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Effective Use of Product Roadmap Software to Align Your Product Strategy
Vital to delivering successful products at Clickatell, an effective product roadmap can quell the confusion and missteps that often derail well-meaning product delivery organizations. Roadmaps provide the required context to understand how individual initiatives combine to meet strategic objectives. They also paint a clear picture of how it all comes together.
An effective product roadmap lists the many deliverables and deadlines. However, most importantly, it tells a story. The roadmap guides and informs everyone involved with the product from ideation to market. Furthermore, the alignment creates a cohesive organization around the same core objectives.
Using Your Product Strategy and Product Vision to Plan Your Roadmap
Product strategies must be rooted in the overall vision of the company and product. This ensures organizational alignment and support. When each product initiative advances, the product vision is easy for everyone to be on board. Some product teams may find themselves challenged by the individual whims of sales staff, executives, or even their product managers.
The product roadmap then reflects that strategy. It illustrates the product team’s approach to making their product vision a reality. The linkage prevents the product from straying into uncertain territory. An effective product roadmap can provide your team with a mission and vision into actual functionality and deliverables.
Anything that doesn’t directly service the overall vision of the product roadmap needs reevaluation. Strategic and effective product roadmaps provide independent product managers and implementation teams time to focus on what really matters. They can then produce their desired outcomes. Teams can then ensure a product-led company arrives at the desired destination.
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The Product Roadmap’s Key Role in the “Triad”
Product management, product development, and user experience comprise the “triad.” Moreover, these disciplines are essential to delivering great products. Every organization strives to find the sweet spot for these collaborations. The results are products that delight customers while also solving their problems.
[Source for reference of the “triad”]
Product roadmaps serve as the golden thread that weaves these three disciplines together. When roadmaps align with the product strategy, all three key disciplines are working off the same plan. The alignment creates a secure buy-in from stakeholders regarding its contents’ viability, feasibility, and desirability. Moreover, it creates a true partnership that can’t reach a common goal without working in sync.
The Importance of Storytelling and the Roadmap’s Role
Humans respond much better to stories and narratives than bulleted lists of talking points. Positioning your product in terms of stories helps people communicate its value and helps keep all teams on message and consistent.
While the specifics may be highly dependent on the product’s and company’s maturity and scale, the logic and sequence of the roadmap’s contents should always make sense. I believe every product strategy needs a storyline and a timeline.
Product storyline
The storyline explains the “why,” typically presented verbally with a few slides to support the presentation. The timeline denotes the order, with sequences and key milestones best expressed in a visual roadmap created with purpose-built tools like ProductPlan.
Storylines introduce concepts and create consistent naming conventions that ensure everyone in the business can associate with. This narrative device provides input to concepts reflected in the roadmap. Storylines help underpin the product’s vision and mission.
A solid visual roadmap pulls the story together. It provides documentation of the narrative. The roadmap’s timeline can serve as a preview of how and when that story will expand and get even better over time.
6 Roadmapping Best Practices
Roadmap’s key value exists in sharing data in a digestible, consistent format. It serves as the record reference for anyone building, selling, supporting, or using the product. But the best roadmaps have a few key elements that increase their utility.
1.) Know your audience
Not every crowd wants or needs the same thing from a roadmap. The storyline and timeline should remain consistent. The level of detail and emphasis get tailored to different sets of stakeholders. So it puts the focus on what’s meaningful to them. Don’t make the rookie mistake of thinking the only audience that matters is product development or the C-suite.
2.) Choose an appropriate tool
Visual roadmaps are the best way to convey your product’s story. Don’t rely on tools that lack the flexibility and ease of use required to create a compelling visual roadmap. It will evolve as the product strategy matures and new features and functionality ship. Other teams would never settle for subpar tools, and neither should product management. Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint do many things well, but roadmapping isn’t one of them, and neither do a collaboration or issue tracking tools. Pick a purpose-built roadmapping tool.
3.) Static is for suckers
Roadmaps are living resources that demand regular updates. Create a cadence for updating and socializing the latest versions of the roadmap, so stakeholders expect and look forward to their natural evolution. Slide decks and screenshots don’t do roadmaps justice – rather, use a specialized and interactive tool put in the hands of competent roadmap owners to mitigate the danger of outdated documents remaining in circulation.
4.) Consistency is crucial
Regardless of how roadmaps get built in your organization, they should always look and read the same. Relying on templates, standard terminology, and consistent visual elements avoids stakeholders’ confusion and prevent product team members from reinventing the wheel. With a roadmap strategy guide, everyone can focus on the substance and less on the format.
5.) Take a portfolio approach
No roadmap is an island in organizations with multiple products and product lines. With a consistent approach, it’s easy to roll up various roadmaps for different products into a portfolio or master view. The portfolio approach creates a cohesive roadmap ecosystem, even with diverse global teams working on product strategy and execution. Project managers, developers, testers, sales, and marketing must make sense of each product, how they interact, and any interdependencies.
6.) Build for a remote and distributed world
Roadmaps provide a reference regardless of the location or time zone, especially in Agile environments where rapid iterations and learnings are the norms. Since far-flung teams get so few overlapping time slots when they can work together, roadmap consistency allows those meetings to be more productive and efficient, fostering increased collaboration.
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Make Roadmaps Work for You
Humans invented tools to accomplish more, not so they could spend their time fooling around with the tools. Product managers should view roadmaps as a valuable tool. They should invest enough time in them to maximize their benefits.
Product managers are the keepers of one of the most important artifacts in the entire company—the product roadmap. Understanding what roadmaps can do and continually improving and updating them makes them more helpful for challenging conversations and negotiations between product teams and stakeholders.
Roadmaps do well to limit noise and distractions. They focus on the core of the vision and leave the shiny objects on the sidelines. Consequently, they are the “chaos shield.” We all need to deliver value and delight to our customers while at the same time appeasing our internal stakeholders. Finally, their accuracy creates credibility, which will give them more utility moving forward.
Read the Strategic Roadmap Planning Guide ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '06f68ad8-23a4-4d4e-b15a-e578f0f8adaf', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});
Employ an IMPACT Prioritization Strategy to Your Product
What drives product professionals? They are driven with a hyperfocus on doing things that matter. Product professionals talk to customers and stakeholders to understand what’s important to them. They unpack their pain points to get to the root cause. They know the importance of a prioritization strategy and seek out opportunities to improve upon it.
We conduct customer research and stakeholder alignment so we can figure out what matters. Then we identify what we can do in our products that make an impact, be it on the lives of our customers, the growth of the user base, or the bottom line of the business.
However, we usually have far more ideas and options than bandwidth and resources. Thus, we realize a real need for prioritization, ranking and sorting, and culling the list. We can then choose a few items worthy of making the product roadmap rise to the top.
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The Downsides of Prioritization Frameworks
Because a prioritization strategy is of crucial importance to any product’s success, many different methods exist. Dozens upon dozens of frameworks stand ready for product teams looking for a new way to figure out the best ideas to pursue first, from buy-a-feature to MoSCoW analysis.
These frameworks aim to maximize windows of opportunity and optimize product development. It’s a testament to just how tricky, and complex a prioritization strategy can be.
Not only do these frameworks have lots of different names and acronyms, but they also require varied inputs. Some rely heavily on customer surveys, while others need a well-structured strategy or clear key performance indicators (KPIs).
While these tools often help, there’s an inherent risk to them as well. Product managers may feel forced to ignore critical data points due to the limits of the overall framework.
Product managers face limits due to the lack of a solid strategy. Their strategy should align stakeholders on a consensus moving forward. That must be in place well before plugging numbers into a framework. How else can you assess the significance of any item on the business making progress toward its goals?
IMPACT sets the stage for better prioritization conversations, moving the team past the “why” and focusing on specific trade-offs and expected outcomes.
Watch our webinar on IMPACT:
Applying an IMPACT Prioritization Strategy
As I’ve covered in many other blog posts, webinars, and our free ebook, IMPACT is a mindset for ensuring you’re doing things that matter. And there’s no domain where that matters more than prioritization.
So let’s run through the six elements of IMPACT and see how they relate to this essential aspect of product management:
Interesting
Not all problems are created equal. Framing and Context provide stakeholders with an idea of how pressing the issue is. Product management must act as a storyteller to engage their colleagues instead of just giving a dry recounting of the facts.
Folks get excited and influence how things get ranked. At this stage, the solution must take a backseat to the prevalence and significance of the problem.
Meaningful
The problems you opt to solve must both move the business forward and provide customer value. You can’t do either without an agreed-upon vision and strategy as well as a quantifiable benefit to the customer.
People
The focus must remain squarely on the customers, in this case, how many benefits and how significant is the improvement, which creates an apples-to-apples comparison and shifts distractions and edge cases to the parking lot.
Actionable
Prioritization must consider the realistic chances of solving the problem. Putting something impossible at the top of the queue—despite its possible value—wastes everyone’s time. That requires a little homework with engineering to consider feasibility and level of effort to ensure a balance between resource allocation and weight.
Clear
It’s tough to consider and adequately rank potential development items without a comprehensive understanding of the problem. Don’t prioritize things until the research is complete and the ideal solution is already in hand.
Testable
How will you validate that each prioritized item worked once it ships? Without a measurable definition of success, no one knows if it was worth it or if similar projects warrant resource allocation in the future.
Did you solve the problem? Is the value clear to end-users and prospects? User feedback confirms those assumptions—or sends you back to the drawing board—so the sooner they chime in, the better.
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An IMPACT Prioritization Strategy in Action
For an additional lens incorporating IMPACT into a prioritization strategy, you can rank each item being considered based on the six tenets of IMPACT. For each of those six pillars, the team can rate each item on a five-point scale.
When evaluating a potential development item for “People,” for example, it might look like this:
1 – This only helps a minimal number of users in our target market.
3 – This allows lots of users with a particular characteristic/within a specific market segment.
5 – Everyone reaps significant benefits, and it expands the pool of potential customers.
Each item’s IMPACT is an objective countermeasure to the inertia that plague prioritization. The goal is to make the most of each development cycle, and the work with the most significant IMPACT is the work worth doing first.
To learn more about how IMPACT can influence this and other aspects of product management, download the free ebook today!
Finding Your True Career IMPACT Within the Product Field
Product professionals get paid to manage products and services. Delighting customers and creating innovative solutions for their problems dictates our priorities. But this single-minded focus on helping others often leads to a lack of focus on ourselves and our career impact in the product field.
And, unlike our products, no one’s getting paid to manage our careers on our behalf. Without intentional and thoughtful strategizing, years and decades can roll by, shifting and stalking our career trajectories while we worry about the success of others.
Applying the IMPACT mindset to your career can help keep that career impact trajectory on track by ensuring each move you make gets you closer to where you want to go.
From Individual Contributor to Director of Product➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '9110b373-1b93-491b-8f83-5fc4b63b4b89', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});
Being a Selfless Generalist is a Good Thing
A selfless approach based on customer empathy and satisfying stakeholders is an asset on the job, but less so for ourselves. We suffer from imposter syndrome and deprecate our value because, as generalists, we don’t command the same respect and awe as our more specialized coworkers.
But our selfless generalist approach is a superpower in its own right. Seeing the big-picture vision and possessing versatility enables product managers to impact, even when the spotlight falls on others instead. We check our egos at the door because the job demands it, and we don’t want a blindspot to punish the customers we care about.
Though it may not grab as many headlines or turn us into “influencers” in our respective industries, it builds the proper habits and work ethic to succeed in our current roles… and our next ones. Unfortunately, this means a scant opportunity to promote ourselves leads to personal “brands” that seldom extend beyond our companies’ walls (physical or virtual). Thus comes fewer opportunities to be “discovered” or headhunted or recruited as we continue operating backstage and behind the scenes.
Variety is the Spice of Life and the Bane of Product Management Careers
Anyone in product for a few years quickly notices no fixed definition of product management from one company to another. Some view Product as an equal peer to Marketing, Sales, and Engineering, while others tuck it away under a VP of Product Marketing or a CTO.
One organization may crown us “CEO of the Product” while another views us as an annoying check on runaway innovation. There appears to be a lack of shared understanding of what Product has to offer and why it’s so necessary. But the net result is seemingly random locations on organization charts, daily duties that differ significantly from one company to another, and product managers hailing from many walks of life.
The diversity presents challenges when attempting to:
Identify growth opportunities and spot which areas you must improve upon.
Translate a written job description into what it would mean for your career aspirations and how it maps to your current experience.
Tailor your resume, cover letter, and personal pitch to fit a particular job opportunity.
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Putting IMPACT to work for your career
The IMPACT approach can help you optimize your career impact by assessing yourself in order to improve your career prospects and how you position yourself when you’re actually on the hunt for a new gig.
Optimize yourself with IMPACT
Whether you’re desperate to change companies, are angling for a promotion, or want to be the best you can be, IMPACT provides a structure for identifying your strengths and weaknesses while identifying areas to work on.
Interesting
Product managers need an exciting story. How you got to your current role, the career path you took, and where you’d like to go are essential to shaping how others view you. Resumes list the jobs, the degrees, and a few details in bullet points but don’t always recount a compelling story.
In a vacuum, your resume or LinkedIn profile might leave people with more questions than answers:
Why did you leave Microsoft for some startup that failed?
Why did you quit your job at a unicorn and throw in with a medium-sized firm?
What made you stay at the same company in the same role for six years?
How come you were once a Director, but now you’re a Senior PM?
Why did you bounce around between product marketing and product management?
To you, those moves all make sense, given the full context of your life and career. But job titles alone don’t do your narrative justice, ergo the need for a story that weaves them together. Connect the dots, find themes and common threads, and spin a tale that leaves others wondering what the next chapter holds in store.
Meaningful
Product managers do a lot of different things, many of them decidedly necessary. Listing out your responsibilities conveys competence with these tasks and obligations but camouflages your most impactful work.
Why you did those things and how you prioritized them is far more relevant. What did those accomplishments mean to you? To your company? To your users and customers?
When reviewing your experience, the emphasis must be on how they solved pain points and helped the company reach its overall impact goals.
People
A product manager’s relationships and interactions with coworkers are fundamental to their success. Those soft skills may not be measurable, but they are essential traits of your current future employer’s values.
Are you a good teammate that people enjoy working with? Do you make life easier and better for your colleagues? Are you a great mentor or a devoted protégé?
Those skills also come into play when interacting with customers. Can you speak in a language they understand and connect with them where they’re at? Can you engage them in deeper conversations to uncover the root issues and not just the surface-level gripes and wish lists?
Talent, intelligence, and creativity aren’t enough for a successful run in Product. You need to be a people person, too.
Actionable
When listing accomplishments, it’s important to deviate from the laundry-list approach and instead emphasize anecdotes or success stories where you either took action or set the stage for stakeholders to do so. You need to explain beyond merely discussing the completion of a task and what you did with the results.
You didn’t just “survey users,” you used that survey data to make recommendations, and one of those recommendations improved a KPI or led to a big deal, which better illustrates the meaningful impact of those actions, not that you just took them.
Clear
Keep things short and sweet while focusing on real-world examples of how your accomplishments made an impact. Showing off your skills and touting what they’ve done for you in the past are both keys to convincing folks you’re worth adding to their team.
Did you bridge gaps and build consensus by creating clarity among stakeholders. Have you inspired the masses with your oratorical prowess? Did you slice and dice the data and create dazzling visuals or unignorable metrics that won people over?
Testable
The dull, repeatable, everyday elements of your job aren’t the best measures of your competency. You need to get uncomfortable in an unfamiliar situation before knowing if you’re up to the challenge.
Push yourself to try new things, learn new skills, and dive into new areas of interest. Measure your faculty with this new material and see if you’ve got the resilience to power through when things get tricky.
Watch the full webinar below:
Putting IMPACT Into Action On a Job Hunt
With your elevator pitch nailed, the next part of advancing your career is assessing new opportunities. Once again, IMPACT can help by weeding out postings that won’t be a great fit while zeroing in on the good ones.
Job descriptions aren’t just ads; they’re problem statements you’ve yet to unpack.
What problem is this company trying to solve?
Where can someone add value and make an impact?
Are they mentioning customers and data?
Which verbs do they use?
Are they super specific in what they’re looking for or searching for an athlete to grow into the position and evolve with it over time?
Of course, what they say they want isn’t always what they need (or want), but it is a sneak preview of how they view product management today. It might be wrong and negotiable, but it provides a good glimpse of their current mindset.
With this as a starting point—and the remainder of the interviewing process as a series of additional opportunities for further digging—you can better ascertain the expectations for the role, your fit for the opportunity, and whether it will provide you with enough chances to make a true career impact. You want a job where you’re motivated to succeed, not just happy to collect the paycheck.
A Position with Purpose
The product offers us the opportunities to change lives, fuel businesses, and transform organizations. The problems we solve may be trivial or life-changing, but they all have the chance to impact our product’s users and customers.
Finding impactful opportunities throughout our career means more than just a job we enjoy or a product we’re passionate about. It gives our entire lives purpose and adds to the story of our career, adding new chapters with every step we take.
To learn more about how IMPACT can help with your career and other dimensions of product management, download the free ebook today.
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5 Ways LIKE.TG Helps Standardize Your Roadmaps
Sometimes you don’t know you have a problem until something breaks. Young companies are often scrappy by design. Their product teams are small and agile. Perhaps the team consists of a few product managers. These professionals can easily communicate, stay aligned, and present a cohesive product strategy to the team. Many teams fail to understand the importance of a roadmap. They fail to understand how it can help standardize and align their team.
The scrappy methods that worked in the past can lead to inconsistency and disorganization as the company scales. There are more features to build, more roadmaps to maintain, and more stakeholders to satisfy. Without standardized processes to maintain uniformity, tiny inconsistencies in how each product manager approaches their work are magnified over time. This results in miscommunication, redundant work, and errors.
Whether you’re a product manager or a product operations person for a large enterprise organization, we want to help you. Our roadmap software can help you create streamlined processes that scale along with your company. Our roadmaps can improve efficiency, reduce redundant work, and establish best practices. Here are five ways LIKE.TG helps you and your product team standardize roadmaps.
