985 Coca-Cola canceled New Coke because the product team didn’t confirm that Coca-Cola drinkers would accept a change to their favorite soft drink. Samsung had to recall its Note 7 smartphones because they were exploding. And Google Glass suffered from privacy concerns, bugs, low battery life, bans from public spaces, and an inability to live up to the hype all stymied public adoption of the technology.
Thankfully, few product launches fail in such spectacular fashion as those examples.
More often than not, product launches simply fall flat with the market, and often lack true product-market fit. In my experience in working with product teams, one of the most common reasons for lackluster product launches is ineffective communication throughout the launch process. And I’m not talking about a lack of emails, Slack messages, or meetings. We can all agree that there usually is plenty of communication happening at any given time—especially in a remote work environment.
If it’s not a lack of words, what makes communication and organization ineffective during a product launch? More often than not, it’s a lack of listening and intent where cross-functional teams talk at each other rather than collaborating together to achieve an outcome.
Is Your Product Launch Cross-Functional Team a Track and Field Team, or a Bobsled Team?
Right now, many product folks are running launches like they’re a track and field team in the Olympics. Every department has a separate job; they’re a sprinter, a long jumper, or pole vaulter. The pole vaulter can’t tell the long jumper how to jump farther, and the sprinter is solely focused on their run, so they can’t even help another runner participating in hurdles. They’re all participating in separate events. And while they’re all contributing to the total medal count (Cue: USA chant!), the athletes aren’t actually working together.
So, while individual medals sound great, it doesn’t quite work out as well when it comes to product launches. And that’s because product launches are a team sport.
What cross-functional teams should strive to be like in product launches is a bobsled team.
In this scenario, everyone is doing their job in sync with one another, and it directly impacts the shared outcome—a successful product launch. And there’s no better feeling than when everyone is doing their best. That’s how you get Cool Runnings!
If you’re ready for your next product launch to run as smooth as a bobsled on an Olympic ice track, the key is two-way communication. I’ll explain what I mean in this post when I say that product launch communication needs to be a two-way street. I’ll also give you a couple of suggestions for making it happen with your team.
Transforming Your Product Launch Communication Into a Two-Way Street
First, let me start by breaking down the difference between what I have deemed one-way and two-way street communication.
One-way communication is like building a baseball field in the middle of a cornfield in Kansas and expecting people to show up (are you tired of sports movie references yet?). Kevin Costner clearly made it work, but the odds of success in the real world are extremely low.
In this case, product folks tell other stakeholders what they are doing, why, and when. When the stakeholders get confused, the solution is to repeat the information. On Zoom meetings, in documents, and on a roadmap.
The one-way communication is often mistaken for alignment, but in reality, all you have done is pushed information and hope the right things happen.
In contrast, two-way street communication is about presenting your launch plans and asking for feedback. It relies on the product person understanding what the stakeholders are (or aren’t) excited about and what they will need to be able to do their jobs well. It’s also about making sure they understand what they need to do to do their jobs well. The most significant benefit of two-way communication is that everyone becomes invested in the outcome because they feel like a key part of the launch process rather than a passive player in the product person’s plan.
To drive home the difference between one-way and two-way street communication, we created this helpful comic:
Two-way communication ties back to the idea that product folks need to focus on building relationships with key stakeholders. And as Simon Sinek shared, “Strong relationships are based on trust and communication. But if there is no communication, there can be no trust.”
Source: LinkedIn
When you focus on two-way communication, you are instilling trust in stakeholders. You show this by welcoming and valuing their input in the launch prep process.
What Two-Way Product Launch Communication Looks Like in Practice
Achieving two-way communication in product launches takes a concerted effort—especially from the product person leading the charge.
1. You’re speaking with product launch stakeholders early and often.
Communicating your product launch strategy is an iterative process requiring you to communicate with stakeholders at every step of the process. A lack of communication destroys any sense of alignment and cross-functional flow.
Your product roadmap needs to communicate the product team’s strategic goals and top priorities as they relate to the business’s strategic goals. At the end of the day, what the product and development teams build is to serve the customer after all. Stakeholders may require you to provide them with status updates, while marketing may need information on how to appeal to your target audience.
Roadmaps are great resources to communicate the status of initiatives and provide milestones that reflect your strategic goals. Two-way communication in product launches breaks down silos and can help mitigate any bottlenecks throughout the launch process.
2. You’re making yourself available for stakeholder questions and proactively providing guidance throughout the launch-prep stage.
As the product professional driving the launch, you are the main point of contact and information for all company stakeholders. The key is to understand what your cross-functional team needs to be successful and use your interactions with them to help them navigate what is often a complicated and long process.
It’s important to not drive yourself crazy trying to assume you understand all of your stakeholders’ needs and concerns. The truth is, you are not a mind reader. But you can use your product experience to hone in on questions to ask your stakeholders, like:
Do you understand the timeline of the product launch?
Is your team prepared for the launch?
What can the product team provide you to craft an effective marketing message?
Do you feel the product addresses our customer’s concerns?
Do you have any insights into how customers may react or any thoughts about the questions customers may ask?
Implementing two-way communication allows you to clearly define to stakeholders the goals and objectives of your launch. You can achieve this by setting up 1:1 meetings with stakeholders from various departments.
3. The conversation doesn’t end when the product is launched.
A successful product launch doesn’t end once the product hits the market. Keeping an eye on how the market is responding to your product can embolden your team or reveal major gaps in the product launch process.
Your team will recognize a successful product launch when end-users engage with your product or service. By providing marketing and sales with enough information, your end-user clearly understands the benefits of your product or service.
After the launch, your team should continue engaging with your customers. Customer feedback can provide your team with product insights to assist your team in their product launch. The product launch process is an iterative process. With each launch comes new findings.
Go for Gold with Your Next Product Launch
Product Launches and Olympic Bobsledding have one thing in common: both are exhilarating.
A lack of listening and intent can derail your product launch. Clear communication allows stakeholders to fill in knowledge gaps or provide extra resources to streamline the launch process. Break down those communication silos with better communication.
Two-way communication and cross-functional alignment provide your team with the support to launch a successful product. A successful launch gives you the privilege to make the impossible, possible.
Fostering Collective Development, Bonding, and Connection at Product Plan Fest 2022
Many of us have been to a corporate event at some point in our careers. Often they focused on lengthy training sessions, had a high-stakes environment of “impressing your boss,” and the cocktail hour mingling that was more painful than relaxing. While the COVID pandemic put these events on hiatus, they sadly still exist. But we knew it didn’t have to be this way. That’s why LIKE.TG purposefully created an experience that flipped this narrative.
LIKE.TG’s all-company event, known as Fest, started many years back when our first remote team was hired and began to experience the common disconnect between in-office and remote work. Far before the COVID pandemic, these experiences were real and something employers needed to solve. Looking back, we feel lucky that we channeled a lot of focus and effort toward creating an equitable work experience for in-office and remote employees well before the world was thrust into it with little to no warning or time to plan.
