At its most basic level, a customer-led product strategy means that your customers are the top priority at all times. Sounds pretty obvious, right? But creating a truly customer-centric business model means balancing a lot of different factors, not just customer service. All too often, customers are losing out to more influential stakeholder groups and other priorities. One report found that80 percent of customers said the experience a company provides is just as important as its products or services. Therefore, it makes total sense to look at the products you offer from the customers’ perspective. Ensuring your products and services bring joy to customers at every stage of their journey will help grow your business, helping it survive even in tough times. Putting Customers First Any time you launch a new idea, a new product, or a new system, ask yourself the following questions: #1 Who will this serve? #2 How will it benefit the people it serves? #3 What are the company’s goals for this product or service? By asking – and answering – these questions, you can create something that people truly value. Anticipating the kind of products customers need and making sure they get them will lead to deeper brand loyalty and customer retention. But first, you need to know exactly what the customer wants to deliver it. Making use of key customer insights and then implementing them is vitally important. For example, if you discover that most customers want to receive their purchases in the fastest possible time, you could use retail inventory management software to speed things up. Remember that81 percent of consumers are willing to increase their spend with an organization in return for a better experience! Read the Customer Interview Toolbox ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'd7d86cbd-164a-46c9-8c8f-f15fee88bc7f', {}); Looking at the Data You might think you’re pretty hot on knowing what your customers want, especially if you’ve been running a successful business for many years. However, here’s a sobering statistic: 80 percent of companies believe they are delivering a superior customer experience, but only 8 percent of customers agree! This proves that you shouldn’t claim to be customer-centric if your products and services don’t reflect that. Digital technology means there are now more avenues for observing customer behaviors and spotting crucial insights – and statistics suggest thatinsight-driven customer experiences help businesses retain 89 percent of their customers. By blending data from customer surveys with qualitative and observational insights, you can build a detailed profile of your target users and see their needs. It’s also helpful to note what your competitors are up to and look at non-competitors to get an idea of best practices. You don’t have to copy their approach, but you can tease out the best bits and blend them into the perfect strategy for you. Creatinga partnership with a competitor can actually aid the customer journey in some cases. If you cannot offer a product or service that your customer really wants, put your rivalry to one side and team up with a company that can! Making a Plan Once you’ve taken a look at the improvements you could make, it’s time to produce your plan of action. This framework should always put the customer front and center while ensuring any changes are viable within your overall business model. Product roadmaps are useful in planning and development and can be used to create alignment across the organization. Start with the product vision statement, then set out your goals and initiatives. The customer-led product strategy must be ingrained at every level of your company, so all your employees need to understand who the product is aimed at, what its unique selling points are, and what the long-term goal should be. Having your customer service and marketing departments work together is a good way to boost the customer experience. Hiring the right people, who truly believe in your vision, is crucial – as is keeping them up to date and motivated. Using video conferencing software can help maintain face-to-face contact with those in other sectors of the business. Download the Guide to Roadmap Software ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '4bf8579a-d29b-4f68-83a0-dff66a99d470', {}); Adapting to Change The digital environment has created a definite shift in customer behavior, meaning that customers become more discerning and impatient in the products and services they choose. They now have higher expectations and more choice than ever before – so if you don’t meet their needs, they can just as easily go elsewhere. New technology might make it easier for you to communicate with customers, but it’s also easier for them to complain! Older businesses, in particular, can struggle to adapt to the new pattern, compared to newer companies and start-ups with millennials at the helm. But it’s basically a case of “adapt or die.” Companies that consistently find innovative ways to develop and market their products will succeed in the long run. Tapping into Technology One prediction is that by 2021, there will be over 230 million digital shoppers in the United States. The role of technology affords many opportunities to provide a superb customer experience and gain customer insights at all the different touchpoints. The automation of customer service is one such element, and we’re seeing businesses introduce improvements like a call recording service to make life simpler for both customers and agents. Meanwhile, the rise of artificial intelligence can give extra insights into the customer experience using smart chatbots and analytics. Technology will only increase in importance, but you should make sure it is always useful to the customer and helps rather than hinders their journey! For older customers and more traditional businesses, the latest tech may not necessarily be the best solution for booking appointments, where it has advantages and disadvantages. Making it Personal A customer-led product strategy means learning which products appeal to customers and viewing them as much more than mere transactions. However, just offering them excellent products and an enjoyable, hassle-free experience isn’t enough. Personalization is the real key, as it makes customers feel like they are genuinely valuable to the business. Finding ways to personalize both the product and the overall journey will boost customer retention – and a happy customer will share their positive experiences with others, thus enhancing your rating on product review sites. It goes without saying that you should deliver a great omnichannel experience as standard. Still, it also helps to give customers personalized support as they browse and hopefully make a purchase. Customers appreciate little details, such as adding extra filters to narrow down browsing choices and save time. A customer-facing product roadmap can be used to let individual customers know what you’re up to and how you’re implementing their feedback, helping you to build a deeper relationship. You can encourage employees to develop empathy for the customers by talking to new service users and regular visitors if a customer has decided to switch to a different company, try to find out why – and see if there’s a way to tempt them back in. 点击播放声音 @keyframes VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } @keyframes VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } .volume__small-wave { animation: VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite; opacity: 0; } .volume__large-wave { animation: VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite .3s; opacity: 0; } 1:09:25●●●●●IntroCustomer Feedback and Your Product VisionDeciding What to BuildHow to Use Metrics to Align Product Strategy...Questions Answers #wistia_chrome_37 #wistia_grid_103_wrapper .w-css-reset{font-size:14px;} #wistia_chrome_37 #wistia_grid_103_wrapper 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.w-css-reset-button-important{border-radius:0!important;color:#fff!important;} Complete the form to access the full webinarFirst Name*Last Name*Job Title*Email*LIKE.TG is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy, and we’ll only use your personal information to administer your account and to provide the products and services you requested from us. 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Make sure you ask the necessary questions before the customer embarks on their experience, thereby keeping in control of the process. Once a customer has been convinced to create an account, the onboarding system is crucial in executing your product strategy. You could keep them coming back by creating personalized messages or offering free trials or discounts on products you’ve learned that particular customer would like. The importance of website maintenance cannot be overstated if you want customers to choose you over your competitors. Ensure your whole online presence is optimized to give all users the best experience on whatever device they use, including personalized product suggestions and plenty of up-to-date, relevant content. The eventual aim is that happy customers will keep returning, so you won’t have to spend so much on marketing and sales activities – especially great news for smaller businesses. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '1f74539e-d4fc-4cb3-97c6-fd86de2bf62e', {});

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

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

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

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

TLDR: The Newest Version of LIKE.TG’s Roadmap App, with an Enhanced Table Can Be Your All-in-One Roadmapping Solution With the new and improved table, roadmap owners can reduce their reliance on static spreadsheets and own the data behind their roadmaps. Now they can create, edit, and share ideas, strategic thinking, plans, evidence, and other details right in their roadmap software platform. The Problem: Roadmap Data Lives in Too Many Places It’s a challenge just about every product manager faces. Maintaining and updating roadmap details requires hopping back and forth between various apps and keeping track of several static files. Most product managers use a spreadsheet to capture ideas, feedback, usage data points, and other product details. Then they have to reproduce the high-priority items in a different app—usually PowerPoint—to create a visual roadmap. Whenever priorities change, or they need to add new information, these product managers have to update two static files: the spreadsheet and the slide deck. Even more frustrating, they need to make these updates separately in each file every time. It’s not an ideal workflow. The Solution: LIKE.TG’s Updated Table Creates an All-in-One Roadmapping Platform We created LIKE.TG’s roadmap app to help you simplify the roadmapping process. With our latest release, which includes major enhancements to our table, you now have an all-in-one platform for your roadmapping tasks. If you already use LIKE.TG, our new table will help you finally move your data out of a spreadsheet and into a live tool. Or if you haven’t started using a roadmapping app, you’ll find LIKE.TG creates an easy, intuitive way to manage the data behind your product strategy. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'bcf47ad4-3832-42c0-9ae8-1fd954c6be9c', {"region":"na1"}); We’ve made it easier than ever to create, view, edit, and share your roadmap data right in the LIKE.TG app. Here’s how. 5 Ways Our Updated Table Improves Your Workflows Here are five quality-of-life enhancements in our new and improved table that can streamline your workflows, save you time and frustration, and help your team build better products. 1. See all of the data you need and none that you don’t With the new table, you now have more control over how you view and edit your roadmap data. You can see all of your bar details at once in the table. We’ve also included the ability to add or subtract which information is exposed, by toggling items in the Edit Columns dropdown menu. If you’re used to relying on a spreadsheet to make updates and then manually pulling them into your roadmap, this can save you an enormous amount of time. It can also help you drill down into the information that’s really important—and hide what isn’t. 2. Switch into ‘roadmap update mode’ with ease Sometimes you need to review your roadmap’s details for accuracy and make updates where relevant. Perhaps you need to add a new strategic objective, modify the tags associated with a roadmap item, or change up which team is working on which initiative. You’ll find that all of these details are now housed within your table. By clicking into any field, you can make edits on the fly without needing to bounce back and forth between apps. Make all of the edits you need in one place. 3. Keep your planned and parked items close, but separate The table offers two linked but separate sections: Parked (for your idea backlog) and Planned (for the items up next for development). You can easily move features between Parked and Planned with just a click. You can also add bars or containers directly to the planned section of the table, which is perfect for those instances when a new initiative is accelerated and needs to go directly on the roadmap. 4. Keep features in one place from creation to conclusion Just because an idea evolves into a planned initiative doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to manage it from one interface. The new table makes it easier than ever to create, track, and update each product initiative throughout its entire lifecycle. Whether you add new initiatives to your Planned or Parked lists, you can easily update each item in your table as it moves through development. You can also easily move an item to Prioritization in the score column. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '7c551d2b-ed71-444c-888b-18461bcb6944', {"region":"na1"}); 5. Automatically populate your table updates in the visual roadmap When you update roadmap details in your table, the app will automatically transfer those updates across your roadmap. No need to switch back and forth between views, or manually visualize initiatives in a tool like PowerPoint. Note: For stakeholders who are more comfortable with spreadsheets than a visual roadmap, you can always present your product roadmap in table. This allows you to avoid the hassle of exporting CSV files, and provides control over what you present to who. Simply click the Edit Columns dropdown menu and select which information you would like to share with them. What These Workflow Improvements Look Like in Practice Let’s say you’re a product manager and need to organize and analyze a lot of data. Before prioritizing anything on a roadmap, you have to sort through feature requests, customer feedback, stakeholder priorities, and more. With a more powerful table, you won’t have to constantly move between your spreadsheet and your LIKE.TG roadmap. You can now create, update, and maintain these roadmap details all within the LIKE.TG app. What if you’ve already built out your data in a spreadsheet? No problem. You can easily import your spreadsheet into your table without losing any of your formatting column orders or header names. Seamlessly transition from creating roadmap data to visualizing roadmap data. Takeaway With LIKE.TG’s new and improved table, you now have one unified space to create, update, and maintain your roadmap details. You’ll be able to see everything at-a-glance, edit details inline, and find the information you need. Improve Your Workflows with Our Improved Table Try the Product App Free >

I’ve spoken with so many product managers who have a dream of becoming an entrepreneur or launching their own product one day. Every one of those conversations is exciting because that was my dream too. After a decade of working with others to launch successful SaaS products, I took the plunge to launch a startup in 2013. As I continued to help launch products, I realized that I was prepared to dive into entrepreneurial life myself. Our surveys at LIKE.TG support this trend of product managers (PM) desiring the entrepreneurial life. In LIKE.TG’s 2021 State of Product Management Report, we learned that 27% of product managers said they wanted to start their own company in the next 10 years.

