At LIKE.TG, I frequently get questions about agile roadmap planning. How should you balance long-term strategic planning with short-term agility? This was an especially hot topic on a recent webinar we hosted. I thought I’d elaborate on some of my answers in this post. Here are 3 questions on that topic I’d like to highlight. 1. How do you balance agile uncertainty with roadmap planning at a growing small or medium-sized company? It’s important for product managers to not make the mistake of thinking that because they have a roadmap, they’re not agile. Those two concepts actually work in tandem. You need an agile roadmap to set the strategic goals for your company, but you still have a lot of freedom to move things around within those goals. Download How Agile Product Managers Can Build Better Products ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'b4eb5c0b-bf4b-4a7e-9b0a-75f92005c127', {}); There are a couple of points that I’ll make around this: The first is that you should be doing continuous customer discovery and customer interviews. You should always be engaging with customers in order to find the big problems worth solving. And when you match customer problems up with the strategic goals that you’ve set for your organization, it will point you in the right direction in terms of which features to build. It’s important to remember that you’re not necessarily putting narrow features and tasks on the roadmap. Instead, you’re bubbling those up to make the roadmap very high-level. You need to be looking at big themes that will help you move the needle in problem areas that your customers have. Think about the jobs your customers need to get done. Remember, your agile roadmap helps you communicate the strategy. When you keep your roadmap high-level, you maintain a lot of flexibility as a product manager to move features in and out of the backlog in order to accomplish your goals. The second point I want to make is that you should be reprioritizing all the time. Reprioritize your backlog and your roadmap, especially in the long-term, because things change and different competitive pressures come up. Don’t lock in timelines that are too long, or your stakeholders will feel like you’re making commitments and they’ll expect you to deliver. [Free book] Backlog Refinement: How to Prioritize What Matters ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'ba6d6ffb-c21a-41c0-8f7e-7f79e553dae1', {}); I think those two points are really important — doing continuous customer discovery and constantly reprioritizing features. That way you can ensure your agile process is really working for you. You don’t want to find yourself in a position where you’re throwing features into the development queue that was decided on twelve months ago. Those features may or may not be the right things to do today. And there’s one more thing I want to touch on — this idea of using a Kanban-style roadmap. The Kanban methodology has become pretty popular because it lets you organize the roadmap into different buckets — planned, doing, done, etc. — without committing to specific deadlines. With a Kanban roadmap, you can designate things that you might want to be doing in the future, but you’re not quite sure about yet. You can distinguish the things that are a little bit fuzzy from the things that you’ve already committed to for the short term. I think that in a small or mid-size organization, Kanban is a great way to avoid making the mistake of locking in an inflexible,12-month roadmap that may or may not end up being the right course of action. And, of course, it should also be mixed in with continuous customer discovery and reprioritization. 2. How far out should you plan your roadmap? How do you properly set expectations with stakeholders that plans will change? I think it depends. The appropriate timeframe for your roadmap depends on the kind of organization you have, the type of product you have, and where your product is in its lifecycle. If it’s an early-stage product, your roadmap needs to be very short-term. You simply don’t have enough insight into what the right things to build are, so your roadmap needs to be very flexible. On the other hand, if you have a product that is five or six years into its lifecycle, your planning horizon needs to be much longer. So, again, it really depends on product and company maturity, but at LIKE.TG, the most common roadmap time horizon our customers use is about a year. Many organizations are moving to an agile planning approach, and that makes it less likely that the things you’re putting on your roadmap for six or nine months from now are solid — and that presents challenges for product managers. We hear from a lot of product managers who feel that creating a one-year roadmap means setting unreasonable expectations among their stakeholders. And that’s really a caveat here — you have to communicate to your stakeholders that the roadmap will change. One of the ways that you can do that is by bringing your roadmap up a level. Again, the roadmap should not be simply a list of features or a backlog. The roadmap should be tied to strategic themes. So rather than listing out specific features or tasks that need to be accomplished, roll those up into larger themes and communicate the roadmap at the theme level. A theme ties back to strategy. For example, if your product is an e-commerce product and you want to reduce the rate of shopping cart abandonment — i.e. you want to improve the number of customers who are actually making purchases — that could become a theme. Now, the exact features that you create in order to accomplish that goal, or that theme, may change. You also may not really know the effort level behind the features you’re considering. As you get closer to building them and you estimate the stories, it will become more clear what that effort level is. Then you can make trade-off decisions about which items will best accomplish your goals. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); So those are my recommendations — that you manage stakeholder expectations that the plan will change and that you bring the roadmap up a level. As a product manager, you have a lot of flexibility in what you can accomplish as long as you don’t get locked into building a specific feature set. 3. How do you adjust when you have roadmaps for a racehorse but realize you’re actually riding a mule? I love that question! I think a lot of us have been there, and I think it’s just the nature of things. As product managers, we know what the path is — we have the vision for the product. But sometimes things don’t move as quickly as we want them to. I think setting up those longer-term strategic goals is the right way to safeguard against unexpected bumps in the road. And there’s no quick fix here other than to just stay on the path. As long as the path fits in with those strategic goals, you’ll eventually get there. Having that long-term strategic perspective will make it easier to say, “Yes, we are going to do that, just not yet.” I also think that this is where the concept of an MVP comes into play. Not every feature is important, and a lot of the things that you have on your roadmap, especially if you thought them up in the conference room, may not be the right things to build in the first place. I’ve found that I can often satisfy customers and give them a lot of value by building only 50% of what I thought they needed to have — and I’m constantly surprised by that. If you’re solving one key problem for them, they’ll buy and they’ll be happy, even though you may not have given them everything that was on the initial roadmap.

Criticism can uncover important truths. This is one reason that product managers have such a difficult job: Sometimes the only way to learn what your users truly think about your product is to launch and then listen to their unvarnished “feedback.” One valuable truth that criticism can uncover is how much your customers have come to expect and demand from your company and your products. So it says a lot about what an innovative powerhouse Apple has been that the public now expects the company to transform another industry every couple of years, and that we assume every one of its product releases will offer something revolutionary. Apple has certainly earned that reputation. They changed digital music, with the iPod and iTunes; how we consume video entertainment, with Apple TV; and how and where we interact with the Internet and our digital communities, with the iPad. And of course, with the iPhone, by standing on the shoulders of countless innovations before them, they’ve literally changed the way more than a billion people hold their heads — downward — for much of every day. The Next Stages of an Innovation The iPhone was introduced in 2007, the iPad in 2010. Apple TV? That hit the market almost a decade ago, in 2007. And the first iPod was launched way back in 2001. One major new addition to the Apple product line in recent years, the Apple Watch, wasn’t the first wristwatch to connect via Bluetooth to the owner’s smartphone. Nor was the concept of a piece of wearable, wireless technology so groundbreaking — fitness trackers like Fitbit had already been gaining popularity for years. So it’s understandable that people are now publicly asking — Why aren’t Apple’s product teams innovating anymore? I believe those criticisms miss part of the story. Yes, Apple revolutionized several industries — across music, movies and television, web browsing and phone communications. Heck, they even created the concept of an “app store,” where millions of other innovators could sell their own digital tools over web and mobile platforms. But here’s the real question, a question to which every product manager should give serious thought: When you’ve innovated and brought something truly original and different to the market, what then? What’s your next move? Should you just keep innovating more new products, or should you spend more of your resources and your team’s creative energy improving, tweaking, refining and upgrading that first innovation? Tweet This: Should Apple innovate new products, or should they spend time improving existing innovations? Apple took advantage of a wildly creative period at the company a decade or so ago, and launched a flurry of groundbreaking products. Those products were so groundbreaking, and changed so many people’s lives, that the company has been correct in treating the follow-up stages — nurturing and improving these innovative products — with as much energy and enthusiasm as they gave to the original innovation stage. Download the Anatomy of a Product Launch ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '0edb2611-2761-4434-90b0-f055704d9daa', {}); The Next Stage in Innovation Isn’t Another Innovation — it’s Nurturing and Improving So when people criticize Apple for not unveiling more cool, never-before-seen tech year after year, here’s what I think they might be missing. The very Apple products that have so endeared the company to millions of fans — fans, mind you, not merely customers — require a tremendous amount of ongoing stewardship from Apple’s product teams. The reason the iPhone is still so popular in its seventh iteration, now nearly ten years after its original release, is that the company has put so much thought, analysis and, yes, innovation, into continually improving it. The seventh version of any product might not sound like it leaves much room for innovation. But consider, for example, the company’s decision to remove the phone jack from the iPhone 7 and introduce a set of wireless headphones. That move was bold and gutsy. And as Apple’s product team no doubt expected, they immediately received serious criticism for it. In this sense, Apple is damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Many of the people critical of Apple for not releasing more completely new products — in other words, demanding more innovation — are at the same angered at the company’s innovative move to change the way we interact physically with our smartphones. But that’s okay. True innovators understand that it can take time for the public to see the value in their innovations, even if with time everyone claims the ideas made sense all along. Is Amazon Today a Snapshot of Apple a Decade Ago? Perhaps another reason so many people have taken issue with Apple for slowing their pace of new product launches is that there are examples all around us of other companies, in their own wildly creative and productive periods, introducing flurries of groundbreaking products right now. Consider Amazon. The product teams there are on an innovation tear — across product categories, customer personas and industries. The Echo is already redefining how people interact with the Internet in their homes. The Dash Button is a simple, brilliant solution to a household problem faced by tens of millions of people every day. With Amazon Studios, the company is taking a bold step from another set-top-box provider of TV and movie apps to a content creator in its own right. The company has of course become a major player in the enterprise cloud-computing game, with Amazon Web Services. And if all of that weren’t enough, there’s the drone delivery project (called Amazon Prime Air). Now if this isn’t innovation, we don’t know what would qualify (whether or not it eventually becomes a reality). The whole idea is so revolutionary it almost sounds like the punchline to a joke uttered by an obsessed Amazon customer: “I love Amazon, but I hate that it takes a whole day for them to ship me stuff. Why can’t they just have a drone pick up my shipment from the distribution center, fly it to my house and land it on my front porch? Hahaha!” Of course, maybe the idea actually did originate as a joke like this uttered in a customer’s home… and the Amazon Echo was listening. Just kidding. Probably. Tweet This: Is Amazon today a snapshot of Apple a decade ago? Looking at Amazon’s rapid-paced introduction of new products alongside Apple, what are we to conclude? Amazon is certainly enjoying a flurry of creativity similar to the one Apple experienced maybe a dozen years ago. If that’s the case, then perhaps as its new products — the Echo, Amazon Prime Air — become ubiquitous and then begin to mature, Amazon will slow down the rush of revolutionary new products out the door (or, in the case of the drones, out the roof). And like Apple, Amazon will begin shifting its focus to refining and improving its existing portfolio of products. We’ll see. The Best Innovators Care for Their Products Well After the Initial Thrill of the Innovation Wears Off The initial unveiling of an innovative new product is fun, not only for the public but for the company itself, particularly the product teams responsible for it. That unveiling is what grabs the headlines. It’s what wins new fans. But even if the new product is an instant hit with the public — in fact, especially if the public takes to it immediately — the company then needs to shift to the next stage, which is learning how to improve upon the product and make it even better. That’s what champion product managers do. Even after an early win in the market with a new product, they head right back to their desk to start gathering new data from users, and whatever else they can find, to start improving the product for the 1.1 release. Tiger Woods was famously spotted practicing on the driving range just hours after winning the US Open. Real champions in any field, including product management, never stop practicing, never stop learning and never stop improving. We believe that as Apple slows its pace of unveiling category-defining new products, it’s not because they’re resting on their accomplishments or playing it safe. It’s because they are treating the all-important next steps in product innovation — nurturing and improving — with equal respect. But that’s just one opinion. Agree? Disagree? Perhaps Apple has slowed its innovation for another reason. And perhaps Amazon’s product teams never will. We want to know what you think about Apple’s slowed pace of innovation. Please share your thoughts in the comments section. Let’s get this product discussion flowing.