Fest created a time when employees from near and far came together to grow personally and professionally, all while having fun. The ultimate goal was to increase employee engagement, satisfaction, and stickiness at the company.
We’re creating all-employee events that make sense for the moment
LIKE.TG’s Fest has always been and will continue to be organic to where the company and employee needs are at that time. In years past, Fest included developer-specific hackathons, sushi dinners, problem-solving sessions, murder mystery parties, scavenger hunts, etc. You name it; we probably did it! No matter what the team needed, the company looked for creative ways to provide that in a collective experience. The common denominator is that we built Fest to meet our employee’s needs, not our own – this may be the primary differentiating factor from other corporate events. There is something for everyone, and no detail is overlooked.
Bringing a rapidly growing team together for connection, fun, and appreciation
This year, Fest included three days in beautiful Santa Barbara, California. Team members flew in from near and far (some literally across the globe!) to connect over various activities designed for their unique roles and needs. This year’s Fest was a long time coming and had a unique challenge because the team is the largest it has ever been in the history of ProductPlan. Last quarter alone, we hired over twenty new employees across Product, Engineering, People and Culture, Sales, and Customer Success! With so many new faces on Zoom, we needed to bring the company together in person.
There were fun moments of food trucks, sunrise yoga, late-night fire pit shenanigans, beach volleyball, and trivia on topics such as diversity, culture, and inclusion. We even had a wonderful and insightful keynote presentation from Product Management thought leader, Dan Olsen. However, the magic of our Fest was the enhancement of our company culture. We wove our values of Hustle, Humility, and Heart into every moment of the event. In addition, we built bridges across departments with cross-collaboration sessions. We hosted educational training and added fun competitions, including one around Quarterly Business Reviews. We also made sure to show our team members some personalized appreciation.
At the end of the day, the little moments matter. For example, we asked our team members about their favorite snacks and personalized their welcome bags. In addition, each manager wrote unique appreciation cards to their employees. It may seem small, but when a team member opened their welcome bag and saw their favorite chips or beef jerky, they knew we cared about their individual needs.
These moments break down the anxieties some have with meeting so many new people for the first time off Zoom. All of these touches of appreciation culminated on the last day when we celebrated our company’s success.
We’re already looking forward to next year’s Fest
Although three days feel like a whirlwind, we’re thrilled with its impact on our team. In fact, over 90 percent of LIKE.TGners said that Fest increased their feeling of connection with the company and peers. I am already excited to start planning next year’s event!
If LIKE.TG sounds like the right fit for your next chapter, we’d love to hear from you. Take a look at our open roles at productplan.com/careers.
Why Product Launch Communication is a Two-Way Street
Launching a product is not for the faint of heart. So many things, both large and small, can go wrong. In 1985 Coca-Cola canceled New Coke because the product team didn’t confirm that Coca-Cola drinkers would accept a change to their favorite soft drink. Samsung had to recall its Note 7 smartphones because they were exploding. And Google Glass suffered from privacy concerns, bugs, low battery life, bans from public spaces, and an inability to live up to the hype all stymied public adoption of the technology.
Thankfully, few product launches fail in such spectacular fashion as those examples.
More often than not, product launches simply fall flat with the market, and often lack true product-market fit. In my experience in working with product teams, one of the most common reasons for lackluster product launches is ineffective communication throughout the launch process. And I’m not talking about a lack of emails, Slack messages, or meetings. We can all agree that there usually is plenty of communication happening at any given time—especially in a remote work environment.
If it’s not a lack of words, what makes communication and organization ineffective during a product launch? More often than not, it’s a lack of listening and intent where cross-functional teams talk at each other rather than collaborating together to achieve an outcome.
Is Your Product Launch Cross-Functional Team a Track and Field Team, or a Bobsled Team?
Right now, many product folks are running launches like they’re a track and field team in the Olympics. Every department has a separate job; they’re a sprinter, a long jumper, or pole vaulter. The pole vaulter can’t tell the long jumper how to jump farther, and the sprinter is solely focused on their run, so they can’t even help another runner participating in hurdles. They’re all participating in separate events. And while they’re all contributing to the total medal count (Cue: USA chant!), the athletes aren’t actually working together.
So, while individual medals sound great, it doesn’t quite work out as well when it comes to product launches. And that’s because product launches are a team sport.
What cross-functional teams should strive to be like in product launches is a bobsled team.
In this scenario, everyone is doing their job in sync with one another, and it directly impacts the shared outcome—a successful product launch. And there’s no better feeling than when everyone is doing their best. That’s how you get Cool Runnings!
If you’re ready for your next product launch to run as smooth as a bobsled on an Olympic ice track, the key is two-way communication. I’ll explain what I mean in this post when I say that product launch communication needs to be a two-way street. I’ll also give you a couple of suggestions for making it happen with your team.
Transforming Your Product Launch Communication Into a Two-Way Street
First, let me start by breaking down the difference between what I have deemed one-way and two-way street communication.
One-way communication is like building a baseball field in the middle of a cornfield in Kansas and expecting people to show up (are you tired of sports movie references yet?). Kevin Costner clearly made it work, but the odds of success in the real world are extremely low.
In this case, product folks tell other stakeholders what they are doing, why, and when. When the stakeholders get confused, the solution is to repeat the information. On Zoom meetings, in documents, and on a roadmap.
The one-way communication is often mistaken for alignment, but in reality, all you have done is pushed information and hope the right things happen.
In contrast, two-way street communication is about presenting your launch plans and asking for feedback. It relies on the product person understanding what the stakeholders are (or aren’t) excited about and what they will need to be able to do their jobs well. It’s also about making sure they understand what they need to do to do their jobs well. The most significant benefit of two-way communication is that everyone becomes invested in the outcome because they feel like a key part of the launch process rather than a passive player in the product person’s plan.
To drive home the difference between one-way and two-way street communication, we created this helpful comic:
Two-way communication ties back to the idea that product folks need to focus on building relationships with key stakeholders. And as Simon Sinek shared, “Strong relationships are based on trust and communication. But if there is no communication, there can be no trust.”
Source: LinkedIn
When you focus on two-way communication, you are instilling trust in stakeholders. You show this by welcoming and valuing their input in the launch prep process.
What Two-Way Product Launch Communication Looks Like in Practice
Achieving two-way communication in product launches takes a concerted effort—especially from the product person leading the charge.
1. You’re speaking with product launch stakeholders early and often.
Communicating your product launch strategy is an iterative process requiring you to communicate with stakeholders at every step of the process. A lack of communication destroys any sense of alignment and cross-functional flow.
Your product roadmap needs to communicate the product team’s strategic goals and top priorities as they relate to the business’s strategic goals. At the end of the day, what the product and development teams build is to serve the customer after all. Stakeholders may require you to provide them with status updates, while marketing may need information on how to appeal to your target audience.
Roadmaps are great resources to communicate the status of initiatives and provide milestones that reflect your strategic goals. Two-way communication in product launches breaks down silos and can help mitigate any bottlenecks throughout the launch process.