The evolution of product-led growth may seem to be a recent trend at software companies, but the underlying concepts have been in full force for years. Being product-led is a path to success: we’ve seen consistently that product-led companies achieve faster growth once they achieve scale. Companies like Slack, Zoom, Calendly, Hubspot, and Dropbox are often mentioned as examples. But there are thousands of others that have achieved faster growth through similar methods. I’ve had the fortune of working on teams launching some of the early SaaS products going back almost 20 years. All of them baked product-led growth into their business models. In this article, I’ll give you some examples of product-led growth from my own experience. And I’ll additionally provide a few thoughts on where it’s all heading. But first I’ll quickly explain what I mean when I say “product-led”. To me, it means that the company is thinking product-first and is focused on the customer experience. It means they use the product itself to drive growth through new sales and expansion revenue. In my experience, the best companies build the business model to help the product achieve faster growth without adding a commensurate number of salespeople to the mix. Rather than the previous generation of software companies with high friction sales models, in a product-led company the customers themselves foster the growth. My Experience with GoToMeeting: Growth Built-In In 2004 I helped launch GoToMeeting, one of the earliest web-based products with a SaaS model. The product was acquired by Citrix, and later by LogMeIn. I was on the team conducting market validation and I led the early customer discovery interviews. I then wrote the product requirements that outlined the features, value propositions, and business model. We took our learnings from launching two earlier products at the same company and created a model integrating several characteristics that, while we didn’t call it product-led at the time, clearly were product-led. These characteristics helped create a wildly successful product and a model for future companies: Self-service model. Customers could use the free trial and purchase one or a few licenses with a credit card. We experimented zealously and continued to optimize the purchase flow and experience. While this seems like a no-brainer for so many software companies today, at the time it was an uncommon approach and helped our rapid growth. Easy to get started. The product was easy to get up and running without any training. Viral licensing model. Participants could join the meetings for free. This allowed viral awareness within organizations because it was so easy to get started. This then fostered growth as participants decided to host their own meetings and purchased a license. Customer-focused pricing model. Our “all you can meet” pricing model was innovative at the time and was so appealing to customers who were used to the unfriendly meeting models such as per-participant / per-minute Product-Led Growth at LIKE.TG My company LIKE.TG launched our product roadmap platform in 2013 and we baked in product-led growth from the very beginning. In our early market validation, we discovered that product managers wanted to try the product on their own before buying. For that reason, we launched with a completely self-service model and didn’t hire our first salesperson until years later in 2016. Here are some of the characteristics of LIKE.TG that make us product-led. Educational focus with inbound marketing. Our low-key educational approach to content allows product managers to learn about us through high-quality articles, books, webinars, and other content. They choose to engage with a trial when they are ready. Fully-functional Free Trial. Product managers can sign up for a free trial without a credit card and get access to all the features in our entry-level plan. Easy to get started. Product managers could build (or import) their first roadmap in minutes – our interface is laser-focused on getting started fast. We deliver value in minutes, even before purchasing the product. Self-service purchasing model. Since we launched in 2013, customers have been able to purchase licenses without contacting us. This makes it possible for product managers and others in larger organizations to “go rogue,” and purchase LIKE.TG (sometimes using their own credit card). This approach helps plant the seeds within an organization for future growth. Free viewer licenses. When a product manager shares their roadmap for free to others (including executives), awareness within other teams grows – they are then inspired to purchase their licenses to create and edit their own roadmaps. Easy to add more licenses. For our basic plan customers can add more licenses without contacting us – as awareness grows internally it’s easy to add a license so new people can get started immediately. Network effect. As adoption grows within an organization, the value of LIKE.TG increases. As more product teams adopt the solution, we’re seen as a platform and the need for standardization across the organization becomes important. The standardization included in our enterprise plans evolves to be a requirement. These features provide even more value for larger organizations and an upgrade path for additional recurring revenue for us. I’m not saying that we’ve nailed product-led growth. We have a lot more to learn and do. And our model continues to evolve. Today we have an enterprise account management team and more options for trying the product, including coordinated team trials, but our core product-led approach is still there. Core Principles Going Forward What I’ve described so far are a few basics from my experience that companies can adopt to become more product-led. My opinion is that we can focus on a couple of core principles to become more product-led in our companies. A couple of my favorite products can provide some insight. The first core principle is to deliver an outstandingly positive user experience. A great example of this is Slack. Like many of you, we’re a customer, and it was their thoughtful focus on creating a simple and fun way for our team to communicate that created rapid and enthusiastic adoption. The other core principle is some kind of viral growth built into the business model – often accelerated by existing customers. I’ve been a customer of Calendly’s meeting scheduling tool for a while now because it makes it so easy to find meeting times. I chiefly use it for scheduling calls with customers. It’s the virality of their product that fascinates me—every time I send an invitation to someone to find a meeting time, I’m essentially sending an email to a new prospective customer for them. The product doesn’t need an overly aesthetic UI to have product-led growth. It’s so easy to get started that this product gains fast adoption. For those of us in the software world, most of us want to evolve to be product-led. By looking at these examples you hopefully are inspired to build growth levers into your product and business model. Have other examples? I’d love to hear what you think.

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

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

Product managers can find inspiration for their products everywhere, and that’s great. But those inspired ideas can’t go straight onto the roadmap. A product manager first needs to subject a new concept to a process that involves making the case. For example, they can do this through research and weighing the idea against other items already on the roadmap. And perhaps most importantly, before you add or remove anything, you should gain leadership consensus. As someone who has worked for years as both a product manager and a product leader, I can tell you this from firsthand experience (some of it learned the hard way). Do not let your product leader see any of the following on your roadmap. 1. Surprises Don’t make your product leader ask, “What’s this?” Let’s say you’re working on a mobile app, and someone in your office mentions that connecting more deeply with Facebook would increase app engagement with specific segments of your user base. That sounds like a great idea. And we all know how thrilling a product manager can find discovering an excellent idea for their product. (It’s one of the best things about this job.) Also, let’s assume you trust the judgment of the person who suggested it—a sales manager or a product manager who handles a different suite of apps. So, you immediately add “Implement Facebook Integrations” to the roadmap. Then your product leader sees it and says, “Huh?” It would have helped to discuss this with your team, including your product leader before the integration epic appeared on your roadmap. Worse, you didn’t subject the idea to the full vetting before adding it to the strategic timeline. When your product leader asked about it, you weren’t ready with the answers to all the necessary follow-up questions, such as: Which persona will these integrations resonate with, and why? What will the anticipated increases in engagement do for the bottom line? How are we going to measure success with this initiative? A great idea alone can’t earn a spot on a product roadmap. Only great, vetted, and agreed-upon ideas can. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '527dc6af-8860-436f-9ca6-ae2b71b0cc99', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); 2. Items that raise more questions than they answer Don’t make your product leader ask, “How is this going to work?” Now imagine that for a different item you’re adding to the roadmap, you’ve cleared the first hurdle above. You shared the idea with your product leader and the rest of the team, and it won’t take them entirely by surprise when they see it on the roadmap. Heck, the team may even agree in principle that the idea had merit. And now you’re thinking: Everyone sounded enthusiastic about this idea. Why not give it a slot on the roadmap right away? So, that’s what you do. Then your product leader sees the initiative on the roadmap and says, “Wait. Did we all agree on this? Does our development team have the expertise to build it? Have they agreed to the timeline I see here? Did we get the budget?” Again, you’ve created friction with your team by short-circuiting the process of building alignment. You’ve also undermined your product leader’s trust in your judgment and your ability to guide the team successfully through development. If I saw an initiative suddenly appear on one of my product managers’ roadmaps—and it raised more questions than it answered—here’s what I would be thinking: If I can’t count on you to gain team alignment around a new item before you slap it on the product roadmap, what else should I be concerned about? 3. Items that have disappeared without explanation Don’t make your product leader ask, “Where’d that epic go?” Assume your product leader and other executives will notice any change you make to your roadmap. If you decide to shelve an initiative that your team had been expecting to build, you first need to complete two strategic steps: Step 1: Build and document your case When you drop a feature or epic from your roadmap, your product leader will need to know why. They might have shared the item with the rest of the executive team or discussed it with sales and marketing. You don’t want to pull the rug out from under everyone now, and not without good reason. Your development team, which may have already begun breaking down the initiative into stories and tasks, will also expect to know why it’s off the roadmap. If they have spent time and resources delegating tasks and creating a schedule, you owe them an explanation for why you’ve decided to change plans. Step 2: Have the conversations It would help to let your team know about your plans to table the initiative. Your first call (or Zoom or Slack or drop-in) should be with your product leader, and you’ll want to share your reasoning and then seek agreement. If your product leader agrees, it’s time to update the rest of the team. That means having the conversation with development, sales, marketing, customer success, and any other people who could be affected. Even if you don’t need their approval or agreement, you still want to offer everyone on your team a thoughtful explanation about why you’re making this change. It can ease the frustration of anyone who has already started working on the now-tabled initiative. It will also show that you respect your coworkers and believe that they have a right to know not just what’s happening but why. That will help you strengthen these meaningful relationships with your cross-functional team. Purpose-built roadmap app By the way, this is reason number 7,329 to use a purpose-built roadmap app, rather than trying to maintain your product roadmap in a static file like a spreadsheet or slideshow. A native web app will let you make changes like this on your roadmap much more quickly and easily. For example, with the LIKE.TG app, you can easily switch any initiative from Planned (where you publish in-flight items on the main roadmap view) over to Parked with just a click. Also, you can—and should—add a comment beside the Parked item to explain why you’ve chosen to park it. If your product leader or other execs open your roadmap and notice something missing, they can easily find it in the Parked section, along with a brief explanation of why you moved it. Better still: Before removing any strategic initiative from the roadmap, have that conversation with your product leader. 4. Technical details that fail to tell a story Don’t make your product leader ask, “Why should we care about that?” Your roadmap isn’t the place for technical specs, and it’s there to tell the compelling story behind your product. Let’s say you’ve prioritized making your enterprise software more secure to meet customers’ regulatory needs in industries like healthcare and financial services. One project that came out of your research is to beef up your apps from 32-bit to 64-bit encryption. Offering that level of security will stop your software from getting eliminated from these customers’ searches. Solid plan. But then, when you add that epic to your roadmap, it looks like this: “Upgrade enterprise apps to 64-bit encryption.” And your product leader says, “Why should we care about that?” Fair question. The encryption enhancement itself isn’t the goal, just a step toward achieving that goal. The epic should read: “Enhance app security to acquire more healthcare/FinServ customers.” That tells a story! With LIKE.TG’s app, you can even add a blurb explaining your reasoning, which you can hide in the epic and make available by clicking on it. That description might read this like: “Our research suggests health/financial markets are choosing our competitors because their regulators demand higher levels of encryption than we offer. Remember, your roadmap should communicate your strategy and plans. Any technical details that fail to advance your big-picture story will only slow your readers down and make them ask, “Who cares?” 5. Lack of clarity about where the product stands now Don’t make your product leader ask, “Where are we today?” Anyone who opens your roadmap should be able to quickly figure out what strategic initiatives you’re working on now, the status of those items, and what projects are up next. But with the tools that most product managers use for roadmaps—spreadsheets, slideshows—conveying this information is difficult. It would be best to keep that in mind when you build and share your roadmap. The roadmap should clarify and illuminate the details of your progress—not confuse your audience. When your executives review the epics on your roadmap, how will they know whether each one is complete, in process, or not started? One simple solution—and reason number 7,330 to use a purpose-built roadmap app—is to create your roadmap using software that lets you update the percent complete of any item on the roadmap. The right roadmap software will also integrate with your project management apps. That way, you can sync the progress of each roadmap item with the relevant tasks your team is working on and tracking in their project management app. In the LIKE.TG app, that looks like the screen below. Those with access to the roadmap can click into a theme or epic, allowing them to see how much progress the team has made. The key takeaway here is when you present your roadmap, or if you publish it live and invite the company to review it anytime, you always want to be able to answer—clearly and with data—the question, “Where are we today?” Successful Roadmapping Always Comes Down to Communication The common thread among all the pitfalls I’ve discussed in this post is lack of communication. When it comes to creating and maintaining a product roadmap that will benefit your company, the key is communicating with the relevant people every step of the way. When you present the roadmap to your product leader or when people in other departments log in to your roadmap online to see where things stand, you want them all to find it clear, compelling, and consistent with their expectations. You don’t want to give anyone a reason to say, “Huh?” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});