Thousands of new products launch every month. Yet only a fraction of those gets enough traction to be considered successful. Of course, there are the exceptions — the breakout successes that we all hear about: Snapchat, Uber, and of course Pokémon Go. Even though that’s not likely to be your product, you can still knock it out of the park. But how do you test market demand early to know if your idea is a winner? Throughout my career, I’ve helped launch a dozen successful software products including GoToMeeting, AppFolio, and ProductPlan. I have learned five powerful techniques that entrepreneurs use to learn whether their product will be successful — before they launch their product. Download the Anatomy of a Product Launch ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '0edb2611-2761-4434-90b0-f055704d9daa', {}); These methods won’t guarantee success, but will dramatically increase your odds. In my case, these techniques resulted in products that today now generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue yearly. 1. Before Anything Else, Find a Problem Worth Solving Before spending a dime on development, I interview 10-20 potential customers to understand the problem I’m solving. This is before I tell them about the product features, pricing, or how it’s going to change their lives. Tweet This: “Before spending a dime on development, interview potential customers to understand the problem.” I call these “problem discovery” interviews. They’re in-depth conversations, often conducted in person, and last between 30-60 minutes. They’re designed to not only thoroughly understand the problems but to learn whether the problem is worth solving in the first place. A problem needs to be high enough on a customer’s priority list to be interested in your product. For example, in the early interviews for GoToMeeting we learned that other online meeting products were hard to use, feature bloated, and difficult to budget. By thoroughly understanding these problems, we developed a product that was easier to use, with fewer features, with all-you-can-use pricing. Within a short time, that product became a blockbuster success. In early conversations with customers and investors, many entrepreneurs lead with the product description and features. I think this is a mistake – by not understanding the problem thoroughly, many products miss the mark. I think the single most important key to product success is asking the right questions about their problems. Here are some questions you can use to understand whether the problem is important enough to solve: “How are you solving that problem today?” “What is most frustrating about your current solution?” “Where is solving this problem on your priority list?” “If you solve that problem, how much money will you save/make?” “What does a successful year for you look like?” 2. It’s Not a Business Unless You Can Sell So many entrepreneurs launch their product and then wonder why their sales are anemic. How do you know in advance whether customers will actually pay for your product? In my experience, knowing how to sell the product in a repeatable way is more important than the product itself. In a sense, you’re validating sales, not just validating a product. For every successful product I’ve launched, I previously had test-sold the product to at least 20 customers. My belief is entrepreneurs do not need a fully functional product to learn whether customers will buy. In fact, my early test sales are often from a slide deck or a rough prototype. By test-selling, you can learn about the sales cycle, whether your target customer is the actual decision-maker, whether they have a budget to buy, and further refine your pricing. In these sales interviews, customers don’t necessarily pay you in advance, but you are one step closer to having to pay customers on the first day of your product launch. For example, with my current company LIKE.TG, we had several customers who were ready to give us their credit card number within hours of when our product was available for purchase. If you don’t have sales skills or can’t handle rejection, get over it and pick up the phone. 3. Customer Acquisition Costs are the Key to Success You’ve seen it before: Awesome products that launch with a bang and then couldn’t achieve enough traction to make the numbers pencil out. Many entrepreneurs don’t thoroughly understand how they will acquire customers and then how much those customers will cost to acquire. The rule of thumb is simple: A customer’s acquisition cost needs to be significantly less than their lifetime value. Yet so many entrepreneurs go in blind on these basic metrics when launching products. Fortunately, there are easy and inexpensive experiments that you can use to test acquisition costs. At LIKE.TG, before we had written any line of code, we set up a landing page. This primitive website was designed to test whether anyone was searching for software like ours and to learn whether the messaging we had defined resonated with our target audience. We then drove traffic to the landing page using Google Adwords and LinkedIn Ads. We targeted product managers with keywords that they might use to search for a solution like ours. Once they came to our landing page they were prompted to sign up for an early version of our product. The experiment was a success because we learned so much about the acquisition cost – how much it cost to bring someone to our website, the clickthrough rate on advertising, what percentage of people signed up for more information, and more. Through this process, we could roughly estimate the conversion rates and acquisition costs for each step of the sales funnel. Perhaps more importantly, these prospects provided their contact information. We then reached out to them to have deeper discussions about the problem, product features, and pricing. It was a goldmine of information, and we spent less than $1,000 on this simple experiment. 4. Know This: Your Original Product Idea is Probably Wrong For every product I’ve developed, the final product we launched was dramatically different from the original concept we began with. Through interviews and experiments, we were able to challenge our assumptions, discard bad ideas, uncover innovative features, and fine-tune our prices. For example, when we were validating LIKE.TG, we assumed our market would be limited to product managers at software companies. That turned out to be false. By speaking with dozens of product managers we discovered our market was much broader and included companies in media, healthcare, retail, and more. This helped us create a product and marketing that better suited a wider market. Often entrepreneurs spend an inordinate amount of time on business plans and spreadsheets that are essentially a work of fiction. Or worse, they launch their product based on their original idea and then waste time and resources changing the product and pricing to better fit their market. That’s backward. Entrepreneurs can get closer to reality — and build a better product — by testing their assumptions before launching. But many misuse the “Lean Startup” method to throw spaghetti against a wall and then hope that people buy. And when people don’t buy (or buy in low numbers) the entrepreneur wastes valuable time. It goes without saying that pivoting your product ideas during this early validation rather than after you’ve built the product is significantly cheaper. Tweet This: “Pivoting during early validation is much cheaper than doing so after the product is built.” The way entrepreneurs can challenge their assumptions: write them down and then get out to test them to see if they resonate with potential customers experts (for example, analysts for the industry, people who have been employed by the industry, consultants, etc.). A healthy dose of skepticism goes a long way. “Why?” is by far the most important question you can ask to challenge your assumptions. With it you can get closer to the truth from customers. Unfortunately this question isn’t used often enough — too many people ask a question, and then take the answer at face value. It’s a missed opportunity to understand motivation and validate what someone would really do. The Five Whys is a great technique for getting to the underlying reason — the real reason — behind a customer’s motivation. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'ad657ba8-be75-4be1-a163-e71ff5498018', {}); 5. Perfect is the Enemy of Good — Just Launch Your Product Idea I’m a believer that entrepreneurs should jump off the cliff. This means, especially for software products, that you should launch as early as possible. Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, famously said, “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” I’m not saying that you don’t have a great first-time customer experience. Often people don’t give you a second chance if your product simply doesn’t work. But if you are solving a problem that’s big enough, customers will forgive you if the experience isn’t perfect. With software products in particular, it’s possible to launch quickly with a minimal feature set if the product provides enough value. If a handful of customers are willing to pay, it’s good enough and you can improve over time. Launching early gives you no better way to determine if you are on the right track. So many entrepreneurs waste time by trying to think of every scenario, please every customer, and ensure every feature is included. An entrepreneur I know was passionate about launching a new mobile app he was certain would be popular. He spent months perfecting it. He spent thousands of dollars on mobile developers, and eventually took out a second mortgage on his house to put the finishing touches on the app before launching. Once he finally launched, he was shocked he had so few downloads. It was a sad, expensive lesson. Entrepreneurs need to spend more of their time at the front end – discovering the problems in the market and validating whether someone will buy the product – before they build and launch. If you do an effective job at this front end, the building and launching the product becomes so much easier. You’re also gaining evidence for potential investors. There is no way to systematically know with certainty whether you’ll be successful. But by using these techniques and launching early you can improve your odds dramatically.