Create a Roadmapping Process that Grows as You Grow
Adopting roadmapping software alone goes a long way toward establishing the organization-wide processes that allow your team to scale. Without a tool built for roadmapping specifically, many product managers rely on square-peg, round-hole solutions. For example, spreadsheets and slide decks, neither of which make it easy to maintain uniformity.
Product roadmaps should be consistent in the way they present information. They can be pretty complex, packing tons of data into a visual format that spans months. Moreover, roadmaps illustrate various work across teams. To make sense of this information, a viewer needs to know where to look. They need to know what the colors on the roadmap mean and how roadmap lanes get organized.
They also need to know that the roadmap they’re viewing isn’t outdated.
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Choosing the right tool
Tools like Excel and Powerpoint open the door for too much variability when creating a roadmap. These tools fail to build effective roadmaps, so product managers must customize them to work for their needs.
It’s a minefield of possibility that’s difficult to reign in as your organization grows. The style and structure of your roadmaps evolve organically in different directions and become challenging to comprehend and combine. Coupled with the lack of version control, and your roadmap process becomes a roadmap mess.
Using native roadmap software, like LIKE.TG, provides immediate structure to how your team roadmaps. Think of a roadmapping tool as a pre-built foundation and frame. The frame gives your roadmaps reliability and strength while also still leaving room for customization and creativity. By adopting a roadmapping tool, your roadmaps will all live in a single space. They will follow a consistent style and structure.
Standardize the Style and Structure of Your Roadmaps
Roadmap legends help you visually communicate strategic goals. With just a pop of color, you can organize your roadmap by initiatives that increase customer satisfaction. You can create more revenue opportunities or enhance your product’s performance.
It can be difficult to keep these legends uniform when you have a team of product managers who each create and maintain their own roadmaps. If every roadmap uses a different visual vocabulary for communicating the same information, the result is a set of roadmaps that require time and energy to learn to read, and worse, can’t be compared or combined into a high-level portfolio view without a lot of work to remedy inconsistencies.
Many of our customers have felt this pain firsthand. It’s why we built Shared Legends, a way for you to standardize the style and structure of your roadmaps.
With Shared Legends, you can create a centrally managed legend that can apply to any existing roadmap with just a few clicks. Rather than developing legends themselves, your product team can easily follow best practices and use the legends agreed upon by your organization.
Even better, you only need to update your shared legend once to cascade that update to every other roadmap using that legend. Instead of hounding your product team to make the same update countless times, you can rest assured that everyone on the team is following best practices and using the same legend.
Standardize the Information Included in Your Roadmap Details
You don’t want to create consistency in the style and structure of your roadmaps. You also want to predict the kinds of information people can expect to find when they go to your roadmap with questions.
Within the details of every roadmap bar, we provide a space for you to include additional information to help roadmap viewers understand “what” the product team is building and why they’re building it, who they’re building it for, and other essential information.
If left to their own devices, product managers will likely provide the information they deem most relevant. They perceive this through the information they care about the most. On the other hand, they can determine by asking themselves the questions they’ve most often received from others. Either way, it’s unlikely that the information provided within each initiative will be the same across your team. Product managers need to find a way to properly align expectations.
Custom Fields
With LIKE.TG’s custom fields, you can designate a space for the information you want your product team to include on every roadmap bar. Maybe your team needs to keep track of the success metrics tied to each initiative. Or perhaps your senior leaders want to see the budget allocated for each priority.
Rather than answer these questions individually over and over, you can direct team members to your roadmap and allow it to speak for you. Over time, team members will build a habit of checking the roadmap first rather than interrupting work. The assurance will provide you and your team with more time to focus on strategic initiatives, speaking with customers, launching new products, exploring new market opportunities. The freed-up time will allow product managers to work on addressing things that need quick prioritization.
Standardize How Your Team Decides What to Build Next
Prioritization can be a painstaking process. There are so many inputs to consider, from a mountain of customer feedback to features that your executive team believes will drive the business forward to your ideas around what innovations could attract entire markets of new customers.
Without an agreed-upon way to decide what to build next, it’s easy to fall into the trap of reacting to what others ask for rather than what your product strategy dictates. It’s even easier for each product manager on your team to prioritize something different based on their assessment of what’s essential and what’s not.
We want to help you bring standardization to how you prioritize roadmap initiatives. The LIKE.TG prioritization board allows your team to objectively score opportunities based on a customizable set of benefit and cost categories.
Maybe your company has a business goal to increase revenue from a particular segment of customers. With the prioritization board, you can easily include that consideration as a benefit. You can then customize how to compare to other initiatives and consider how they might factor into deprioritization. For example, operational costs or the amount of development work required can also add to your prioritization framework as a cost.
The prioritization board helps your product managers stay laser-focused on your company’s most important priorities. It also provides new product managers on your team with an accessible template for learning what should be top-of-mind considerations when deciding what to build next.
Standardize Your Roadmap to Communicate with Different Audiences
LIKE.TG’s tags are an easy way to categorize and filter your roadmap based on custom information. Indeed, not every initiative on a roadmap will be relevant to every kind of audience.
Tags aren’t helpful if they aren’t implemented consistently across your various roadmaps.
Tags highlight particular stories about your product strategy. For example, your customer success team might want to know which features support a specific set of customers. Your marketing team may need a release overview for August so they can plan their go-to-market strategy. Tags add these additional details to your roadmap and then filter your roadmaps by this information.
Unfortunately, without standardizing how your team uses them, tags can quickly become a source of disorganization and confusion. In an attempt to create an August release overview, your product team might unintentionally create multiple variations of the same tag. Some roadmap items might be tagged with “Aug” while others tagged with “August Release.” Anyone who wants to see an overview of everything releasing in August will need to be aware of these variations.
Centralized Tag Manager
You should be able to keep your tags organized and avoid redundancy, confusion, and error. If you’re a Professional or Enterprise customer, we provide you with a place to do this. We call our centralized tag manager.
With the LIKE.TG tag manager, you can easily manage the tags used to highlight product owners, dependencies, release statuses, and more. The manager defines which tags pertain to which kinds of information, merge similar tags to avoid confusion, and deletes any tag your team shouldn’t use.
It may sound obvious, but making it easy for your audience to access the information most relevant to them is critical in keeping your team aligned, delivery schedules on time, and your roadmaps in use. Without a way to readily view this information, many will either rely on inefficient methods of getting the information they need – like asking the same questions of your product team over and over again – or move forward in ignorance. Neither of these outcomes is acceptable, especially as your organization scales.
Streamline Your Product Roadmap
Ultimately, roadmaps that have a standardized style and structure communicate information in the same way. They use a common vocabulary to express goals, identify priorities, highlight dependencies, and more. When you take the time to create consistent processes for building and maintaining your roadmaps, you reduce the cognitive load these tasks require. The freed-up time allows your team to focus on more important things, like speaking with customers, drilling into market research, and otherwise working on ways to improve your product.
It’s important to understand that standardization is an investment. It requires more work upfront to create less work overall over time. Unfortunately, many organizations realize the need for standardization too late, often when existing processes break down as the organization scales.
With LIKE.TG’s roadmapping platform, you can create a foundation of guidelines that build consistency and predictability within your organization over time. Our suite of standardization features ensures your roadmaps are produced by the best practices you’ve established, making it easy for your team to stay aligned, work efficiently, and gather the information they need to be better at their jobs.
Read the Strategic Roadmap Planning Guide ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '06f68ad8-23a4-4d4e-b15a-e578f0f8adaf', {"region":"na1"});
Your Product Team’s Communication is Making or Breaking Your Product
Effective product team communication is not about talking to your team more often or providing them with more granular tasks. You want to make sure your team understands why what they’re doing matters.
As a product manager, you need to create an atmosphere that keeps the lines of communication open. Not just from you to your team, but from them to you, and to each other. You also want to communicate not only your tactical requirements but the strategy and vision for the product.
Why Poor Product Team Communication Can Kill Your Product
Industry surveys reveal that product managers view communication skills as the most important.
In our most recent annual survey—The 2021 State of Product Management Report—we found that product professionals rate communication #2 on the list of skills they believe their coworkers lack most.
And don’t assume this means product managers let themselves off the hook when it comes to their communication abilities. More than half of our 2021 survey respondents admitted they have room to improve. The improvement came in their process of articulating strategy to their product team.
What is this data telling us? Product professionals understand that clear, effective, and frequent communication among their team can affect whether a product succeeds or fails in the market.
But what does that mean? Simply stating the abstract phrase, “We need to improve product team communication,” doesn’t illustrate the problem clearly. So, let’s talk specifics.
When your product team is not communicating effectively that miscommunication can derail your product.
1. Your development team might take away the wrong success criteria.
You can generate what feels like consensus in a meeting with your cross-functional team. Everyone on the team might nod their heads as you say: “We want to create an intuitive, streamlined experience that solves the XYZ problem for our user persona. In actuality, everyone might have a different understanding of what to prioritize first. Moreover, this may affect how your team builds out the functionality.
2. Your marketing team might develop the wrong messages for your user persona.
Your marketing team might hear your goal to solve the XYZ problem, but do they know why it’s a problem worth solving? Do they know your target user or buyer—what that person needs, wants, fears?
You want your marketing coworkers to understand your product and customer so well that they feel enthusiastic as they develop your product’s marketing messages and campaigns.
That can’t happen if you don’t regularly communicate with your marketing team, show them the market data you’ve compiled, encourage them to sit in on your developers’ demos, etc.
Without that deeper understanding, your marketing team will parrot the terms and phrases you’ve given them. That’s no way to unlock their expertise and develop the most compelling messages possible.
3. Your sales team might focus on benefits that don’t resonate with prospects.
You can hand your sales department a bunch of collateral when the product is ready for launch: demo videos, slideshows, sales sheets, prospect emails.
But will that be enough to turn your reps into an army of enthusiastic, knowledgeable advocates for the product? Almost certainly not.
If you want your sales team to have a deep understanding of the product they’re offering—and the customer they’re offering it to—you need to give them enough of a sense of your product’s value that they become evangelists for it.
4. You might not hear that your development team isn’t equipped to realize your vision.
Remember, product team communication needs to go in every direction. That means you need to be listening to your coworkers and hearing what they’re telling you.
If you’re not willing or able to do this, you could build your entire plan around a development team trying to let you know they don’t have the resources, skillset, budget, or understanding to deliver what you want.
The team might not want to disappoint you, so they offer noncommittal responses to your feature requests and timeline. And if you’re not truly listening, you might miss those signals.
For these reasons—and a thousand more like them—you need to prioritize clear and open communication among your product team. Now let me give you a few tips for incorporating this strategy into your process.
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5 Ways a Great Product Manager Creates Effective Product Team Communication
1. Answering questions around priorities.
As you begin to translate your high-level product vision into a strategic action plan, you can expect to hear questions, concerns, and challenges from your cross-functional team. Your action plan will require work from them, of course, and they might have questions about what should come first.
A great product manager is ready for these challenges with evidence, strategic reasoning, and, above all, patience.
Every question you hear from your cross-functional team consists of two parts—the spoken question and the unspoken “why” behind it.
Pro tip: Start your answer by providing the why behind the question and see if your team can get to your answer before you reveal it to them.
2. Explaining the product story.
Well-told stories are memorable and influential. That’s why we still remember fairy tales and parables we heard in childhood.
A great product manager can turn the details of a product concept into a story that’s clear, engaging, and fun to hear. A compelling product story can make it easier for your team to communicate the product’s value to each other—because they remember the story.
Imagine: You’re trying to develop a financial app to let parents give teenagers an allowance and monitor their spending habits. Rather than start by telling your cross-functional team all about the product’s features or what types of coding the app will need, you can give everyone a brief story:
“Charlie’s parents are done handing him cash every week, asking him a few days later what he’s done with the money and hearing, ‘I forgot.’” Our app is going to put Charlie’s spending on the grid. We’re going to relieve mom and dad of the head-bashing frustration of trying to decide every week whether to send Charlie’s allowance into a black hole. We’re going to help these well-meaning parents give their son some independence… with limits.”
Everyone on the team can now keep this memorable story as a reference while working on the product. If the product team gets stuck or confused, the team can ask themselves, “Is this going to help us help parents give their teenage kids independence and financial limits?”
3. Listening to the team.
Great product managers don’t just talk. They listen.
As I noted above, listening means paying attention not only to what your team is saying but the implications behind it.
If your developers ask why you have prioritized an initiative, they ask because they don’t understand its strategic value? Or is it because they don’t think they can complete the project but are uncomfortable saying so? Is there a different reason altogether?
When you receive questions or challenges from members of your team, you should not assume you’ve effectively resolved the issue just because you’ve answered. You also need to make sure your coworkers understand your reasoning and agree to whatever you’re asking of them.
Every person on your cross-functional team comes to their work from a unique perspective, with a fantastic set of skills and hopes, and challenges. They all have something valuable to contribute to your product’s success—even if it’s something you’d rather not hear, such as a warning about resource levels or your timeline. The only way to give your product the best chance of success is to listen to your team’s unique insights.
4. Staying available and accessible.
Fortunately, we’re in the digital and mobile era. Staying accessible to your product team is easier than it’s ever been. You can set up Slack channels or an MS Teams environment to chat with your team anytime.
Great product managers make themselves approachable to their cross-functional team, and they respond to questions and requests with enthusiasm and a positive attitude.
You don’t need a 24-hour policy where you promise to answer any text within 15 minutes. But you do want to send your coworkers the signal that you welcome their feedback and questions throughout the product development process.
5. Sharing a clear, up-to-date roadmap.
Finally, a great product manager builds and shares a roadmap that answers the team’s strategic questions.
For a product manager, this means including, wherever possible, your strategic reasoning alongside every theme and epic you add to your roadmap. Suppose your sales team popped open your roadmap and saw that your next priority was to develop an Android version of your app. Could they also know the evidence for why you chose that as the product’s following significant enhancement?
As you can see from the above LIKE.TG screenshot, you can quickly drop in a note about why you’ve decided to work on each item on the roadmap with our app.
This is another reason to use a purpose-built roadmap app instead of building out your product roadmap in a spreadsheet. All the extraordinary product managers are doing it these days.
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Building a Team of Effective Product Managers (and a Path to Product Leadership)
I hope you’ve found my reasoning for effective product team communication persuasive and that my suggestions can help you get there. But I want to leave you with one more thought.
As a product leader for years and a product manager for years before that, I can tell you from firsthand experience that building a solid communication foundation for your team can also create direct benefits for your career.
First—and this is true primarily with larger companies—you’ll be building a model for the other product managers in your organization to follow. And there’s a good chance your company’s executive staff will notice what you’re creating as well. They’ll want the great chemistry, the positive team conversations, the good outcomes that they see happening with your cross-functional product team.
A second related benefit: When you’ve demonstrated that you can build a streamlined product team where everyone is speaking the same language, you’ll be adding a solid skill to your arsenal, one that often leads to product leadership.
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Lead with Context, Not Control
Acquiring a consensus on product direction remains the number one challenge for product professionals, according to LIKE.TG’s 2021 State of Product Management Annual Report. The art of product leader communication relies on the concept of responsibility without authority. Product managers who follow this concept understand the responsibility to influence others to achieve the organization’s product goals.
The dynamic turns upside down as we progress through our careers and establish ourselves as product leaders. As product managers, we have the power to task others with responsibilities. We need to convince stakeholders in other departments to buy into strategies and get things done.
The responsibility of managing a product team gives us a type of control that we’re not used to. We can give orders and hold people accountable, and we also have the authority to assign our direct reports with tasks.
But should we treat our direct reports differently than our other coworkers and colleagues? Should we skip the niceties and consensus building within our own teams just because we can?
Product Manager’s Control of Employee Expectations
With your team, no one can stop you from giving orders and micromanaging staff. As a product manager, implementing an effective product strategy should remain a priority. Though you may have authority, it remains crucial that you wield this power responsibly.
Remember your time as a junior team member or individual contributor. The product managers who provided clarity around expectations and responsibilities empowered their employees. In contrast, those who failed to exude product leader communication let their product team down. As a junior product team member, what you were looking for was the “why.” The “why” provided you the context to think and act strategically versus tactically. Now that the roles have switched, you want to set up your product team for success, by developing your own product leader communication strategies.
By leading with context versus control, you position yourself to empower your staff to complete their tasks and reach their objectives. Autonomy provides employees with the freedom to solve problems and accomplish tasks utilizing their processes.
You likely hired your team members because you believed they had a good head on their shoulders and the ability to fulfill the job responsibilities. After they get fully onboarded, you can tap into those abilities.
When you grant your employees some level of autonomy, you convey to them that they have your trust. Trust can go a long way towards mitigating any cases of imposter syndrome and boosting employee confidence.
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Leading with context instead of control.
Product managers who provide context instead of control open up the possibilities of potential solutions. If you’re always offering basic action plans, you’re limiting your product team’s creativity. When you close off avenues that might be worth exploring, you ultimately miss out on opportunities that can lead to a better product.
Finally, leading with context means you create alignment within your own team. You must ensure that you provide consistent messaging to external stakeholders. As a united front, you can then start tackling product initiatives. Your product team needs to understand the rationale and motivations for these initiatives and decisions.
Plenty of opportunities exist to lead your team. By empowering them with knowledge, you refrain from bogging them down with directives.
Recognizing the 0pportunities to lead your team.
For example, let’s say you have a disgruntled customer bugging you to add a new feature. The request falls within the domain of an associate product manager. You could use a command approach: (1.) directing them to write up user stories based on sales team and customer services notes. (2.) Follow up to make sure it gets prioritized.
In contrast, the alternative approach calls for you to lead with context. To achieve this, you can tell the associate PM that a particular customer may need more attention than a returning customer. You need to emphasize that they should do some research to understand the customer’s true pain points. The overall goal to solve and recommend one or more solutions permits them to do some real product management work.
The customer’s request for a feature may relate to a symptom of a whole other issue, such as a lack of training. An effective product professional understands a small tweak takes less time than weeks of work. These revelations wouldn’t happen if you simply handed down a direct order from a project manager to an associate PM.
Likewise, you can also be less prescriptive with how junior team members spend their time by emphasizing context over control. Moreover, you can provide them with adequate context to make those decisions for themselves.
Utilizing metrics to measure success.