Kicking off a greenfield project can be one of the most challenging tasks a product manager ever faces. Greenfield projects present different risks from other types of product development. Bringing these products to market requires a different strategic approach. And the process can be downright scary. I’ll walk you through a few strategies I’ve found work well for turning a greenfield project into a successful product. What Is a Greenfield Project? First, let’s make sure we’re on the same page about this concept. The term greenfield gets its name from the construction industry. It describes a project that builders will be starting from scratch. That is, they’ll be building on a green field with no infrastructure already in place. Adding a science lab to an existing college campus, by contrast, would be a brownfield project. In product management, greenfield projects refer to products developed entirely from scratch. For software companies, this would mean that the solution your team plans to kick off does not have: Existing codebase for the development team to build on. Current user base to leverage for usage statistics and feedback. Market history to estimate adoption rates, revenue, or customer lifetime value. Company familiarity with the value proposition or user personas. Constraints on how to proceed (which might be the most challenging aspect). hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '527dc6af-8860-436f-9ca6-ae2b71b0cc99', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); There’s Greenfield, and Then There’s Greenfield There’s a spectrum in terms of how green the field is among these projects. For example, a product idea might be new to the company thinking about building it but already available from a competitor. Then there are projects where the concept itself is new to the market (think Uber a decade ago). The truth is, any greenfield project is going to be challenging. But for a product concept that doesn’t have a comparable on the market, you’ll find even more obstacles. From this point on, let’s use the latter definition of greenfield. Imagine your team wants to build a product that is genuinely new to the market, has no direct competitor, and which your target users don’t even know they’re missing. Let’s start with an example of such a product idea. Then we’ll walk through a few strategic steps that can increase your chances of market success with this greenfield project. Hypothetical Greenfield Product: A Chat-based Hiring App First, let me briefly discuss the difference between a brownfield project and a greenfield project. An online job site that decides to build an instant-messaging feature into its platform is creating a brownfield project. The company already runs a job site with a wealth of usage data. And they can work with existing users to validate the idea of adding a chat feature. But let’s assume that’s not your situation. Instead, imagine your company is a startup. And you want to create a brand-new hiring app built as an AI-based chat platform. You’ll be creating the solution from the ground up. Since there are no other chat apps on the market that connects job seekers and hiring managers—you have a true greenfield project. How the heck are you going to pull this off? Here are a few thoughts. 1. Prepare to spend months on research. Because you are starting literally from scratch with this idea, your team will need to front-load your research work. With no competitive chat-based hiring apps to investigate, you’ll need to get creative. Your research might involve activities such as: Talking with representatives of each of the app’s personas: job seekers, recruiters, company founders, department leaders, and HR managers. Learning from these key personas about their current hiring processes. Find out what tools these people use today. Understand how those tools help and where they fall short. Know where these personas struggle in the process, and what solutions they wish they had. The more information you gather, the better. Validating your idea with your key personas. Note: Market validation is more than your focus group liking the idea of an AI-based chat app for hiring. They also need to confirm that they would be willing to pay to use it. Investigating other business areas to discover if any of these areas have successfully improved their processes by using messaging. The investigation could give your team a sense of the workflow improvements that your app can offer the industry. Researching the existing online job sites and other digital tools used to connect candidates and recruiters. Here, you’ll want to learn whether these platforms use messaging in any way. If so, need to find out how people use these tools and how they affect the hiring process. 2. Start educating your market on the problem. Let’s say you’ve confirmed with your personas that there’s a market out there for your app. You’re confident you’ve hit on an ingenious idea that’s going to cause an earthquake in the recruiting industry. That’s great. You’ll need to maintain that enthusiasm and share it across your company. But you also need to remember that nobody cares outside the walls of your organization. Nobody knows your product is on the way. And because the market has never introduced such an app to them, your personas don’t feel like they’re missing anything. Education is a critical component of thought leadership. Because you are building this app from scratch, you can anticipate a longer timeframe for the initial development. Your product and marketing teams can use this time wisely to create content discussing the problems your personas face today. Start a public conversation about the many drawbacks Again, you’ll be facing a similar challenge here in terms of being able to show direct data. You can’t demonstrate that chat-based recruiting tools speed hiring time by XX days. Or that it reduces the number of interviews required to fill a job by XX%. That data doesn’t exist yet. But you can plant the seed in your future customers’ minds about the inefficiencies they’re living with today. You can base your claim on the existing apps available to customers. For example, you might be able to find data showing: Most hiring managers and job seekers feel unsatisfied with the traditional job interview format. Both sides wish they could engage the other using less formal communication. The average time to hire using traditional online job sites is XX days. It is XX% longer than recruiters would prefer. The average number of interviews per hire is X, which is XX% more than recruiters would prefer. HR managers say that the hiring process consumes XX% of a typical hiring manager’s time. 3. Share the vision with your company, and evangelize the heck out of it. Your coworkers won’t know why your product team is bouncing off the walls with enthusiasm, either. So you’ll need to persuade them to start bouncing too. You will need to spread your enthusiasm across the company—and you need to start right away. For example, you’ll want to: Make sure your engineering team understands the app’s objectives, use cases, and value proposition. Engineering is a true strategic partner as they build from scratch. Product and Engineering can work side by side on all coding decisions. The more your engineers can envision the power of this product, the better decisions they will make. Walk your marketing and sales teams through your strategic vision for the app. At this greenfield stage, your plans and ideas are all abstractions. You need to help your marketing team understand the value proposition and market opportunity. Without that information, marketing can’t do its best work. Make your evangelism an ongoing project. Remember, bringing your greenfield project to market will take many months. Therefore, you need to keep the momentum and enthusiasm levels high for as much of that period as you can. You must encourage ongoing communication. You need to regularly check in with each team. And most importantly, you need to share all insights that show this new app will be awesome. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '9252db78-e0f2-4f64-b933-416e291c2422', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});

TL;DR LIKE.TG integrations help your team extend the value of your roadmapping app. The integrations help you automate the flow of data across your most essential product management tools. This post will show you what some of our key integrations can do for your company. Your Roadmap Doesn’t Exist in a Vacuum. We built the LIKE.TG roadmapping app to simplify product management. Historically, most product managers—including our founding team—were stuck building and updating their roadmaps in spreadsheets and presentation files. We wanted to give product professionals an easy-to-use web platform to let them build and share visually compelling roadmaps. Customers can easily update those roadmaps with drag-and-drop ease. But product roadmaps don’t exist in a vacuum. The information on a roadmap is interconnected with data in other apps used by stakeholders across the company. If your roadmap app does not connect with these tools, your product team could perform a lot of manual re-work and app hopping. For example: As your development team closes out user stories in Jira, you might need to update the status of your roadmap’s initiatives manually. When your product team wants to add backlog items to your Roadmap, you might need to re-enter those items from your original backlog source manually. If you want to walk your stakeholders through your Roadmap but can’t get them all together, you might need to explain your Roadmap over and over as each stakeholder becomes available. If you want to keep up with the progress of roadmap initiatives, you might need to review these details in your development team’s task management app. When you make changes to your Roadmap, you might need to send out the update notifications to stakeholders manually. Soon after we released the LIKE.TG app, we went to work building integrations to connect our customers’ roadmaps with the apps and data sources their stakeholders use every day.Download the Essential Feature Kickoff Book ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '28f87cb3-284f-41bb-aa69-525372e559e0', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Add Value to Your Roadmap with the Right Integrations Let’s look at how a few of the many LIKE.TG integrations can help streamline your workflows, improve alignment across teams, and help everyone in your company make better product decisions. The LIKE.TG Jira integration: sync the development team’s progress to your product roadmap. After you’ve communicated the strategic plan for your product, your development team will break those projects into discrete tasks. They will likely assign and track those tasks in another software development tool, such as Jira. With the LIKE.TG Jira integration, you can 2-way sync fields between Jira and your roadmap so updates to your projects in one tool are reflected automatically in the other (and vice versa). The dev team breaks up an epic into five separate user stories in Jira and assigns an equal number of points to each story. You can associate all five stories with the relevant epic in your Roadmap. And as the developers mark each task complete in Jira, your Roadmap will update the “percent complete” field to reflect the good news. When you click into the epic in your Roadmap, you will see the status of each user story in Jira—either complete or in progress. Key benefit You can save time and stay better informed by monitoring the progress of both your dev team’s tasks and your strategic projects—all without leaving your LIKE.TG app. You can also use your bar’s percent complete feature to show the overall status of the epic based on the total story points the dev team has marked complete in Jira. Note: We also offer an Azure DevOps integration if that’s your jam. The LIKE.TG Confluence integration: make it easy for your stakeholders to stay up-to-date on your product strategy. The LIKE.TG Confluence integration is an example of how our integrations can help you keep stakeholders across your company better informed about your product strategy and progress. This integration lets you embed a live version of your LIKE.TG Roadmap into the Confluence workspace your developers, marketing department, or other teams use to get their work done. Your developers or marketing team spend most of their time collaborating and working in their Confluence wiki. Perhaps they won’t want to log into your Roadmap each time they need to view the latest version or remind themselves about the objective behind an epic or theme. With this integration, they won’t have to. You can create a page in Confluence for these teams to view the current version of your Roadmap without having to leave their favorite workspace or even log into ProductPlan. Your stakeholders can also interact with the Roadmap from their Confluence environment—including adding a comment or question for you. Key benefit You can make it easier for stakeholders to check in on your product roadmap, which will increase the chances they refer to it when needed. The result will be that your cross-functional team stays aligned and up to date on your product’s strategy. Oh, and one more big benefit: Implementing integrations like this, which make life easier for stakeholders across your company, will also help you build a sense of trust, respect, and teamwork among those stakeholders. The LIKE.TG Slack integration: automatically send notifications to stakeholders whenever your roadmap changes With a simple web link, you can invite stakeholders to view the latest version of your product roadmap anytime. But the LIKE.TG Slack integration makes it even easier to keep your stakeholders up to date. With the apps linked, you can program LIKE.TG to send an automated notice to the relevant Slack channel when someone updates your Roadmap. Imagine you have a Slack channel of stakeholders contributing to your product launch: people from the product team, dev, sales, marketing, customer success, and an executive sponsor. Anytime you add an item to a container, change the timeline of an initiative, or make other updates to the Roadmap, LIKE.TG will send a message through that Slack channel. Also, if a stakeholder adds a comment or question on the Roadmap, LIKE.TG will send that exchange to the Slack channel. Key benefit By automatically pushing roadmap-update notices through Slack, you accomplish two objectives. First, you increase the chances of stakeholders seeing a notification they need to know about because you won’t be relying on them checking in with the Roadmap. Second, you eliminate a lot of work for your team, sending out update alerts manually anytime something changes on the Roadmap. Nor are these the only ways this LIKE.TG integration can improve team alignment around your Roadmap. Check out our recent article to discover more ideas for communicating your Roadmap with Slack. Note: We also offer a Microsoft Teams integration if that’s your jam. LIKE.TG Integrations… Thousands of Them We wanted to make sure LIKE.TG integrates with any of the roadmap-adjacent apps and data sources your team uses. That includes tools for task management, DevOps, spreadsheets, team collaboration, analytics, marketing automation, customer relationship management, team chat, etc. So, in addition to the many native integrations we’ve built, LIKE.TG also integrates with Zapier. This integration makes it easy for you to connect your Roadmap to any of the 3,000+ apps in the Zapier library. Want to integrate your Roadmap with Salesforce, Google Docs, Asana, Zendesk, Dropbox, GitLab, etc.? No problem. Just turn on your LIKE.TG Zapier integration—and start extending the value of your Roadmap across your company. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '68f4841e-0e88-4b86-9ddc-7e644a82dc92', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});