One of the central roles of a product manager is to drive shared understanding. With shared understanding, a team is more effective, resilient, and creative. Alignment without shared understanding is temporary and short-lived. The best teams find a way to break down complexity and speak the same language. They row relentlessly in the right direction, even when that point on the horizon shifts. In my chalk talk, I share a framework for building shared understanding with your team and other stakeholders. You can either watch my chalk talk or read the transcript below. Enjoy! The Problem: Context is Always Changing We all know that one of the big challenges of product management is sharing context. You don’t only have to share it with your team, or across your team, but you also have to share it across the entire organization. You’re basically sharing context all the time. And the challenge is that the context is always changing. The context of yesterday is not the context of today. Tweet This: “A big challenge in product management is sharing context. Because context is always changing.” In my chalk talk, I’m going to frame that problem, and give you some strategies to make sure that the context you share is the most current context, and is deep enough for your teams to be able to take action. Direction vs. Destination Think about some of the words that we use, and think about how we communicate strategy as product managers. Let’s say you’ve got a horizon, and you’re in a boat. Now for a lot of knowledge work, you’re just generally sailing west, like Columbus. You’re sailing to a point on the horizon. You’re going somewhere. That’s a direction. Now think about how people frequently state goals. They state a series of unique points along a line, that you need to be able to hit in order to get to a specific endpoint. And that’s what we call a destination. Think about those two words: One is direction, and that’s a lot more applicable to knowledge work, and the other is a very linear, deterministic goal that you’re trying to hit. Direction versus destination. Let’s take a real-life situation: You have a friend and they say, “I want to lose five pounds.” You have another friend that says, “I want to eat healthy.” Those are two different perspectives. One is a destination-based perspective (“I want to lose five pounds”). And the other one is a more systems-based perspective (“I want to eat healthy”). Now, we all know there are many unhealthy ways that you could lose five pounds. The idea is by eating healthy, one of the things we might notice is losing weight. But we might also live longer, we might be happier, and we might be less stressed. So that’s more of a systems approach. Now, the third example is this idea of cascading goals. Dividing one goal into a sub-goal, into many sub-sub-goals, into many sub-sub-sub-goals, into sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-goals. We see this in practices like OKRs, or management by objectives. The idea is that everything cascades up and connects with a higher level goal. Teams are told to focus on their individual goal. Now, that might be good in some situations. But in a lot of the environments that we’re working in, the teams that are on the front lines actually need to be able to see the big picture. They need to do this so that they can take course corrections as they’re moving along. Think about a person who’s working right there [points at lower level goal]. If they know that’s the goal and they see the context changing, what if they could circumvent all these steps and just achieve that goal in another way? What if the context changes for this goal, or if they could take a shortcut? I tried to lay these out here as we’re understanding the problem. You have destinations versus directions. You have goals versus systems. And then you have the need for teams to be able to see the big picture in knowledge work to make sure that they can take the course corrections necessary to move in the right direction. The Reality: Context is a Moving Target But the reality in product management is, we’ll do a kickoff, and at that point, shared understanding is at an all-time high. Or we think it’s at a high. But over time, we’re always fighting the downward pressure on shared understanding. The context is changing. And at the same time, we’re learning, and we’re improving our shared understanding. We might be iterating and getting more shared understanding. It’s always this push and pull on what we’re learning and the degree to which our learning is depreciating that really dictates the situation. That’s one problem. We’re always losing shared understanding and gaining shared understanding. And even when we have a new, better, shared understanding, we still have trouble communicating that. A second reality is that different people on your team have different needs. You might have someone who is more junior, who’s new at this, who may just not care all that much about the big picture, and they’re looking down here [draws line downward]. They’re looking for things right in front of them: “Can you tell me what needs to be done next, please, so that I can do my job?” Meanwhile, you have the people who are asking why all the time and the people who need to understand the big picture. And these sometimes are your most valuable employees. They want to understand the big picture, how things are fitting together, and how things relate to each other. You’ve got both of these personalities on your teams. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '57ff7e42-ccfa-4d9e-b5be-8a0f6ba69363', {}); And the third part of the reality is, the problem-solution dichotomy that everyone talks about, where we’ll specify the problem and you specify the solution, is a lot more intricate than that. Because every problem has a solution to some higher-level problem. Even something like hitting quarterly goals, or a new round of funding, that’s a solution towards maybe reaching a higher-level goal for your company. When people are talking about problems and solutions, it’s a lot more complicated than that. Talk to an engineer for example, even the slightest interface change is a problem to solve. You have nested problems and solutions and people with different needs. And you have the fact that shared understanding is always in a dynamic state, and you’re always having to communicate it. The Solution: Mapping Context I’ve found the following technique to be an extremely helpful tool to help you get your own head straight about things, and for communicating context to your team. I also recommend doing this exercise with your team. It’s a great way to develop a shared vocabulary. And this is an issue with roadmaps as well; it’s really about having a conversation. It’s really about sharing the same vocabulary and having the conversation that yields the best results. Let me show you this method for mind mapping. 1. A Fuzzy Goal You start with some fuzzy goal. And fuzzy goals like we’re talking about aren’t the most prescriptive goals, and they’re not the big pie-in-the-sky goals. They’re something that is actionable and directional. 2. Because, We Know, And We Assume Now, everyone wants to know the why. Why are we trying this? Why are we doing this? To answer this question, we use the word because. Everyone can relate to the word because. And we throw on two other phrases: ‘we know’, and ‘we assume’. And this is absolutely essential. How many times have you gotten two months into a project, and someone says, ‘why are we doing this’? And someone said, ‘well, I guess we assumed that this was true’. And the person says, I know that’s not true. So by saying this, we know and we assume, you really make it clear why you’re doing it, and what’s the underlying rationale. 3. While And Without And the next two words are ‘while’ and ‘without’. This can be a little tricky to wrap your head around. In your quest to achieve this fuzzy goal, what are the boundaries? What resources are you playing with? A great example that I can think about is that you’re doing something that might potentially damage the user experience. You might want to create a boundary there. You know what? No matter what we do in our effort to try to improve this fuzzy goal, we don’t want to mess up the user experience. So we use these words, ‘while’ and ‘without’. And I’ll give you an example of all of this together in a bit. 4. By Trying And then finally, we have what people commonly call solutions, but I just call it ‘by trying’. We’re going to try something to attempt to move this fuzzy goal. But the most important point here is that you can nest these. And by nesting, you can start having another ‘because’ for this, and another ‘while’ or ‘without’, and another ‘by trying’. 5. Example Let me give you an example that everyone can relate to, something like eating healthy. Because we know that eating healthy might help you live longer. Maybe that’s an assumption, but I think commonly, people know that. And we assume that our relationship might be better if we eat healthy and we’re less stressed out. Because we assume that eating healthy reduces stress. We’ll do this without breaking the bank. We’ll try to eat healthy, but you know, we’ve got a budget. And we’ll do this while making sure that, we have fun sometimes. We’re going to go out and eat with our friends. And we’re going to do this by trying what? We’re going to do this by trying to cook in six nights a week. Because we think that by cooking in six nights a week, just by the nature of cooking in, we’re going to eat healthier. We’re going to do that without annoying our kids, because they watch TV at a certain time. And then we’re going to do that by trying to have a set menu ahead of time that we shop for at Whole Foods, for example. What you see here is that if you can start to state your goals this way, instead of just having a big cascade of goals that just say things like ‘meet this revenue goal’, ‘or ‘this is this metric’, or this is this other aspect of your goal’ you’re explaining your rationale. What I would like to encourage you to do is to try this mind mapping method as a way to just get your heads straight before jumping into a roadmap or another strategic document. In Summary: Resist Prescriptive Goals First we talked about the difference between a destination and a direction, or systems and goals. And next we talked about the challenges of shared understanding. That we’re always trying to grow shared understanding, but it’s always degrading, too. There’s always that dynamic happening. And then, I talked about a mind mapping method to help you develop a common vocabulary. And that conversation is critical because if you have that conversation, you can constantly get context. Tweet This: “It’s tempting to create prescriptive goals, but when the context changes, people won’t be able to course correct.” When you think about it from a product manager’s point of view, it is always tempting to have prescriptive goals. That is a temptation that always exists. And If you take a step back, that is too fragile for most knowledge work. If you just create those destinations that people must hit, then the context changes, they’re not going to be able to change course. You’re going to lose that shared understanding very quickly. What I’d like you to do is to think about direction instead of destination as you’re putting together your roadmaps. Make sure that you’re communicating the why, the data that you have behind that, the boundaries that you’ve created around your particular goal, and also encourage people to try new things. Maybe one thing won’t work, but if they can understand what your rationale is in your thought process, then they might creatively come up with other solutions that might achieve that goal even faster.