In addition, product managers—who understand the metrics used to define and gauge success—can identify the gaps themselves and add value where they see opportunity. It puts the onus on them to consult with colleagues to see where they might need some extra help. Moreover, they can review the overall situation and identify the areas that require an active owner.
If you take a holistic approach, junior staff can see the big picture and their contributions for maximum impact. While this may be too much leeway for newly hired staff, a solid contributor should quickly discern where they can do the most good.
Setting the Stage for Successful Context-Based Leadership
Context-driven management requires two key ingredients—clarity and communication. As any veteran product leader knows, there’s no better tool to facilitate that than the product roadmap.
A theme-based roadmap articulates the initiatives that need prioritization. Roadmaps can also convey the intended outcomes, objectives, and goals the plan expects to achieve. An effective product roadmap can align stakeholders and provide an appropriate framework for managing your team.
With a firm understanding of the roadmap, the entire product team operates from the same foundation by utilizing product software to remain in sync. In addition, the roadmap acts as a starting point where any decisions or conversations can provide context for the team.
Product managers may have a hard time loosening the reins. For this reason, product managers need to develop their product leader communication skills. Frequent check-ins and updates can ease the discomfort you may have with letting go of some of that control. In addition, if the guidance fails to provide them enough context, you can ask them questions before they jump back.
Creating an environment where the product team remains steeped in context ensures that the product team does not lose the product narrative. The entire team can play a role by remaining curious and seeking advice.
Spend Time on What Matters Most
We know from our 2021 State of Product Management report that product managers dislike mitigating issues through a reactive process instead of implementing a strategic process. Context-driven leadership can change that dynamic by forcing even the most junior members of the product team to think strategically.
This mindset can also inform your hiring strategies as well. Leading with context only works when you have staff members capable of synthesizing information and making sound choices independently and not just blindly following detailed instructions.
You may feel uncomfortable giving up control, but part of your job responsibility includes letting your team blossom and maximizing their potential. This concept mirrors the same basic tenet that underlies the entire Agile framework, where developers mitigate problems by developing solutions. Plus, it will give you more time to focus on strategic thinking, which 96% of product leaders say they don’t have enough time for.
Thinking Beyond Roadmapping to Elevate and Revolutionize Product Organizations
At LIKE.TG, we have the tremendous privilege of working with and listening to tens of thousands of product leaders. Our customers span across thousands of organizations ranging from smaller, growth-stage startups to Fortune 500 global enterprises. This vantage point has helped us better understand what communication strategies work best. Moreover, we understand why companies face alignment issues, and why products fail to live up to expectations.
In particular, we’ve observed customers struggling to democratize access to the artifacts insights that inform prioritization and go-to-market. The roadmap can serve as an organizational blueprint that binds strategy and execution. To assure product success, product organizations need to ensure the entirety of the organization is informed, aligned, and accountable.
Whether that means automating time-consuming approval processes, creating a central repository for go-to-market artifacts, or providing more meaningful analytics on product progress, LIKE.TG’s product operations platform will help organizations orchestrate their entire product strategy.
Change is Afoot
Many of our customers are in the midst of rapid change. For some customers, this change may be rebalancing how collaboration happens with an increasingly remote workforce. Others are witnessing larger-scale changes to their business model as buying behaviors shift in response to current macroeconomic or other factors.
Product-led growth (PLG) companies are becoming increasingly commonplace as PLG unlocks distribution advantages that can lower acquisition costs and improve the consumer purchasing experience in b2c and b2b businesses. Gartner reported that 85% of organizations surveyed had adopted or intended to adopt a product-centric delivery model.
The proliferation of software tooling to support data analytics, user research, and design, among other areas, has never been more accessible for product teams. While these tools often solve acute problems for their purpose, data managed within these tools can remain siloed, adding further complexity to the product organization. This ‘swivel chair process problem’ keeps product organizations from elevating critical strategic perspectives to the broader organization. LIKE.TG helps stitch together this siloed data to create a more unified view of the product story.
Tool proliferation is one of the reasons companies are introducing Product Operations into their organizations. The emergence of Revenue and Sales Operations disciplines and platforms such as Salesforce.com, which enabled organizations to improve transparency, alignment, and operational rigor, serve as a potential analog for what lies in store for Product. We view ourselves as a close product partner to this emerging discipline.
Embracing digital transformation
Finally, incumbents within industries such as financial services and healthcare that tend to embrace change more slowly are in the midst of a significant digital transformation as the competitive landscape shifts around them. Our SVP of Engineering, Mark Barbir, recently wrote about Implementing a Successful Product Transformation Strategy addressing digital transformation among other topics in case you are interested in learning more.
Elevating The Product Organization
All of these changes have accelerated the demand for product managers. Our 2021 State of Product Management Annual Report noted that interest in product management has doubled in the last five years. We also see an increase in product operations evidenced by LinkedIn’s recent assertion that the job skill of product operations has increased by 80% within the past year.
Despite these changes, many product teams still use slide decks or spreadsheets to communicate their roadmap strategy. They’re sharing information without context that no one can ‘double-click’ into to learn more. As a result, product managers spend too much time answering low-value questions from stakeholders. 60% of product managers say they spend most of their time updating teams internally, according to our 2021 State of Product Management Annual Report.
Yet strong alignment among Product, engineering, and the entirety of the go-to-market function is pivotal in delivering positive outcomes. Marketing needs to understand more about the persona or segment targeted. Sales want customer stories and the latest slide deck. Executives want to understand the KPIs and other metrics that will determine success. The product organization has the potential to be the heart of this insight connecting the broader team more closely to the product strategy to unlock crisper execution.
We believe the companies that can successfully elevate the product organization to the heart of strategy execution will be the most equipped to disrupt the future. The change will require executives across the organization to think differently about the role of Product within the company. Many product leaders may feel powerless to initiate systemic changes. However, we are here to partner in this revolution.
The Secret to Product Planning
The secret to product planning starts with “why.” In some cases, product planning focuses on what we’re building, completing, and what’s up next. The rationale for all that activity isn’t simply to cross things off the list or pump out new functionality. It’s about turning a vision into reality.
But connecting the dots between the activities of a particular product development team and the overarching corporate vision can be a bit of a stretch for those not steeped in the strategic exercises occurring at the top of the organization. How a particular widget maps back to a vision of “transforming the world of peer-to-peer finance” or “unlocking the potential of idle computing power” or whatever can be a heavy lift. To unlock the secret to product planning, product professionals need to develop a clear product vision.
Putting Vision into Context
In an ideal world, everyone should understand the organization’s overall vision. It’s beneficial to take a top-down approach. Breaking that vision down into smaller pieces becomes more relevant to different parts of the business. It’s not always easy to map the contents of an individual sprint. However, a high-level strategy for an entire company remains possible.
The significance of each element of the strategy increases stakeholder alignment. Alignment creates motivation and enthusiasm amongst the teams. They can now realize how their contributions impact the big picture. This increased fidelity must begin at the planning stages, creating the platform for ongoing alignment and teamwork.
At LIKE.TG, each engineering team has a vision. That aligns with the product vision, which in turn aligns with the company vision. Though there is no one secret to product planning, this concept comes close. It enables engineering teams to understand how the world looks different if they’re successful.
Planning for Outcomes While Preserving Accountability
Each squad understands its purpose and objectives. The squads remain grounded on a shared understanding of what success looks like to them. Boiling down grand sweeping statements and visions to something tangible is key to bridging that gap.
Each member should answer the question: “What will our customers be able to do tomorrow that they can’t do today?” This very concrete, specific ideal guides their actions without being too prescriptive.
For example, it might be that customers can now automate more of their daily updates. The update doesn’t spell out precisely what that might look like or how it will get built. However, the vision is crystal clear. The product manager can then fill in more details. Consequently, delivering value is more important than a list of features.
That value must also be measurable to ensure the team achieves its goal of executing its vision. Alignment around how we know our customers’ lives got better is just as crucial as intending to improve things. That shared definition of success keeps everyone pointed in the same direction. Moreover, it creates a benchmark for ongoing, measurable refinement.
Finding the Sweet Spot
While strategic thinking and keeping everything in perspective are product managers’ strong suits, that’s not always the forte for everyone in the organization. They may not have the impetus or motivation to do so, and they may also lack the information and context even if they did.
Therefore it’s up to product managers to determine the right level of vision required to give everyone enough autonomy to move forward without overwhelming them. This task only becomes more difficult as the scale of the vision expands thanks to growth.
Creating a shared vision
For example, at LIKE.TG, our vision is to help companies accelerate product outcomes.
By presenting a shared vision and securing buy-in, the product calibrates the squad to be on the same page. Presenting roadmaps tailored to the audience in question provides a helpful resource to paint this picture as well.
That’s why we keep narrowing things down. We know this team in particular’s contribution to accelerating product outcomes centers on collaboration within the application. We briefly explain how collaboration contributes to the vision, giving product development further insight into the purpose of their work and not just the “what.”
Shrinking the view and scope of things isn’t typically how the product discusses vision, but departing from grand narratives and concentrating on specifics is what the implementation teams need to succeed. Like with IMPACT, it conveys what’s meaningful about the work, giving the team a better picture of how their individual and team efforts plug into the larger strategic objectives and customer experience. It turns abstract platitudes into concrete action plans and tasks.
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Planning for the Future Without Becoming a Feature Factory
Company missions rarely change. Visions for the business typically extend five or ten years into the future. And strategies tend to cover the next year or two. Things get more specific the closer they are to the present.
But while missions and visions are vague, strategies and roadmaps tend to get more detailed out of necessity. Things can’t remain fuzzy once it’s time to build stuff, and that granularity helps teams plan accordingly and deliver functionality that adds customer value.
However, one shouldn’t confuse increased specificity with rigidity. The secret to product planning is to remain vision-driven and customer-centric. Product teams should stay flexible at every stage of the product planning process. Our product vision gets more precise as we continually learn more about our customers, their needs, and the overall market dynamics.
That’s where a roadmap based on themes versus specific features comes in. We’re all aligned about what areas we’re focusing on and our goals for each effort, but there’s still plenty of wiggle room on the details right up until implementation kicks off.
Maintaining Excitement and Energy.
Building products is still a job, and work remains an obligation versus a choice for most. However, imbuing the team with a sense of purpose can elevate the team above the daily grind and get them pumped up for what they can achieve.
By continuing to build what customers need and not just the promises in an outdated vision, strategy, or roadmap, we keep that joy of delighting customers close to the surface. We know we’re prioritizing what matters and spending our cycles on enhancements to the product experience that genuinely make a positive difference. And we won’t just build things because months or years ago, we happened to say we would.
The process only works well with the suitable structures in place. A foundation built on increasingly relevant visions grounds the work in its purpose. Visual roadmaps tie each project, task, and sprint back to each level.
This transparency builds trust and alignment while leaving room for flexibility as situations change and conditions evolve. It doesn’t happen overnight, and each stakeholder might warm up and embrace this approach on their timeline. By creating a solid understanding of the process and delivering a relevant vision for each team member, the team has established a product plan everyone can get behind. The secret to product planning will continuously evolve.
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The Critical Importance of Finding Time for Strategic Thinking and Planning
In our 2021 State of Product Management report, 97% of senior leaders said being strategic is the most important thing for their organization’s success. But at the same time, 96% of those same leaders say they don’t have the time for strategic thinking and planning. So why is it so difficult to find time for strategic thinking and planning?
I threw this question to the crowd in a LinkedIn post and received some surprising and insightful responses.
Time Management
Time management remains an essential theme for product teams because there aren’t enough hours in the day. Strategic thinking and planning tend to fall to the sideline for other pressing needs.
One possible solution is “outsourcing” some strategic thinking to junior staff members before passing it onto senior management to make the final call.
“I think they don’t have the time to do so,” said associate product manager Evelyn EBO. “Hence the need to have young and innovative minds who follow the trends of the industry to come up with these strategic thoughts while the senior leaders review and align it with the organization’s business goals.”
Strategic thinking and planning may require some intentionality, but there are plenty of ways to work them into the rhythms and schedule of a product team, such as working on it as a team, carving out some “alone time” to focus on a deep dive, or holding an off-site session. It all starts with a commitment from leadership that strategic thinking and planning are worth the time and makes it a core tenet of the team’s approach.
Prioritizing Quick Wins
Nearly every product has a backlog of great ideas, and customers continually generate additional requests and wish lists. The backlog creates excessive pressure to deliver value and appease the “squeaky wheels” as quickly as possible.
That low-hanging fruit is so darn appealing because it’s an easy win. It offers minimal effort and rapid rewards. But just like junk food is initially filling and satisfying without providing a ton of nutritional value, constantly front-loading your development queue with these “quick wins.”
A feature-factory mindset means you’ll never get around to the complex, important work until it’s reached a crisis point. Moreover, the most critical projects may not cover every use case and contingency due to poor planning.
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Turning an Abstract Concept Into Practice
Another common thread is the difficulty some product leaders and organizations have grappling with something as broad and malleable as “strategy.” Some teams have trouble defining the specific tactical actions required to work on a product strategy, and they sometimes struggle to define “strategy” in the first place.
“It can be difficult since ‘strategy’ is an abstract concept – at least for me,” said program manager Michael C’deBaca. “I’ve found it’s better first to define strategy. Here’s my take (not my idea, picked it up somewhere along the line): it’s identifying and quantifying business problems in the area of interest; deciding which problems to address; putting people, processes, and technology in place to execute the decisions; evaluating/measuring the execution; and finally acting on the evaluation/measurements. For me, this breaks down the abstract concept into smaller, and hopefully easier-to-work-on, pieces.”
Brant Cooper, an author, founder, and CEO, thinks a misunderstanding of strategic thinking even plagues many industries.
“I don’t think people even know what they mean by ‘strategic.’ It’s maybe worse management speak than ‘innovation,’” Cooper said. “Management consulting firms hire 20-something-year-olds to help with corporate strategy. I mean, really? I think they mean they wish they were more proactive. But they are reactive, go to too many meetings, fighting fires, pulling hair out, etc.”
Regardless of who does the upfront work, the product strategy must ultimately be aligned with stakeholders from across the organization and imbued in every product element, particularly the product roadmap. Strategy becomes the guiding principle for the team when you have company-wide support and align objectives.
Strategic Thinking and Planning Shouldn’t Require All of Your Time
Another take is that “being strategic” shouldn’t be a dedicated activity product leaders need to find time for… because they should already be doing it at all times!
With a top-down strategy in place, ensuring each tactical decision and minor task are all done with the overall strategy in mind is far more accessible. A solid strategic foundation prevents you from retrofitting existing structures and plans to a newly developed approach.
A sound strategy ensures a net positive outcome on your team’s goals, objectives, and overall vision. The vision remains the focus at all times, so it never requires any “extra effort.”
Stick to the Essentials of Strategic Thinking and Planning
Product managers and leaders never lack things to do. Our plates are always overflowing, and there’s inevitably another hat someone is desperate for us to wear. To break free of this neverending cycle, we must pare things back and do less overall, while ensuring what we are doing is truly important.
With an emphasis on strategic thinking and planning, we can focus our attention on what matters. To achieve this, we must learn how to say no. We must understand which product enhancements and features don’t support our strategy. Furthermore, we must also learn to say no to tactical activities that waste time.
Therefore, you must realize that you can’t do everything. Free yourselves and manifest the strategic thinker and planner customers want. Our products don’t need every bell and whistle. Moreover, it’s not practical to go to every meeting and read every customer support inquiry.
Using a strategic imperative as our guide, we can carve out the hours required to establish strategic thinking and planning. There will always be details to attend to, but you can’t let that get you distracted from your true objectives.
For more insights on how to become an essentialist product manager, download my free book here.
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How to Handle Resistance to Change Management
If you’re responsible for change management at your company, you have my respect. My sympathies, too. Because the resistance to change management can be difficult. People find it easy, even fun, to envision a great outcome. But the resistance to change management can negatively affect this excitement.
So, in this post, let’s talk through the common reasons businesses face resistance to change. When you understand and recognize these reasons, you position yourself to address and overcome them. Then I’ll offer a few suggestions for a successful change management process.
Why You’ll Encounter Resistance to Change (and You Will, Every Time)
1. People are often unaware that their daily actions conflict with their aspirations.
I once worked for a CEO who liked to describe our company as product-team driven. He truly believed he’d built an organization that empowered the product department to lead the strategy.
But in practice, that wasn’t the case. The CEO set all priorities and approved or rejected all product ideas. When the product team came up with viable concepts and produced evidence that these products could succeed in the market, the CEO often said no, ending the project.
If someone had proposed a plan to shift the company culture to be more product-team-led, the CEO would have rejected that idea as well. His resistance would have stemmed from the fact that he believed we already had a product-driven company.
One reason you might face resistance to change is that your team believes—or at least wants to imagine—that they have already adopted the new framework you’re suggesting. “Hey, we’re already a customer-centric business.”
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2. Inertia is a powerful driver of human behavior.
When you present a plan for digital transformation or some other company-wide change, many people’s first instinct will be to feel threatened or worried. Their second instinct will be to push back against your plan.
Everyone has routines and processes that make them feel comfortable. With your sweeping change proposal, you’ll be asking them to give up some or even most of these routines. Additionally, some people on your team could worry that they will have a diminished role under your new framework. Others might have the opposite concern: that they will have to take on more work and responsibility.
Often the resistance you will face in your change management efforts will have nothing to do with the merits of the approach or framework you’re proposing. It will simply be the result of your team’s fear of shifting to a new process in which they might not be as needed or successful.
3. People might not realize what they’re committing to when they sign on for the change.
Let’s say you persuade your company to make a change. You begin rolling out the new processes. For a time, everyone seems to be adjusting smoothly. But then something happens. A reality sets in that your team hadn’t physiologically prepared for.
Here’s what that might look like under a couple of real-world examples.
Transform Your Organization from Traditional Marketing to Product-Led Growth
Sure, your stakeholders might have found this idea exciting in principle. It sounded great: Let’s be like Slack and make a free version of our product so compelling that people can’t help but share it and market it for us. We can even cut down on our paid marketing campaigns.
But then the first month passes, and your paid signup rate is down. That was part of your product-led growth model, and everyone agreed in theory. But experiencing a month of lower-than-normal revenue could make your executives panic. Will they demand the company reactivate its costly marketing campaigns to generate immediate revenue?