2. You’re making yourself available for stakeholder questions and proactively providing guidance throughout the launch-prep stage.
As the product professional driving the launch, you are the main point of contact and information for all company stakeholders. The key is to understand what your cross-functional team needs to be successful and use your interactions with them to help them navigate what is often a complicated and long process.
It’s important to not drive yourself crazy trying to assume you understand all of your stakeholders’ needs and concerns. The truth is, you are not a mind reader. But you can use your product experience to hone in on questions to ask your stakeholders, like:
Do you understand the timeline of the product launch?
Is your team prepared for the launch?
What can the product team provide you to craft an effective marketing message?
Do you feel the product addresses our customer’s concerns?
Do you have any insights into how customers may react or any thoughts about the questions customers may ask?
Implementing two-way communication allows you to clearly define to stakeholders the goals and objectives of your launch. You can achieve this by setting up 1:1 meetings with stakeholders from various departments.
3. The conversation doesn’t end when the product is launched.
A successful product launch doesn’t end once the product hits the market. Keeping an eye on how the market is responding to your product can embolden your team or reveal major gaps in the product launch process.
Your team will recognize a successful product launch when end-users engage with your product or service. By providing marketing and sales with enough information, your end-user clearly understands the benefits of your product or service.
After the launch, your team should continue engaging with your customers. Customer feedback can provide your team with product insights to assist your team in their product launch. The product launch process is an iterative process. With each launch comes new findings.
Go for Gold with Your Next Product Launch
Product Launches and Olympic Bobsledding have one thing in common: both are exhilarating.
A lack of listening and intent can derail your product launch. Clear communication allows stakeholders to fill in knowledge gaps or provide extra resources to streamline the launch process. Break down those communication silos with better communication.
Two-way communication and cross-functional alignment provide your team with the support to launch a successful product. A successful launch gives you the privilege to make the impossible, possible.
The Benefits of Adding More Product Roadmap Viewers in LIKE.TG
The Benefits of Adding More Product Roadmap Viewers in LIKE.TG
Product leaders across industries—software, finance, and healthcare—want a centralized location to house product initiatives and updates. However, many waste valuable time updating inflexible spreadsheets or slide decks that fail to capture a product strategy effectively. Instead, product leaders can transcend the confines of these antiquated tools by using a purpose-built roadmap solution to add roadmap viewers.
A Single Source of Truth
As a product professional, your product roadmap is your single source of truth. Your roadmap enables you to present your team’s big-picture goals to internal stakeholders. However, to ensure you don’t silo stakeholders or overwhelm them with unnecessary information, you must provide each department with a customizable view of your roadmap. It’s a balance to share the product strategy in a clear and easy-to-digest format for all audiences.
This article covers the benefits of using a product roadmap to break down the naturally occurring silos amongst teams. When you add more product roadmap viewers, each stakeholder comes with a unique perspective. You also encourage open communication and collaboration, which pushes your product to new heights.
Cultivate Collaboration and Communication
Your roadmap serves as the single source of truth to gain buy-in from these stakeholders. Yet, how do you create transparency during a product launch and present the correct information to the right stakeholder?
You can empower them by granting them access to view your roadmap to achieve these beneficial outcomes. Directly viewing your product roadmap provides transparency and lets stakeholders stay up-to-date on the launch process.
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The Benefits of Adding More Viewers to Your Roadmap
When communicating product initiatives to executive stakeholders, the inclination toward transparency may not be every product leader’s first choice. Most importantly, more viewers lead to more opinions and a push away from the organization’s original product vision. Or so you may think.
If done correctly, adding more viewers to your roadmap can assist you in guiding your team through the launch. Product leaders who incorporate a roadmap into their workflow reap the many benefits of adding more viewers, which include:
Empowerment + alignment
A more credible roadmap
Roadmap accountability
Your roadmap becomes a self-service tool for cross-functional teams
We live in a busy world, where 24 hours is nearly not enough time in the day. Consequently, product teams have relied on asynchronous communication to inform stakeholders of updates to their product roadmap. Admins can add an unlimited number of viewers to their roadmap, allowing these stakeholders to access important product information in their free time. A “self-service” roadmap provides customers with a quick, easy solution to their problems.
Save time with asynchronous communication and fewer meetings
Asynchronous communication is necessary, especially in a remote work environment. But what about asynchronous video communication capabilities within your roadmap? Well, wouldn’t that be a dream?
Guess what? It’s a reality with LIKE.TG’s Vimeo integration. Product leaders can now communicate with their product team and stakeholders via recorded video. You can now walk individuals through your roadmap.
Our integration allows you to provide targeted details to specific stakeholders, which gives them greater context about the product lifecycle.
Increase the ease of communication and collaboration with stakeholders
Asynchronous video communication may not be for everyone. Many product professionals prefer to communicate within the product roadmap. Moreover, with our roadmap-level conversations, product leaders, product teams, and stakeholders can provide detailed comments relating to status updates, roadblocks, requests for information, or the state of initiatives.
Roadmap Level Conversations
Roadmap-level conversations allow you to tag essential stakeholders within the comment section. Product leaders can use this feature to pinpoint particular areas within the roadmap that needs stakeholder attention. On their end, they will receive an email notifying them that their attention is required. But what about standardization?
Shared Legends
Product leaders understand the struggle of ensuring multiple product portfolio views have a standardized legend. Our shared legend feature promotes consistency and ease of communication throughout your product-led organization.
Furthermore, those granted access as “Viewers” can make comments and tag roadmap editors or owners. The function assists them in making an inquiry or asking for more context. Adding viewers supports your product launch and helps you gain stakeholder buy-in.
Free-up time to focus on what matters most
We understand that product leaders wear many hats. They not only advocate for the needs of the customer, but they also serve as a deal-maker with executive stakeholders. Though you don’t directly manage these individuals, you serve as a facilitator of information.
Adding viewers to your roadmap can help you communicate asynchronously and effectively. Not only can you save time, but you can create an environment that supports two-way communication.
Customize Your Viewers’ Experience with Custom Views
The LIKE.TG roadmap platform allows you to create custom view roadmaps that help keep your team in sync. Moreover, product leaders can align their teams with a product strategy that empowers them to make the right product decisions. The platform offers unlimited free viewer accounts that allow stakeholders to ask questions and provide feedback.
Product leaders find our Custom Views feature supports their efforts in effectively communicating changes in the roadmap.
Custom view for development
Your development team focuses on the granular details of your product. Developers’ tasks range from bug fixes to testing and making minor tweaks. Consequently, these tasks occur over a short period of time.
As a product leader, providing a custom view roadmap for developers should show the product’s more significant big-picture objectives. Therefore, roadmap conversations allow developers to give feedback and align behind the big-picture strategic view.
Custom view for customer success
In contrast to development, customer success understands the current and future needs of the customer. Product leaders can provide a custom view for CS that gives them a specific idea of upcoming initiatives and features. CS can use the tagging feature to ask questions or provide feedback to other viewers or editors.