This post is part of our product lessons learned series of interviews that we are conducting with product leaders across various industries. In this interview series, product leaders share their advice with their fellow product managers. We hope this series will shed light on trends and challenges in the profession, and be helpful to new and experienced product managers alike. The following is a conversation with Lea Hickman, VP of Product Management at InVision (an award-winning SaaS-based product design collaboration platform). Lea is a tech industry veteran and before leading the product team at InVision, she was an executive at Adobe, AOL, and Netscape. Here is Lea’s story. 1. How has product management changed over the years? Lea Hickman (LH): I think the fundamental catalyst to changing product management over the years has been the change in development processes. We are no longer in a world where we create 70-page PRDs and product specs to hand off to engineering. The advent of agile and lean development methodologies, it’s fundamentally changed the work a product manager does. Not only from a task perspective but also the type of skills that are required. I remember early on in my career, product management was more like project management. It was someone who was part project manager, part systems analyst — where you were writing very detailed specifications. And thankfully, that has evolved into something where a product manager is more like a mini-CEO. Someone who can understand holistically what the problems really are, identify if they’re big enough problems to go after, and work with a core team to find the most efficient way(s) to solve them. Here at InVision, we look for a very specific type of product manager. Our company solves workflow problems for design teams, so our product managers usually have a design background. The other key criteria are that they are very entrepreneurial. We typically look for folks who have founded or started their own companies. This provides the mindset of someone who is willing to play the mini-CEO role. That person who’s willing to jump in and be a critical thinker and a great problem solver (coupled with design skills). If they have those two fundamental skills, that’s the recipe for our success on the product management side at InVision. Anything else, we can teach. 2. What’s the biggest product design challenge you’ve encountered in your career and how did you solve it? LH: Throughout my career, the biggest challenge is probably when the iPad was first released. The iPad was introduced when I was at Adobe and we were looking to understand how users design on a tablet device. How would they naturally and intuitively think about creating design on a tablet? This was a completely different way of consuming information. We wondered, how could it be used to create content as well? The design challenge was focused on a different form factor. You have this device that has a camera attached to it and a completely different interface — touch. We spent a fair amount of time exploring ways to make that even better and to leverage the device. Our CTO at the time was Kevin Lynch who firmly believed there was a great opportunity there. We did a lot of investigation and a lot of discovery work to understand how we could meet that need. We launched a few iPad products that did quite well and got a lot of adoption. In fact, the artwork behind me (and I know no one’s going to be able to see it) is an album cover that was created by a designer named Brian Yap, who used one of our tablet applications to do the illustration work. I’m not entirely sure we solved it during that time frame — I’m not sure it’s solved today, but I think it’s a very interesting challenge, in terms of how we can leverage different platforms to create content. There’s promise and an audience for it, but I think designers need the power and precision of a more robust environment. That was the big takeaway. 3. You led the charge when Adobe Creative Suite transitioned to a subscription-based model. Do you have any recommendations for product managers on how they can best navigate big shifts in strategy? LH: On that particular project, especially considering the scale of it (hundreds and hundreds of people were involved), consistent and repetitive communication was absolutely critical, both verbally and written. I can’t emphasize that enough. A product manager has to be obsessive about getting their story out and repeating it. Never assume that just because you already told someone, they’re going to remember what the story is, or the why behind making a pivot. That was a huge takeaway. Over-communicate, make it extremely consistent, and do it again and again and again. Also, be sure to pre-vet key messages with your stakeholders — which is essential for making any major strategic shift. If you have an idea of how you want to shift something, meet with your stakeholders ahead of time and get their feedback prior to actually doing that broader communication. 4. What advice do you have for uniting stakeholders around product strategy and getting buy-in on the roadmap? LH: I always make sure that whenever there’s a roadmap discussion, no one in the room is seeing the roadmap for the first time in that forum. I’ve had the most resistance from stakeholders when they were surprised by something. Now, I take whatever draft I have, and I share it really early on, like prototyping. If you present your ideas and thoughts and start gathering feedback to course correct them from the beginning, you’ll earn your stakeholders’ trust since they will buy into the process with you. Then, take your early concepts, pre-vet them again with your stakeholders, and ask them for help to refine and shape. This doesn’t mean you’re asking for their ideas, you’re collaborating and bringing them along in the process. Nine times out of 10, this strategy will alleviate major conflicts you’ll face when you have the official roadmap discussion or the official MVP discussion. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); 5. What do you think are the most important skills for product managers? Tweet This: “A great product manager believes in what they’re creating, and has conviction around their ideas.” LH: There are three traits I look for in product managers: Product managers need to be exceptional communicators. The more subtle, harder thing to interview for is conviction. A great product manager believes in what they’re creating and has conviction around their ideas. And by that, I don’t mean falling in love with your idea. I mean having a defensible conviction about your idea and being able to stand behind it and answer the ‘why’. I talk a lot about the why. We often fall short in explaining the why to other people, and that’s part of the conviction. If you can explain why you want to do something, you have conviction. The final trait is something that’s important for me when I’m hiring and in product managers, I like to work with — a sense of humility. Understanding it’s not about you. It’s about getting an opportunity to shop for the product and get it into the hands of users — letting users decide. 6. Are there any design principles you think successful products have in common? LH: It’s research — but it’s not the UX type of research most folks talk about. We do research a little differently at InVision. We recently invested in and hired our second ethnographic researcher, who evaluates people and cultures. I like this approach because if you can get at the root cause of a problem through research, you’ll come up with an ultimate solution. For example, we work with a lot of companies (big and small) who have really incredible design teams (Airbnb, WeWork, IDEO, Adobe). If we present a proposal or review a prototype for a new feature, we’re going to have a very short conversation with that team, where it’s just about the solution we’re putting in front of them. However, if we go in and observe how the team works, and we sit with them for a while, we begin to understand their problems. One of our ethnographers has a Ph.D. in anthropology and sits with a few design teams a week. Through his observations, we’re able to get at the root cause of the problems particular design teams are having. It helps us to ask, “Is this a one-off problem or is this a persistent problem? How many people are having this problem?” This is step two of our research. You’re basically sizing your market. Then, go into product discovery, which identifies solutions that address the root cause. When we think about design, we start at the root cause of the problem. Tweet This: “When we think about design, we start at the root cause of the problem.” Then listening to customers, observing them, and applying solutions, followed by UX testing and analysis, which determines the solution that will best meet those needs and address those core problems we’ve uncovered. It’s so foundational, giving you something you can build on and iterate on that yields great results. 7. What are some of the challenges that UX/UI teams have working together with Product Management? And what do you recommend to improve their interactions? LH: At InVision, we have this concept of a core team, which consists of three roles: the product manager, the design lead, and the development lead. The core team goes through all of that product discovery we talked about earlier. We found this process creates a lot of empathy across the roles and eliminates a lot of friction, particularly between the product manager and the UX or UI designer. From a velocity perspective, it cuts a lot of that friction out too. It helps these teams understand whether or not a particular design is going to be the most efficient to implement in real-time. It allows the team to coalesce around that core MVP in terms of what it’s delivering. You don’t have a PM saying, “I need feature x by y date,” and then a designer creating things that are unimplementable and a developer saying, “Wait a minute, I have a say in this too…” I’m a very strong believer that great ideas come from everywhere — design, development, or product. As soon as you take that away, it removes a lot of that friction. 8. What are some major product design trends that we can expect in 2017? LH: It’s not so much about a design trend, but about designer trends. I’m finding a lot of the lines are blurring across the product team. Similar to when I was talking earlier about how we put our product teams together. Tweet This: “I think it’s not so much about a design trend, but it’s about designer trend.” More and more designers are learning how to code, and product managers are learning how to design. The whole core mix of how we built products in the past and how we’re going to be building products in the future is evolving. To learn these languages, the tools are making design so much easier. Everything is evolving so quickly, where before you needed to have very specific skill sets. The biggest trend is the explosion—the simplification of the tooling is going to make anything possible.

Let’s face it. Building an IoT product roadmap is hard — much harder than building roadmaps for “normal” technology products. That’s because IoT products are complex systems. To create a working solution, all layers of the IoT Technology Stack — device hardware, device software, communications, cloud platform, and cloud applications — need to work together. It’s like having to manage five products in one, and your roadmap needs to be the glue that keeps all your stakeholders aligned with your vision. Tweet This: “IoT products are like managing 5 products in 1. The roadmap is the glue that keeps everyone aligned.” The IoT Roadmap — Your Key to Aligning Stakeholders and Teams An IoT roadmap needs to show the product direction as well as the impact of new features in a way that makes sense for all stakeholders. Your stakeholders might be from Sales, Marketing, the Executive team, Engineering, and more. They all have different needs and different levels of understanding of how the product is put together. In fact, IoT introduces additional complexity because even the technical implementation is probably split across multiple groups. Depending on your company’s structure, you might have dedicated teams for hardware vs. software, embedded vs. cloud development, etc. No single team will have a holistic understanding, which makes it even more important for you (and your roadmap) to communicate the full picture. Because of this complexity, managing an IoT product is similar to managing a portfolio of products, with the distinction that ALL the products in your portfolio need to work together to form a cohesive solution. Not an easy task. The key to creating a solid IoT product roadmap is to balance a high-level view of the end-to-end product with more detailed views at each layer of the IoT Technology Stack. That way, you’ll be able to provide the right level of information for your different stakeholders and ensure nobody loses sight of the big picture. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); Building Your High-level IoT Product Roadmap Let’s use an example to illustrate all the moving parts of an IoT product roadmap. Let’s pretend your company builds industrial water pumps. After talking to a lot of customers and sales folks, you discover that a major concern for your customers is to keep operations going at all times. They would like to know if a pump is about to fail so they can proactively order parts and schedule service. This would reduce downtime and save them a lot of money. Such “predictive maintenance” is very valuable to your customers, and they are willing to pay a lot for it. Researching solutions with engineering, you learn that as a pump ages, it starts to vibrate. The more it vibrates, the closer it is to failing. Therefore, if you were able to monitor pump vibration and perform analytics on that data, you’d be able to predict failures. With this information and some business due diligence, you determine this is a great solution and you are ready to put it in the roadmap for internal buy-in. Your high-level roadmap might look something like this. As you can see, this is no different than the roadmap for a non-IoT product. The challenge here is that it is very difficult for your stakeholders — Executives, Sales, Marketing, and Engineering — to understand what it will take to build this functionality and what the final product looks like. It’s also difficult to understand why release #1 will take 6 months and release #2 and #3 will be shorter. Using Story Mapping to Enhance Your IoT Roadmap For your IoT roadmap to convey the full story, you need to provide another level of detail describing the features of the high-level roadmap across the IoT Technology Stack. I’ve found that story mapping is a great way to dive into this next level of detail. I like to combine story mapping with the IoT Technology Stack to show how features align to the various layers of the end-to-end IoT product. The result is a visualization that is still higher level than a “product backlog”, but gives enough information for all teams to understand the big picture. This view also empowers teams to understand how the planned functionality relates to the day-to-day work they’ll need to do. Here’s how this approach would look for our “smart pump” example. From this view, it is easier to explain the work that needs to get done to support the predictive maintenance functionality. Notice how the names of the high-level features in the previous roadmap became the theme for each of the releases. This helps your team keep an eye on the big picture while still focusing on smaller details. Notice that not all layers have to be impacted on every single release. In this example, there are no features in the “Communications” layer after release #1. This example assumes that the release #1 features in the “Communications” layer will be able to support the functionality of releases #2 and #3. From this visualization, it is easy to see that release #1 is the only one that impacts your device’s hardware. Therefore, it’s easy to explain why release #1 will take longer than other releases. You can also see that fewer layers are impacted in releases #2 and #3. The initial release will be the longest because you need to build a lot of infrastructure. Once you build that initial “plumbing”, then you’ll be able to add features on top of it at a much faster pace. You can use this tool to explain that evolution as well. Using The Roadmap to Coordinate Engineering You can also use the story mapping roadmap to coordinate multiple engineering teams across various layers of the IoT Technology Stack. Every team needs to share a unified vision of where the product is going. But at the same time, they need to understand the work that lies ahead for their specific team. This roadmap can help you with both goals. Tweet This: “Use a story mapping roadmap to coordinate multiple engineering teams across the IoT Technology Stack.” As shown below, you can take “vertical slices” to create specific roadmaps for each engineering team across multiple releases. As long as the data format and the interfaces between layers are well defined, this approach will enable each team to work independently and make progress faster. The Bottom Line As a Product Manager, you will always face challenges when communicating the product vision throughout your company. It’s a difficult task, and yet it is probably the most important function of our role. The approach outlined in this post provides you with a very powerful communication tool you can use to clearly express your product ideas and get everybody aligned. The result: increased transparency, which results in better communication, happy teams, and happy customers. About the Guest Author Daniel is an IoT product leader with 17 years of experience building connected products. He is the author of TechProductManagement.com, the leading blog on IoT Product Management, and the creator of the IoT Decision Framework. Daniel also teaches the course “Product Management for IoT” at Stanford Continuing Studies.