Transform Your Product Development Process from Waterfall to Agile
Changing your company’s development approach from waterfall to agile might be a wise strategic decision. And at first, you might find a lot of enthusiasm across the company. In the abstract, saying “We’re an agile shop” will probably sound appealing to your stakeholders.
But let’s do another thought experiment. Imagine your company has made this transformation its official policy, and your cross-functional team is about to begin work on a new product, with natural resources and budget on the line.
Will your development team panic at the idea of starting their work without a complete vision of the full-featured product?
Does your executive team be willing to greenlight a new product without a firm market launch date?
Will your product team have the discipline to turn down stories that aren’t ready for development in their weekly sprint planning?
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Resistance to Change Is Part of Human Nature
As I hoped I’d communicated, resistance to change often stems from our hardwiring.
In some cases, you’ll have trouble earning buy-in for a transformation because your coworkers envision themselves as having already made the change. In other cases, they’ll push back because they feel more comfortable with a legacy approach or worry about their fate under new conditions. Sometimes, your team will agree to the change first but then abandon it when it leads to challenges.
Bottom line: Do not expect to pull off a company change with zero pushback. Dealing with resistance is part of the change management process.
But you can reduce this resistance and earn more trust and enthusiasm for your plan by following some best practices. I’ve outlined them below.
6 Steps to Successful Change Management
1. Present the potential benefits to your stakeholders.
Before you describe how much work the transformation will require, you should explain to your team why it will be worth the effort. Keep your description of the upside anchored to reality but let your enthusiasm for the new framework show. If you’re going to earn buy-in for the change, you’ll need your team to be enthusiastic about it.
2. Explain honestly the effort needed to make the change happen.
Everyone needs to know upfront what they’re getting into when they sign on to your proposed transformation. That will minimize the culture shock your company experiences as people run into the inevitable bumps along the way.
If you’re proposing a shift from waterfall to agile, what if anything is agile about your current practices? If your processes are entirely waterfall, you need to explain the significant adjustment this represents for everyone involved.
3. Let your team know what success will look like.
One common reason employees resist proposals for change is that the process seems endless. Your stakeholders could legitimately worry about you following them around forever, saying: “Can we make this process more agile?” “How can we make that routine more agile?”
A key to earning stakeholder buy-in for your plan is to give everyone a picture of what it will look like when they’ve completed the change. That will provide them with something tangible. It will also counter the fear they have in their minds that they’ll never get done once they start this process.
4. Evangelize the change throughout the process.
Every change implementation faces setbacks and frustrations. As the driver behind this change management effort, an essential part of your role will be to continually serve as the plan’s advocate and champion. You’re there to remind your coworkers that the struggles they’re experiencing during the change will pay off when the company becomes more vital, more competitive, more profitable, etc.
You might have this conversation dozens of times with different stakeholders. Heck, you might have to evangelize to the same stakeholders repeatedly. Some people will need more convincing, more pep talks to keep them on track. That’s okay. Bring the same level of enthusiasm and confidence to your evangelizing every time.
5. Establish celebratory milestones along the way.
You’ve shown your team the end state of your transformation. They have a picture of the finish line. Still, many of them will experience change fatigue at different points in the process.
One way to counter this is to create internal victories to celebrate throughout the process. Send out positive updates when the company achieves a milestone along the way—schedule parties for internal accomplishments throughout the transformation. Give out awards to stakeholders: Maybe honor an “Agile Hero of the Week” for your agile transformation.
6. Remain resilient.
Essential stakeholders may tire of the changes you plan to implement. It is also important to note that you may also get fatigued from changes.
As your coworkers push back against the change or show signs of frustration with it, you’re going to be tempted to throw up your hands and revert to the old process.
This is where you need to remain resilient, remind yourself about the strategic benefits of implementing this change and maybe even evangelize the plan for yourself.
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The Essentialist’s Way to Building Better Products
“Am I working on the right things?”
“How can I fit it all in?”
I find myself asking these questions almost daily, both in my personal and professional life. How can I spend my time working on the things that matter most?
Even with the world in upheaval and our shift to distributed work, these questions are still top of my mind. With my trips, events, and other plans postponed for now, there are so many other things that can potentially fill up my time in this time of uncertainty.
Many of us live our lives doing 100 things at the same time. Trying to please everyone. Trying to do it all. I certainly have fallen into this camp. As a result, we scatter our energy and don’t make significant, meaningful, or satisfying progress on any of those 100 things.
Recently, I really enjoyed reading the book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown and gave a talk about the essentialism concepts internally at ProductPlan. I highly recommend it for product leaders and anyone who aspires to make the biggest possible contribution to their work and life.
If I could summarize this book in one sentence it would be:
“Less but better.”
Now, if there’s a single statement for product managers to live by, that would be it.
I’ve often thought that product leaders can learn lessons about building better products from the methods we use to prioritize our personal life. So let’s look at the concept of “essentialism.”
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A Quick Primer on Essentialism
According to the book, an “essentialist” is someone who lives by design, not by default. An essentialist isn’t reactive, but rather makes choices deliberately by separating the vital few from the trivial many.
Essentialism is an approach for determining where your highest value is, and then executing on it—to the exclusion of many other activities. An essentialist says “No” a lot.
According to McKeown, essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done.
Does that sound a lot like what product managers do every day as we prioritize what to build?
An essentialist says, “I choose to work on only a few things that really matter.” By carefully choosing these few things that matter (for our products and our lives), we can make great leaps forward. Moreover, we’ll live a life that feels in control and one that matters.
The “Non-essentialist” Product Manager
According to McKeown, there are ways that a “non-essentialist” thinks. As I read the book, I found several parallels to ineffective product management. Here are a few patterns that might represent “non-essential” thinking by product managers:
“It’s all-important.” A non-essentialist product manager will try to be all things to all people. They will struggle to fit it all in – all the meetings, feeling like they are responsible for everything. They are the product expert with all the answers, and no decisions can be made without their input.
“More.” A non-essentialist product manager will focus on “more.” It’s undisciplined and reactive. More features to beat the competition. More saying “yes” without thinking first. Or saying Yes because it’s the easier path. What’s the harm of fitting in one more user story?
“Are we working on the right things?” A non-essentialist product manager, because they take on too much, will often feel out of control. They’re unsure if they’re working on the right things, and as a result, will ultimately feel overwhelmed and unsatisfied.
If any of those statements sound familiar, that’s OK. We all fall into that trap occasionally. All of us that are building products, will at some point feel or exhibit these patterns.
Yet there are ways of thinking and organizing our days so we don’t get to that point—after all, don’t we all want a sense of purpose, ease, and satisfaction in our work?
The Mindset of the Essentialist Product Manager
How can you foster the mindset of an essentialist product manager to avoid those traps? Here are four lessons I took away from the book that you can apply to your personal and product life.
1. Create space for thinking.
For most product managers, our days are filled with video meetings, calls, writing emails, writing stories, interruptions on Slack, and so on. With the recent switch to distributed work, we have been given this opportunity to create time in our day for strategic and creative thinking without the constant interruptions.
What would that look like? An essentialist creates time in their day for insights and contemplation, rather than putting out fires all day.
This process also applies to our working space. Many of us are now working from home—is your space one where you can focus? Is it pleasant to be in? Since you might be spending about one-third of your day there, why not make it one that inspires you to think creatively? For me, taking a break during my day for outside time (a walk, run, or even a stroll in my backyard) is a great way to process what to work on next.
2. Define your product’s purpose.
When was the last time you thought through your product’s purpose and mission? The OKRs you’ve been managing? How is your product differentiated from the competition? What is your product best at, and how can you double down on that?
With so much economic disruption, you can no longer take it for granted that your product’s vision and mission will be the correct one going forward.
Now is a time of reset for reflection on those things. What you (and your team) decide will set the stage for which initiatives are the most important things that you choose to work on next.
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3. Implement the minimum product.
This is the opposite of the “it’s all-important” mentality. I’ve written a lot about the minimum viable product (or the minimum sellable product) that provides value to customers. Now is the time to take that philosophy to heart.
I recently wrote about decluttering your product backlog. Revisit those epics in your backlog and scale those back. What will give your customers the most value with 50% of the effort you previously estimated?
4. Pause. Say No.
A non-essentialist product manager will pause before eventually saying “Yes.” An essentialist says “No” a lot, focusing on the vital few. Product managers will need to do this with empathy and reasoned explanations about why the answer is No (or “not yet”).
Additionally, it’s not only about saying “No” to feature requests. But rather, not committing to projects and decisions that do not lead you towards the greater goal. By saying No, and having a well thought out justification, you will foster more respect among your peers, stakeholders, and customers. Help them understand what the tradeoffs are. What will they (or the company) be giving up if you choose one path versus another?
If you have items in your product backlog that you now realize you won’t get to within the next six months, that’s probably a sign that you’re committing to too much. Likewise, if your day is back-to-back meetings, perhaps you can review your schedule next week and opt-out of a few.
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Takeaways—Claim Back Your Time.
These are only a few ways that product teams and entrepreneurs can introduce an essentialist mentality into their day. In talking with other startup founders and product leaders I often hear the challenges of “not enough time” as a common refrain.
Perhaps with essentialism, we can claim back that time, work on what matters, and make better products as a result.
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Benefits of Roadmap Metrics
A tool is only helpful if people are using it. We’ve all got exercise equipment, cooking gadgets, or crafting supplies lying in corners and closets collecting dust and good intentions. There’s nothing wrong with those items, but they’re also not adding any value while they sit idle. Understanding the benefits of roadmap metrics can help align your product team. For this reason, tracking whether or not your roadmaps are being used can help guide your product team towards a shared vision.
Roadmaps add value when used regularly by coworkers and other stakeholders. But once you email or Slack a document, you have no idea if anyone even opened it a single time. The lack of visibility may have you wondering if anyone actually referred to it. There’s simply no way to measure, leaving you with doubts and uncertainty.
When the Ideal Meets Reality
Roadmaps intend to create and reinforce alignment across the organization. They give everyone a clear view of the direction of the product or project. They connect to the key themes, strategic goals, and intended outcomes of those efforts.
In a perfect world, individuals reviewing and referencing roadmaps would happen all the time. Roadmaps would be part of everyone’s daily or weekly routines. Yet far too often, roadmaps are glanced at briefly. Sometimes they may get ignored until an issue forces a second look.
If people aren’t looking at your roadmaps regularly and using them to guide their own work, they aren’t living up to their full potential. Even worse, some stakeholders might still be viewing old and outdated roadmaps without realizing it, making their plans based on false information.
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Solving a Pervasive Problem
Using a purpose-built, cloud-based roadmapping tool such as LIKE.TG alleviates many of these issues. For one thing, as long as people are using the web viewer to see your roadmaps, you’ll know they’re always looking at the latest version.
Beyond this critical version control advantage, these tools can also provide product managers, scrum masters, project managers, and other roadmap authors with additional insights. We want to help you treat your roadmaps as a product. That means understanding if and how people are engaging with them. This is why we built roadmap Activity Metrics, so you can now see exactly how often your individuals view your roadmap each week.
Putting Roadmap Activity Metrics into Action
With this data, you’ll have a much better sense of whether your roadmaps are collecting digital dust or accessed regularly. Product Ops and project managers can track roadmap activity metrics just like other KPIs and metrics.
After an update is shared and communicated, roadmap authors can eyeball these metrics to ensure a corresponding spike in views occurred. If not, they’ll know they need to use other vehicles to prompt this action, from leveraging a company all-hands meeting to other tactics specifically tailored to engage critical stakeholders.
Additionally, roadmap owners can pursue a different course of action if roadmap activity metrics indicate that views are too low in between announced updates. Initiating open, frank discussions with various stakeholders and colleagues, you can investigate why they’re not viewing your roadmap more often.
Analyzing roadmap metrics may reveal a host of unknowns, from a general lack of awareness to missing information and context. These unknowns make the roadmap valuable to your product team and stakeholders. If the latter scenario turns out to be the case, you can create custom views of the roadmap for each of these audiences, ensuring it has the most relevant information.
Analyzing roadmap activity metrics can help you manage your product team better. By seeing the number of individuals who view your roadmap, you’ll be able to jump in and coach your team to socialize the roadmap’s contents and value better. It may also be an early indicator that their roadmap is flawed or missing something.
Another Measure of Success
Every business has many ways to measure its overall success, from revenues and profits to usage, adoption, and churn. But our internal processes don’t always have as many data points to track and put to use.
Your roadmap metrics deserve a spot on your organization’s Product Ops dashboard. These artifacts are too essential to ignore. Roadmap authors now have the power to evaluate their utilization and effectiveness.
Learn more about how roadmap activity metrics work in LIKE.TG or schedule a full demo today!
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The 7 Ts of Product-Led Transformation
Transformation is a word that isn’t commonly favored by the Product community because Transformation Programs rarely allow Product Teams to autonomously decide how they’ll achieve their mission.However, Transformation Programs incur significant costs. According to the CIO magazine, Global spending on digital transformation technologies and services was $1.3 trillion in 2020 of which 70% of that spend is wasted. That is approximately $900 billion.Why Product Managers Should care?Great Product Management can, without a doubt do better with the $900 billion squandered on Transformation Programs.Great Product Management can apply the Transformation spend more effectively by creating desirable and valuable products for customers. Great Product Management can deliver a higher return on the companies Transformation investment.Download The Essentialist Product Manager ➜hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'be753440-dc4d-40c5-9808-cad744d00a28', {"region":"na1"});Why be Product-Led?Product-Led Transformation is more holistic than other Transformations because it begins with the customer.The outcome of a Product-Led Transformation is a company that is aligned first and foremost towards discovering and quantifying customer problems before designing solutions.Product-Led Transformation re-focuses the company on the fundamentals of real value creation while embracing the benefits of the faster engines that Digital and Agile practices deliver.What are the 7-Ts of Product-Led Transformation?The 7-Ts of Product-Led Transformation is a comprehensive framework using modern Product Management concepts and techniques.It embraces both the functional aspects of delivering and scaling products as well as the adaptive capabilities required to evolve mindsets and behaviours in companies.The 7Ts isn’t a simple checklist but is intended to facilitate deep thought and action. They have been developed to ignite our thinking and to ensure that Product concepts and principles are included in any type of change process.The 7 Ts of are: Triggers | Tactics | Timeline | Talent | Tell Tales | Transition | Truths1 – TriggersHow do we take action from the definitive market signals that require the organisation to transform its current way of operating?Transformation is a necessary process in all organisations because technology and marketplaces are moving at an ever-increasing pace. It is no surprise that organisations have to keep up or perish.As Product People, our role is to pay attention to internal and external triggers that may disrupt the way our organisation competes. More often than not, there are multiple triggers that indicate that we need to make a change in the way we interact and deliver value to the market.As Product People, once we’ve identified the triggers, we have to deliberately prepare our response with a Portfolio or Product Vision and an implementable strategy, in order to galvanise the organisation with a convincing purpose for the necessary changes.2 – TacticsHow can we imagine success, and participate in the design of the Transformation plan with a strategic focus on being Product-Led?Every Product-Led Transformation Program requires a tactical plan outlining discrete steps and actions that will enable the team to achieve a ‘Target State’.In the case of a Product-Led Transformation, the ‘Target State’ must be aligned to the Portfolio or Product Vision; specifically how the organisation will change the way it orchestrates Product discovery, delivery and growth.When the Program is completed, a Product-Led organisation is resourced appropriately with the skills and capacity to deliver the Portfolio or Product Vision, processes and systems support not hinder Product teams, teams keep a watchful eye on the customer and the market so that they can continuously make and deliver appropriate enhancements and products, and more importantly, the organisation is steeped in its belief and support of good Product Management.3 – TimelineHow can you craft a timeline with achievable milestones and metrics to measure and guide the team to success?It is difficult not to consider transformation as a large, onerous project. The word “transformation” itself suggests that a significant effect is going to be needed.But, the Product-Led Transformation approach should be an experimental, iterative, meaningful course of action, leading towards a lasting, impactful way of operating.Transformation does not need to be a big project but it does need to make a big impact (and rightly so).Engineering the timeline for a Product-Led Program should reduce the change fatigue that often sets in during any large change initiative. Embedding the concept of adaptability and accomplishments through experiments and celebratory milestones should keep the program energized.Change is uncomfortable and for most people, threatening, but for change to occur, there needs to be a sense of urgency to propel people to transition from their current state to a new, better way of operating.We need to apply positive pressure and that according to Kotter, requires CEOs to communicate the vision by a factor of ten.hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '527dc6af-8860-436f-9ca6-ae2b71b0cc99', {"region":"na1"});4 – TalentHow do we know when to course-correct during the Program?It’s fair to say that we don’t have perfect information during the Transformation planning process and we’ll need to change our approach during the Program. To do so, we’ll need to recognise the signs that the Program is off track.There are 2 key ways to determine if or when the Program is off track.You’ll want to look out for signals from the team and review the Program’s milestones regularly. The team’s behavior and how they express themselves is key indicator if the Program is progressing well. If folks in the organization are continuing to demand that features be added to the Roadmap, you know that the Program needs rescuing.Missing a key or several key milestones is another tell-tale that the Transformation Program is struggling to deliver its intended outcomes.5 – Tell TalesHow can you seek out, lean on and learn from Product People that have successfully navigate their Transformation mishaps?Tell Tales is the learning component of the Transformation Program.In reality, we all know that Tactical Plans change. Especially if we experiment and execute the tasks and activities in functioning environments. make every effort to corroborate our plans and investment made in the planning process.One way to reduce the risk of failure is to create and run an “Outreach Plan” to learn from other organisations. The aim should be to help key stakeholders in your organisation to have realistic expectations about transformation and the process of transforming.The old adage ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’ really applies when the organisation is embarking on a transformation program. It is without a doubt, a significant expenditure and while mishaps will occur, we should try to avoid failure if possible.6 – TransitionHow can you highlight and zealously communicate the Transformation Transition period to your Product Teams to maintain their drive and commitment?Change is perhaps the hardest part of any transformation program. Like all journeys, all programs begin with anticipation and a flurry of activity, but after a few heady weeks, it can feel like nothing has happened.Unfortunately, the change process itself takes time. Important changes generally cannot be completed overnight. This means that the deliverables and the long-term benefits described in the transformation program may not be evident for quite some time.While the program Timeline and the Tell Tales outcomes can be used to educate people in the organisation about the transformation plan and potential pitfalls, during the transition period ongoing, visible internal publicity is required.Keep in mind and plan for the fact that the transition period requires significant, ongoing conversations and presentations to drive the organisation towards its Target State, and to maintain alignment.7 – TruthsHow can you explain the difference to your peers that Product-Led Transformation delivers broader, more beneficial outcomes than an Agile or Digital Transformation alone?The cost of not being one is too great as markets are hyper-competitive and aggressive. Economies are global and companies these days work broader, safer, better, and faster to deliver targeted products that solve specific customer problems.A product-led organisation will have teams that make independent decisions within the organisation’s strategic agenda and are able to identify and develop products that deliver optimal value for its customers and benefits for the organisation.Arriving at this destination is worth the effort because as Product People we are able to most effectively meet our promises to our customers.The 7Ts of Product-Led Transformation is an opportunity to view Transformation through a different lens, one that more holistically involves a key function in the organisation, the Product Management function. Activate your Product Management function as a growth engine, rather than treating it as a Delivery arm of the organisation.Attend LTP DIGITAL 2022 | USA to delve into The 7 Ts of Product-Led Transformation on March 9th, 2022.