Custom view for marketing
The marketing team wants to know what features are coming down the pipeline, so they can begin to prepare a product narrative for a new release. A custom view for marketing can give them enough insight to craft messaging for the sales team. The deeper insight creates further cross-functional alignment around a shared product strategy.
Custom view for sales
The custom view for your sales team will focus on more high-level detail than your development team. Your sales teams will want to know what upcoming features will impact customers. A sales-focused custom view roadmap gives further context to the prioritization of a feature. Finally, the sales teams can use this information to help develop curated pitches for potential prospects.
Creating Transparency and Customizing Viewership to Serve Your Roadmap
LIKE.TG’s Custom View feature aims to empower “Viewers.” Furthermore, adding viewers and utilizing the Custom View features can save you time by providing only relevant stakeholder information.
The ability to tag these stakeholders within the roadmap ensures that they are immediately aware of roadblocks or updated initiatives. In addition, adding viewers to your roadmap and allowing them to provide comments ensures your stakeholders are always up-to-date.
Two-way communication across departments fosters cross-functional alignment. Therefore, with LIKE.TG’s purpose-built roadmap app, you can help your team develop a roadmap that supports your product strategy, and your organization’s overall product vision.
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10 Tips for New Product Research and Discovery
A blank page, much like the one I’m using to write this article, used to scare me. A new product can feel the same way. There’s nothing to build on and so many more risks. There is a place between nothing and a great product that’s full of uncertainty. Earlier in my career, this was nerve-wracking. Now, after a decade of managing products and advising, I find it exciting.
These days I look forward to starting research and discovery with nothing but a hypothesis. Throughout my experience, I’ve used many frameworks and tools to support the research and discovery process. I may not know exactly what I’ll uncover in the discovery process, but I know how I’ll get there. I look forward to becoming smarter every day and knowledge unfolding at a rapid pace. And I just want to pinch myself because I’ll never learn as rapidly as when I’m starting out not knowing much at all.
With the launch of Launch Management at LIKE.TG, I’d like to walk you through what research and discovery looked like for us and share the lessons we learned along the way. So if you are looking to launch a new product or feature, you are prepared with some tips to reduce that blank page anxiety.
1. Start with your company and product mission and vision.
LIKE.TG is the product management platform that operationalizes product strategy and execution best practices and drives innovation, trust, and accountability. To fully realize this and empower product teams to change the world through their products and the people they serve, LIKE.TG is more than roadmapping.
With our vision in mind, we stepped back and asked, “What can we do for customers in addition to roadmapping to achieve our vision?” Understanding (or defining) your vision is important because the journey ahead is not easy, and you’ll need something to reflect on to help you remember what you are trying to accomplish and why.
To be a product management platform that operationalizes product strategy and execution best practices and drives innovation, trust, and accountability.
2. Understand your customer outside of why they use your product.
Focusing on how and why customers use your product is incredibly valuable for increasing the depth of your product offering but less valuable for increasing the breadth. When you understand your customer outside of why and how they use your product, you can uncover customer jobs and opportunities that your customer may not ask you to solve. It’s possible there isn’t a solution to these problems on the market today.
What you learn is your opportunity to surprise and delight your customers. I approached this through customer interviews, spending time in groups and forums where my customers are, and looking for gaps in the product stack my customers use in their larger workflow outside of just how they use ProductPlan.
This work led me to dig into the product team’s role in launching products. There seemed to be a lot of pain and no solutions for launching a product or feature from the product manager’s perspective. There was so much pain that I found improving launches is one of the first tasks a new product operations team is responsible for.
Bonus Tip: When a customer shows up late to a meeting (happens all the time, right?) and says, “Sorry that I’m late. It’s been a crazy week.”, ask them, “Sorry to hear that, what’s going on?”. You’ll learn what’s causing them stress. And that can give you incredible insight.
3. Refine the problem early, even if you are uncertain.
The challenges with launching a product are immense. It would have been easy for me to take on the whole domain in my research. It also would have been easy to move to analysis paralysis and thoroughly research every opportunity within the domain.
Instead, I chose to refine the problem to a high-level report or dashboard of upcoming launches, so that product managers and stakeholders could get a quick glimpse at upcoming launches and whether they needed attention.
Early research into where this and other opportunities would sit in the market and its impact on customer pain around managing launches informed the decision. Researching outside of customer interviews can be incredibly valuable, but there’s nothing quite like talking to customers to learn quickly whether a problem or opportunity has potential.
4. Be prepared to be wrong.
If you don’t prepare yourself to be wrong, you might miss noticing when something isn’t right! When we get too invested in a solution early, we’re more likely to see all the ways that the solution is the right solution. Bias is really strong and can cloud your judgment when it comes to recognizing errors.
For this reason, I celebrate when I find out I’m wrong through research since it’s a sign that I didn’t let bias cloud my vision. You’ll find out sooner or later, and it’s far less costly to find out sooner. The opportunity around managing launches was appreciated and validated by customers, but why and how was different than I expected.
Instead of being most interested in the higher-level dashboard, the customers we talked to were most interested in managing launches at a lower level. They wanted something that would reduce the time they spent project managing the launch and would be a tool to support co-ownership and accountability for cross-functional colleagues contributing to launching deliverables. This led to us keeping the scope and design of our Launch Management dashboard very lean and instead investing more in the checklist.
5. Embrace the shitty first draft.
As a writer, I’m a big fan of Ann Lammot’s Bird by Bird, where she encourages writers to write a shitty first draft. If your intention is for the first draft to be shitty and not perfect, then you free your mind from the burdens of perfection. It allows you to move faster and be more creative, even if some of the creativity results in more bad ideas! I’ve embraced this in many areas of my life and work life, including Launch Management.
The first visual designs for Launch Management took a lot of time and had a lot of emotion tied to them, especially when we received initial feedback from customers that we didn’t quite understand their problems. When the product designer and I discussed the feedback, we revisited the job of those early designs. We didn’t need those early designs to test usability or guide our engineering team in what to build. Since we were working on a greenfield product, the primary job of those early designs was to take the stories and words customers shared with us and reflect our understanding in the form of a picture.
The picture didn’t need to be pretty. Customers just needed to see themselves in it. With this in mind, I asked the product designer to create an “ugly table” so we could see if this would better show customers the solution to the problems they were facing. Tables are relatively uninteresting aesthetically, but we went with something functional first.
When this got the validation from customers we needed, and they communicated that what they were looking at would be a good solution, we started improving the functionality and aesthetics. That imperfect and frankly ugly table was perfect for the conversations because it was relatively quick to produce, and our customers felt comfortable giving us critical feedback on something that was far from finished.
6. Your customer is the expert, even if they don’t know the answers.
Because Launch Management was the first solution that helps product managers launch products and features, there wasn’t anything on the market we could reference. Also, our customers didn’t have experience using anything to solve this problem either. We asked questions about launches and how to measure the success of launches. As a result, we got a fair amount of “I don’t know” answers from our customers.