This post is part of a series of interviews that we are conducting with product leaders across various industries. In thisinterview series, product leaders share their product management lessons and advice with their fellow product managers. We hope this series will shed light on trends and challenges in the profession, and be helpful to new and experienced product managers alike. The following is a conversation with Brian Crofts, VP of Product atNamely. Namely is a fast-growing, all-in-one HR platform. Before Namely, Brian held a variety of product management and finance roles at Intuit. Here’s Brian’s story. How did you get into product management? Brian Crofts (BC):I started my career at Intuit as a corporate finance intern. Like most people, I didn’t go to school for product management. I studied economics and finance and discovered PM later. I considered several career paths after college, but in the end, I chose to stay in finance. Early on, I saw a product manager on stage at an Intuit all-hands and I thought, “that guy has the best job.” The product manager was a great story teller. He articulated a clear customer problem and had deep empathy for the customer’s pain. He then shared his vision on how to solve that problem, in a compelling way. I knew I wanted a career inproduct. A year later I was building my first mobile application. We solved big customer problems at Intuit — we built software to help consumers feel confident about doing their own taxes, for example. We were tackling that kind of customer challenge guided by a specific business model — working with greatdesigners,and the best engineers. As a product manager being at the intersection of the customer, the technology, and the business, in my mind, was the closest thing to being a general manager. A lot of people describe the product manager’s role as the “CEO of the Product”. What do you make of that moniker? What leadership challenges do you think product managers face? BC:Leadership can be a hard thing to define. My prior CEO always said, “Your title makes you a manager, but the people decide whether or not you’re a leader.” I think that makes a lot of sense. Generally speaking, people want to be led. In product management, you lead by understanding customer pain (and advocating to solve it), driving towards the best idea, and then ultimately building that solution in a timely manner. Engineers, designers, and the team want to solve the problem, and at the end of the day, they are looking to be led. Being a leader is not the same as being opinionated. It’s about the desire to “get it right,” not just “be right.” And while many people are working IN the business, it’s important as a leader to constantlyworkingON the business. These statements can be cliche, but they’ve always mattered to me. And the combination of the two is when we move from people working hard every day to working towards something that really matters — and is customer-driven, data-backed. Do that day after day, year after year, and the probabilities of success dramatically improve. Tweet This: “Being a leader is not the same as being opinionated. It’s about the desire to ‘get it right,’ not just ‘be right.'” Being a leader isn’t something that just happens; it’s something that you develop over time and by experience — by succeeding and failing. It’s action-oriented. We follow people who have a vision, who make decisions, and who move. What do you love about your job and what is the most challenging part? BC:Earlier in my career, it was all about launching new products. And that was fun. But it was a new process for me and I didn’t have much confidence. Like anything, it’s been a maturation process. And so those first few times, it was so exciting just to get a feature released or to get a new product launched — and see customers using them. I think it’s so true in every aspect of life. You get to a point where you can look back, reflect, and ask, “What was the best part of that experience?”There’s of coursea big payoff when you launch something and people really love it, but if you didn’t enjoy the part where you were solving the problem — where you were working with customers, and poring over spreadsheets, and looking at data, and trying to synthesize it into insights (Eric Ries calls it “the photo montage”) — then you’re just not going to be a good product manager. If you don’t like that part, you should find a different gig. I have much more confidence in the process — and a strong point of view on what that process entails. Today, I get just as much satisfaction seeing the members of my team develop as leaders as I do launching a new product. For the most part, my team is my product. As far as the most challenging aspect of my job, I think it’s surprising how much of the job demands effective and efficient communication. To be a successful product manager, you need to communicate not only what the vision is and what it is we’re building, but why we’re building it.Read Simon Sinek’sStart With Why.And because we’re agile and because we’re always changing, and constantly getting new data and insights, it becomes imperative that we bring stakeholders along. This often requires some kind of cadence oropmech within the company. I useLIKE.TGto help facilitate the communication of what we’re doing, when we’re doing it, and ultimately, why we’re doing it. As a cross-functional team, we review the roadmap together every month. In the earlier days of my career, I underappreciated the communication aspect of the job. But at the same time, if I had just done it effectively, I would have had an easier time — more time focused on building. I used to spend all my days managing stakeholders — and that’s not right. There’s a balance that needs to be struck, and we’re doing that here at Namely. One of the first things I worked on when I got here at Namely was reimagining how we communicate both internally and externally. That involves getting different tools, different processes, and getting people aligned/trained on the new way. When it comes to customers, our communication also needs to be agile and contextual, and non-obtrusive. These are things that people don’t typically think about — they think product management is just about building products. But it’s so much more. How do you manage conflicting priorities within your organization? BC:There’s a three-part answer to this. First, teams need to operate under guiding principles — principles the organization is aligned to. For example, availability, compliance, security are usually the top of the list and are highly prioritized. That sounds easy, but it can be difficult once you get past the “non-negotiables.” Soon after joining Namely, our CTO and I worked to get aligned with the other leaders on how we’d prioritize our backlog. It required aligning first on our product vision and strategy. Apart from aligning on principles, it’s important to bring data to the discussion. The most ineffective meetings are those when decisions get made (or missed) because the loudest person in the room influences everyone else. Meanwhile, key insights and data points have the answer, or can at least aid a decision. For example, your data may show that users are dropping off at the top of the funnel, and nobody’s converting past the homepage, so why are you debating the user experience later on? What does it matter if there is no conversion? Good data and insights can open up the conversation and keep it objective. And finally, when I say make customer-backed decisions, I mean bringing empathy back into the process and reminding people why we’re doing what we’re doing. I think that can also help unstick people when it comes to conflicting priorities. It’s also really important to understand the role of escalation. If there is a debate amongst leadership, it’s ultimately up to the CEO to be the tie breaker. That’s a role our CEO plays and an example of how effective escalation can be. It isn’t always a democracy — the reality is we need to make decisions. I think understanding that is very healthy. Escalation is not a negative thing, it’s just about getting to decisions so that teams can commit to those decisions and focus on execution. Our CEO plays that role well here at Namely. What tools or software can you not live without? BC:I’ve learned to love a good whiteboard and marker. I have one on wheels, so I often take it with me. I’ve got one whiteboard out here in our working area, and I’ve got another one that sits rightbymy desk. I like whiteboards because ideas seem to flow when jotting them down. I do most of my writing there. I’ve still yet to find a good “digital whiteboard” for online collaboration. I know they exist, but nothing I’ve incorporated into my toolset. I also use Evernote, but mostly for sketching. I use Evernote + iPad to sketch out everything from new org charts to product sketches–to sketches of my presentations. I usually will sketch out my whole deck before I actually put it together (similar to building a product). I view everything as a product — whether it’s a deck or whether it’s a team. The idea is that anything that’s early stage needs to be lower fidelity. I used to have a Moleskine notebook, but now that I have the iPad Pro, I mostly use that. For example, I’ll sketch out a deck in Evernote, go over it with our CEO, and makereal timeedits without ever having committed anything to PowerPoint. That kind of rapid iteration process — going from low to increasing fidelity as I get more solid on the answer — that’s how I operate in every aspect of my life. Even my goals for next year are written in Evernote. Not typed, but written with my messy pen because it denotes the lower fidelity. Eventually, those goals will end up nice and typed out in Evernote, and then in our Namely platform. I think all of these tools are pretty common for product managers; it’s how we use them differently that’s probably the more interesting. I’ve got four or five Trello boards, for instance. I use them for personal to-dos and admin to-dos in the business, and then I’ve got more strategic-level boards. I even have a family board where my kids actually have little things to work on. The high-level, Kanban format gives me a sense of understanding of what’s going on and what we’ve got coming up. Describe your organization’s roadmap planning process. How far out do you plan? BC:Like I mentioned earlier, the first step was getting everybody aligned on how we’re going to prioritize. Then we simply shared those prioritization principles with the team at an all-hands meeting, and talked through the high-level game plan and how we as the leadership team were aligned. Although it was very high level, there were decisions made. We were more explicit on what’s in/what’s out for this next year. After we distributed the product vision and principles, the teams came back and shared their first draft of their roadmap. We pushed them a little bit on vision. We asked if it was aggressive enough. We made sure it was core to our platform, etc. The best part was seeing how collaboratively these teams worked across design, product, and engineering — and then collaborating with the rest of the business for feedback. It showed in the final result; the team’s roadmaps were very much in line with our strategy. We focus on six months at a time, say 90% confidence for the stuff in Q1 and 60% confidence for Q2. In LIKE.TG, I use milestones to show the beginning of the quarters, and on there, I actually write the percent level of confidence. This is our way of communicating withmarketing for exampleto say, “Hey, this is what we’re going ship, but don’t take it to the bank.” Marketing would never look at Q2 features and communicate them to prospects in any way, but they at least know where we think we’re headed and they can give us feedback on it. Tweet This: “The worst thing is becoming beholden to a document that was wrong to begin with.” It might be the case that we don’t ship what’s on the roadmap. I think the worst thing is becoming beholden to a document that waswrongto begin with just because that’s the nature of how we work. So that’s something we’re trying to break up. In years past, it was like, “Here’s the roadmap, and success for everybody means shipping everything on the roadmap.” But ultimately it’s about getting closer to solving our customer’s pain. That is how we are measuring success. That’s our approach — and I think it’s pretty similar to how we did things at Intuit. I’m taking some of the best practices we had previously, but also realizing I can move even faster here at Namely. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); How do you incorporate customer feedback into your roadmap? BC:Here’s the thing. Usually, when customers give me feedback on stuff, I already know that it’s broken or that the user experience is bad. It’s either already on our roadmap, or it’s not because it just hasn’t hit the priority list yet. We have work constraints and limited resources, so everything on the roadmap has been prioritized, and there obviously has to be a cut line somewhere. But the thing that steers the roadmap more than anything is customer insights. What I mean by customer insights is actually spending time with customers and observing how they use the product, and how they solve problems using a variety of tools — even what they do with paper. Going onsite, in their office, and actually observing what customers are doing is so much more valuable than just listening to what they say. If I’m on a phone call with somebody, I can’t see their environment. Let’s say I’m working on document management, and I’m talking to someone about how they use document management software. I’m listening and I’m thinking they’re probably paper-free, but then I goon-premise,and see they have all kinds of file cabinets. That leads me to my next step of discovery. Having the contextual references and seeing their environment can lead to insights. When you watch them use your product, in their space, you see their stress — you see how they feel and you see the emotional side of it. Whereas on the phone they might just tell you, “Yeah, I use it. It’s a good product.” What are some big mistakes that you’ve seen product managers make (or mistakes you’ve made yourself)? BC:One mistake I made happened not too longago,when we had just launched the French version of QuickBooks. During the setupexperience,or the first time user experience, there was a period where the app would stall and spin for over a minute. It was a terrible user experience, and I remember coming onto that team and thinking, “Ugh, that’s not very good.” But then I got caught up in the day job. Even though I knew it was not a good setup experience, I just accepted the status quo and focused elsewhere. As a product manager, you need to be the person that advocates for good design and a good product, or nobody will. Tweet This: “As a PM, you need to be the person that advocates for good design and a good product, or nobody will.” It took an embarrassing demo with a customer and a senior executive to bring it back to our attention. We all looked at each other and knew we could only blame ourselves for accepting the status quo. So that’s a trap that I’ve fallen into — and I’ve seen others fall into as well. At the end of the day, we need to be advocates. We need to advocate for the customer, and for great user experiences, and for great products. We need to always be raising the bar. If you could give only one piece of advice to a new product manager, what would it be? BC:We’ve talked a lot about making decisions and leading, but I think product