The amount of money invested in “Transformation Programs” is staggering. In the past 20 years, we have seen Digital and Agile Transformation Programs grow and swell to $1.3 trillion dollars in 2020 alone. According to the HBR, 70% of that spend is wasted. Many companies miss a key component in their Transformation Program. How will a Product-Led Transformation be Different? You only have to whisper the word “transformation” and the next thing you’ll see is people scurrying away. It’s a word that isn’t commonly favoured by the Product community because Transformation Programs rarely allow Product Teams to autonomously decide how they’ll achieve their mission. The term “transformation theatre” reflects how new practices are perceived after a Transformation Program. Organisations arbitrarily issue new role titles such as Product Owner, Agile coaches are bussed in, and teams are organised in “squads”. This seems to be the extent of some Transformation Programs from a Product Manager’s perspective. Rarely, do we hear of Product Teams given the space and time to conduct Problem and Solution discovery properly. Instead, Product Teams are normally given features to develop, not outcomes to achieve. But, Transformation Programs incur significant costs. There are various sources which suggests that the spend on Transformation Programs are astronomical. Some of which are; Harvard Business Review states, $1.3 trillion that was spent on Digital Transformation last year (2018) Digital Transformation is not about the Technology According to CIO magazine, Global spending on digital transformation technologies and services was $1.3 trillion in 2020. What is digital transformation? A necessary disruption And Barry O’Reilly argues that, By 2023, an estimated $7 trillion will be spent on these initiatives annually. The Metrics Of Digital Transformation: Small Steps to Outcome-Based Innovation According to the HBR, 70% of that spend is wasted. Digital Transformation Is Not About Technology As you can see, the amount of money invested in Transformation Programs is staggering. Unfortunately, Product People are normally the overlooked recipients of Transformation Programs rather than actively involved change leaders. As Product People, we should not only deeply care about the dollars spent on Transformation Programs but we should find ways to participate and lead the program. These programs affect our practice directly. They affect our ability to do our jobs. Sadly, they can also badly affect our ability to meet our promises to our customers. Transformation is such an important, emerging topic in the global Product community that we are focusing on it at LTP Digital 2021 | APAC. The burning questions that we want to consider at the conference, and afterwards, are: How can Product People participate in company-wide Transformation programs, and extract more value from these initiatives? How can Product People design and initiate Product-Led Transformation programs that enable their organisation to continuously discover, design and deliver products to the right market at the right time? What is Transformation? Transformation is about embracing a new way of operating – an alternate way of living – for organisations and the people in the organisation. According to Innosight, “What businesses are doing here is fundamentally changing in form or substance. A piece, if not the essence, of the old remains, but what emerges is clearly different in material ways. It is a liquid becoming a gas. Lead turning into gold. A caterpillar becoming a butterfly.” The Transformation 20: The Top Global Companies Leading Strategic Transformations A lot has been written specifically about Digital Transformation as, “The integration of digital technology into all areas of a business, fundamentally changing how you operate and deliver value to customers. It’s also a cultural change that requires organizations to continually challenge the status quo, experiment, and get comfortable with failure.” What is digital transformation? Digital Transformations challenge current operating models and architecture, allowing organisations to be more adaptable to market fluctuations. It means the introduction of: Agile SDLC Practices Continuous Delivery Simplified Governance Model Continuous Funding Approach Team Performance Management Indicators New Roles Career Paths Integrated Digital Technology Innovative Products What Do We Mean by Product-Led? “Product-Led” means aligning all your business activities around modern Product Management practices, by: Continuously identifying markets and customers with unsolved problems, Acquiring and or developing a feasible and sustainable solution to solve these problems, Exchanging measurable value by delivering a timely, desirable and intuitive solution to the market. “Product-Led Transformation” means re-focusing your business on the fundamentals of real value creation, while embracing the benefits of the faster engines that digital and Agile practices have delivered. Product-Led Transformation is more holistic than other transformations, because it begins with the customer. The outcome of a Product-Led Transformation is an organisation that is aligned first and foremost towards discovering and quantifying customer problems before designing solutions. It is about changing established mindsets and practices to ensure that organisations stops throwing random features into their product mix, and hoping that somehow the good will emerge. Why Should We Care? Product-Led Transformation creates an environment for companies to build more successful products. The evidence resoundingly shows that “Product-Led companies yield better financial results.” “These companies perform better than other companies including those organizations built for the Sales Marketing-Led era. Today there are 21 large public companies with a Product-Led model. These companies have a combined market capitalization of $208B and are performing better post-IPO. Exemplary Product-Led organizations are Zoom, Datadog, Slack, Fastly, Pagerduty, Elastic, Surveymonkey, Pluralsight, Smartsheet, Docusign, Dropbox, Twilio, Atlassian, Shopify, New Relic, Hubspot, and others.” What is Product-Led Growth? How to Build a Software Company in the End User Era Being Product-Led also means using Product-Led growth techniques which reduce the reliance on sales and marketing to drive growth. The product itself is designed to motivate customers to subscribe to the product. The Difference Between Digital Transformation and Product-Led Transformation One of the key differences between a Digital Transformation and a Product-Led Transformation is that Product-Led Transformation focuses on introducing: Better, more holistic Product Management practices, and More strategic, effective Product Management roles. What often happens after the implementation of a Digital Transformation program is that leaders continue to frame their plans as a series of features, instead of ‘problem’ or ‘outcome-driven’ plans. This leads to two commonly seen challenges: The organisation succeeds in feature delivery, but not necessarily customer-value delivery. They become good at ‘building the thing’, but are not asking ‘is this the right thing to build?’ Teams are so focused on delivering features that they become mere order-takers, who are not entrusted to focus on tackling the real problems, and delivering the right solutions. This is not to argue that Digital Transformations aren’t valuable. In principle, they are worthwhile. But often these programs run for far too long, and at the same time don’t go far enough. The intent of Digital Transformation is to improve the organisation. In practice, however, the Programs do not allow the right teams to participate, and to provide their insights as to the best ways to deliver value to the organisation, as well as to customers. Product-Led Transformation builds on the Digital Transformation mindset but provides additional capacity and tools to convince an organisation’s leaders to let go of dictating what gets built. Product-Led Transformation teams do not start by focusing on delivering features. They start by focusing on solving problems, which ultimately delivers more genuine customer and business value. Another key difference between Product-Led and Digital Transformation is the approach to change. The Product-Led Transformation approach is a “minimal viable digital change program, delivered by a semi-autonomous Lean and Agile product innovation team.” It is Time to Stop the Waste Seriously, stop wasting billions on Transformation projects. Instead, apply smaller incremental changes in the organisation, to test and learn if these changes make a positive difference. Consider learning more about The 7Ts of Product-Led Transformation. Want to improve your company’s chances of Transformation success by learning how others transformed their companies and teams using Product-Led techniques? The evidence shows that Product-Led organisations yield better financial results. LTP DIGITAL 2022 | USA is a one-day conference that is all about how to become one of those organisations.

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

At LIKE.TG, we are revolutionizing how a company delivers products to market by elevating product organizations to the heart of strategy and execution. This vision holds true with our own organization as well. It is a very meta experience to build the LIKE.TG platform as a go-to central hub for everything product management-related. As we help our customers overcome challenges, we’re using the same product we deliver to customers to overcome our own challenges. It’s a win-win situation! This year, we focus on the major priorities that help us achieve our vision while maintaining an easy-to-use, delightful, and flexible user experience. Through this effort, we created a very exciting and strategic annual roadmap. With so many impactful initiatives planned out for the year, we knew it was important to communicate with our customers and keep them updated on our product strategy. And what better way to do that than a customer-facing roadmap? Why we built a customer-facing roadmap Our customers are one of the major driving forces behind what we decide to build. Their thoughts and feedback are an incredible source of information for our product team. In fact, customer interviews play a key role in what gets prioritized and put on our roadmap. The purpose of our customer-facing roadmap is to communicate the vision of LIKE.TG and, at a high level, show the steps we’re taking in 2022 to realize our vision. And by creating a customer-facing roadmap, we can address common questions from our customers like: What is LIKE.TG working on right now? What new features and updates are coming next? And most importantly, why is LIKE.TG doing what they are doing? Through this exercise, we have uncovered helpful best practices and tips for creating your own customer-facing roadmap. Keep reading to learn more! How we built our customer-facing roadmap When we began building our customer-facing roadmap, we thought about a frequently referenced metaphor for prioritization: In this metaphor, you have a jar, rocks, pebbles, and sand. The goal is to fit the most important items into the jar. However, if you start with the sand and pebbles (the less important stuff), you quickly run out of room for the rocks. Instead, you start with the rocks, then the pebbles, and finally the sand. In that order, everything perfectly fits into the jar. The rocks leave gaps that the pebbles can fill, and the remaining gaps fill with sand. So how does this translate to building a customer-facing roadmap? We started with the rocks—these are the major items that we’re tackling to achieve our vision for the year. These are the product features that will have the greatest impact on our customers and therefore need to be on the customer-facing roadmap. The smaller items (the pebbles and sand) typically don’t impact our entire customer base, and we don’t necessarily plan our development sprints around them. We can get more done when we properly prioritize these items according to importance. The roadmap is designed to be dynamic and evolves over time. This can play out in a multitude of ways, but a great example is when we refined our filter functionality based on customer feedback. Thanks to the flexibility of our roadmap, we were able to accommodate this update. Organizing major items on the roadmap Once we decided on our “rocks” or major initiatives we planned for the year, our next focus was organizing this information into a roadmap that would make the most sense for our customers. We organized four categories into columns from left to right on the roadmap to give our customers an insight into our plans. The four columns are: Recently released. The containers and bars in this column help our customers understand what problems we’ve recently solved. Now. Bars and containers in this column are problems we’ve committed to solving and are actively being built. Next. We’re currently researching bars and containers in this column and plan to build solutions for these problems next. Future. Bars and containers featured in this column represent items we recognize as an opportunity to invest in research but have not committed to building yet. The information here gives our customers insight into what we are thinking about long-term. Below, is a mockup of what this kind of customer-facing roadmap can look like. We also break down our product vision using bars, containers, and lanes: The Legend represents how we will execute our vision for the year. So everything featured in the customer-facing roadmap lines up to specific items in the legend. Lanes represent areas of investment. These areas are how we spend our time and help us ensure we can organize our resources towards our specific goals throughout the year. Containers organize bars and provide additional context. Bars feature details about specific features that contribute to the overall objective. Our roadmap does not include everything we have planned for the year. It would be way too overwhelming if that were the case. So the smaller items, our pebbles and sand, don’t make it on the roadmap because they are lower priorities. Instead, we include them in our regularly scheduled release notes. Take a look at the mock-up below to see how changes and updates to the container and bar details can be communicated in the Highlights section. It’s important to note that we restart the roadmap each year, so we focus on the specific vision and goals that we set for that year. How we share our roadmap Our roadmap is a tool for starting a conversation with our customers. It is also an opportunity to learn more from our customers. Their feedback from conversations where we share the customer-facing roadmap helps us inform and refine our plan. Our customer success team is trained on the ins and outs of our customer-facing roadmap so that we can have these important conversations at scale. With this training, our customer success team can speak confidently to the problems we are solving, they provide the product team with more insightful customer feedback, and it is a great way to develop deeper relationships with our customers. As an added bonus, our roadmap also serves as a great training tool for our customers so they can build their own customer-facing roadmaps. Looking to the future We’re so excited about all of the major enhancements and updates planned for the year. Additionally, we’re looking forward to continuing our work with our customers to achieve our vision of revolutionizing product management.