While managing a launch created all sorts of challenges, our customers didn’t have expectations that this problem could be solved. So they hadn’t thought deeply about it. Instead of gathering our customers’ direct feedback, we focused on the pain they were facing and understanding the cost of not solving the problem, where our customers were the experts. As these stories started to come together, themes started to emerge, and the solution of Launch Management developed.
7. Look for your customers to take ownership and action.
When your customers assume ownership of what you are showing them and start talking about how they’ll use it with their team, you’ll know you truly understand the problem enough to solve it. When you can move your customers to action, you’ll know you have a good solution.
As we iterated on a solution through designs and prototypes and listened to customers, we got to a point where we could talk about the problems we were solving with Launch Management with product leaders the validation was clear. A customer asked, “When can I use this?” as they peered through the screen. They then asked, “Are you in my Slack?” and excitedly pumped their fist. Their language shifted from asking us how it would work to telling us how they would use Launch Management. They even shared how it would help them with their challenges.
Similarly excited, people who weren’t customers yet wanted to talk to our sales team. This is when the research and discovery team at LIKE.TG looked at each other and said, “It’s real now. It isn’t built yet, but it definitely feels real.”
8. Use your beta wisely.
While customer betas shouldn’t be about finding bugs, getting feedback before everything is polished and perfect is ideal. Beta feedback can help you figure out what to build next through enhancement requests, but I really love beta feedback to understand if I’ve effectively solved the problems I intended to solve.
I used LIKE.TG to create a list of jobs necessary to accomplish the Launch Management vision. I put the jobs in the order I expected us to accomplish them. As our fantastic customer success managers talked to customers and gathered feedback, they added it to the board.
The feedback created this beautiful curve on the board that showed enhancement requests for the jobs we were working on. The feedback was validation (in addition to the customer interviews) that customers recognized the problem we were trying to solve. It was a good signal that we were moving toward product-market fit.
9. Rely on the experts on your team.
Launching a new product is not a one-person endeavor. Even the most skilled among us need colleagues with different expertise to help. Similar to when launching products, when discovering a new product, product managers can take too much on.
By focusing on where each of your team members is an expert, including yourself, you can work together more effectively. In researching Launch Management, I relied on the expertise of product design to create a great customer experience. I looked to product marketing to craft a message and test it with our customers before enabling our customer-facing teams. And I trusted engineering’s expertise to build a right-sized solution that would help us learn quickly and scale.
Since I trusted that my colleagues owned their expertise, I could focus on my own expertise. This was amplified during our launch. We eventually got to the point where we could use Launch Management ourselves. Which meant I wasn’t the one keeping track of all the launch deliverables.
10. Know that what you launch with won’t be done.
Launch Management is far from done. Our first priority was to visualize what was happening in a launch alongside the roadmap strategy. So, the launch manager and launch team could easily see the launch. Rather than having the launch live in the launch manager’s head.
Once we have the launch visualized, we want to help customers standardize their launches. By doing so, they become more predictable and ultimately more successful. Our enterprise customers really value standardization as it helps operationalize best practices and creates predictability in teams across the company. As much as I want all of this to be possible in our general availability launch, I’m launching with less. And instead, I’m focusing on learning from customers to refine the Launch Management strategy.
Research and discovery for a new product is a big challenge. It requires relishing ambiguity on the path from turning that blank page to a product your customers love. Once you’ve got that figured out, then LIKE.TG will help you make launching it easy. Learn more about Launch Management when you schedule a 45-minute demo with us!
Introducing the LIKE.TG Diversity & Inclusion Task Force
Diversity and inclusion is a high-priority topic for many organizations worldwide. And it’s no different at ProductPlan. For years, our team has been working to build a more inclusive and welcoming company for people from all backgrounds.
This vision for an equitable and diverse workplace has evolved and transformed through the years. I’m honored to share what we have accomplished and some of our plans for the future.
But first, allow me to introduce myself. My name is David Hughes. I am a Customer Success Manager and Diversity and Inclusion Manager at ProductPlan. As you can probably tell, I love wearing multiple hats. And diversity and inclusion are very near and dear to my heart. I don’t have the typical background of someone who works in tech. So, I am keenly aware of how important it is to welcome folks from all walks of life.
As the Diversity and Inclusion Manager, I work closely with our People and Culture team and our Diversity and Inclusion Task Force. Together, we ensure a diverse group of people feels comfortable, welcomed, and fully integrated within the company. We seek to achieve lasting equality, equity, and justice by making LIKE.TG an inclusive, safe space where all employees can thrive.
Who is part of the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force?
The DI Task Force is comprised of passionate individuals from all areas of the business who come together to brainstorm ways to promote diversity and inclusion at the company as well as act as liaisons for their respective departments. Everyone who is interested is welcome to join the DI task force. It’s all about getting as many voices and perspectives involved as possible. The group is always learning new strategies and tactics for supporting a diverse workforce.
The journey so far…
Since the creation of the DI Task Force, we have been hard at work building scalable programs to help foster an inclusive culture for all employees across the country.
Giving employees opportunities to get to know each other outside of work
It’s important for employees to feel comfortable bringing their full selves to the workplace. This can be especially challenging in a remote environment. So our DI Task Force began hosting regularly scheduled opportunities for employees to get to connect and collaborate cross-functionally with specific topics, questions, and cultural activities. We call these monthly events, Culture, Connection, Collaboration Break.
During a CCC Break, employees are randomly paired up to discuss a specific topic or prompt. It’s been a great experience so far and has given employees who might not normally cross paths an opportunity to meet.
Encouraging employee-led diversity education
We are lucky to have such an enthusiastic group of employees who come from unique backgrounds and perspectives. It is important for us to encourage and celebrate our differences and learn from one another.
This plays out at LIKE.TG in a couple of ways. First, we have LunchLearn events where an employee can speak about a DI-related topic with their peers. Everyone is welcome to join the LunchLearns and to host them. We have enjoyed a lot of great conversations, and look forward to hearing more from employees as we continue to grow and have new voices join the team.
For our employees who are not inclined to host a live discussion, we also provide a dedicated Slack channel for DI discussions. In that channel, employees can share knowledge, resources, and ask questions. It’s a great way to bring the team together asynchronously.
Establishing partnerships with local non-profit organizations
Volunteering with our local communities is core to the LIKE.TG culture. The Diversity Inclusion Task Force has established two amazing partnerships with two Santa Barbara organizations.
First, is the Equal Learning Fund, a nonprofit organization that provides school supplies to children from low socioeconomic households and communities. In partnership with the ELF, the LIKE.TG team has participated in back-to-school fundraisers where we raised enough funds to supply hundreds of kids with backpacks and school supplies for the new school year.
Another partnership we are very proud of is with the United Boys Girls Club of Santa Barbara County, an organization that provides a safe, welcoming place for kids where they have access to tutoring and education programs, sports, art and music classes, and other opportunities.