managers who really excel are those who also find a way to build hand-in-hand with engineers and designers. We can be builders too. Product managers should understand what it means to be a builder. That may mean learning to become more technical, or it may mean learning how to lead design thinking. It’s important to establish that role as you lead. A PM who is more technical usually pulls their own SQL queries to better understand customer usage trends. In doing that, you’re gathering information that’s helpful to ensure you’re building and investing in the right areas. Design thinking is the process of developing deep customer empathy and insight, and then building something that customers will love — and that’s being a builder as well. It’s not just about writing good user stories or setting a good vision. It’s about actually getting your hands dirty and building; sketching out designs, observing customers, sitting in on sales calls. This is the right step in the evolution of product management. I would advise aspiring product managers to develop those skills. In your undergrad, learn how to code or learn how to design. Even if you ultimately want to become a product manager, you need to have technical chops — and you need to know how to actually build stuff. You have been involved in bringing new products to market for quite some time. How has product management changed over the years? BC:I think macro shifts used to happen every 3-5 years, but now they seem to be happening every six months — whether it’s the sharing economy or the gig economy. The world and its markets are changing faster. You look at all the newer companies that are driving the highest value, and they’re all network effects. Airbnb doesn’t own a single room. Uber doesn’t own a single car. Even LIKE.TG — you’re shifting from a feature-based approach to more of a platform. You now are spending more time building the pipes,becausethose pipes — and being at the center of those pipes — are actually much more valuable. You’re bringing much larger ecosystems together than if you just built a point solution. This was acriteriaI used when deciding which startup to join. I wanted to build a platform. And that is what we are doing at Namely. We have our core products, but we are becoming more of an open platform to connect 3rd party apps. It becomes a platform that is personalized to fit each of our client’s business needs. We are early in thatjourney,but are making great progress.

This post is part of a series of interviews that we are conducting with product leaders across various industries. In this interview series, product leaders share their advice with their fellow product managers. We hope this series will shed light on trends and challenges in the profession, and be helpful to new and experienced product managers alike. The following is a conversation with Julie Cabinaw, VP of Sales, Marketing Innovation at Scentsy (a leading provider of home and personal fragrance). Before Scentsy, Julie held a variety of product management and user experience roles at Microsoft, Healthwise, Hewlett-Packard, and Amazon. Here is Julie’s story. You have been involved in bringing new products to market for quite some time. How has product management changed over the years? Julie Cabinaw (JC): Thinking back to the early stages of product management, I remember really trying to convince developers that we had value to add to the equation. In the late 90s, developers often drove the vision for products — and it was based quite a bit on what technology could do. Sometimes, user specific needs were secondary. I think we’ve really seen a maturation of product management’s relationship with all the other parts of the company. We’re working with sales, we’re working with marketing, and we work so closely with technology. We really exist as a unifying force to be the voice of the customer. We help make sure that customer experience — or in our case at Scentsy, consultant and customer experience — is the center of what we’re doing. As product managers, we’re relied upon to be the voice of business, consultant and customer needs, and to rationalize these sometimes conflicting viewpoints. The maturation of the product management field has been really fun to be a part of. Tweet This: “Product Managers need to be the voice of business and customer needs, and to rationalize conflicting viewpoints.” You worked in a variety of product-related roles over the years, including UX positions at Hewlett Packard and Healthwise as well as leading the content experience team for the Amazon Kindle. What’s the biggest product design challenge you’ve encountered in your career and how did you solve it? JC: There have been so many fun challenges to work on over the years. I have two examples. One is from the healthcare space. In healthcare, people have struggled with the role of technology — knowing that it could be absolutely essential to improving people’s decision-making relative to their health issues, but also not wanting to over-complicate things for patients and families. One very user-focused challenge that we had at Healthwise, a Boise-based health decision-focused company, was helping people make better health decisions. We had to understand where patients were in their thinking about their healthcare issues. The challenge was understanding what was important to them, and then combining that information with what we knew about the patient transactionally (maybe their claims history or patterns in data that might predict that they have more health issues with a particular concern) — as well as what the best medical guidance might be. It was an incredibly big product design challenge and it continues to be something that’s very near and dear to my heart. The folks at Healthwise do amazing work in researching the needs of patients and representing those through content technology. I think that’s probably one of the proudest things: being part of something that really made a difference through technology. That ability to make an impact, and improve someone’s life is a similarity to the product management function at Scentsy. It’s so exciting! On the other hand, the scale of working on content experience at Amazon is fascinating — being able to understand the magnitude of a project that has so many technology implications. There are so many different versions of the Kindle that you have to take into account in order to roll-out a new feature. When you think about people using their Kindles, many people still love the first Kindle that they ever purchased. And so, when making decisions about how far back to go on a feature set, you have to understand how that experience is going to play out for millions of users around the world with different languages and with different expectations from a user experience standpoint. It was an amazing thing to watch happen at a company like Amazon. The efficiency and the scale that they bring to it, while still being laser-focused on the customer, was really fun to learn from. You are currently the VP of Marketing Sales Technology for Scentsy. What are your recommendations for how product and sales and marketing teams can work better together? JC: What’s most important, I think, is bringing together a cross-functional team for an opportunity to share a vision. People who are involved in a project early on, from the beginning, should be able to represent their viewpoints and answer tough questions. We try to do a lot of design thinking in the technology program work that we do at Scentsy. We broaden and explore different problem spaces before we narrow in on a solution. This approach has two advantages. One is creating the best possible product. And second, more to your question of how to bring teams together, it focuses everyone on understanding that what we’re about to do is bigger than us — bigger than any of our particular interests on our team. It’s really important to keep the focus on the problem that we’re solving and the people that we’re solving it for. Another thing that’s important is being a good listener. I think sometimes people listen for the things that validate what they already want to do. It’s so much more important to listen openly and make sure you’re getting a complete understanding of how someone thinks about things, what they’re looking for, and what they’re concerned about. At Scentsy, we’re exploring a partnership between our hard goods product team and our technical product team. It’s really interesting to, for the first time, bring together these teams that have never worked with each other, but that have similar backgrounds in many ways in terms of being owners of their products. In bringing them together we really get the best of both worlds — and listening goes a long way in that. Tweet This: “Data provides a strong foundation for everybody to understand the problem in a similar way.” I think the other thing that really helps when you’re talking about needing to reduce friction between teams is making sure that people understand things from a data-focused perspective. There’s always a balance of guts (intuition) and data that goes into the things that we do, but data provides an incredibly strong foundation for everybody to understand the problem in a similar way. Having everybody sit and watch users struggle with something, or succeed fabulously, gives everybody a shared understanding of how things are going. It’s crucial to get everybody grounded in reality through data, rather than just their impressions or their opinions of what might be the best path. And finally, I think good processes are really important to have when you’re working together. The larger a company is, the more some kind of process is needed to make sure that things don’t get missed, and that you don’t miss out on opportunities to understand each other’s perspectives. Given your extensive UX experience, are there any design principles that you think successful products have in common? JC: Foremost, I think great products are designed based on user needs. We see a lot of great technology, and we think of potential applications for that technology, but being grounded in the most important problems that users are trying to solve is not so much an aesthetic design principle, but a principle that keeps everybody focused on what they’re really trying to accomplish. The next thing that we’re always looking for is simplicity in design. There’s a lot of things we can do with any particular product, but should we do them? Should we do them now? I think everybody gets very focused on a long-term vision for what something will be in the future. A lot of companies I’m seeing are maturing to a state of understanding the concept of an MVP, and getting comfortable with continual iterations and cycles to improve on that. I think that continuous deployment and having regular ongoing releases allows us much more technical agility. Bridging from UX to product management, as late as five years ago, it seemed that every product manager’s fear was not getting to come back anytime soon to what they just released and improve upon it. You felt like you needed to cram in as much as you could in that first release, and it may not have been the quality that you wanted it to be. So improvements in the way that we deploy things technically have really allowed us to have more simple MVPs. And then, minimalistic design is kind of the companion to simplicity in feature sets — ensuring that the design keeps the focus on the most important next action that a user can take. Minimalism is so important when you’re trying to accomplish a brand experience, and when you’re trying to realize the goal of having someone buy something or complete a task. Minimalism is often hard. It’s much harder to develop something and scale it back to the most essential than to just kind of throw it all out there and hope for the best. It requires a lot more discipline to achieve minimalistic design. Finally, exploring the gaps in what is not said by users, to understand unmet needs and create a product that perhaps a user couldn’t have articulated that they wanted, but delights them in providing new solutions they had not anticipated. What advice do you have for uniting stakeholders around product strategy and getting buy-in on the roadmap? JC: I’ve had the chance to hone this skill over many years, but I think some of the best lessons that I learned have come in the past couple of years, both here at Scentsy as well as at Amazon. There are a lot of articles around Amazon’s working backwards process. I encourage people to explore the Amazon process. The idea is to unite your stakeholders around a shared vision of customer experience. The process involves writing the press release, a crisp and succinct six page strategy, answering hard questions about the approach via FAQs and committing to disciplined and rigorous document reviews. Working backwards allows the rest of the project to flow in a much nicer way. We make sure that we understand how we’re going to measure success, and we make sure that we can think of any possible question that a user could have or any scenario that could develop that we would need to address. It’s something that I’ve brought into my work currently, and I think we’re having higher quality and better releases as a result of more rigor upfront. Not everyone was super excited at first, with a more rigorous approach. Then I had one of my team members, after having gone through the process, reach the C-level review for the program that she was proposing. She was able to answer every single question that got fired at her, and to get approval for a very ambitious sales technology program. Tweet This: “First and foremost, you need to unite everyone around a shared product vision.” So, first and foremost, you need to unite everyone around a shared vision and get them bought-in on the story. Then, follow up with strong evidence for the KPIs that you’re trying to achieve. You need to be able to show that you’ve done your homework in regard to the return on investment that your product will produce. And even if you don’t have the perfect scenario, working with your partners in sales and in finance to build a model based on logical assumptions is the really big part of the battle. Finally, for resolving differences of opinion around experiential issues, bringing in user feedback and data is really essential. You need to show that you’ve arrived at your recommendations based on real user input. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); How do you incorporate customer feedback into your roadmap? JC: One of the most important things, and something that I’ve done at the last couple of organizations that I’ve been a part of, is making sure product management is unified with UX. They should have such a tight alliance that there’s just a natural understanding among the team that customer feedback has a role in every phase that they move through — whether that’s researching the initial idea for a concept, getting feedback on prototypes, or the Wizard of Oz-type things where we’re simulating a product’s experience and understanding reactions to it. Right now we’re in a thousand person beta for a new product. We uncovered a fairly significant issue and we’re excited that we encountered that issue with 1,000 people rather than 130,000 people. It helps you understand things so much better once you get the the product out into the wild. When we release something out to our consultants and our customers, we have several mechanisms to evaluate it. We’re using A/B testing. We’re using on-site surveys for new features, and we’re doing ongoing usability testing of both existing features and new features that are being planned. Any given week we’re probably running at least three or four usability tests on things in different phases of the cycle. For us, feedback is an incredibly big part of what drives our roadmap. It helps drive the next set of features, and course-correct features we may have planned but that need to be tweaked. What are some big mistakes that you’ve seen product managers make (or mistakes you’ve made yourself)? JC: I am going to speak from personal experience, but I have seen other product managers do this too. I think when you’re younger, you want so much to be the hero of the product, and you care deeply about your product. But what can happen is that you take too much on yourself, and you don’t realize the value that other people can bring to the table. You think you have to do it all yourself. You’re not inclusive enough, and in the end, you don’t create a product that is good as you could have created, had you allowed those people to be a part of it. It’s often a matter of ego. You say to yourself, “I know what the right thing is. I’ve got the data. Thank you for your opinion, but I’ve got it.” I think that this is especially common when you’re newer and you’re trying to prove to people that you know what you’re doing. What ends up happening is that you prove you can build something pretty good all by yourself, but you could have created something much bigger and much better if you had some other input. Tweet This: “There is a balance of head and heart in any good product manager.” Another mistake is not understanding that there is a balance of head and heart in any good product manager. Every single situation involves a mix in some way of those two parts. You have to have that foundation of data and analytics to make decisions, but sometimes product managers who don’t appreciate the heart, or the personal impact of a product design choice, may miss opportunities to put in little kisses that move a product from being a good utilitarian experience to something that people talk about. Finally, another common mistake I see product managers make is having a big vision, but not realizing how much scenario planning they need to do in order to achieve it. You can’t afford to gloss over the details. You may, for example, realize that there’s a gap in a feature set that you need to release. This means you’re either going to delay your product, or you’re going to release something that’s not as good as it should be because you’re missing a big part of it. This relates back to the first point about making sure you have enough voices in the mix giving you feedback and helping you make better decisions. But it’s also about playing devil’s advocate with yourself and with your team — asking, “What’s the worst thing that could happen here? What’s the best thing that could happen here? If the best thing happens, do we have enough bandwidth to handle what’s going to come at us?” What do you think are the most important skills for product managers? JC: What I’ve learned over the years is that there is an expectation that good product managers have a basis of technical and business acumen. They should functionally know how to write requirements and how to communicate with developers. They should understand how to build a business case from a financial perspective. Those things are kind of a given, in my opinion. When I’m hiring someone new, the things that I’m looking for most are the things that I’ve realized over the years result in better members of my team. The most important thing is passion. You can see that light in some people’s eyes where they just get so fired up; I call it the raw meat factor. You can just feel from everything that they’re doing that they’re going to go after what they’re about with 110%. On the other hand, you may have somebody who’s like, “Yeah, I’m really good at what I do, but it’s just a job.” Those can also be good people to have on your team, and you need a balance of all sorts of people. But with product managers, I’m looking for a spark. And, along with a spark, intense curiosity. In good product management teams, people ask questions about each other’s work. To some it might appear aggressive, but it actually results in people thinking harder about what it is that they’re doing. Done respectfully, intense curiosity can lead to figuring out the root cause of why you’re making a decision, or why users might be feeling a certain way, or why something’s going on with the analytics on your site. It’s all about not just taking things at face value, and trying to understand the “why”. Finally, the last two features I look for are soft skills. Every new market that you might be in — you have to be fluid and teachable, and agile. We’re not looking for someone who won’t make mistakes, we’re looking for people who are willing to make mistakes, but won’t make the same mistakes twice. You also, I think, have to be willing to have a chameleon-like aspect of yourself. It’s not that you don’t keep your core values or your core skills, but you should understand how to soak up the environment and the context of a company. You should be able to build relationships and understand the factors that drive people in the company to make decisions, and understand how to meet their needs. I think those things — passion, curiosity, teachability, having chameleon-like aspects, and the softer relationship management skills — go a long way. But they need to be built on a base of technical acumen and business strength.

I was asked by LIKE.TG to create a journey map that maps out their customers’ experience during the 30 day free trial. In this post I am sharing the process I used to create the journey map for ProductPlan. As discussed in our previous article, How Journey Maps Can Help Product Managers Build Better Products, a customer journey map is a graphic or narrative representation of the customer’s relationship with a company, product or service. It shows the customer’s interactions with the business over time and across service channels. Based on the customer’s perspective, it shows the meeting points between the customer’s expectations and the requirements of the business. Like most designers, I’ve had to wear two hats — one hat as the designer who knows the application inside and out looking for pitfalls and pain points to help identify how to make the product better, and the other hat as the customer who is reviewing the product for the first time and wants to see if it fits their organization’s needs. This article is a peek into my process of creating a journey map and the insights gained while evaluating the first time product experience of a LIKE.TG customer. Along with this post, I’ve included the customer journey map my team and I created so you can use the final deliverable as a reference when and if you choose to create your own organization’s customer journey map. In our original blog post on this topic, we discussed how journey maps can perform three important functions: uncover problems, show gaps in service, and help align members of the company to company goals. My focus therefore was to create a journey map that would identify the pain points for LIKE.TG’s customers, analyze how the customer touch points could be refined and make recommendations resulting in better customer interactions. Tweet This: “Journey maps uncover problems, show gaps in service, and help align members of the company to company goals.” Creation Process To create the customer journey map, the team got together to set our objectives and decided that the journey map had to: Identify ways to get customers more engaged with the product from the beginning Uncover problems that might be turning customers away Increase the number of customers who move from using the free trial to purchasing a plan To move forward, we first needed to pull together all our existing research findings. The information that would tell us about customers’ experiences with the product came from customer surveys, interviews, and in-app feedback. From looking at the many great journey map examples out there, it’s clear that there is no universally correct way to make one, and it can be overwhelming to decide the right elements to include. This is the phase where “analysis by paralysis” can kick in and one must be diligent in deciding what to include and, just as important, what to leave out. To avoid that problem, the team and I decided to narrow our focus on three aspects of the customer experience: customer actions, pain points and opportunities for improvement. Understanding the Customer’s Journey Customers come to LIKE.TG because they need a roadmapping solution that visually communicates the progress of their company’s goals, highlights opportunities, and prioritizes initiatives. When potential customers become aware of LIKE.TG, their first stop is the LIKE.TG website. The home page provides a high level overview, while subsequent pages dive into details on how the product actually works. As customers review the LIKE.TG website and its competitors’ websites, we imagined typical questions that come up and included them in the journey map: There are several roadmapping products out there. Which one is best? I don’t have time to research every solution and read details. How will LIKE.TG integrate with existing project management tools within my organization? After signing up, customers are invited to take the product tour, participate in a webinar, and watch our video tutorials. In addition, we message them in the support chat to let them know we’re here if they have any questions. After that, users are on their own to explore the product. Employees at LIKE.TG who regularly chat with customers share that users report having different needs when getting started. While some users are ready to dive in by starting from scratch, many new customers often ask for templates or samples to get a sense for how a roadmap could be used for their particular situation. Other customers want an easy way to import their data from third party project management tools like JIRA or Pivotal Tracker. Our team thought, “Why not provide roadmap samples and make importing data accessible to users from day one during the onboarding process?” From the large number of team accounts, we know that users don’t typically create roadmaps in silos, but often do so in collaboration with their team. Looking through our customer database, we found a lot current free trial users who work at the same company and are evaluating LIKE.TG separately. In addition to analyzing our customer database, we looked at key usage metrics and discovered that a large percentage of users who purchase LIKE.TG frequently share roadmaps with others. We hypothesized that facilitating collaboration during the signup process by allowing users to invite colleagues would increase total customer engagement and awareness of LIKE.TG while getting increased buy-in from their team to justify the purchase. During our research for this project, the LIKE.TG team conducted tests on usertesting.com and ran participants through the entire sign-up flow, allowing them to explore the various areas of the product. After each test, we surveyed them and asked, “What onboarding formats do you like best in order to get started with a new software application?” The multiple choice answers included: Video Tutorials Contextual Tool Tips Educational Emails Live Chat I prefer no onboarding process The majority of users chose video tutorials and contextual tool tips. We also got usage data that the videos we send through the support chat don’t get a lot of attention. The team realized that embedding the videos in the product tour could potentially improve the customer’s learning while at the same time encouraging them to explore the interface. From surveying several hundred customers who didn’t purchase a paid plan after their free trial expired, we discovered that a large percentage of users who didn’t purchase LIKE.TG said it was because they felt they didn’t have enough time to evaluate the product. Today, we don’t do a good job of making it clear to customers how many days are left in their free trial and we don’t present an obvious way to upgrade to a paid account. We hypothesized that users’ free trials were expiring without them realizing it and decided to experiment with different approaches to this problem. Making the Customer Journey Map Actionable In my experience, stakeholders often look at a customer journey map and say, “This a great visual, but how am I supposed to use this?” That’s a great question. In our case, as soon as the LIKE.TG customer journey map was complete, the team took the insights we gathered and added them to our “First Time User Experience” roadmap. Putting the opportunities into the Planning Board helped us weigh the benefits and costs of each item. We defined our benefit categories as “Faster customer success in app” with a weight of 30 and “Increase engagement” with a weight of 20. We then defined our cost categories as “Dev team involvement” with a weight of 35 and “Other team involvement” with a weight of 15 giving us a total score of 100. Once we added our opportunities to the Planning Board and defined our cost and benefit categories, we scored the costs and benefits of each item on a scale of 1-5. We then prioritized each item according to its total score. (Tip: we regularly use Google Hangouts for our meetings and discovered an easy way to vote on the ranking for each item by simultaneously entering our scores into the Google Hangouts chat box.) After scoring each item, we moved the top 4 items to the roadmap and set about adding these items to our product backlog for future experimentation. Reflections on the Customer’s Journey LIKE.TG offers lots of flexibility to customers, but customers still need some targeted guidance based on their unique needs when they’re first getting started. With some tweaks to the process of guiding customers on day one, I believe LIKE.TG can improve overall user engagement and ultimately increase its conversion rate of free trial users to purchased plan customers. In summary, here are a few of the opportunities we discovered from the journey mapping process: Include FAQs on the sign up page Allow users to invite team members during sign up Embed video tutorials in the product tour Provide sample roadmaps from the outset Allow users to import their data right after signing up Add a friendly “Subscribe Now” button in the interface Display an indicator of how many days are left in the free trial Final Thoughts on the Journey Mapping Process There is no one correct way to create a journey map. It depends on variables such as the stakeholders involved, the UX expert facilitating the process, and of course, the business’s product or service that is being mapped. Tweet This: “As designers and product managers, we must walk a fine line between educating users while not overwhelming them.” How your customers use your product is rarely straightforward. As designers and product managers, we must walk a fine line between educating first time users while not overwhelming them with too much information. Getting people through the process from signing up to try your product all the way to becoming a paying customer doesn’t always happen smoothly. But, spending time to learn as much as you can about your users’ goals and how they’re using (or not using) your product makes for happy customers and better business. When used correctly, customer journey maps can be an effective tool in facilitating that process.