Lessons from a Product Launch: Rivian Ask any product manager, and they will tell you that product launches are equal parts daunting and exciting. “Go, go, go” is the mantra, as all team members kick into high gear to get the first minimum viable product (MVP) out into the world. Launching a product should be an exciting time for product managers and key stakeholders. However, it is often a daunting task because there are a lot of moving parts throughout the launch process. It includes running customer validation interviews and developing team sprints, communicating updates with internal stakeholders. And so much more! It’s a lot to manage, both at a macro and a micro-level. Pretty daunting, right? A successful product launch provides a sense of accomplishment and excitement, despite how chaotic it first appears. That’s the situation Zack Suhadolnik, a Senior Product Designer, found himself in at Rivian—an American electric vehicle automaker and automotive technology company. “It was pretty chaotic; I’d say,” he mused. It is completely understandable, considering Rivian was simultaneously going to market with the first-ever EV truck, gearing up for their IPO, and grounding its new brand. Zack was gracious enough to sit down with us to share his first-hand experience with Rivian’s R1T electric truck launch. We came away from the discussion with some fundamental principles that can benefit any product person managing their own respective launches. View Chaos as an Opportunity Chaos—it’s a state of being that evokes images of complete disarray and a lack of process. It is a natural byproduct of a product launch of any size. Yet, we should view chaos as an opportunity to create order by streamlining the product launch process. “I personally thrive in the chaos [of a launch]. It’s really easy for me to pump something out fast, and I get inspired when we’re just like, ‘All right, we gotta stand this up as soon as possible.’ It sparks creativity for me.” During launches, Zack noted that things need to get done and get done fast. The need for speed sparks and generates inspiration that would not exist otherwise. “Creativity comes out of those less structured chaotic projects. For designers, the beginning of a project is where it’s the most fun. As soon as a project starts to get very organized and you’re starting to implement things is when I think creativity drops off.” When Zack joined the team at Rivian, there were some initial structures in place for his team, but also room for creativity. This unique freedom—given to everyone in the organization—was a boon to a designer like him. “If you look at a lot of other automotive industry companies, their design is all very similar, very templatized. It is clean, and it probably converts really well, but it lacks character and any sort of voice that’s different.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '8e19b48f-8595-47ff-ab25-1211bd3d6159', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Stay Open, Come Together Complete freedom and collaboration did not just happen organically at Rivian. It’s their core principle, embodied in the mission statement, “Stay open, come together.” At all levels of the company, there is a shared vulnerability that encourages employees to reiterate on ideas to make them better. Coworkers have a pride-driven “fight” instinct to redo initial versions of products. The company firmly believes everyone should have pride in their work. While collaboration is encouraged at every company, during Rivian’s launch, they took it a step further. Zack references the “storming” phase of Tuchman’s stages of group development to describe research and ideation at Rivian. During this phase, leadership and individual teams leverage as many creatives as possible to solve a problem, produce the best ideas, and prioritize the right items. “It’s really hard for some people to accept this strategy, and I think it takes a certain personality type to thrive in that sort of ambiguity and uncertainty. But you get to make sure that everything’s on the table, and then you can start to narrow in on what’s feeling right.” Zack admits that this is a unique approach to Rivian, not in execution but the executive buy-in. They allow teams to bring in people early and often at the beginning of ideation and even intentionally cross-pollinate teams on the creative side. As a result, the process allows each team a broader view of their options and opportunities and keeps fresh perspectives at the forefront of their projects. Collaboration Doesn’t End with the Launch What happens after the product gets launched? At Rivian, they pump the brakes. Then, each team carefully works in a cross-functional way to smooth out any leftover rough edges from the launch. “For me personally, it’s been a very new way of working. I’ve always been so used to just owning everything. So to be vulnerable and open up has been hard, but I think it really leads to better design in the long run.” Groups that got siloed came together to foster further collaboration. Their goal is to move forward and align on what worked and what did not retroactively. 3 Key Takeaways from Rivian’s Product Launch Experience Rivian’s product launch has several key takeaways from a product perspective: 1. Embrace the chaos of the launch, and use it to your team’s advantage. Tap into that mix of creativity and independence to get a bird’s eye view of the problem at hand, ensuring that you have a higher chance of executing the right decision. 2. Collaborate with anyone and everyone at the early stages of a launch. Early collaboration ensures that you have good coverage on all ideas for your side of the product. Additionally, it ensures you plant the seeds of cross-functional teamwork to deal with possible siloes later in the launch. Executive buy-in can be another way to ensure the success of this collaboration. 3. Conduct a retrospective and reach out to siloed teams post-launch. The retrospective process allows your team the opportunity to align with others from a process perspective and take stock of what worked and what didn’t during the launch. No product launch will turn out perfectly, but there are important learnings to be had from each launch, even those outside of a traditional software product launch. Take these findings and apply them to your next major launch! P.S. Have a great product launch story to share? We’d love to hear it! Send a brief overview of your product launch tale to [email protected], and we’ll be in touch. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '68f4841e-0e88-4b86-9ddc-7e644a82dc92', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});

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

The ugly truth is product launches are a messy business. At times, they can be overwhelming, impossible nightmares. There are launch activities to track, expectations to manage, and stakeholders to hold accountable. Product teams carry this burden alone without the help of proper tooling. Launch Management is a first-of-its-kind tool for product teams that helps you wrangle the chaos of a product launch. We are incredibly excited to show you how you can guarantee launch readiness, all within a single platform. For more, check out our guided product tour of Launch Management functionality provided below. Today our Launch Management solution enters General Availability as an exclusive Enterprise Plan feature set. For our LIKE.TG customers, if you have questions about our pricing plans or want to see a demo, you can reach out to your Customer Success Manager, or you can schedule a demo here. Or, if you’re new to LIKE.TG and want to try everything we offer, including best-in-class roadmapping and tailored launch planning, you can also sign up for our two-week free trial. But first, let us take a step back and explain how we realized the opportunity for launch management. So why did we build Launch Management? Ask any product manager about their launch process, and you will likely hear something like this: “It’s a nightmare. There’s no standard process for go-to-market. It’s confusing for everyone.” Or maybe something like this: “It’s a nightmare. I’ve never worked for a company that had an airtight GTM process. There’s always a stakeholder who wants to be more in the loop and says there isn’t enough communication.” Or even this: “Lol, what launch process?” Disclaimer: These are all actual statements our customers made when we spoke to them about their launch process! Product managers are some of the most organized people in the world. They must be to rally their entire organization around the product strategy successfully. So it’s telling that such a critical piece of the product strategy—its execution—is described as a trainwreck. However, it’s not their fault. Launching a new product or feature requires the complex orchestration of multiple moving pieces. It extends beyond the product and engineering teams to include marketing, sales, customer success, legal—the list goes on. It’s one of the few instances where an entire organization collaborates to do a single project simultaneously. Of course, it’s a mess. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '842368a9-af78-421f-a3cb-4da00ad39f75', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); What challenges does Launch Management solve? Many of our customers spoke candidly about their challenges with inconsistent and disorganized launch processes. Our research discovered three core challenges at the heart of the problem. 1. Lack of visibility across teams There is no single place to check the status of an upcoming launch and any deliverables it requires. Instead, that information is often scattered across documents and minds, spanning teams and, at times, entire departments. To uncover what needs to be done next is to go on a scavenger hunt. The result is wasting valuable time and fraying nerves. 2. Building manual, time-intensive reports to access launch progress Many product managers are stuck building manual, time-intensive reports to assess launch progress and identify loose ends. Time spent here is time spent away from work product managers want to be doing: talking with customers and collaborating with their dev teams to build new cool things. 3. Inconsistent and disorganized launch processes And finally, the ad hoc, figure-it-out-as-we-go nature of these proceedings means no two launches follow the same process. Instead, launches are inconsistent and disorganized. Repeating successful launches isn’t easily done. Failed launches have no easy answer to the question, “why didn’t this work?” And every new launch must start from scratch. In many cases, stakeholders involved in the launch aren’t clear on expectations and therefore default to peppering the launch leader with the dreaded “so what should I do next?” question. Instead of distributing mutual ownership of the launch among all relevant stakeholders, the lion’s share of the responsibility rests with the product team. If the product team doesn’t make sure it happens, it simply doesn’t. The problem with status quo solutions These challenges haven’t had great solutions. Yes, you can build a launch process on a house of cards using spreadsheets, slide decks, and a jumbled array of documents. But that leaves you chasing the work when you’d rather be directing the strategy. To make matters worse, there are no purpose-built tools for launching a new product. There are plenty of tools that help you organize a project. They might allow you to plan deliverables, assign owners, and create due dates—all of which are useful in planning a product launch. But it’s rare for tools like these to be managed by the product team, and they never live alongside other important pieces of the product puzzle, like the roadmap. A launch process that’s severed from the product strategy is a dangerous thing. It encourages messy handoffs while creating unintended silos. Ideally, your product vision will carry from your roadmap to the launch plan. You want every deliverable created—whether a marketing asset, a sales talk track or a customer support article—to demonstrate a firm understanding of the “why” behind the product. If you create these deliverables in a silo, it’s less likely they will leverage important pieces of product knowledge. They may not empathize with key customer pain points, for instance, or show little understanding of the target audience. The cost of a bad launch It’s difficult to overstate the cost of a bad launch. There is, of course, the opportunity cost to the product team when things break down. Instead of doing more important work, they must play the role of project manager and hold things together for their go-to-market team. Occasionally, a launch cobbled together on the fly like this is a success. Even if the road was a painful one. The cost of product diverting their attention to wrangle the chaos might not be felt until later when it becomes clear other opportunities slipped by the wayside while the product team had their hands full. But more likely, a bad launch means, well, a bad launch. That means your product isn’t being pushed by your enablement team or sold by the sales team because there was no clear direction or ownership over key deliverables. A bad launch might result in poor customer awareness of the new thing you’ve built or, perhaps worse, a betrayal of customer expectations. A bad launch can also result in a delayed launch, meaning less time on the market, generating revenue for the company. Overall, a launch that flops is painful for everyone involved. It takes a cut from sales expectations. In addition, it hampers the marketing team’s ability to bring in new leads. It steals a vital tool away from customer success in their fight against churn. This reflects poorly on the product team, who tragically may have built the perfect product. The launch just didn’t do it justice. Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be this way! Let’s dive into an overview of LIKE.TG’s new Launch Management solution. A guided tour of Launch Management To ensure every launch is a winning launch, you now have Launch Management. With our solution, you can: Create thoughtful launch strategies that your entire team can get behind Build tailored plans for each launch, assign due dates, and assess progress While creating shared ownership of your go-to-market process The Launch Dashboard: Ditch the hassle of weekly launch reports Welcome to the Launch Management Dashboard. This is your 10,000-foot view of all upcoming launches in a single place. We designed the Dashboard to wrangle together all the important details you need to see at a glance about every launch you have planned. Use the Dashboard to see all upcoming launches and their respective launch dates. You can also use the Dashboard to track progress on individual launches, which is calculated automatically according to the percentage of completed deliverables in the Launch Checklist (more on that later). Based on the progress of your launch and its launch date, you can assign each launch a status: low risk, medium risk, high risk, or launched. While the Launch Dashboard is fantastic for helping you and your team stay organized in your go-to-market planning, it’s also the perfect place to send executive stakeholders whenever they come sniffing around asking for an update. It houses everything the curious senior executive needs to feel “in the know” about your launch strategy. And as a bonus, it allows you to sidestep having to create manual, time-intensive reports every week. The Launch Checklist: Manage the launch strategy, not the work The Launch Checklist is where a product launch comes together. A successful launch includes a tailored array of deliverables. In some cases, the list may be small. It might only include release notes, a new section in a product support article, and a slide for the sales team. Other launches might require the kitchen sink. In either case, for a new product or feature to land successfully in your customers’ laps, you need other members of your organization to pitch in and help support. We designed the Launch Checklist for this purpose. Many product people we work with described how the handoff between the release of a new product and its launch often felt like tossing items over a fence, hoping others would be on the other side to receive them and run. You have complete visibility into every task required to see a launch through to success with the Launch Checklist. The Launch Checklist has a few purpose-built tools to help you do this. Each item added to the Launch Checklist has a place for a brief description, a due date, and an owner. So, you can assign anyone in your account (both editors and viewers) as a deliverable owner. Upon assigning, that person receives an email alerting them to the required task. The goal is to create co-ownership of the launch. We’ve heard many horror stories of the one-person launch, where someone on the product team ends up holding the launch together through sheer force of will (likely complimented by a disorganized flurry of ad hoc meetings and one-on-one Slack conversations). These kinds of launches unravel quickly and come at a significant opportunity cost to the product team, who end up playing project manager and dealing with all the questions from confused stakeholders. Instead, the Launch Checklist can be your central place to plan a launch tailored to the released product or feature and get buy-in early from your cross-functional partners. And if you give your cross-functional team editor permissions, it’s also a great best practice to have them help you determine which deliverables you commit to as a team. Consider delegating the customer communication plan to a marketing or customer success person. Have your sales engineer come up with any deliverables needed to train your sales team on how to demo a new feature. These are great ways to encourage others to feel a sense of ownership over the launch. You’ll need their expertise to help guide your new product to market. All this might beg the question: what should go into your Launch Checklist? There are no hard and fast rules. Every launch will be different and depend on the product itself, your customers, and your organization’s makeup. That said, you can find 20 great ideas for your next product launch checklist here to help get you started. Connect your launch plans to your roadmap One of the benefits of having your launch plan in the same platform as your roadmap is it helps ensure your product vision influences your go-to-market deliverables. We make this easy with the “Features Included in the Launch” module found to the left of your Launch Checklist. Your roadmap houses all kinds of helpful information about your product. Many of our customers use their roadmap to document their roadmap strategy (what they’re building and when) and the why behind the features they prioritize. They will add context to the descriptions within their bars and often link to essential assets like objective documents or customer-facing collateral. This information is gold for anyone planning a marketing campaign or coming up with sales talk tracks to support the launch. Adding features to your launch allows cross-functional partners easy access to what is on deck for the release and the vital context fueling it. It also encourages team members outside of the product team to read your roadmap because the information there is now actionable. The connection works both ways. From your LIKE.TG roadmap, you can also assign an individual bar or container to a specific launch in Launch Management, allowing you to quickly switch between your strategy and your execution plan with a click. Try Launch Management today! Launch Management is available as a part of our Enterprise plan and our two-week free trial. If you’d like to learn more, schedule 45 minutes with us, and we’ll tailor a demo to your unique launch goals and challenges. We’re looking forward to turning your next product launch into a success! hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'd1163e8d-11be-4436-91aa-b02b58ebcba4', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});