Your Scaling Team Needs Product Ops, featuring Melissa Perri
“If you’re a growth stage company then you have to be able to make strategy decisions very rapidly. If you don’t have the data then you can’t make secure decisions and alter course.”
A key insight shared by Melissa Perri, CEO of Produx Labs and author of Escaping the Build Trap during our “Getting Started with Product Ops” webinar series.
It’s no secret that product management often looks different from one organization to the next. There’s a lot of reasons why this is the case. It’s not necessarily bad when product management adapts to each company’s specific needs. Product managers are versatile and possess a broad range of skills, so if any role for company-specific customization suits them, this is it.
However, product management must be consistent within the same organization. The responsibilities and expectations for product managers shouldn’t be based on individual personalities and preferences, and it must be steady and dependable regardless of the particular product or line of business.
Product operations (more commonly known as product ops) is where product management becomes a scalable resource and function for companies instead of a made-to-order one-off.
Below is the discussion Melissa Perri had with John Cutler and Jim Semick on why teams that are scaling need product ops.
What is Product Ops, Exactly?
As a relatively new discipline, there is plenty of confusion regarding product ops. When we spoke with Melissa, whose company helps organizations stand up their product ops, she identified product ops’ three key components:
Business Data Insights: There is a sea of data locked inside various nooks and crannies of corporate systems, but knowing what’s available, getting it regularly, and making sense of it all can be tricky. Product ops collect and analyze internal data to support strategic planning and monitor progress. It includes revenue, costs, usage, churn, etc.
Customer Market Insights: Talking to customers and using their feedback to drive product decisions and priorities are essential. But executing that comes with major administrative overhead. Product ops can facilitate and aggregate external research, whether sizing the market opportunity or unlocking user research basics.
Processes Practices: The more product teams grow and multiply, the less homogenous they get. But both high-growth and enterprise organizations rely on consistency to remain efficient and effective. Product ops introduces and maintains operational standards. This addresses the potential differences and disparities that can emerge when lots of people are trying to do the same things in different silos.
One thing product ops is not, however, is program management. While they may have some surface-level similarities, they definitely shouldn’t be doing the same things.
Program management, often housed in a centralized Program Management Office, is all about executing large-scale projects and initiatives that span multiple business units and groups within the organization. It’s an essential role for growing and large companies, but it’s really an outgrowth of project management.
Product ops, while also a centralized resource, is responsible for very specific areas of expertise. They’re providing information that serves as an input to strategy decisions, but they’re not involved in execution.
When Is the Right Time to Add Product Ops?
Product ops don’t exist in smaller organizations for a good reason—they don’t really need it. There are simply not enough people or products requiring their services, and a business analyst can probably do all that’s required.
But once a company’s headcount and product offerings start multiplying, Melissa thinks that product ops can start adding value.
“At larger enterprise organizations, they don’t always do the basic stuff, like talking to customers, because they’re afraid that unbeknownst to them different teams might also be talking to the same customers. Start to classify your customers in databases so that every product manager is empowered to reach out to them or know who to start or stop reaching out to.”
For LIKE.TG co-founder Jim Semick, he sees product roadmaps as one early warning sign that product ops are in order. Melissa believes, “Large companies don’t tend to have a standardized roadmap because they’re stuck in an excel sheet… Roadmaps will bring in transparency into what people are doing.”
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Companies not only start to worry that roadmapping is too variable, but that stakeholders can’t even find the product roadmaps they need because they’re in a forgotten folder on someone’s hard drive instead of being widely available and frequently updated.
Forming the Team
Of course, starting with product ops doesn’t require organizations to hire an entire team immediately. Plus, these hires aren’t the same generalists that might make good product managers.
Melissa suggests that this first hire should fill the product data analytics role. They’ll be responsible for doing data analysis, modeling, identifying trends, and segmenting customers. Over time the team can grow, with a second hire often best filled by someone who can program business intelligence and analytics tools to aggregate data and make sense of it. It also frees the product team from relying on development resources to get the data they need.
Ideally, Melissa advises, there will be a VP of Product Ops reporting to the Chief Product Officer (or a Director of Product Ops reporting to the VP of Product). They’ll be responsible for analytics, standardization of practices and tools, standardized cadence for strategy reviews, roadmap reviews, agile cadences, budgeting, and those sorts of tasks.
Other hires to fill out the team can include user researchers, folks doing user outreach to build out the customer database, and additional data analytics people. But making these new teams work requires product management to give up some of the tasks they may previously have been directly responsible for.
Delegating isn’t easy, but Melissa said that product ops ultimately make product managers more visible, available, and productive. They can be more present for internal stakeholders since they’re not so busy mucking with data and scheduling customer calls.
Product managers must accept this trade-off so they can focus on other things. No product manager ever complains they have too much extra time, and product ops free up time for other duties.
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Proactive, but Advisory
Product management shouldn’t fear product ops hijacking their core responsibilities. Product ops is a support function, offering up data, insights, and assistance without grabbing the reigns.
For example, many large companies shy away from reaching out to customers for feedback. This shyness is because they’re not sure what each company is up to and their openness to this solicitation. Plus, they’re afraid someone else from their organization might have already reached out.
With this function centralized and an accurate database of customers and their feedback channel preferences known, product managers can survey, conduct interviews, and even identify beta testers with confidence and speed.
That said, Melissa mentions that product ops shouldn’t just be an on-demand resource; they can be encouraged to proactively identify and communicate relevant information. Since they’re looking at the data all the time, they can spot trends product managers didn’t even know to look out for, while also responding to specific information requests. The secret is empowering product ops to investigate and report what they find while still managing the scope of their activities.
Product Ops Is the Key to Scaling Product Management
People like dependability and consistency. Executives like it even more so in their employees. When a company scales, there’s little leeway for lone wolves and their individual styles and traits.
Companies must make strategic decisions quickly, which means they need data, product roadmaps, and all the other ingredients for those processes to be readily available and easy to consume. By instituting standard policies, defining tools and frameworks, and facilitating data analysis, product ops make it all go smoothly.
People start speaking the same language and presenting data using the same benchmarks, templates, and baselines. Teams mine customers for data and insights without ruffling feathers or squandering unnecessary hours identifying and contacting them to gauge their interest.
Melissa advocates that product ops streamline everything for optimal strategic performance. It ensures teams are working toward the right goals, and you’re spending product investments properly,
Putting off this building-out product ops is all too easy. But any delay can sacrifice potential growth since what worked when the company was smaller isn’t feasible after a while.
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To learn more about building out a product ops team in your organization, check out our webinars on this topic.
The Ultimate Motivation: What Gets Product Managers Out of Bed Every Morning?
No matter how much we love our career, we all have some days when we’d rather stay in bed.
So what motivates product managers to get out of bed and show up?
I recently moderated a panel of experts to talk about the intersection of happiness and product management. We found that our panelists and our attendees had a variety of reasons they not only show up every day but are excited to do so.
Check out what other product management professionals use for their motivation. File away a few of your favorites for the next time you’d rather keep hitting the snooze button.
What Motivates Product Managers to Get Out of Bed Every Morning?
Variety
When you’re working in product management, no two days are the same. With a wide range of tasks on our plate and the dynamic nature of the role, you’re never in danger of getting bored. This unpredictableness is a spark that many product managers thrive on.
Suzanne Abate, CEO of The Development Factory, was one of the featured panelists in our happiness webinar. She cited this element of the job as her spark to start the day.
“It’s never the same,” Abate said. “Every single day is going to be a different kind of thing because there’s going to be different tasks that you’re facing or different fires you have to put out.”
This sentiment was echoed by several webinar attendees. One product manager from a healthcare company, who cited “The opportunity to do something new every day.”
A product manager in the content protection industry said, “I get excited to wake up and learn, do something new.”
Embracing the pandemonium
Not only must product managers tackle a diverse array of tasks during their workday, but there’s also an element of unpredictability. You simply never know what the day will throw at you.
For panelist Kevin Steigerwald, Director of Product Design at Jama Software, that’s a feature, not a bug.
“Knowing that there is going to be a little bit of chaos today, and there are going to be different problems to solve,” he said. “I have to coordinate with everyone in the organization. I’m not going into work and just talking to one person all day long.”
Another webinar attendee eloquently echoed this. “If you’re not drawn to crazy, then you don’t belong in product,” said a product manager for a credit rating firm.
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Teamwork
Product management is a team sport, even if the other players aren’t technically on your “team” in the org chart. But the tasks on our plate require a ton of interaction and working together with colleagues from across the organization. Together you’ll investigate, discuss, debate, and solve problems.
This powers another panelist’s internal alarm clock.
“Collaboration is a pretty key thing that I really enjoy. When you come together with everyone from the different disciplines, working with design, working with developers, with support and marketing,” said Candice Yono, Senior Product Manager at Pivotal. “I love seeing the different perspectives and the different take that everyone brings to the table and how that comes to shape some solutions that no single individual would have been able to come up with on their own.”
Some of our attendees also found this facet of the job to be their reason for clocking in every day. A product manager for auto dealer software referenced “my core working team” as his motivation.
“The people I work with,” said a product development manager for a guitar company. “And the pride we all share in the quality products we make.”
Innovation
One of the best parts of product management is bringing new solutions to the market. It’s the perfect combination of creativity, business savvy, and execution. For some attendees, this was their catalyst for seizing the day.
A product manager for a user research platform craves “exciting challenges to solve,” while a senior product manager for a computer-aided design firm is pumped about “changing the industry.”
“The opportunity to create cool, new products,” said a product manager for a real estate software firm while their colleague answered, “Addressing my beta testers issues.”
Making a real impact was key for a security firm product manager for a security firm, who cherishes “the opportunity to have real input into effective change.”
But an associate product manager working on employee engagement solutions might have summed it up best, exclaiming, “watching my idea come to life!”
Delighting customers
A customer-centric mindset is essential for developing great, useful solutions, and thinking about their users was another commonly cited incentive.
The COO of a healthcare call center solutions provider mentioned: “the end value our products provide our clients.” However, the big motivator for others is addressing their customers’ key challenges.
“Solving someone’s problem, making them enjoy their job, and making their day,” said a product owner for a process management firm.
The grind
Patience is a virtue. Especially in product management, where it can take months or years to bring an idea to life and reach end-users. To keep their eyes on the prize and show up every day with a smile, some product managers lean into the routine.
A senior business analyst for a television production and monetization firm referenced “my 7 am daily standup” as their wake-up call.
Others just enjoy chipping away at things a little each day. A product owner in the financial services industry mentioned “moving things forward one step,” while an industrial systems product manager said, “I want to complete something.”
“I really enjoy what I do… with challenges and all,” said a product manager at a process automation firm. “I have still so much to learn only being a year in this position coming from QA… major change but loving it more every day.”
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A Little Hectic, but Pretty Happy
No matter what particular part of the job ultimately gets people going, product managers remain a pretty happy cohort. Our 2020 product management survey found the vast majority of product managers are happy with their role. The average satisfaction rating is 3.8 out of 5. To read a little more about the current state of product management, download the 2020 product management report below.
There are some important drivers for that happiness—and definitely, a few things we’re not fans of—but most of us wouldn’t want to do anything else. 92% of product managers plan to stay in a similar role, and most of us just want more help and support to do the jobs we have.
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6 Things Product Managers Can Do with Qualitative Research
We are excited to welcome guest writer Carlos González de Villaumbrosia to the LIKE.TG blog. Carlos González de Villaumbrosia has over 10 years of experience building teams and digital products in the US, Europe, and Latin America. Carlos founded Product School in San Francisco in 2014. Today, the company is the global leader in product management training with 20 campuses worldwide and a live online campus.
What is Qualitative Research?
Qualitative data is sometimes referred to as ‘soft data’ and is usually described as the exact opposite of quantitative data: the numbers. Quantitative includes the hard facts; things like demographics, statistics, and other kinds of ‘hard data.’
This form of user research fills in the gaps that hard data can’t. It tells you about your customer’s opinions, what they’re thinking, and how they feel about your product. Modern product managers are often encouraged to be as data-driven as possible, and may instinctively want to turn to the numbers, but great products require both types. You need to know what feelings your product evokes in users as much as you need that full Google Analytics report.
Let’s take a look at what product managers need qualitative data for and how to do it right!
Qualitative Research Methods
The best qualitative research method for your product depends on a variety of factors. Before you set out choosing your method, look at how much time you can spend on it and how many resources you can afford to use.
Surveys and forms: An easy and scalable way to collect data.
Customer interviews: A good way to get in-depth feedback, but takes time and resources.
Focus groups: More time effective than one-to-ones, but less effective than surveys. More commonly used for physical products.
Ethnographic research: Observations of your customer’s environment (demographics, geography, infrastructures, culture, etc.) Useful for breaking into brand new markets.
App store reviews: Sometimes the qualitative data comes to you!
Smaller startups may only be able to use one or two efficient and cheap methods, whereas massive companies will be able to do much more. If you’re in the former category, don’t spend all of your resources running endless focus groups, but make sure you invest in a proper discovery phase. Finding that balance is a key product manager responsibility!
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6 Things Product Managers Can Do with Qualitative Research
1. Back it up with quantitative data
When you’re conducting qualitative research, should you believe every word your customers say? Well, no not really!
Sometimes customers don’t know what they want. They may think that, in theory, they’re willing to pay $12.99 per month for a subscription service. But when the time comes to put in their credit card details, many will hesitate. Abandoned carts are a huge challenge to overcome in eCommerce, as everyone is eager to buy…until the point of purchase.
Many companies, such at Netflix, find that giving customers what they were begging for, barely increases retention. That’s why you need to cross reference your quantitative and qualitative data. If you’re seeing a trend in the answers to your surveys, then back them up by checking the hard data.
The key here is to know which questions to ask. The answer to “do you like this product?” may not be the same as “would you be willing to pay for this product?”
2. Use it to find your ‘Why’
One of your main duties as a product manager is to focus on the ‘why’ of the product. Or rather, making sure that your ‘why’ both solves a real problem and that you’re building the right product for it.
There’s no better way of understanding your customer’s problem than to ask them about it. If you see a problem that needs to be solved, ask your target market questions like:
What are the main roadblocks in achieving X?
What other solutions do you know of/have tried?
What do you envision being the solution for X?
Would you be willing to pay for a tool that does X?
To learn how to build your own data-driven roadmap, watch LIKE.TG’s webinar:
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3. Use it to challenge your assumptions
On the flip side, if you’re seeing a trend in your data, you can back it up with what customers are telling you in the surveys. Never assume anything in product! Qualitative data is used to challenge your assumptions no matter where you are in the product life cycle.
For example, you might be seeing that a lot of your customers are failing to use one of your features. You might assume that’s because they hate the feature and you need to redesign the whole thing. But when you go into your surveys, your customers tell you that they didn’t even realize it was there! That leaves you with a relatively simple UI redesign to do, rather than a huge feature overhaul.
4. Use it with your product marketing manager
Marketing needs to be built into your product from the beginning, which means you need to have a close relationship with your product marketing manager.
Together, you create a powerhouse of growth for your company, because you can both benefit from qualitative research. It’ll help inform your communication style with your customers, making marketing significantly easier, and help you build feedback loops into your product.
5. Use it to build your minimum viable product
A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a great learning tool, and gets you feedback on what users want. But if you can build it based on user feedback you’ll be one step head! If you start gathering data from your target market when you don’t even have a launched product or a user base yet, you’ll have the advantage.
This exercise will also be vital for finding your product-market fit. A story we see repeated time and time again, is that someone has an idea, they build what they want, and then see if people like it. Sometimes they hit it out of the park straight away, but more often they have to pivot in a different direction.
By using qualitative data to inform how you build your MVP, you’ll save yourself time and resources, making your time to market that much quicker.
6. Use it for post-launch feedback
All the best product leaders know that their job isn’t done after your initial product launch! Once you’ve finished popping champagne bottles, it’s time to find out what people think.
The most common form of qualitative research done at this point is a user-feedback survey, much like those you may have conducted with your MVP. This will help you figure out how well you listened to, and understood, your customers the first time around. Did your product fix their problem? Is it easy to use? Is there a reason some downloaded and uninstalled it within a day?
If you have an app, you’re also likely to collect reviews. Don’t just go off the immediate reviews after launch. Early adopters tend to be quite techy and may have vastly different opinions to users who onboard further down the line. Your reviews are a great source of qualitative information, which you can keep referring back to throughout your product’s lifecycle.
Getting Qualitative Research Right
Have a plan. Set out what questions you need the answer to (big and small!) and take stock of your resources.
Set a time limit. You’ll always think of other things to ask, but eventually you’ll reach the point where you just need to build. When using qualitative research to build your MVP, or at the start of a new feature, set a time limit for your research phase.
Don’t just use your favorite customers. You need to have a good mix. It’s a great ego-stroke to interview people who sing our praises, but you need a balanced mix of opinions.