We had a blast participating in the Corporate Playdates hosted by the UBGC. We get to meet some of the students, play games, and learn more about how the organization supports the local Santa Barbara community.
The best part is, this is only the beginning!
We are proud of the incredible work the team has accomplished in just a couple of years. However, we are nowhere near done! Looking ahead, we plan to scale our DI programs and initiatives alongside our plans to grow the LIKE.TG team. Stay tuned for more updates from the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force!
If LIKE.TG sounds like a good fit for your next chapter, take a look at our open roles in Sales, Customer Success, Engineering, and Product on our website: https://www.productplan.com/careers/
Roadmapping Isn’t Just for Product Managers Anymore
As your IT department changes, the nature of your department’s role may transition to a strategic partner. You will find several product management techniques useful during this transformation, such as roadmapping. Once considered the domain of product managers, roadmaps are useful in various contexts. You can use a roadmap to effectively communicate and collaborate with your business partners at the beginning and throughout an IT initiative.
Here’s a look at how IT departments can take a page from the Product Management playbook and use roadmaps to effectively collaborate and communicate with their business partners.
Why IT departments use roadmaps
When you become a strategic partner to your business partners, you’ll find creating and using roadmaps very helpful. Here are some specific reasons.
Build clarity and understanding
You’ll no longer have solution requests chucked over your cubicle walls as a strategic partner. Rather, you’ll be able to have a collaborative discussion with your business partners about the problems they are trying to solve and what potential solutions might look like.
You can collaboratively build a roadmap for the initiative with your business partners to gain clarity and shared understanding about that initiative.
This collaborative effort helps you clarify why your business partners want to make a change and the potential themes and epics that could play a role in accomplishing that outcome. These themes provide strategic direction to your initiative without diving into specific details too early.
Communicate goals and intent
You can use a roadmap to communicate information about your initiative to a wider audience. Because the roadmap contains information at a broad strategic level, it’s concise enough that people can get an idea of what you’re planning to accomplish without getting bogged down with specifics.
When creating your roadmap, you’ll involve a small group of key people in the initial discussion. That means there will be several people who may be interested in your IT initiative that weren’t originally involved in those initial discussions. When you share the roadmap with them, they can get an overview of the intended benefits of your initiative, what actions are currently underway, and your plans for future efforts.
For most stakeholders, that level of detail is sufficient. There will be some who would like additional data, which is where a tool like LIKE.TG comes in handy, providing custom views for different stakeholders and displaying the data most meaningful to them.
Track and communicate progress
A good roadmap is a living document that people can rely on to reflect the current state of your work.
You shouldn’t create a roadmap, present it once, and then stash it in a drawer (real or virtual). Nor should you only update it once a quarter when you have to present your current status to your executive committee.
Instead, keep your roadmap up to date regularly, so it accurately reflects what you’re currently working on and what you plan to work on next.
If you set it up properly, you may even use your roadmap as your primary means of reporting status, removing the need to create multiple different status reports for different audiences. Here again, a road mapping tool like LIKE.TG can help you out.
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How to use roadmaps and backlogs together
If you’ve been using backlogs for any length of time, you’re probably familiar with the problem of an overflowing backlog.
This is where the backlog becomes a dumping ground for everything you could do as part of your initiative. While there’s a certain amount of comfort in having a list of to-do’s, you soon find that it’s almost impossible to discern the forest from the trees. There are too many items to manage, and it’s difficult to discern ties between highly detailed items and the broader parts of the initiative.
Fortunately, our friend, the roadmap can provide a big lift here.
The primary cause of the overflowing backlog is when you identify a bunch of low-level backlog items too early. To avoid this issue, use your roadmap as a broad overview of your initiative showing the themes and epics you’re considering.
Avoid the temptation
Avoid the temptation to dive into detail on those epics and create items in your backlog until you’re just about to work on that epic. That means your backlog does not contain any backlog items for an epic unless it shows up in the current period on your roadmap. (Or in the “Now” column of a Now – Next – Later roadmap).
When you take this approach, your roadmap provides the overall view at a strategic level, and the backlog provides a more tactical view of the current time horizon. You avoid breaking epics into user stories too early, preventing wasted effort if you decide you don’t need to do a particular epic. You also have far fewer user stories to manage on your backlog.
Because roadmaps and backlogs contain information at different levels of detail and have different audiences, you’ll be tempted to use different tools for each.
Using separate tools works as long as the two tools integrate seamlessly. Fortunately, LIKE.TG integrates with Jira and Azure DevOps so that you can keep your roadmap in sync with your backlog and vice versa.
Examples of using roadmaps
There are many ways that you can use a roadmap for your IT work. Here are three examples that show how you can use different roadmaps to collaborate and communicate with your business partners.
Roadmap for IT portfolio
A nonprofit association wanted a full picture of its various IT initiatives for planning and communication purposes.
The IT Staff created an Enterprise IT Roadmap to show the initiatives that they:
were currently working on (in a Now column)
were planning to work on next (in a Next column)
may consider in the future (in a Later column).
The initiatives were further divided into swim lanes that represented which of the nonprofit’s key objectives the initiatives addressed. Examples of those objectives include:
Build an inclusive global community
Deliver value to members
Build brand awareness for the association
These are the key decision filters that the association uses to decide whether to undertake the initiatives. When they considered a fairly significant action, they would run it through those decision filters (i.e. “Will this help us deliver value to members?) if it didn’t pass through any of the decision filters, they didn’t do it.
The association used this roadmap as an aid for their regular planning discussions. For example, when one initiative was nearing completion, they’d look at the roadmap and see which initiative in the next column made sense to start next. They could also move items off the roadmap or switch items between the later and next columns if they found their needs or priorities changed.
Roadmap for a custom development project
A team was tasked with replacing a 20-year-old pricing tool built on outdated client-server technology. The original scope included rebuilding the tool on modern technology and adding functionality to support some new business processes.
As the team investigated how staff used the current tool, they found several inefficient processes and unused features. They also realized that the target date for cutover to the new system was very aggressive. It wasn’t likely that they’d be able to rebuild everything and add the new functionality by the initial target date.
IT project roadmap
The team created an IT Project Roadmap to plan out the order in which they would build functionality in the new tool and communicate their plan to executives in their organization. They built the roadmap with a monthly timeline and displayed the epics they planned to work on. They also put key milestones on the roadmap so that when they moved the delivery of epics with each other, they could see whether they had a viable solution for the cutover date.
The team built an initial version of the new tool by the cutover date that addressed all the users’ immediate needs. They then delivered additional functionality over the course of the next few months so that the users had the functionality they needed when they needed it in their annual cycle.
The roadmap helped the team keep stakeholders up to date on their plans and convey what functionality to expect when. It also helped with the frequent discussions the team had about changing their order of delivery when they ran into challenges or uncovered new information.
Roadmap for a platform build-out
A team started work to merge product data from several transactional systems and provide that data to a partner to list those products for sale. As the team progressed with their work, they realized they were building a data platform that several other initiatives could use for different purposes.