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

Launching a product is not for the faint of heart. So many things, both large and small, can go wrong. In 1985 Coca-Cola canceled New Coke because the product team didn’t confirm that Coca-Cola drinkers would accept a change to their favorite soft drink. Samsung had to recall its Note 7 smartphones because they were exploding. And Google Glass suffered from privacy concerns, bugs, low battery life, bans from public spaces, and an inability to live up to the hype all stymied public adoption of the technology. Thankfully, few product launches fail in such spectacular fashion as those examples. More often than not, product launches simply fall flat with the market, and often lack true product-market fit. In my experience in working with product teams, one of the most common reasons for lackluster product launches is ineffective communication throughout the launch process. And I’m not talking about a lack of emails, Slack messages, or meetings. We can all agree that there usually is plenty of communication happening at any given time—especially in a remote work environment. If it’s not a lack of words, what makes communication and organization ineffective during a product launch? More often than not, it’s a lack of listening and intent where cross-functional teams talk at each other rather than collaborating together to achieve an outcome. Is Your Product Launch Cross-Functional Team a Track and Field Team, or a Bobsled Team? Right now, many product folks are running launches like they’re a track and field team in the Olympics. Every department has a separate job; they’re a sprinter, a long jumper, or pole vaulter. The pole vaulter can’t tell the long jumper how to jump farther, and the sprinter is solely focused on their run, so they can’t even help another runner participating in hurdles. They’re all participating in separate events. And while they’re all contributing to the total medal count (Cue: USA chant!), the athletes aren’t actually working together. So, while individual medals sound great, it doesn’t quite work out as well when it comes to product launches. And that’s because product launches are a team sport. What cross-functional teams should strive to be like in product launches is a bobsled team. In this scenario, everyone is doing their job in sync with one another, and it directly impacts the shared outcome—a successful product launch. And there’s no better feeling than when everyone is doing their best. That’s how you get Cool Runnings! If you’re ready for your next product launch to run as smooth as a bobsled on an Olympic ice track, the key is two-way communication. I’ll explain what I mean in this post when I say that product launch communication needs to be a two-way street. I’ll also give you a couple of suggestions for making it happen with your team. Transforming Your Product Launch Communication Into a Two-Way Street First, let me start by breaking down the difference between what I have deemed one-way and two-way street communication. One-way communication is like building a baseball field in the middle of a cornfield in Kansas and expecting people to show up (are you tired of sports movie references yet?). Kevin Costner clearly made it work, but the odds of success in the real world are extremely low. In this case, product folks tell other stakeholders what they are doing, why, and when. When the stakeholders get confused, the solution is to repeat the information. On Zoom meetings, in documents, and on a roadmap. The one-way communication is often mistaken for alignment, but in reality, all you have done is pushed information and hope the right things happen. In contrast, two-way street communication is about presenting your launch plans and asking for feedback. It relies on the product person understanding what the stakeholders are (or aren’t) excited about and what they will need to be able to do their jobs well. It’s also about making sure they understand what they need to do to do their jobs well. The most significant benefit of two-way communication is that everyone becomes invested in the outcome because they feel like a key part of the launch process rather than a passive player in the product person’s plan. To drive home the difference between one-way and two-way street communication, we created this helpful comic: Two-way communication ties back to the idea that product folks need to focus on building relationships with key stakeholders. And as Simon Sinek shared, “Strong relationships are based on trust and communication. But if there is no communication, there can be no trust.” Source: LinkedIn When you focus on two-way communication, you are instilling trust in stakeholders. You show this by welcoming and valuing their input in the launch prep process. What Two-Way Product Launch Communication Looks Like in Practice Achieving two-way communication in product launches takes a concerted effort—especially from the product person leading the charge. 1. You’re speaking with product launch stakeholders early and often. Communicating your product launch strategy is an iterative process requiring you to communicate with stakeholders at every step of the process. A lack of communication destroys any sense of alignment and cross-functional flow. Your product roadmap needs to communicate the product team’s strategic goals and top priorities as they relate to the business’s strategic goals. At the end of the day, what the product and development teams build is to serve the customer after all. Stakeholders may require you to provide them with status updates, while marketing may need information on how to appeal to your target audience. Roadmaps are great resources to communicate the status of initiatives and provide milestones that reflect your strategic goals. Two-way communication in product launches breaks down silos and can help mitigate any bottlenecks throughout the launch process. 2. You’re making yourself available for stakeholder questions and proactively providing guidance throughout the launch-prep stage. As the product professional driving the launch, you are the main point of contact and information for all company stakeholders. The key is to understand what your cross-functional team needs to be successful and use your interactions with them to help them navigate what is often a complicated and long process. It’s important to not drive yourself crazy trying to assume you understand all of your stakeholders’ needs and concerns. The truth is, you are not a mind reader. But you can use your product experience to hone in on questions to ask your stakeholders, like: Do you understand the timeline of the product launch? Is your team prepared for the launch? What can the product team provide you to craft an effective marketing message? Do you feel the product addresses our customer’s concerns? Do you have any insights into how customers may react or any thoughts about the questions customers may ask? Implementing two-way communication allows you to clearly define to stakeholders the goals and objectives of your launch. You can achieve this by setting up 1:1 meetings with stakeholders from various departments. 3. The conversation doesn’t end when the product is launched. A successful product launch doesn’t end once the product hits the market. Keeping an eye on how the market is responding to your product can embolden your team or reveal major gaps in the product launch process. Your team will recognize a successful product launch when end-users engage with your product or service. By providing marketing and sales with enough information, your end-user clearly understands the benefits of your product or service. After the launch, your team should continue engaging with your customers. Customer feedback can provide your team with product insights to assist your team in their product launch. The product launch process is an iterative process. With each launch comes new findings. Go for Gold with Your Next Product Launch Product Launches and Olympic Bobsledding have one thing in common: both are exhilarating. A lack of listening and intent can derail your product launch. Clear communication allows stakeholders to fill in knowledge gaps or provide extra resources to streamline the launch process. Break down those communication silos with better communication. Two-way communication and cross-functional alignment provide your team with the support to launch a successful product. A successful launch gives you the privilege to make the impossible, possible.