Ask open-ended questions. Yes/No questions usually won’t give you the depth you need. Ask detailed questions that give you plenty of information to work with. Here are 10 great questions you should ask customers.
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The Difference Between Thought Leadership vs. People Leadership
At times, product professionals fail to realize the similarities and differences between thought leadership vs people leadership. A compelling thought leader most likely started as a people leader, such as a manager or a director.
In itself, leading is a sought-after position that requires specialized knowledge and experience. Professionals may decide to pursue a leadership position to lead a team and guide them towards primary objectives and milestones. Leaders are the ones that provide all the go-to answers. There are rewards for having the position, both in money and respect. And those in leadership positions have a hard-earned experience that allows them to navigate their colleague towards actionable plans.
That said, being a thought leader is close to meaningless if you’re not a people leader, which is one of the primary connections between thought leadership vs people leadership. You can opine all day about the best way, but if it’s not the best way for your people, then it’s a sum-loss game. Even if you are thoughtful with your written pieces and presentations, you miss out.
The Start of Thought Leadership
Product management is complex. The work is ambiguous. The long hours working on a craft can take a toll if you don’t have the right people behind you.
Product leadership requires cross-disciplinary thinking from fields as software development to manufacturing. A vast breadth of insight and the best practices gives a product leader a unique insight. Their point of view combined with their experience brings multiple products from ideation to market. That is how best practices are born, and when leveraged, can make great things happen.
Hopefully, that is how most product professionals advance in their careers. They’ve taken those ideas and put them to work.
Who in the world is Charlie Munger?
Charlie Munger is Warren Buffet’s investment partner and has a reputation as a wise investor. He has an impactful way of looking at the world, which he calls mental models.
One of the most useful for those who want to work involves the concept of the “Circle of Competence.”
“You have to figure out what your aptitudes are. If you play games where other people have the aptitudes, and you don’t, you’re going to lose. And that’s as close to certain as any prediction that you can make. You have to figure out where you’ve got an edge. And you’ve got to play within your own circle of competence.
When the ego goes into the wrong place, operating outside of an individualized circle of competence has disastrous results.
Easing the transition of leadership
Product leaders need to implement best practices and stay inside the organization’s circle of competence. Though imposter syndrome may affect people differently, product leaders need to feel empowered to utilize their product experience and translate that knowledge into their new role.
Whether it’s a new company or a new team, these professionals need to show empathy towards the company culture. Newly hired leaders must respect the company culture and exhibit a level of empathy towards their new team. The leadership transition also affects employees, so an effective leader knows how the change affects their colleagues.
Taking Your Thoughts Into New Territory
If a tree falls into the woods and no one hears it, does it make a sound?
Let’s adapt the famous question into one that fits “people leadership.”
“If you have a best practice, and it doesn’t change the culture, is it a best practice at all?”
Being good at what you do is a given. You’ve earned that experience in your career. None of that matters if you can’t relate to your current environment.
Talking about your ideas is useless if it doesn’t affect the company culture.
It’s about managing relationships. People have to respect what you bring to the table. If they don’t see you as credible, your value decreases.
If your ideas don’t connect, then you are that tree mentioned earlier. Best practices are fascinating thought exercises, but if they don’t affect change, that is all they are.
Digital Transformation Blues
Enterprises struggle with transformation. Anyone that has done this work long enough has seen the following play out:
The new hire comes on board and promises a digital transformation within eighteen months.
They come in with all sorts of bonafide – they’ve worked with all the essential companies.
The leader makes a big speech and gets the team fired up.
Then nothing happens.
Let’s make a couple of bets for this transformation: the teams have a communication issue and find themselves siloed. They have the best practices and experience, but they can’t connect.
The behavior does not align with the values of the company.
When asked about it, they get process documentation, if anything at all.
These examples show how thought leadership can happen without culture shifts.
Culture-Shifting Practices
Now, here is an example of effectively applying culture-shifting practices.
1.) The leader comes on board and promises a digital transformation within eighteen months.
When the leader comes in, they avoid the splash. Instead of trying to grab the spotlight, they spend time listening. They do so to understand the culture they are working with, where their experience can help, and where it won’t.
2.) The leader comes in with all sorts of bonafide – they’ve worked with all the “essential” companies.
Instead of leading with company names, the leader leads with experience. They tell stories that pair with the listening tour and give the folks around them a feel of who they are. Along the way, they find minor problems and fix them.
3.) The leader makes a big speech and gets the team fired up.
The leader distributes the work. Instead of putting themselves out front immediately, they learn. After finding the actual difference makers, they get their buy-in before going to the group. This way, they know they have support at all levels.
Avoid agile-fall
Those three changes put culture first. The company gets to be better at making changes because the changes tie to a realistic vision.
For example, when shifting from waterfall to agile, go to each team and understand what waterfall did for them. After understanding each team’s waterfall processes, you can develop a business case to sell your agile product management strategy. Listen, apply your experience, and get buy-in. If you are running more reviews of the process than retrospectives, you’ve fallen for the trap.
We’ve all been on teams where agile turned into “agile-fall,” and everyone sours on the process.
Change is hard, and our thoughts need to evolve. The process is iterative, and when you treat it that way, you’ll get better.
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Minding the Gap: Thought Leadership vs. People Leadership
Changes are an evolutionary process. They aren’t something that happens only once. Leading doesn’t mean being curious and going to make the conference talk.
Remember this:
“If you have a best practice, and it doesn’t change the culture, is it a best practice at all?”
The concept also applies to ourselves.
Making an impact once is good, but we want to expand our circle of competence.
There is an opportunity to build that muscle by working within our culture, seeking new problems, and staying curious.
When you do that, you shift. You go from one experience to multiple.
Remember, leadership is ambiguous, and what you do here won’t always get you to the place you want to go. The more product narratives you have, the more you can exhibit your competence around the organization. Every cycle of change is another opportunity to add to your toolkit. Please focus on the culture, and cultivate it like a plant. From there, you’ll see things develop.
That development helps develop yourself as a realized thought leader. An influential thought leader can tell a product narrative in multiple ways while shedding light on the problem from different angles. They can level up to standard best practices by being flexible.
We can’t avoid the will to lead. It’s a part of us being leaders. Please don’t deny it, as it may lead you to overdo it. It isn’t harmful to use it to grow opportunistically. It’s essential, however, to stay curious to find ways to develop your craft further.
Change is Hard, so Use it to Get Better.
Change is hard, and our thoughts need to evolve. It’s an iterative process, and when you start treating it that way, you’ll get better.
That said, being a thought leader is close to meaningless if you’re not a people leader.
As you do that, you’ll craft the best environment to increase productivity from your team and improve your abilities. Remember, when the team gets better, you get better.
Change is hard, and it takes time. Coming in and dropping in ideas isn’t going to do anything. Being able to take those ideas, help them evolve, and make them relevant is the step to leveling up your career.
Culture isn’t just something that comes from best practice documents. It is living, growing, breathing. When you treat yourself, the team, and your career that way, you’ll find yourself in a position to take it to the next level.
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Resilient Leadership During Challenging Times
A crisis can bring out the best (and worst) in people. Throughout my career, I’ve seen a spectrum of responses from leaders that have shaped my views on which strategies work and which ones don’t.
I had no idea that a crisis would unfold so quickly into the start of my tenure as CEO of ProductPlan.
I transitioned to CEO of LIKE.TG in early February, which for those of you keeping track was a month before a global health and economic crisis unfolded.
Resilient Leadership During Challenging Times
As a leader, I believe in radical candor, and I have always strived to create an environment where my team feels safe to share their feedback and opinions. If you operate from a place of authenticity and transparency, then you can facilitate an environment of trust. Teams that feel safe also tend to trust each other and are, in turn, well-positioned to step up in times of crisis.
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Demonstrate flexibility
Our team has done a tremendous job building a fantastic product and a durable business model. Anytime a company goes through change management, I believe it’s essential to honor and sustain the elements of what makes the company great—while infusing your own philosophy to move the business forward. For LIKE.TG, I recognized we needed to develop a more comprehensive mindset toward growth. We had been gearing up our offensive for several quarters investing in engineering and building out our go-to-market team to better capitalize on opportunities within the business. The results were really starting to show.
However, business growth and global economic uncertainty don’t necessarily mix well. As the crisis unfolded, we had to immediately ask hard questions of ourselves and our business to assess what the correct strategy was for us moving forward. During times like these, sometimes you’ve got to play defense.
First, we took a magnifying glass to the entirety of our business. We recalibrated our revenue and expense plans based upon different scenarios. We made adjustments to hiring plans and created a more rigorous and gated approach to releasing investments. On the product side, we are building a system of record to help product teams and executives better align and standardize their priorities and ultimately drive better outcomes. We have been ‘pedal to the metal’ on this strategy for the better part of 9 months. We also recognized that we have customers significantly affected by this crisis. We reviewed our product roadmap with an eye toward “what do our customers need now?” This exercise spun up some short-term wins we were able to deliver quickly.
Trust in your team
In a world where there’s no face to face interaction, one can fall into the trap of feeling less in control of the business. If you and your leadership team have hired right, then, hopefully, you have a deep bench of intrinsically motivated people. These are the people that will step up and do the right thing if you have done your part to convey the mission and the situation at hand. This is the absolute wrong time to turn into a micromanager.
To me, the concept of a workday feels a bit antiquated for knowledge workers anyway. Our lives are such that we have them, and that means, at times, things in our life are going to intertwine with our workday. Sometimes a workout in the middle of the day is exactly the best use of your time.
Ultimately, if we empower the right people to manage their time, then I’m going to bet on them doing the right thing.
The decision to switch to remote work to protect the health and safety of our team happened over the course of an afternoon. About half of the company has already been remote for years, so we already had somewhat of an established blueprint. This certainly helped. For the other half, however, remote work was an entirely new practice.
The transition to remote work
Interestingly, I’ve noticed that since we have transitioned to 100% remote in response to the crisis, we’ve actually improved our communication. For my part, I wanted to make sure the entire team had a better picture of how the crisis was impacting our customers and our business. This has translated to a cadence of team updates where we openly share our business performance, our views of the potential impact of the crisis and how that impacts decisions we are making. I’ve observed cultures where information is kept tucked away to only be parsed out on a need to know basis to employees. That kind of culture breeds mistrust.
Our leadership team also increased the frequency of our communication to stay aligned. Initially, we experimented with meeting every day before determining an every-other-day cadence was sufficient. We have also had to improve our asynchronous communication to help fight off Zoom fatigue.
As we can no longer walk down the hall to ask a question or solicit feedback, Slack has become our go-to channel for establishing a shared understanding of doing what matters. We have opened up new Slack channels such as #research to serve as a central repository for relevant information. Going 100% remote has forced us to be more intentional about how, when, and why we’re communicating.
Consequently, our alignment about what to do is better. We no longer need a daisy chain to keep people in the loop. Instead, we have the information we need to make qualified decisions. As such, I’ve noticed the timeframe for decision-making is faster than when we were in office. I don’t think these results would be possible without a foundation of trust.
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Embrace vulnerability
As the CEO, strategy and culture are two of my key focus areas. During moments of great challenge, we owe it to one another to tune in to the signals and EQ indicators of how the team is doing. There’s so much scary information out there about the pandemic and the economic fallout that can really affect our morale. You can usually tell when someone on your team is having a tough day. People give a lot away. In a world where you aren’t able to comfort face to face – follow up, lean-in, and ask questions.
As a team, we are forthright and honest with each other. I will often share with my leadership team when I’m struggling with an important decision. In a way, I’m hoping to elicit more information from them to help make a better decision. It’s a misguided assumption that CEOs have to have the answers. You need to be open and approachable with your team. It’s okay to say, “I don’t have all the answers.” If you want a culture where people feel safe, then embrace your own vulnerabilities.
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Takeaways
Even in the worst of situations, I still believe a company can flourish and achieve awesome things. Trust in one another, be flexible, and, most importantly, stay real.
Why Distributed Product Teams are Here to Stay
There is no going back to “normal” for product teams. The idea of simply translating what we did in the office can’t be matched in our distributed world.
At a minimum, I believe we need to start thinking remote-first. While we will eventually head back to our offices, we want to prepare ourselves to do it better next time. Even better is to embrace it going forward, perhaps with office/remote hybrids that take advantage of the benefits of both worlds. Like many of you I’m missing the social side of the office, yet cherish the productivity and focus time I’m getting while working from my home.
Even before the pandemic there was a shift happening towards distributed product development teams. Especially for software companies that had the luxury of hiring employees wherever they lived. Covid-19 has accelerated this process and, in my opinion, distributed teams will become the new norm.
There have always been the remote work success stories such as Invision and Basecamp who have entirely distributed teams – and made it work. Most tech companies dabbled in remote workers, yet it was often the exception to the “normal” onsite work policy.
LIKE.TG was somewhere in between. Much of our engineering team was already distributed throughout the US, because we made the decision early on to hire the most talented employees regardless of where they lived. Often these were people we worked with in former roles, so we knew their remote work ethic and knew their approach fit in our growing company and our culture.
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Our company values infuse our beliefs about “balance” in our lives, “transparency” in our communications, and other attributes that lend themselves to a distributed work culture. And over the past few years we had fully embraced the tools and communication practices that make distributed work, well, work. We were already good at it.
And personally, I was already predisposed to remote work. For years I’ve been living a semi-remote work life, and have advocated its benefits. Twenty years ago when I was a technical book author for Microsoft I would spend my days drinking coffee in bed with my laptop, eventually moving to the coffee shop. Clearly, I love coffee.
I was an early remote worker and believed then (and now) that it’s possible to have an ideal combination of work/life/tech balance and be productive while having a hand in building products I was incredibly proud of.
Like many of you, we transitioned to fully distributed one day in March. We finished “shifting” to remote work in a matter of minutes. Or so I thought.
Over the past two months, I’ve come to realize that we don’t want to simply replicate what we previously had.
The New Norm is Different
I’ve realized that the idea of us waiting for the eventual day when we can return to the prior way of doing things was actually not the goal.
At LIKE.TG we’ve decided to fully embrace remote work—to be even better than before. Sure, many of us will eventually head back into the office (after all, we have space in a fun location near the beach). But in the meantime, let’s shift the way we think about distributed work altogether, and get really good at it.
I’ve been reading and listening a lot about the future of work, and while this shift has been happening for a while, with Covid-19, that shift has accelerated even faster.
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Recently, I listened to a podcast by Sam Harris interviewing Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, about the evolution of distributed work. Matt’s company, Automattic, is entirely distributed—with almost 1,200 employees.
In the interview, Mullenweg talks about how we don’t want to replicate what we’re doing today in offices, but rather about how we can take distributed work to the next level. This next-level creates even more productivity and better decisions than before.
These ideas have me realizing that there are so many more best practices we can incorporate into our distributed work culture that can help us build a better product. We no longer need to hold meetings in 60-minute chunks. Or perhaps we can create a culture of combined in-person and distributed brainstorming that gives the best of both worlds.
In his follow-up article on Distributed Works’ Five Levels of Autonomy, Mullenweg discusses how so many companies (or at least knowledge workers) today are working remotely, yet not fully embracing remote work. They’re still waiting for the day they can head back to the office, and still have the same mindset that decisions need to be made in person for example.
If we can hire people anywhere in the world, in any country, we need to be willing to adapt processes for asynchronous decisions by people in different timezones. They no longer should need to adapt to the timezone and schedules for the people back at “headquarters.” (Is there such a thing as “headquarters” any more?) For example, we can use tools like Slack and email more effectively, support home offices for employees, limiting synchronous meetings (and having clear agendas when we do have scheduled meetings).
In the different levels of distributed work autonomy, Mullenweg makes a great point that at the highest levels, fully distributed product teams and even companies can work asynchronously and in “nirvana” actually perform better than any in-person organization.
Our paradigm is truly shifting at this moment if more companies are aspiring to this level of asynchronous work.
Distributed Product Teams
The shift to distributed work means we need to trust more. It means that creativity and written communication skills become even more important. At Mullenweg’s company Automattic they sometimes “interview” people exclusively via email for some roles – after all, if the written word is one of the most essential skills, why not shift the interview to that.
Annie Dunham, our Director of Product at LIKE.TG believes that as product teams move to remote work, we need to be intentional about the culture. “Rather than defaulting to a command and control structure, think about how you build a foundation as a team,” she says. “On the engineering side, we speak frequently about our ceremonies and standups and what is the best way for us to get value out of them. It’s not process for the sake of process.”
In this new way of distributed work, I believe that writing, creative problem solving, and overall communication skills will be more valuable than ever. So will autonomy, time management, and following through on plans. The findings in LIKE.TG’s 2020 Product Management Report show that communication skills are the most important skills for success.
I’m waking up to the idea that we can be an even more productive, creative team that is distributed. Teams that have a great combination of life balance and collaboration with their customers and teams. This has the potential of fostering happier employees who are inspired by the work they’re doing and the products they’re building.
I’m not saying that a shift to distributed work will happen overnight, or that it’s even ideal for all organizations. I understand that many employees’ lives aren’t set up for remote work — especially in this current time of homeschooling, social distancing, and economic uncertainty. However, many product teams, especially those working on digital products, are in an ideal position to take advantage of these benefits.
As the pandemic restrictions ease and as employees feel more comfortable, we’ll experiment with hybrid distributed/in-office configurations, perhaps complementing the remote work with in-person creativity sessions. We’ll certainly be using our office space differently. We’re also frequently sharing best practices and discussing how to do distributed work even better.
Distributed product teams will take work and a mindset shift to be successful. But it’s time.
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How will you better the remote work environment? Let me know in the comments or on LinkedIn.
5 Ways Product Teams Can Drive an Exceptional Customer Experience Strategy
I’ve worked exclusively on digital products for over 14 years, primarily in product and design-centric roles. Thinking back, it’s surprising that it was only about five years ago that I had an important epiphany that would alter the trajectory of our company’s product strategy and my career. As the Director of User Experience, our team was tightly partnered with our product management counterparts to ensure we had baked-in practices and habits that enabled all of our development teams to deliver an exceptional product experience effortlessly. And our success was evident in the feedback. Over 20% of customers took the time to praise the product’s ease of use every month in our Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys. Pat on back.