The team started having conversations with the other initiatives and began identifying the common patterns from all the requests.
The team put together an IT Infrastructure Roadmap for the data platform to reflect their plans for building out interfaces into the platform. These interfaces included additional data sources and ways for other systems to get data from the platform.
The team designed the roadmap with a quarterly time frame to convey which interfaces they planned to work on and when. They chose this timeframe based on the uncertainty of working with several departments in this large retail organization.
IT teams can use this roadmap as a high-level view of their work. They also tied the roadmap to their backlog tool so they could track how individual backlog items satisfied work toward the broader interfaces shown on the roadmap.
Roadmaps are a powerful IT Tool
As you look for new ways to work with your business partners, take a moment to consider how you can use a roadmap to help you out.
You don’t have to be a Product Manager to use a roadmap, but you can certainly use Product Management tools to use a roadmap more effectively.
When you’re ready to build a roadmap for your next IT initiative, give LIKE.TG and one of its IT specific roadmap templates a try.
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What are the benefits of having your launch plan in the same tool as your roadmap?
As a product marketer, I’ve run a good number of launches throughout my career. Product launches. Feature launches. Some were quite big, requiring a tidal wave of activity that spanned departments. Others were small, perhaps only involving an entry in the biweekly release notes.
Regardless of size and scope, launches always turn out better when you involve the product team. It should be a given, considering that what you’re launching is a direct result of the research, prioritization, and planning the product team did months prior. So much of the knowledge you need to launch a product—whether you’re a salesperson, a customer success rep, or a product marketer—is in the minds of the product team.
But time and time again, we hear from product teams that they don’t have great visibility into what happens during a launch. Many, in fact, describe a siloed approach to launching products. Product teams may be responsible for the planning and development of the product.
But the launch of it? That’s someone else’s job.
This was one of the significant challenges we set out to solve when we built our new go-to-market tool within LIKE.TG, Launch Management. We wanted to create a single space to plan your launch, where the product strategy could flow from roadmap to execution. We also wanted to give product people complete visibility into all the activities required to launch a new product or feature.
So that begs the question. What are the benefits of having your launch plan in the same tool as your roadmap? Read on to find out.
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For those managing the launch, visibility creates the opportunity for better strategy and launch quality.
Try searching for product launch software, and you’ll likely come across several project management tools with launch templates. These tools are effective for managing the launch of a new product. However, the product team often doesn’t own or operate them.
This creates a scenario where the product team works in one tool, and the go-to-market team responsible for the launch works in another.
When this happens, it’s difficult for the product team to maintain visibility into the development of product messaging, creating marketing materials, implementing customer support initiatives, and so forth.
You can partially solve this by juggling licenses and getting your product team to work out of both. But in an era of work defined by tool proliferation and the increasing cost of the Enterprise tech stack, that can be expensive to maintain and cumbersome to use.
Your launch plan should be in the same tool as your roadmap. It gives the product team a clear view into critical launch activities, allowing them to ensure each demonstrates an understanding of what the product is designed to achieve and for who. It also helps product understand the timing of key communication events to inform their expectations for product awareness and adoption.
And finally, it helps product feel assured that every deliverable has an owner. Every piece of the launch has been accounted for, is planned, and is ready to be executed.
For those supporting the launch, it encourages roadmap readership.
Having your launch plan in the same platform your product team spends their time ensures a cohesive strategy, from plan to launch. But it also plays a critical role in establishing shared ownership of the launch and the entire product strategy.
For the marketing folks planning campaigns, the salespeople writing emails, and the customer success reps working with customers, the roadmap needs to be available. If your roadmap has been built well, it contains the context your go-to-market teams need to execute.
“Who is this product for? Why did we build it? What goals will it help our business achieve?”
Answers to questions these questions are found in the roadmap. And they can guide the development of your launch plan.
As a product marketer, I’ll be the first to admit I don’t always read our product roadmap. But I know I can find the information I need for my launch plan in the roadmap.
This accessibility encourages viewership of the roadmap in a context that makes the information contained within the roadmap actionable. For instance, if you’re writing product taglines, you can use the roadmap to view supporting documentation.
Overall, a product launch should never take place in a vacuum. It should be a natural extension of the product strategy and serve as the execution of the product roadmap. Each launch is your opportunity to measure outcomes. And to determine whether you achieve the goals associated with the overall product strategy and vision.
With that being the case, it makes sense that the launch plan should live alongside the roadmap. Schedule a demo with our team to learn more about Launch Management.
Top 5 Best Product Management Websites of 2022
So many websites and so little time. And while that truism could be applied equally to recipes, sports analysis, or politics, we’re focusing here on product management websites. It turns out a lot of product folks like to share their tips and wisdom on the Internet.
Here at LIKE.TG, we can’t get enough of product-related content, so we’re always on the lookout for who’s doling out easily-digestible-yet-professionally-fulfilling insights. That’s why we can save you the Googling and share our top five product management websites from 2022, along with why they topped our year-end list.
5. Product Talk
There’s no one more immersed in applying discovery and customer insights to prioritization and planning than Product Talk’s Teresa Torres. She literally wrote the book on it!
But this author didn’t stop there and continues pumping out quality content, all focused on gathering great customer and market intelligence along with best practices to put it best to use. Real-world stories from the trenches at companies like trivago and CarMax share a stage with meaty posts on how to stop salespeople from blocking your access to customers and using opportunity decision trees to visualize discovery work for easier consumption.
There’s even content on how to land your first product job, what to do when your buyers aren’t your users, and implementing continuous discovery at startups. And if you prefer to watch versus read, there are excellent videos on topics including collaborative decision-making and showing your work to attain stakeholder buy-in. With years of quality content in the archive, you won’t run out any time soon.
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4. Silicon Valley Product Group
The Silicon Valley Product Group isn’t just a bunch of product peeps that happen to have a 415 area code. The SVPG remains at the forefront of thought leadership in product development.
Founded by Marty Cagan, who cut his product leadership teeth at places like eBay, Netscape, and Hewlett-Packard, the SVPG has been sharing best practices and practical insights into product development for more than two decades. That means there’s a massive back-catalog of meaty posts on agile, waterfall, and the age-old dilemma of where product management should live, and the hits keep on coming 20+ years later.
Recent entries include articles on coaching vs. mentoring, product/market fit, and what product managers need to take off their plates so they can focus on interacting directly with customers and engineers. But a quick search on nearly any topic should uncover a gem or two from their list of published posts.
3. Department of Product
This company’s bread and butter is training product managers, but their blog doles out a ton of useful content for anyone interested in the field. For PMs lacking technical backgrounds or who are decades past their days writing code, explainers on buzzy topics, including Web3, GitHub, and natural language processing are unintimidating primers on subjects you need to be conversant in to hold your own with developers.
Posts on process—such as writing release notes and managing UX debt—show they’re not afraid to spend time on the less-sexy parts of the job, while content regarding SaaS pricing and measuring product-market fit helps product managers optimize their go-to-market tactics. There’s also plenty of career advice, including pointers on how to build useful skills, including reading API documentation, SQL, and even how to draw on a whiteboard with confidence.