Many of us have been to a corporate event at some point in our careers. Often they focused on lengthy training sessions, had a high-stakes environment of “impressing your boss,” and the cocktail hour mingling that was more painful than relaxing. While the COVID pandemic put these events on hiatus, they sadly still exist. But we knew it didn’t have to be this way. That’s why LIKE.TG purposefully created an experience that flipped this narrative. LIKE.TG’s all-company event, known as Fest, started many years back when our first remote team was hired and began to experience the common disconnect between in-office and remote work. Far before the COVID pandemic, these experiences were real and something employers needed to solve. Looking back, we feel lucky that we channeled a lot of focus and effort toward creating an equitable work experience for in-office and remote employees well before the world was thrust into it with little to no warning or time to plan. Fest created a time when employees from near and far came together to grow personally and professionally, all while having fun. The ultimate goal was to increase employee engagement, satisfaction, and stickiness at the company. We’re creating all-employee events that make sense for the moment LIKE.TG’s Fest has always been and will continue to be organic to where the company and employee needs are at that time. In years past, Fest included developer-specific hackathons, sushi dinners, problem-solving sessions, murder mystery parties, scavenger hunts, etc. You name it; we probably did it! No matter what the team needed, the company looked for creative ways to provide that in a collective experience. The common denominator is that we built Fest to meet our employee’s needs, not our own – this may be the primary differentiating factor from other corporate events. There is something for everyone, and no detail is overlooked. Bringing a rapidly growing team together for connection, fun, and appreciation This year, Fest included three days in beautiful Santa Barbara, California. Team members flew in from near and far (some literally across the globe!) to connect over various activities designed for their unique roles and needs. This year’s Fest was a long time coming and had a unique challenge because the team is the largest it has ever been in the history of ProductPlan. Last quarter alone, we hired over twenty new employees across Product, Engineering, People and Culture, Sales, and Customer Success! With so many new faces on Zoom, we needed to bring the company together in person. There were fun moments of food trucks, sunrise yoga, late-night fire pit shenanigans, beach volleyball, and trivia on topics such as diversity, culture, and inclusion. We even had a wonderful and insightful keynote presentation from Product Management thought leader, Dan Olsen. However, the magic of our Fest was the enhancement of our company culture. We wove our values of Hustle, Humility, and Heart into every moment of the event. In addition, we built bridges across departments with cross-collaboration sessions. We hosted educational training and added fun competitions, including one around Quarterly Business Reviews. We also made sure to show our team members some personalized appreciation. At the end of the day, the little moments matter. For example, we asked our team members about their favorite snacks and personalized their welcome bags. In addition, each manager wrote unique appreciation cards to their employees. It may seem small, but when a team member opened their welcome bag and saw their favorite chips or beef jerky, they knew we cared about their individual needs. These moments break down the anxieties some have with meeting so many new people for the first time off Zoom. All of these touches of appreciation culminated on the last day when we celebrated our company’s success. We’re already looking forward to next year’s Fest Although three days feel like a whirlwind, we’re thrilled with its impact on our team. In fact, over 90 percent of LIKE.TGners said that Fest increased their feeling of connection with the company and peers. I am already excited to start planning next year’s event! If LIKE.TG sounds like the right fit for your next chapter, we’d love to hear from you. Take a look at our open roles at productplan.com/careers.

Launching a product is not for the faint of heart. So many things, both large and small, can go wrong. In 1985 Coca-Cola canceled New Coke because the product team didn’t confirm that Coca-Cola drinkers would accept a change to their favorite soft drink. Samsung had to recall its Note 7 smartphones because they were exploding. And Google Glass suffered from privacy concerns, bugs, low battery life, bans from public spaces, and an inability to live up to the hype all stymied public adoption of the technology. Thankfully, few product launches fail in such spectacular fashion as those examples. More often than not, product launches simply fall flat with the market, and often lack true product-market fit. In my experience in working with product teams, one of the most common reasons for lackluster product launches is ineffective communication throughout the launch process. And I’m not talking about a lack of emails, Slack messages, or meetings. We can all agree that there usually is plenty of communication happening at any given time—especially in a remote work environment. If it’s not a lack of words, what makes communication and organization ineffective during a product launch? More often than not, it’s a lack of listening and intent where cross-functional teams talk at each other rather than collaborating together to achieve an outcome. Is Your Product Launch Cross-Functional Team a Track and Field Team, or a Bobsled Team? Right now, many product folks are running launches like they’re a track and field team in the Olympics. Every department has a separate job; they’re a sprinter, a long jumper, or pole vaulter. The pole vaulter can’t tell the long jumper how to jump farther, and the sprinter is solely focused on their run, so they can’t even help another runner participating in hurdles. They’re all participating in separate events. And while they’re all contributing to the total medal count (Cue: USA chant!), the athletes aren’t actually working together. So, while individual medals sound great, it doesn’t quite work out as well when it comes to product launches. And that’s because product launches are a team sport. What cross-functional teams should strive to be like in product launches is a bobsled team. In this scenario, everyone is doing their job in sync with one another, and it directly impacts the shared outcome—a successful product launch. And there’s no better feeling than when everyone is doing their best. That’s how you get Cool Runnings! If you’re ready for your next product launch to run as smooth as a bobsled on an Olympic ice track, the key is two-way communication. I’ll explain what I mean in this post when I say that product launch communication needs to be a two-way street. I’ll also give you a couple of suggestions for making it happen with your team. Transforming Your Product Launch Communication Into a Two-Way Street First, let me start by breaking down the difference between what I have deemed one-way and two-way street communication. One-way communication is like building a baseball field in the middle of a cornfield in Kansas and expecting people to show up (are you tired of sports movie references yet?). Kevin Costner clearly made it work, but the odds of success in the real world are extremely low. In this case, product folks tell other stakeholders what they are doing, why, and when. When the stakeholders get confused, the solution is to repeat the information. On Zoom meetings, in documents, and on a roadmap. The one-way communication is often mistaken for alignment, but in reality, all you have done is pushed information and hope the right things happen. In contrast, two-way street communication is about presenting your launch plans and asking for feedback. It relies on the product person understanding what the stakeholders are (or aren’t) excited about and what they will need to be able to do their jobs well. It’s also about making sure they understand what they need to do to do their jobs well. The most significant benefit of two-way communication is that everyone becomes invested in the outcome because they feel like a key part of the launch process rather than a passive player in the product person’s plan. To drive home the difference between one-way and two-way street communication, we created this helpful comic: Two-way communication ties back to the idea that product folks need to focus on building relationships with key stakeholders. And as Simon Sinek shared, “Strong relationships are based on trust and communication. But if there is no communication, there can be no trust.” Source: LinkedIn When you focus on two-way communication, you are instilling trust in stakeholders. You show this by welcoming and valuing their input in the launch prep process. What Two-Way Product Launch Communication Looks Like in Practice Achieving two-way communication in product launches takes a concerted effort—especially from the product person leading the charge. 1. You’re speaking with product launch stakeholders early and often. Communicating your product launch strategy is an iterative process requiring you to communicate with stakeholders at every step of the process. A lack of communication destroys any sense of alignment and cross-functional flow. Your product roadmap needs to communicate the product team’s strategic goals and top priorities as they relate to the business’s strategic goals. At the end of the day, what the product and development teams build is to serve the customer after all. Stakeholders may require you to provide them with status updates, while marketing may need information on how to appeal to your target audience. Roadmaps are great resources to communicate the status of initiatives and provide milestones that reflect your strategic goals. Two-way communication in product launches breaks down silos and can help mitigate any bottlenecks throughout the launch process. 2. You’re making yourself available for stakeholder questions and proactively providing guidance throughout the launch-prep stage. As the product professional driving the launch, you are the main point of contact and information for all company stakeholders. The key is to understand what your cross-functional team needs to be successful and use your interactions with them to help them navigate what is often a complicated and long process. It’s important to not drive yourself crazy trying to assume you understand all of your stakeholders’ needs and concerns. The truth is, you are not a mind reader. But you can use your product experience to hone in on questions to ask your stakeholders, like: Do you understand the timeline of the product launch? Is your team prepared for the launch? What can the product team provide you to craft an effective marketing message? Do you feel the product addresses our customer’s concerns? Do you have any insights into how customers may react or any thoughts about the questions customers may ask? Implementing two-way communication allows you to clearly define to stakeholders the goals and objectives of your launch. You can achieve this by setting up 1:1 meetings with stakeholders from various departments. 3. The conversation doesn’t end when the product is launched. A successful product launch doesn’t end once the product hits the market. Keeping an eye on how the market is responding to your product can embolden your team or reveal major gaps in the product launch process. Your team will recognize a successful product launch when end-users engage with your product or service. By providing marketing and sales with enough information, your end-user clearly understands the benefits of your product or service. After the launch, your team should continue engaging with your customers. Customer feedback can provide your team with product insights to assist your team in their product launch. The product launch process is an iterative process. With each launch comes new findings. Go for Gold with Your Next Product Launch Product Launches and Olympic Bobsledding have one thing in common: both are exhilarating. A lack of listening and intent can derail your product launch. Clear communication allows stakeholders to fill in knowledge gaps or provide extra resources to streamline the launch process. Break down those communication silos with better communication. Two-way communication and cross-functional alignment provide your team with the support to launch a successful product. A successful launch gives you the privilege to make the impossible, possible.

The Benefits of Adding More Product Roadmap Viewers in LIKE.TG Product leaders across industries—software, finance, and healthcare—want a centralized location to house product initiatives and updates. However, many waste valuable time updating inflexible spreadsheets or slide decks that fail to capture a product strategy effectively. Instead, product leaders can transcend the confines of these antiquated tools by using a purpose-built roadmap solution to add roadmap viewers. A Single Source of Truth As a product professional, your product roadmap is your single source of truth. Your roadmap enables you to present your team’s big-picture goals to internal stakeholders. However, to ensure you don’t silo stakeholders or overwhelm them with unnecessary information, you must provide each department with a customizable view of your roadmap. It’s a balance to share the product strategy in a clear and easy-to-digest format for all audiences. This article covers the benefits of using a product roadmap to break down the naturally occurring silos amongst teams. When you add more product roadmap viewers, each stakeholder comes with a unique perspective. You also encourage open communication and collaboration, which pushes your product to new heights. Cultivate Collaboration and Communication Your roadmap serves as the single source of truth to gain buy-in from these stakeholders. Yet, how do you create transparency during a product launch and present the correct information to the right stakeholder? You can empower them by granting them access to view your roadmap to achieve these beneficial outcomes. Directly viewing your product roadmap provides transparency and lets stakeholders stay up-to-date on the launch process. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '527dc6af-8860-436f-9ca6-ae2b71b0cc99', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); The Benefits of Adding More Viewers to Your Roadmap When communicating product initiatives to executive stakeholders, the inclination toward transparency may not be every product leader’s first choice. Most importantly, more viewers lead to more opinions and a push away from the organization’s original product vision. Or so you may think. If done correctly, adding more viewers to your roadmap can assist you in guiding your team through the launch. Product leaders who incorporate a roadmap into their workflow reap the many benefits of adding more viewers, which include: Empowerment + alignment A more credible roadmap Roadmap accountability Your roadmap becomes a self-service tool for cross-functional teams We live in a busy world, where 24 hours is nearly not enough time in the day. Consequently, product teams have relied on asynchronous communication to inform stakeholders of updates to their product roadmap. Admins can add an unlimited number of viewers to their roadmap, allowing these stakeholders to access important product information in their free time. A “self-service” roadmap provides customers with a quick, easy solution to their problems. Save time with asynchronous communication and fewer meetings Asynchronous communication is necessary, especially in a remote work environment. But what about asynchronous video communication capabilities within your roadmap? Well, wouldn’t that be a dream? Guess what? It’s a reality with LIKE.TG’s Vimeo integration. Product leaders can now communicate with their product team and stakeholders via recorded video. You can now walk individuals through your roadmap. Our integration allows you to provide targeted details to specific stakeholders, which gives them greater context about the product lifecycle. Increase the ease of communication and collaboration with stakeholders Asynchronous video communication may not be for everyone. Many product professionals prefer to communicate within the product roadmap. Moreover, with our roadmap-level conversations, product leaders, product teams, and stakeholders can provide detailed comments relating to status updates, roadblocks, requests for information, or the state of initiatives. Roadmap Level Conversations Roadmap-level conversations allow you to tag essential stakeholders within the comment section. Product leaders can use this feature to pinpoint particular areas within the roadmap that needs stakeholder attention. On their end, they will receive an email notifying them that their attention is required. But what about standardization? Shared Legends Product leaders understand the struggle of ensuring multiple product portfolio views have a standardized legend. Our shared legend feature promotes consistency and ease of communication throughout your product-led organization. Furthermore, those granted access as “Viewers” can make comments and tag roadmap editors or owners. The function assists them in making an inquiry or asking for more context. Adding viewers supports your product launch and helps you gain stakeholder buy-in. Free-up time to focus on what matters most We understand that product leaders wear many hats. They not only advocate for the needs of the customer, but they also serve as a deal-maker with executive stakeholders. Though you don’t directly manage these individuals, you serve as a facilitator of information. Adding viewers to your roadmap can help you communicate asynchronously and effectively. Not only can you save time, but you can create an environment that supports two-way communication. Customize Your Viewers’ Experience with Custom Views The LIKE.TG roadmap platform allows you to create custom view roadmaps that help keep your team in sync. Moreover, product leaders can align their teams with a product strategy that empowers them to make the right product decisions. The platform offers unlimited free viewer accounts that allow stakeholders to ask questions and provide feedback. Product leaders find our Custom Views feature supports their efforts in effectively communicating changes in the roadmap. Custom view for development Your development team focuses on the granular details of your product. Developers’ tasks range from bug fixes to testing and making minor tweaks. Consequently, these tasks occur over a short period of time. As a product leader, providing a custom view roadmap for developers should show the product’s more significant big-picture objectives. Therefore, roadmap conversations allow developers to give feedback and align behind the big-picture strategic view. Custom view for customer success In contrast to development, customer success understands the current and future needs of the customer. Product leaders can provide a custom view for CS that gives them a specific idea of upcoming initiatives and features. CS can use the tagging feature to ask questions or provide feedback to other viewers or editors. Custom view for marketing The marketing team wants to know what features are coming down the pipeline, so they can begin to prepare a product narrative for a new release. A custom view for marketing can give them enough insight to craft messaging for the sales team. The deeper insight creates further cross-functional alignment around a shared product strategy. Custom view for sales The custom view for your sales team will focus on more high-level detail than your development team. Your sales teams will want to know what upcoming features will impact customers. A sales-focused custom view roadmap gives further context to the prioritization of a feature. Finally, the sales teams can use this information to help develop curated pitches for potential prospects. Creating Transparency and Customizing Viewership to Serve Your Roadmap LIKE.TG’s Custom View feature aims to empower “Viewers.” Furthermore, adding viewers and utilizing the Custom View features can save you time by providing only relevant stakeholder information. The ability to tag these stakeholders within the roadmap ensures that they are immediately aware of roadblocks or updated initiatives. In addition, adding viewers to your roadmap and allowing them to provide comments ensures your stakeholders are always up-to-date. Two-way communication across departments fosters cross-functional alignment. Therefore, with LIKE.TG’s purpose-built roadmap app, you can help your team develop a roadmap that supports your product strategy, and your organization’s overall product vision. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'c0e72364-ed4f-4ef2-b88d-490d0ae4946f', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); .