But as someone passionate about user feedback, I started noticing a trend in those same NPS responses that kept some customers from being promoters (i.e., 9s or 10s on the scale). There were hints that the onboarding ramp was steep, for example. Or, while most of the customers raved about our support team, others expressed frustration around how long it took to get a response to their support requests. It hit me by surprise but was so incredibly obvious at the same time: The user’s experience does not start and end within the software itself.
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There are other aspects and touchpoints of their experience outside of our product team’s purview or control. This meant that no matter how awesome our UX practices were within the product development organization, we’d never reach our full potential without being more inclusive of other customer-facing roles. In the above examples, that meant, to make more promoters out of our customers, our experience strategy required building stronger partnerships with our onboarding and support teams.
The Product Team’s Role in Customer Experience Strategy
So, a simple realization kicked off a new era for both the company and my career, eventually leading to the creation of a new role and slightly different title from Director of User Experience to Director of Customer Experience. But I was still a member of the Product leadership team, and the reason for that is relatively simple – we were a product company and, therefore, a product-lead organization. We were the hub by which the rest of the organizational spokes organized and focused their efforts, so it was natural for the product team to kick off the Customer Experience Conversation. To meet the increasing demands of our customers consistently, we needed to develop stronger partnerships and expand our user experience philosophy and practices cross-functionally.
What is Customer Experience (CX), and Why Does it Matter?
There are widely varying definitions of customer experience. So, for this conversation, I am defining Customer Experience (CX) as how your customers perceive their interactions with your company across the span of their end-to-end journey. These perceptions are important because they inevitably trigger emotions, and emotions drive decision-making. It’s not intuitive for businesses to consider emotions as part of their equation, but make no mistake that your customers are human beings at the end of the day. Strong emotions such as anger and frustration or pleasant surprise and happiness are the fundamental drivers of whether customers will choose your product, whether they will engage with your product, and whether they’ll stay loyal to your business.
To further press the urgency of a robust CX strategy in your business, in 2019, Qualtric’s XM Institute published a study to better understand the impact of Customer Experience on business. Their research further validates the bottom-line impact that emotions can have on a business. A highly rated experience correlates to a significant increase in the customer’s willingness to spend more money with a company, trust and recommend them, and try out new features and offerings from the company. Overall, a compelling customer experience strategy adds significant value to the business over time through its impact on revenue, growth, and customer loyalty.
The problem is organizational silos
While over 80% of businesses report increased investments in improving Customer Experience, they often struggle to deliver truly exceptional results effectively and sustainably. Why? Because the operational models that serve the company well in so many other aspects are the key blockers of CX success. More specifically, the biggest challenge is in the natural tendency of organizations to create separate departments within the business. The division of functional departments inevitably creates organizational silos, a key roadblock to a successful, long-term customer experience strategy.
Divided operational oversight
By nature of having organizational silos, the business intentionally separates and distributes ownership of all the ingredients required for its ongoing success. Departmentalization has enormous benefits from a business perspective; most importantly, the ability to apply much-needed focus and investment across various efforts. But it also creates an inherent “bubble” from within each department will operate when it comes to designing processes and experiences against the bigger picture. Lack of a broader perspective introduces an increased risk of uncoordinated customer touchpoints and duplicate efforts in different pockets of the organization.
Lack of shared goals
Each department has its own set of metrics and goals that they are responsible for delivering. But what happens when there’s a separate set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) from one department to the other? Most businesses recognize the value and necessity of cross-functional efforts but fall short of creating shared goals at the executive level. Competing goals decrease the likelihood that departments will get the investment and resources they need cross-functionally to deliver effectively. So, each department’s goals are not met to their full potential, they’re also more likely to blame the other for not helping them hit the right targets.
Fragmented technology investments
One potentially significant and unintended outcome of silos, especially for software companies, is an uncoordinated suite of customer-facing technology platforms. Adding digital touchpoints is a culmination of not sharing oversight or goals across business functions. When one department is unable to obtain internal investment to solve a particular problem or need, they’ll leverage their budget to seek it out externally. For example, marketing probably has a separate website, and Customer Support probably has a platform for help documentation and service requests. However, if you’re in the business of a technology-based product customers will not differentiate these disparate experiences from the product itself. That puts all the hard efforts your product teams put into building great user experiences at risk of falling short in the bigger picture.
5 Ways for Product Teams to Drive an Exceptional Customer Experience Strategy
As I previously mentioned, I’m a firm believer that the product team in a software organization is perhaps the best positioned to help catapult a successful Customer Experience Strategy for their businesses. For starters, product teams are at a strong advantage because their role is already cross-functional. In coordinating their efforts across the organization, the team has critical access to observe the subtle differences in focus and processes that might put their customer’s experience at risk. Additionally, the product team is naturally poised to drive end-to-end experience improvements since user experience is already (or should be) a top priority of their efforts. This unique perspective and experience-driven oversight put the product team on the front line of driving change in various ways.
1. Become Intimately familiar with the customer journey
To be successful, this is more than just familiarity, rather, intentional curiosity. How intimately do you understand your customers’ interactions across each phase of their journey with your business and by the different departments in your company? One surefire way to get on the same page is to conduct a cross-functional Journey Mapping Workshop. Journey mapping forces outside-in (customer-centered) thinking by each department, who instinctively design their processes from an inside out (business-centered) perspective. The activity and resulting visual artifact is a powerful tool to promote internal awareness and alignment and to generate actionable insights on key areas of opportunity for the business to rally cross-functionally behind.
2. Share and advocate the journey
Understanding the customer’s journey deepens your understanding of user context, it’s critically important to the long-term success of new features and improvements to the product. Share this context diligently with your teams, and paint the picture of the broader perspective as part of your planning and kickoff of new efforts. Sharing context challenges your team to consider aspects of the experience they otherwise may have overlooked and ask essential questions outside of the immediate product purview. For example, what’s the best point along the journey to generate awareness of this new feature to achieve peak adoption? How can the team partner with their CS counterparts to understand the impact the feature may have on current and future support offerings? It can even expose more complicated nuances where upsell and value-added features are involved, like how to craft an experience that doesn’t complicate or create confusion for customers in the way they are billed for your product services.
3. Broaden cross-functional conversations
Product Managers notoriously have busy schedules meeting with other functions across the business; most of these are driven by a need to align other departments to the product strategy, goals, and roadmap. As the leader of these meetings, make time in the agenda to ask stakeholders to also share their initiatives. Ask them what challenges they are facing and how you might help. Get curious—better yet, involved—where appropriate. Of course, this may require some additional time investment on the front-end. The investment is minimal compared to the costs a business can incur in the long term due to the dangerous pitfalls of uncoordinated efforts.
4. Approach cross-functional relationships as partners, not inputs
It’s all too easy for the product team to become the sounding board for all the other departments vying for their resources; after all, your team owns and sets the product strategy. The endless stream of things a product team could do is why it’s vital for them to constantly develop their skill in the art of saying no. Although your team is ultimately responsible for the product vision, there’s no reason that it needs to be a black hole and can’t be more strategically collaborative. Consider up-leveling conversations that involve people in other departments in setting product strategy. Exposing other departments to the myriad of difficult decisions you face every day not only empowers them to bring more relevant ideas to the table but also provides more understanding (and less disappointment) behind your “no”.
5. Make CX a vital component of your product strategy
Successful execution of a businesses’ customer experience strategy requires investment from each functional department, and product strategy is no exception. Partner across the organization to set shared goals and KPIs around CX, for example NPS, support request volume, time-to-value within the product or for engagement of a particular feature, etc.
Aligned goals and metrics ensure space can be made on the product roadmap to address product-related issues that drive CX challenges, such as usability improvements. It also ensures continuity with 3rd party systems so the product can remain the single digital customer touchpoint.
Takeaways
It’s not your product team’s responsibility to deliver features to your customers, rather to craft an exceptional product experience that drives the loyalty that keeps your customers engaged and makes your product an easy sell for future customers. However, in this day and age, that experience is hardly ever isolated within the product itself but spans in purview across the different organizational silos of your company. Getting genuinely curious – and involved – in the company’s customer experience strategy is the best way to succeed in ultimately delivering a truly exceptional product.
Product Strategy Doesn’t Work in a Vacuum, featuring Hadrien Raffalli
rIn our webinar Product Managers: Treat your Strategy as a Product, Hadrien Raffalli discusses the importance of tracking market activity and tweaking plans accordingly. He has experience building products around the world, including stops in South America, Australia, Asia, and is now in Denver working for Pivotal Tracker, part of VMware. Watch the webinar, below!
The Importance of Trendspotting
Raffalli believes strategy missteps are inevitable if companies aren’t spotting key patterns quickly enough.
“Being able to identify the details of how the market is behaving in different populations and different use cases will give you a better chance to anticipate what is likely to happen later.”
Continuous monitoring and adjusting to what’s happening in relevant areas is essential for remaining relevant, viable, and competitive.
“Consider: how is your market behaving right now?” Raffalli says. “What have been the cycles of adoption to get you where you are? Or, if you’re looking forward, is there a path that has been chartered for other innovations?”
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Also crucial is the ability to gain mindshare when trends and new technologies are still in nascent stages. Companies aren’t always in the mode of having to find and “wow” early adopters, but it’s a key part of growth. So at some point in every product manager’s job, it’s likely to be a challenge that must be met to be successful.
At these points in the product’s lifecycle, Raffalli encourages product teams to consider “if there has been a path that has been charted before for other innovations” that can be replicated or informative for your own journey. “What is the order, what are the customer needs, and what is the value chain for this?”
What Does a Good Strategy Look Like?
Companies don’t start with a product strategy. Instead, it comes on the heels of defining a mission and purpose. However, missions and purposes are often selected well before new companies, or product teams have researched and gotten to know their customers.
Because anyone can settle on a mission or purpose without doing any real work, existing on the plane of “ideals.” They’re not rooted in much more than theory and hunches. Product strategy is where things get real.
“Strategy is the art of finding and exploiting leverage in the competitive landscape to achieve your purpose,” Raffalli says. To do so, he recommends the following steps:
Have a purpose—Why are you doing this, and what are you competing for?
Understanding customer needs and how they’re evolving—Customers aren’t standing still, and neither is their environment or options.
Understand your value chain and how it is evolving—Are you solving a problem that still exists? Have new wrinkles emerged that you’re neglecting?
Determine what change is likely to happen—You’re not psychic, but make an educated guess about what’s probably on the horizon.
Define your actions against those changes—How you respond is just as important as recognizing things have transformed.
Measure success and failure and course-correct—Hunches and guesses aren’t enough to make intelligent, data-driven decisions. Be sure you’re tracking what works and what doesn’t, then use that information to inform your next move.
Notice a common theme? Things keep changing, so you better adjust to those changes. As the famous military truism goes: No plan survives contact with the enemy.
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Stories versus Maps
For millennia, information was passed on as stories. From drawing on prehistoric cave walls to the tales of Viking warriors, these narratives provided instructions on how to retrace the steps of those who came before them.
Raffalli says the flaw with this method for conveying information was the inability to prepare for what those storytellers hadn’t yet seen. If an invading party hadn’t already visited the target in question, they had no idea what to expect.
Then came maps. These cartographical marvels enabled generals to assess the situation in advance and plan accordingly. They could seize the high ground and understand climate and topology without having previously visited the area in question.
While this transformation of military strategy occurred centuries ago, Raffalli says businesses still operate based on stories. Both those we’ve heard from others, and those we tell ourselves.
“We try and convince ourselves of something being right,” he says. But it’s long past due that business strategy is rooted in hard data rather than subjective tales we’ve heard or spun ourselves.
“The product KPI is the ultimate expression of your strategy,” Raffalli says, referring to both users completing significant tasks or business metrics being met. “Your strategy KPI, however, are more like underlying fundamentals. So it’s how the market is moving. So it’s going to be customer needs.”
Context-Switching for Strategic Planning
Most product teams think strategically in terms of their product. But this often spawns convoluted thinking and strained rationales for those decisions. To be truly strategic, decisions be abstracted and purely based on strategy and the market conditions, regardless of the particular product.
It can force some hard conclusions that might otherwise never even be considered. Revelations like “we are targeting the wrong market” or “our value proposition no longer exists.” But if this approach is adopted early enough and remains constant, more minor course corrections can potentially avert such drastic conclusions—or at least give companies time to minimize any negative repercussions.
During the webinar, Raffalli used the example of a coding school to illustrate this. When you’re in the business of training coders, you must assess which technology people will care about in the future, along with which solutions/platforms/languages will win market share for the long term.
“In real life, it’s really hard to step away from those Product KPIs and think about the underlying more important fundamental assumptions that your plan relies on,” Raffalli says. “So, in this game, we abstract away the product piece and only focus on the strategy piece.”
The decision of which framework to invest in has major consequences for these firms, from hiring talent to developing curriculums and materials to enrollment. Betting on the first solution to enter the market could backfire, as it may not be the winner.
Other players can swiftly follow, producing superior tech that might be faster, more efficient, or possess exciting new attributes. The first mover might initially be the most popular, but ascertaining which one wins long-term requires a deeper look at the trends than just speed to market.
Raffalli implored companies and product teams to follow and ride the trends. Pay attention to search traffic, online discussions, tool usage, and other leading indicators far more informative than trailing ones like revenue. Because picking the wrong horse can be fatal, regardless of how well you execute your product.
“If you think about your day to day jobs in product and defining your strategy, independently from how great your product is, probably almost half of the companies that are involved in this game, would probably die at some point and reduce the competitive field by a lot,” Raffalli says. “And that’s just by making decisions of which framework to build against.”
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Product Strategy Doesn’t Work in a Vacuum
All too often, once companies assess an opportunity, draft a strategy, find product-market fit, and define a plan, the sole emphasis is on execution. Hitting dates and making progress toward milestones get all the attention.
But regardless of how compelling that initial product roadmap might have been original if the team isn’t paying attention to what’s happening outside its echo chamber, they may be in for a rude awakening.
Raffalli emphasizes the critical role product management plays in mitigating risk. Asking questions and validating assumptions allows them to add ongoing volume by ensuring they found the plan on a realistic foundation of truth.
To participate in Raffalli’s strategy game and unlock even more wisdom, check out the webinar in its entirety.
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My Experience Transitioning From Engineering to Product Leadership
When I started my career as an engineer, I didn’t set my sights on becoming a product manager. Flash forward fifteen years later, and I’m the Director of Product Management at HG Insights. Working in startups and big technology companies, I’ve encountered one question more than most: “How do I make the switch from engineering to product management?”
That’s a big question, and many roads lead to this outcome. So, what qualities does it take to become a product manager? What differences lie in the company expectations? Moreover, what are the next steps you can take to make the transition?
My Journey Transitioning from Engineering to Product Management
I worked 9+ years in software development, leading sizeable cross-functional engineering teams across time zones. Then, I started gravitating towards product strategy questions, like, “Why am I building products?, Who am I building for?, What impact am I bringing to the business?, What makes startups fail or succeed in their mission?”, and so on.
I thought Business school would be the answer, so I started preparing for it, but an exciting opportunity fell in my lap to transform a struggling product offering. Though I had no idea what I was doing before I knew it, I interviewed external customers, internal stakeholders, and various customer-facing teams to understand the problem better.
I worked with the product leadership to plan out a product strategy. Then, I created a product roadmap to move that strategy forward, which ultimately drove a 15% increase in revenue and a 20% increase in retention. I believe in focusing on outcomes to power-up aligning your product strategy with business goals onto a roadmap.
It was the most satisfying moment of my career, even more than building multiple product lines. From that success, I was then officially asked to move into the product role by the product leadership, and I have not looked back since then.
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4 Key Differences in Skills Engineer to Product Manager
You don’t need to have an engineering background to be a successful product manager. Anyone can learn agile product development, basics of software design and development lifecycle, etc.
Here are the four fundamental elements product managers need that is different than engineering:
Strong empathy for your customers (internal and external)
Strong understanding of the business (and market)
You understand that your goal is to achieve business outcomes through measurable product initiatives. Your role is to identify and validate the problems, not actually to solve them.
Participate in every aspect of product design (not talking about just UX/UI here), but this subtle distinction is key to not lose focus on the big picture.
In addition to core product management skills, there are other essential intangibles to success like strong communication, cross-team alignment, being the thought leader, and always being curious.
I shared more of my thoughts on this in the LIKE.TG video series, Spotlights. Watch them below.
What are the Company’s Expectations of a Product Manager?
As a product manager, your primary goal is to deliver business outcomes. Depending on the company, experience, team structure, and business dynamics, the expectations could vary. But any product manager not focusing on essential KPIs like active use, revenue, retention, customer satisfaction, etc. needs to take a closer look at the role. A good product manager is expected to drive strong cross-functional alignment and proactive communications to ensure everyone is focusing on the right problems.
A wise woman once said: Product management is one of the hardest functions in the business but if done right can transform the entire business.
Engineer vs. Product Manager Responsibilities
The fundamental difference product managers need to understand is that your role is to identify the right problem (business, technical, or customer) and why it is worth solving or how it drives business outcomes. In contrast, engineering is responsible for delivering the solution to that problem. Your role as a product manager is to ensure your team is working on solving problems that have a measurable impact on the business. You are also responsible for ensuring customer-facing teams like Customer Success, Marketing, and Sales are fully aware and aligned on the product roadmap.
Of course, a team is successful only when they collaborate as “one team,” so expect to roll up your sleeves for designing the solution, testing it, providing early feedback, documentation, etc.
How to Transition from Engineering to Product Management
First and foremost, you need to understand what product management is in your business and what they are responsible for. Every business, every team, and every market is different.
To be a product manager, you need to start thinking like a product manager (even before switching over). There are plenty of books, blogs, and online training to sharpen up on the responsibilities.
The best recommendation I can give you is to pair up with a product manager to get that hands-on experience. Start to learn how to approach a problem, define a problem, build hypotheses around solutions, collaborate with cross-functional teams to refine it, build metrics for success (or failure), and finally figure out the best and fastest way to get to market.
The Transition from Engineering to Product Management Timeline
In spite of popular belief, there are no definitive timelines, whether it’s engineering or product management. The first and most important thing is finding a company with an established product management team.
Then, collaborate with an experienced product manager on a real project. I am personally a big proponent of the associate product manager track. That’s the best way to get your hands dirty in the game.