And, if your eyes are tired after all that close reading, pop in your earbuds and check out one of their podcasts, where they interview product leaders from companies including Wayfair, Venmo, and Uber.
2. Sachin Rekhi
Notejoy founder and CEO Sachin Rekhi’s website provides a flavorful variety of hundreds of essays and videos spanning a cornucopia of product-related topics.
Videos on career-propelling topics such as mastering influencing without authority and getting actionable product feedback stand alongside posts on midlife career exploration, finding product culture fit, implementing OKRs, and the importance of leaders reviewing which metrics you’re using
Sachin also frequently re-reads some once-hot business books and gives a fresh take on them with a bit of 20/20 hindsight, including Peter Thiel’s Zero to One and Hamilton Heller’s 7 Powers, as well as more recent reads such as the behind-the-scenes look into Amazon’s working backward approach to product development and where you begin with the press release and Andrew Chen’s The Cold Start Problem.
1. Bring the Donuts
Ken Norton’s Bring the Donuts is sadly not the latest subscription box or instant delivery service for baked goodies, but it is our top website of 2022. What—other than its unforgettable moniker—makes it stand out from the crowd?
Ken’s a former Google product leader and his posts are so thorough they even have footnotes. He challenges product managers to think beyond the immediate and consider nontraditional topics such as thirty-year product plans and why companies should offer dual career tracks for product management. But he also digs into some fundamentals, including creating strong product cultures and figuring out the ideal PM-to-engineer ratio.
There are also “deep dives” into how products get built at leading companies such as Stripe, Slack, and Airbnb, giving product leaders behind-the-scenes peeks into how those firms roll out innovative new offerings.
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LIKE.TG Cares: Q&A with the Equal Learning Fund
Heart, humility, and hustle. These core values aren’t just central to how LIKE.TG operates as a business. They also play a significant role in our Diversity and Inclusion efforts. Through our DI Task Force, LIKE.TG has partnered with several wonderful non-profit organizations helping the local Santa Barbara community.
We’d like to take a moment to highlight one of our non-profit partners, the Equal Learning Fund. And who better to talk about the ELF than its Founder, CEO, and Board President, Hannah Huelin-Meek?
Keep reading to learn more about Hannah and the Equal Learning Fund!
1. Can you tell us a little about your background and experience?
I’ve spent my entire career in the nonprofit world. So, before launching Equal Learning Fund, I worked for the Red Cross for almost 15 years in disaster relief and blood donations, but I’d always had a passion for helping with children’s causes, which led me to start Equal Learning Fund. Throughout my career, I’ve specialized in providing strategic vision and real-world solutions focused on building teams.
Bringing this expertise to my own nonprofit has been a gratifying endeavor.
2. What is the Equal Learning Fund, and what is its mission?
Equal Learning Fund is a 501c3 nonprofit organization created to help bridge the socioeconomic gaps for underserved youth. We believe that every child should have an equal opportunity for education regardless of socioeconomic status. We provide educational funds, school supplies, and program support to those most in need so that every child can have a chance at a great future.\
3. How does the Equal Learning Fund identify communities to support?
Equal Learning Fund prides itself on researching school district data, talking with educators, and working directly with our shelter partners and school programs to identify real-time needs. We have also been cautious only to take on the right number of community partners we can service and make meaningful impacts with based on our available funding.
4. Having spent over 15 years in the non-profit sector, what led to the decision to create the Equal Learning Fund?
Before creating Equal Learning Fund in 2020, I had been pondering the idea for a couple of years. As mentioned, I’ve always had a special place in my heart for children’s causes, and even from a young age, I would donate and volunteer – the calling was definitely there!
Having grown up in the UK and attended college here in the US, I have had the opportunity to learn about different education systems and learning opportunities with a very objective lens. So, I knew there were gaps when it came to learning; this certainly was not a new issue, but when the pandemic hit, it brought these socioeconomic gaps to the forefront of so many households across the nation. Additionally, I knew families that could purchase laptops for virtual learning, get extra tutors, and help their kids continue to succeed, and then some families shared with me that their kids weren’t learning at all; there was no better time to launch than that moment.
5. What accomplishments are you most proud of with the Equal Learning Fund?
There are a couple; our backpack drives each year have been amazing, and providing kids with what they need to feel confident returning to school is great. I was able to meet with some of the families that received these, and it was heartwarming to hear their stories and see the direct impact of our work. The other accomplishment I feel really good about is being able to provide tutors in core academic subjects to some of the students we support. We get progress reports weekly, and it’s incredible to see the improvement week over week!
6. Where do you envision the Equal Learning Fund accomplishing in the next 10 years?
That’s a great question and one I love! Currently, our primary focus is on the California market, with some special projects sprinkled in. Our goal is to scale our model over the coming years so that we can do more nationally and eventually have more of a presence overseas.
7. What do you look for in a corporate partner?
Let me start by saying that we LOVE all our current partners and have a lot of respect for your team at LIKE.TG; I often find myself sharing your company as an example because of the fantastic teamwork and partnership provided. We look for partners who are aligned in what they want to achieve from a giving standpoint; we also look at the company itself and the work they do to see if there might be further overlap and opportunities to collaborate. Ultimately though, we are looking for individuals who have a passion for making an impact and care about the communities that they are in – LIKE.TG is an excellent example of this!
8. What can companies like LIKE.TG do to support organizations like yours?
There are a few ways companies can help:
Fundraisers – These give employees a chance to give back, help their communities, and get involved with a cause!
One-time donations – Great for targeting a specific impact.
Volunteering – We love our volunteers and strive to match individuals with projects they will enjoy! We offer virtual and in-person opportunities.
Spread the word – Help raise awareness.
9. How can folks participate and volunteer without a corporate affiliation?
Individuals can donate their time by volunteering or become an advocate for the cause by reaching out at Get Involved – Equal Learning Fund in Santa Barbara, CA.
10. Can you share any insights about the successes the Equal Learning Fund has seen over the years?
We are proud to have served over 2k students with school supplies, technology, and storytelling sessions! Also, we have provided over 600 backpacks, and over 700 reading books and tutored 15 students in core academic subjects. We have made significant impacts and want to do more! Check out the links below to our current fundraisers.
Is there anything else you would like to share or promote?
LIKE.TG’s Giving Tuesday Technology Fundraiser: LIKE.TG’s Giving Tuesday Fundraiser! – Campaign (equallearningfund.org)
Holiday Fundraiser – Join us for gift giving for children in shelters: Holiday Giving! – Campaign (equallearningfund.org)
We’d like to thank Hannah and the Equal Learning Fund for being such an incredible partner to the LIKE.TG Diversity Inclusion Task Force. We look forward to continuing our efforts to support our local communities.
If LIKE.TG sounds like the right fit for your next chapter, we’d love to hear from you. Take a look at our open roles at https://www.productplan.com/careers/.