A blank page, much like the one I’m using to write this article, used to scare me. A new product can feel the same way. There’s nothing to build on and so many more risks. There is a place between nothing and a great product that’s full of uncertainty. Earlier in my career, this was nerve-wracking. Now, after a decade of managing products and advising, I find it exciting. These days I look forward to starting research and discovery with nothing but a hypothesis. Throughout my experience, I’ve used many frameworks and tools to support the research and discovery process. I may not know exactly what I’ll uncover in the discovery process, but I know how I’ll get there. I look forward to becoming smarter every day and knowledge unfolding at a rapid pace. And I just want to pinch myself because I’ll never learn as rapidly as when I’m starting out not knowing much at all. With the launch of Launch Management at LIKE.TG, I’d like to walk you through what research and discovery looked like for us and share the lessons we learned along the way. So if you are looking to launch a new product or feature, you are prepared with some tips to reduce that blank page anxiety. 1. Start with your company and product mission and vision. LIKE.TG is the product management platform that operationalizes product strategy and execution best practices and drives innovation, trust, and accountability. To fully realize this and empower product teams to change the world through their products and the people they serve, LIKE.TG is more than roadmapping. With our vision in mind, we stepped back and asked, “What can we do for customers in addition to roadmapping to achieve our vision?” Understanding (or defining) your vision is important because the journey ahead is not easy, and you’ll need something to reflect on to help you remember what you are trying to accomplish and why. To be a product management platform that operationalizes product strategy and execution best practices and drives innovation, trust, and accountability. 2. Understand your customer outside of why they use your product. Focusing on how and why customers use your product is incredibly valuable for increasing the depth of your product offering but less valuable for increasing the breadth. When you understand your customer outside of why and how they use your product, you can uncover customer jobs and opportunities that your customer may not ask you to solve. It’s possible there isn’t a solution to these problems on the market today. What you learn is your opportunity to surprise and delight your customers. I approached this through customer interviews, spending time in groups and forums where my customers are, and looking for gaps in the product stack my customers use in their larger workflow outside of just how they use ProductPlan. This work led me to dig into the product team’s role in launching products. There seemed to be a lot of pain and no solutions for launching a product or feature from the product manager’s perspective. There was so much pain that I found improving launches is one of the first tasks a new product operations team is responsible for. Bonus Tip: When a customer shows up late to a meeting (happens all the time, right?) and says, “Sorry that I’m late. It’s been a crazy week.”, ask them, “Sorry to hear that, what’s going on?”. You’ll learn what’s causing them stress. And that can give you incredible insight. 3. Refine the problem early, even if you are uncertain. The challenges with launching a product are immense. It would have been easy for me to take on the whole domain in my research. It also would have been easy to move to analysis paralysis and thoroughly research every opportunity within the domain. Instead, I chose to refine the problem to a high-level report or dashboard of upcoming launches, so that product managers and stakeholders could get a quick glimpse at upcoming launches and whether they needed attention. Early research into where this and other opportunities would sit in the market and its impact on customer pain around managing launches informed the decision. Researching outside of customer interviews can be incredibly valuable, but there’s nothing quite like talking to customers to learn quickly whether a problem or opportunity has potential. 4. Be prepared to be wrong. If you don’t prepare yourself to be wrong, you might miss noticing when something isn’t right! When we get too invested in a solution early, we’re more likely to see all the ways that the solution is the right solution. Bias is really strong and can cloud your judgment when it comes to recognizing errors. For this reason, I celebrate when I find out I’m wrong through research since it’s a sign that I didn’t let bias cloud my vision. You’ll find out sooner or later, and it’s far less costly to find out sooner. The opportunity around managing launches was appreciated and validated by customers, but why and how was different than I expected. Instead of being most interested in the higher-level dashboard, the customers we talked to were most interested in managing launches at a lower level. They wanted something that would reduce the time they spent project managing the launch and would be a tool to support co-ownership and accountability for cross-functional colleagues contributing to launching deliverables. This led to us keeping the scope and design of our Launch Management dashboard very lean and instead investing more in the checklist. 5. Embrace the shitty first draft. As a writer, I’m a big fan of Ann Lammot’s Bird by Bird, where she encourages writers to write a shitty first draft. If your intention is for the first draft to be shitty and not perfect, then you free your mind from the burdens of perfection. It allows you to move faster and be more creative, even if some of the creativity results in more bad ideas! I’ve embraced this in many areas of my life and work life, including Launch Management. The first visual designs for Launch Management took a lot of time and had a lot of emotion tied to them, especially when we received initial feedback from customers that we didn’t quite understand their problems. When the product designer and I discussed the feedback, we revisited the job of those early designs. We didn’t need those early designs to test usability or guide our engineering team in what to build. Since we were working on a greenfield product, the primary job of those early designs was to take the stories and words customers shared with us and reflect our understanding in the form of a picture. The picture didn’t need to be pretty. Customers just needed to see themselves in it. With this in mind, I asked the product designer to create an “ugly table” so we could see if this would better show customers the solution to the problems they were facing. Tables are relatively uninteresting aesthetically, but we went with something functional first. When this got the validation from customers we needed, and they communicated that what they were looking at would be a good solution, we started improving the functionality and aesthetics. That imperfect and frankly ugly table was perfect for the conversations because it was relatively quick to produce, and our customers felt comfortable giving us critical feedback on something that was far from finished. 6. Your customer is the expert, even if they don’t know the answers. Because Launch Management was the first solution that helps product managers launch products and features, there wasn’t anything on the market we could reference. Also, our customers didn’t have experience using anything to solve this problem either. We asked questions about launches and how to measure the success of launches. As a result, we got a fair amount of “I don’t know” answers from our customers. While managing a launch created all sorts of challenges, our customers didn’t have expectations that this problem could be solved. So they hadn’t thought deeply about it. Instead of gathering our customers’ direct feedback, we focused on the pain they were facing and understanding the cost of not solving the problem, where our customers were the experts. As these stories started to come together, themes started to emerge, and the solution of Launch Management developed. 7. Look for your customers to take ownership and action. When your customers assume ownership of what you are showing them and start talking about how they’ll use it with their team, you’ll know you truly understand the problem enough to solve it. When you can move your customers to action, you’ll know you have a good solution. As we iterated on a solution through designs and prototypes and listened to customers, we got to a point where we could talk about the problems we were solving with Launch Management with product leaders the validation was clear. A customer asked, “When can I use this?” as they peered through the screen. They then asked, “Are you in my Slack?” and excitedly pumped their fist. Their language shifted from asking us how it would work to telling us how they would use Launch Management. They even shared how it would help them with their challenges. Similarly excited, people who weren’t customers yet wanted to talk to our sales team. This is when the research and discovery team at LIKE.TG looked at each other and said, “It’s real now. It isn’t built yet, but it definitely feels real.” 8. Use your beta wisely. While customer betas shouldn’t be about finding bugs, getting feedback before everything is polished and perfect is ideal. Beta feedback can help you figure out what to build next through enhancement requests, but I really love beta feedback to understand if I’ve effectively solved the problems I intended to solve. I used LIKE.TG to create a list of jobs necessary to accomplish the Launch Management vision. I put the jobs in the order I expected us to accomplish them. As our fantastic customer success managers talked to customers and gathered feedback, they added it to the board. The feedback created this beautiful curve on the board that showed enhancement requests for the jobs we were working on. The feedback was validation (in addition to the customer interviews) that customers recognized the problem we were trying to solve. It was a good signal that we were moving toward product-market fit. 9. Rely on the experts on your team. Launching a new product is not a one-person endeavor. Even the most skilled among us need colleagues with different expertise to help. Similar to when launching products, when discovering a new product, product managers can take too much on. By focusing on where each of your team members is an expert, including yourself, you can work together more effectively. In researching Launch Management, I relied on the expertise of product design to create a great customer experience. I looked to product marketing to craft a message and test it with our customers before enabling our customer-facing teams. And I trusted engineering’s expertise to build a right-sized solution that would help us learn quickly and scale. Since I trusted that my colleagues owned their expertise, I could focus on my own expertise. This was amplified during our launch. We eventually got to the point where we could use Launch Management ourselves. Which meant I wasn’t the one keeping track of all the launch deliverables. 10. Know that what you launch with won’t be done. Launch Management is far from done. Our first priority was to visualize what was happening in a launch alongside the roadmap strategy. So, the launch manager and launch team could easily see the launch. Rather than having the launch live in the launch manager’s head. Once we have the launch visualized, we want to help customers standardize their launches. By doing so, they become more predictable and ultimately more successful. Our enterprise customers really value standardization as it helps operationalize best practices and creates predictability in teams across the company. As much as I want all of this to be possible in our general availability launch, I’m launching with less. And instead, I’m focusing on learning from customers to refine the Launch Management strategy. Research and discovery for a new product is a big challenge. It requires relishing ambiguity on the path from turning that blank page to a product your customers love. Once you’ve got that figured out, then LIKE.TG will help you make launching it easy. Learn more about Launch Management when you schedule a 45-minute demo with us!