Long term, you can expect to manage a specific KPI (e.g., improve first user experience, reduce churn, etc.), product offering, entire product portfolio, or product team. You have a little more flexibility in product management because you are learning various aspects of running a successful business.
Takeaways
Mentoring and people development is a big passion of my life and gives me more satisfaction than anything else. I talk to a lot of aspiring PMs who want to be product managers because they want to be a product manager or have a very different understanding of the role. I don’t blame them because there is so much wisdom that’s out there, which could be confusing sometimes.
But if you like solving complex business problems and understand why and for whom, then you might like being a product manager.
Look at your career as a marathon and not a sprint. Great products take time. Find the right business and team and learn faster than anyone else. Remember, slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.
What Does a Lead Engineer at LIKE.TG Do in a Day?
I’m writing for the first time on the LIKE.TG blog! Long-time reader, first-time writer. I’m currently a remote Lead Software Engineer at LIKE.TG, where I head up a team of four engineers focused on bringing you List View, among other things.
Our team is distributed throughout the United States and Central America, making my workday out of San Luis Obispo, CA unique from our in-house colleagues.
I’ve been a part of LIKE.TG for over a year now and am excited about how we’ve approached remote team-building. My time here has been unlike anywhere else, which is rooted in the focus on communication, alignment around projects, and the transparency from our leadership team.
A Day in the Life of a Lead Engineer at LIKE.TG
Working here is pretty special. So, what does a Lead Engineer at LIKE.TG do in a day?
Here’s a look into my Thursday.
Morning activities
8:00 am:
The alarm goes off and I immediately hit snooze. Half of my team members are a time zone ahead, so they’re already up and working off our team’s backlog before the other half arrives.
8:15 am:
Snooze again. Luckily, my commute is right around the corner.
8:30 am:
Rise and shine. Now, my baby is awake! I get this time in the morning to bond with him while I make a cup of coffee before my wife takes over.
9:00 am:
I’m sitting at my desk. Crack my knuckles, and the workday begins. We use Slack at ProductPlan. I add the :coffee: emoji to our Slack’s #development channel. Our entire development team does the same. We find this to be an easy way to indicate when we’re all available, especially with overlapping time zones.
Next, I go into my personal Trello and organize my to-do list for the day.
9:15 am:
Time for our team stand up. Here’s where I attempt to make a joke in the morning, it’s challenging with the caffeine just barely sinking in. But our team is benevolent, and I get a few chuckles. Our stand-ups are timeboxed to 15 mins.
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9:30 am:
At this point, we’re all logging into Zoom for our All Team Retro. It’s an opportunity to give shoutouts, explain what went well, and learn what didn’t go well to better pinpoint what we could improve on as an engineering team.
At LIKE.TG, I’ve come to appreciate how much we embrace being “judgment-free.” This enables us to spend time reviewing the wins and losses as an entire engineering team. We’re not a huge team, so we still make the time to do this.
We always try to derive some action items from this meeting. Then it rolls into Part 2 of the meeting with the same attendees.
10:00 am:
The next part of our All Team meeting is All Team Planning. Myself and other team leads demo what was just released. I like to use this time to “eat our own dog food” and showcase new features we built within LIKE.TG. For instance, I use List View to effectively show what we have in store for the coming sprint.
I like to use the Sprint style because I can see our sprint start and end dates. I use Legends to differentiate our Sprint Goals vs. our Stretch Goals—this is nice to have and use as a reference to review past sprints.
Here’s what it looks like:
Yesterday, I used this same view to pitch what we’re planning to product and engineering stakeholders. I synced up with our Director of Product Management (Annie) and SVP of Engineering (Mark) to agree on which projects align with the business goals for the given sprint.
Once they share their feedback, I guide my team with Mark and Annie’s input from our earlier conversation. I love to emphasize that my team helps create the pitch, which goes a long way in building motivation.
In today’s meeting, I am presenting my team’s upcoming sprint to the other engineering teams. I value this time when all the engineering teams come together and have the ear of our CEO (Brad), Annie, and Mark.
We do a great job of having one single source of truth, and that’s ProductPlan. We’re not scattered between a Google Doc here and a Powerpoint there. My team can see this, and my boss can see the plans at any time.
Then I sit back and listen to the other engineering teams present their plans.
10:30:
Time for headphones and VSCode. Today is a high context switching day, so let’s pick up a low-hanging fruit item.
11:30 am:
Time for more coffee. One cool thing that we do to forge relationships with the team are virtual coffee breaks. These are especially important since we don’t have the opportunity to chat over a water cooler in a remote setting.
Once a month, we are randomly paired with another co-worker for 15 minutes (but often the conversation rolls into overtime) and given a prompt question if we need it. It’s a great way to learn about other departments and build your network.
12:00 pm:
It’s lunchtime! I grab a bite with the baby before he takes his afternoon nap. I play with our dogs and try to get out and get some fresh air.
Afternoon activities
1:00 pm:
Once I’m back from lunch, I hold a Project Kickoff with the team. In the background, my dog is barking at the mailman like clockwork.
With every Project Kickoff, I like to start with “Why?” and “What is the problem we are trying to solve?” I’ll leverage our customer feedback board in Trello to pull customer quotes that reinforce the customers’ voice and put them first when trying to solve the problem.
The better I can convey this message to the team; the more successful the project will be.
3:00 pm:
LIKE.TG’s most recent Book Club has been going on for a few weeks. We meet once a week to discuss the chapter we read and answer the questions seeded beforehand. It’s a fun way to collaborate with people outside my team and talk about things that aren’t necessarily tied to the product.
We’re currently reading Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High. If you haven’t read this book yet, I highly recommend it!
Coffee Breaks and Book Club are just some of the great remote team bonding experiences at ProductPlan. I also get a kick out of some running Slack channels like #pets, #parents, and #battlestations.
4:00 pm:
Headphones back on! I set my Slack status to “In the zone” to indicate to my teammates that I may not respond to any messages for a bit. Let’s close this pull request from earlier!
6:00 pm:
What a day. Before I wrap, I like to post an end-of-day status in Slack. This consists of what I did for the day and any requests for code that needs to be reviewed or tested. The rest of the team does this as well, which helps us easily resume in the morning when we’re spread out across different time zones.
Time to start making dinner and enjoy the rest of the night with my family!
Takeaways
The days where we are not planning out the next sprint benefit from being more focused. We strive to have as much asynchronous communication as possible and minimize meetings so our engineers can get into the zone.
At LIKE.TG, every engineer has a say in how we should go about solving a customer problem. I find that being close to determining the solution is highly motivating for everyone involved. We index on team-building opportunities since remote life can be challenging and encourage people to step away to prevent burnout. We’re all here to support one another and help each other out, this is an example of one of those days. If this sounds good, then you’ll be happy to know, we’re hiring!
6 Tips to Creating Roadmap Accountability with Your Team
rIn our webinar Product Managers: Treat your Strategy as a Product, Hadrien Raffalli discusses the importance of tracking market activity and tweaking plans accordingly. He has experience building products around the world, including stops in South America, Australia, Asia, and is now in Denver working for Pivotal Tracker, part of VMware. Watch the webinar, below!
The Importance of Trendspotting
Raffalli believes strategy missteps are inevitable if companies aren’t spotting key patterns quickly enough.
“Being able to identify the details of how the market is behaving in different populations and different use cases will give you a better chance to anticipate what is likely to happen later.”
Continuous monitoring and adjusting to what’s happening in relevant areas is essential for remaining relevant, viable, and competitive.
“Consider: how is your market behaving right now?” Raffalli says. “What have been the cycles of adoption to get you where you are? Or, if you’re looking forward, is there a path that has been chartered for other innovations?”
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Also crucial is the ability to gain mindshare when trends and new technologies are still in nascent stages. Companies aren’t always in the mode of having to find and “wow” early adopters, but it’s a key part of growth. So at some point in every product manager’s job, it’s likely to be a challenge that must be met to be successful.
At these points in the product’s lifecycle, Raffalli encourages product teams to consider “if there has been a path that has been charted before for other innovations” that can be replicated or informative for your own journey. “What is the order, what are the customer needs, and what is the value chain for this?”
What Does a Good Strategy Look Like?
Companies don’t start with a product strategy. Instead, it comes on the heels of defining a mission and purpose. However, missions and purposes are often selected well before new companies, or product teams have researched and gotten to know their customers.
Because anyone can settle on a mission or purpose without doing any real work, existing on the plane of “ideals.” They’re not rooted in much more than theory and hunches. Product strategy is where things get real.
“Strategy is the art of finding and exploiting leverage in the competitive landscape to achieve your purpose,” Raffalli says. To do so, he recommends the following steps:
Have a purpose—Why are you doing this, and what are you competing for?
Understanding customer needs and how they’re evolving—Customers aren’t standing still, and neither is their environment or options.
Understand your value chain and how it is evolving—Are you solving a problem that still exists? Have new wrinkles emerged that you’re neglecting?
Determine what change is likely to happen—You’re not psychic, but make an educated guess about what’s probably on the horizon.
Define your actions against those changes—How you respond is just as important as recognizing things have transformed.
Measure success and failure and course-correct—Hunches and guesses aren’t enough to make intelligent, data-driven decisions. Be sure you’re tracking what works and what doesn’t, then use that information to inform your next move.
Notice a common theme? Things keep changing, so you better adjust to those changes. As the famous military truism goes: No plan survives contact with the enemy.
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Stories versus Maps
For millennia, information was passed on as stories. From drawing on prehistoric cave walls to the tales of Viking warriors, these narratives provided instructions on how to retrace the steps of those who came before them.
Raffalli says the flaw with this method for conveying information was the inability to prepare for what those storytellers hadn’t yet seen. If an invading party hadn’t already visited the target in question, they had no idea what to expect.
Then came maps. These cartographical marvels enabled generals to assess the situation in advance and plan accordingly. They could seize the high ground and understand climate and topology without having previously visited the area in question.
While this transformation of military strategy occurred centuries ago, Raffalli says businesses still operate based on stories. Both those we’ve heard from others, and those we tell ourselves.
“We try and convince ourselves of something being right,” he says. But it’s long past due that business strategy is rooted in hard data rather than subjective tales we’ve heard or spun ourselves.
“The product KPI is the ultimate expression of your strategy,” Raffalli says, referring to both users completing significant tasks or business metrics being met. “Your strategy KPI, however, are more like underlying fundamentals. So it’s how the market is moving. So it’s going to be customer needs.”
Context-Switching for Strategic Planning
Most product teams think strategically in terms of their product. But this often spawns convoluted thinking and strained rationales for those decisions. To be truly strategic, decisions be abstracted and purely based on strategy and the market conditions, regardless of the particular product.
It can force some hard conclusions that might otherwise never even be considered. Revelations like “we are targeting the wrong market” or “our value proposition no longer exists.” But if this approach is adopted early enough and remains constant, more minor course corrections can potentially avert such drastic conclusions—or at least give companies time to minimize any negative repercussions.
During the webinar, Raffalli used the example of a coding school to illustrate this. When you’re in the business of training coders, you must assess which technology people will care about in the future, along with which solutions/platforms/languages will win market share for the long term.
“In real life, it’s really hard to step away from those Product KPIs and think about the underlying more important fundamental assumptions that your plan relies on,” Raffalli says. “So, in this game, we abstract away the product piece and only focus on the strategy piece.”
The decision of which framework to invest in has major consequences for these firms, from hiring talent to developing curriculums and materials to enrollment. Betting on the first solution to enter the market could backfire, as it may not be the winner.
Other players can swiftly follow, producing superior tech that might be faster, more efficient, or possess exciting new attributes. The first mover might initially be the most popular, but ascertaining which one wins long-term requires a deeper look at the trends than just speed to market.
Raffalli implored companies and product teams to follow and ride the trends. Pay attention to search traffic, online discussions, tool usage, and other leading indicators far more informative than trailing ones like revenue. Because picking the wrong horse can be fatal, regardless of how well you execute your product.
“If you think about your day to day jobs in product and defining your strategy, independently from how great your product is, probably almost half of the companies that are involved in this game, would probably die at some point and reduce the competitive field by a lot,” Raffalli says. “And that’s just by making decisions of which framework to build against.”
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Product Strategy Doesn’t Work in a Vacuum
All too often, once companies assess an opportunity, draft a strategy, find product-market fit, and define a plan, the sole emphasis is on execution. Hitting dates and making progress toward milestones get all the attention.
But regardless of how compelling that initial product roadmap might have been original if the team isn’t paying attention to what’s happening outside its echo chamber, they may be in for a rude awakening.
Raffalli emphasizes the critical role product management plays in mitigating risk. Asking questions and validating assumptions allows them to add ongoing volume by ensuring they found the plan on a realistic foundation of truth.
To participate in Raffalli’s strategy game and unlock even more wisdom, check out the webinar in its entirety.
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4 Useful Real-Life Customer Interview Email Templates
Communication is a vital skill for product managers. We spend lots of time thinking about the best way to deliver our product roadmaps, give presentations, run effective meetings, and create stakeholder alignment. But in reality, the communication tool we use far more often is email.
Even if internal communication has shifted to collaboration platforms such as Slack or Microsoft Teams, email is still the universal communication method for interacting with customers. And there may be no more valuable type of email than a customer interview email that solicits customer feedback.
Product managers can’t effectively do their jobs without understanding customer needs and gauging their satisfaction with the current offering. And while in a perfect world we’d get to sit down and chat with every user about their experience, that’s not a particularly scalable model.
But by reaching out to customers via email during specific moments in the customer journey, product managers can tap into what users feel while the experience is still fresh in their minds.
These emails are important because customer feedback is the lifeblood of any customer-centric organization, revealing exciting opportunities and painful realizations. But if the emails you’re sending don’t spark a response, you’ll never know what you’re missing.
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4 Key Ingredients of an Effective Customer Feedback Request Email
Your customers didn’t ask you to ask for their feedback, so you must make it worth their while. By including each of the following in your email template, you’ll increase your response rate and the quality of what you hear back.
1. Lead with intention
Being clear and concise is the key here. Tell them why you’re reaching out—you just tried a feature, haven’t used the product in a while, etc. That way, they don’t think it is just a blanket spam email sent to every user.
2. Tell them what you want
An open-ended request for feedback might seem the least intrusive and limiting, but that can seem daunting to a user not in the habit of offering input and might swamp you with all kinds of irrelevant comments. Be specific without being too leading in your request (think “we want to hear about your experience” and not “tell us what we should do better”).
3. Ask for availability while respecting their time
If your email asks the customer to participate in a call, web conference, or follow-up meeting, be upfront with exactly how much time you’re asking for. Less is more, in this case, so design your feedback session to be efficient, limiting the focus so you can squeeze it into as narrow a window as possible. Telling them you only need, for example, 15 minutes of their time, should increase response rates and be less of a burden on both of your schedules.
Watch our webinar on scaling customer-centricity to see how to strike the balance:
4. Be genuine
Remember, you are asking them for a favor, and they owe you nothing! Use natural language and don’t come across as too pushy or demanding. The more human and organic it feels, the more likely they’ll want to respond.
4 Customer Feedback Request Email Templates
Here are some basic templates for four different types of requests to help you along your journey in crafting useful emails. Use these as starting points, customizing them based on your product’s nature, what you know about the customer and the specific context of “the ask.”
These templates are specifically requesting a phone call or meeting. They could just as easily prompt the user to complete a survey or provide feedback directly via an emailed response. Remember, anything you can do to make this seem like a person-to-person interaction and not an automated, system-generated message will improve the odds of a positive response.
1. The Feature Feedback Request
“Hello [the customer’s first name],
I see you tried [X feature] recently. I’m very interested to hear about your experience on [feature-specific topic]. Do you have some time in the next week or so for a short, 30-minute conversation?
Thank you, and I look forward to hearing from you,
[Your name]
[Your title at/@ your company]”
2. The Discovery Session
“Hello [the customer’s first name],
Thank you for recently purchasing [Y enterprise product]. We’re curious to understand more about your decision process to buy it, and how your experience has been so far— specifically how you’re finding [topic B]. Do you have some time in the next week or so for an informal 15-minute conversation?
Thank you, and I look forward to hearing from you,
[Your name]
[Your title at/@ your company]”
3. The Feature Validation Session
“Hello [the customer’s first name],
I see you run [ABC, are using a particular product feature, or are a particular user]. Based on that experience, I would be very interested in getting your feedback on a potential new feature we’re considering. Do you have some time in the next week for a conversation? It would be great to spend 45 minutes to an hour exploring this with you.
Thank you, and I look forward to hearing from you,
[Your name]
[Your title at/@ your company]”
4. The Support Experience Review
“Hello [the customer’s first name],
I saw you recently contacted customer support regarding an issue you were having with [topic Z]. I would be very interested in hearing your feedback on your customer support experience, and making sure your issue was entirely resolved. Do you have some time in the next week or for a conversation? It should be a quick 15-minute conversation if you’re open to it.
Thank you, and I look forward to hearing from you,
[Your name]
[Your title at/@ your company]”
Prepare for the Response
By relying on templates, automated workflows, and routine, product managers can create a continuous feedback loop by prompting customers for their input. As the goal is for customers to respond and set up a time to talk, be sure your calendar is relatively open before firing these emails off.
You don’t want to spoil your first interaction with them by delaying the actual phone call until their experience is no longer fresh. So don’t be too overly aggressive in sending out more requests than you can reasonably handle.
What product managers hear back from these feedback sessions may be startling insights, painful realizations, or helpful, constructive criticism, thanks to asking great questions before sitting back and listening. But without asking, there’s no way to know what’s truly on the mind of real users. The more perspectives we receive, the more informed and grounded our decisions will be.
To avoid overreacting to any lone nugget of feedback, product teams need a defined system for capturing, organizing, validating, and summarizing what they hear. You should contextualize and socialize these results to key stakeholders. They can learn from what’s really happening in the marketplace, adjusting their plans and strategy accordingly.
Customer Interview Email Takeaways
On a final note, don’t forget to close the loop with customers who give their time and provide feedback. Follow up when their requests are being acted on or are now available, as well as when you decide they won’t be in the cards. It’s the least you can do to acknowledge their participation in the process.
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