As 2016 comes to an end, we’ve looked back and reviewed over 70 product management articles that we’ve written and published on our blog this year. Most of our topics covered product strategy, entrepreneurship, product management, roadmaps, marketing, agile development, and product management career recommendations. Our articles triggered some great conversations with fellow product managers on our blog and on social media. Here are our five most popular articles of 2016. Enjoy! #1: Roadmap Examples Our three blog posts detailing example roadmaps for product management, marketing and IT teams were by far our most read articles of 2016. Tweet This: “Roadmaps were the most popular product management topic of 2016.” Example Product Roadmaps Product roadmaps come in all shapes and sizes, and of course there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all roadmap template. Your strategic plan, and the roadmap that represents it, will depend on many factors, including the stage of your product, the size of your company, the stage of your company, and the nature of your industry — just to name a few. However, there are some things that all good roadmaps have in common. Read this article to find out what they are, plus see three example product roadmaps to get your creative juices flowing. Example Marketing Roadmaps Roadmaps aren’t just for product managers. Marketing teams can also benefit from a high-level strategic plan. After all, how many times have you sat in a marketing meeting, listened as the discussion jumped randomly from topic to topic, and wondered: “Can we take a step back? Can we first discuss how all of these details are related, and why we’re talking about them?” In this post, we walk you through an example marketing plan, an example product launch plan, and an example digital marketing roadmap. These marketing-oriented roadmaps can help you create a strategic framework for otherwise disparate initiatives. Example Technology Roadmaps Roadmaps can also be invaluable tools for teams working on complex IT initiatives, such as upgrading a company’s technology infrastructure, for example. The key to a successful technology roadmap — as with any type of roadmap — is its ability to quickly and effectively communicate the strategic plan to the right constituents. The audience for a technology roadmap will often be stakeholders looking to the IT team for delivering internal-facing systems and solutions. In this post, we share an example technology roadmap, an architecture roadmap, and an enterprise IT roadmap. And we have plenty more examples; check out our entire library of 18 example roadmaps to kick-start 2017. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); #2: 5 Lies Product Managers Tell Themselves Do you call yourself the CEO of your product? Do you believe all product decisions must go through product management? Well, you’re wrong, but at least you’re not alone. Don’t take the “Product CEO” moniker too seriously. At the end of the day, you don’t get to boss around your CTO or Ops VP. And even though, as a product manager, you are ultimately responsible for your product’s successes and failures, you are not — and should not be — the sole decision-maker. It’s important to remember that a key ingredient in successful product management is team-building — creating an atmosphere of camaraderie among your colleagues and a common sense of purpose. This post highlights common (yet misguided) refrains in our product management community. Be sure to read up on these 5 lies so that we can all please stop telling them in 2017. #3: Lean Market Validation — 10 Ways to Rapidly Test Your Startup Idea In this article, Jim emphasizes the importance of questioning your assumptions, interviewing users, and shifting the focus away from features and toward your product’s value proposition. Read the full post to see Jim’s widely circulated 10-step formula for getting your product from concept to market, and ensuring its success by validating it with real prospects at every step of the way. Bonus: The article includes a slide deck from Jim’s presentation. #4: 7 Ways to Build an Awful Product This 7-step formula for building a terrible product was another hit. Every product manager feels the pressure to develop her category’s leading product. But here’s something you’ve probably never considered: Nobody’s competing for the middle slots in their product category. Or the bottom. So without much effort at all, you can own those positions. In this article, we explain how. Some of our tips include designing by committee, including every feature you can think of, and blindly copying your competitors. What the world needs are more awful products. So if you’re looking to launch a dud next year, be sure to do your homework. #5: Help! I’ve Been Handed a Bad Product Strategy What happens when the product management challenge you face is that you have poor strategic direction to begin with? This happens all too often. And it happened to a product manager who attended a recent Pragmatic Marketing webinar on thought leadership. In this post, Jim Semick shares how to fix a poor a product strategy, and explains some of the factors that can cause you to get stuck with a bad strategy in the first place. These factors could include: Software companies wanting to deliver new features. Executives working on assumptions — not always grounded in fact. Growing companies feeling the need to keep their developers busy. Product owners becoming information silos. Read on to learn more about common challenges, and more importantly, how to course correct. In Summary Developing and executing your product strategy was a focal point in 2016. From defining your product strategy, to lean market validation, to dealing with an inherited poor product strategy, product managers at companies of all stages are looking for ways to improve their strategic plans. Tweet This: “Developing and executing your product strategy was a focal point in 2016.” That’s why it isn’t surprising that example roadmaps were our most popular topics this year — after all, the purpose of a roadmap is to communicate your product strategy and keep your organization aligned on the big picture goals. The right product roadmap software can go a long way towards helping you achieve these goals in 2017. Happy New Year from all of us here at LIKE.TG!

I was asked by LIKE.TG to create a journey map that maps out their customers’ experience during the 30 day free trial. In this post I am sharing the process I used to create the journey map for ProductPlan. As discussed in our previous article, How Journey Maps Can Help Product Managers Build Better Products, a customer journey map is a graphic or narrative representation of the customer’s relationship with a company, product or service. It shows the customer’s interactions with the business over time and across service channels. Based on the customer’s perspective, it shows the meeting points between the customer’s expectations and the requirements of the business. Like most designers, I’ve had to wear two hats — one hat as the designer who knows the application inside and out looking for pitfalls and pain points to help identify how to make the product better, and the other hat as the customer who is reviewing the product for the first time and wants to see if it fits their organization’s needs. This article is a peek into my process of creating a journey map and the insights gained while evaluating the first time product experience of a LIKE.TG customer. Along with this post, I’ve included the customer journey map my team and I created so you can use the final deliverable as a reference when and if you choose to create your own organization’s customer journey map. In our original blog post on this topic, we discussed how journey maps can perform three important functions: uncover problems, show gaps in service, and help align members of the company to company goals. My focus therefore was to create a journey map that would identify the pain points for LIKE.TG’s customers, analyze how the customer touch points could be refined and make recommendations resulting in better customer interactions. Tweet This: “Journey maps uncover problems, show gaps in service, and help align members of the company to company goals.” Creation Process To create the customer journey map, the team got together to set our objectives and decided that the journey map had to: Identify ways to get customers more engaged with the product from the beginning Uncover problems that might be turning customers away Increase the number of customers who move from using the free trial to purchasing a plan To move forward, we first needed to pull together all our existing research findings. The information that would tell us about customers’ experiences with the product came from customer surveys, interviews, and in-app feedback. From looking at the many great journey map examples out there, it’s clear that there is no universally correct way to make one, and it can be overwhelming to decide the right elements to include. This is the phase where “analysis by paralysis” can kick in and one must be diligent in deciding what to include and, just as important, what to leave out. To avoid that problem, the team and I decided to narrow our focus on three aspects of the customer experience: customer actions, pain points and opportunities for improvement. Understanding the Customer’s Journey Customers come to LIKE.TG because they need a roadmapping solution that visually communicates the progress of their company’s goals, highlights opportunities, and prioritizes initiatives. When potential customers become aware of LIKE.TG, their first stop is the LIKE.TG website. The home page provides a high level overview, while subsequent pages dive into details on how the product actually works. As customers review the LIKE.TG website and its competitors’ websites, we imagined typical questions that come up and included them in the journey map: There are several roadmapping products out there. Which one is best? I don’t have time to research every solution and read details. How will LIKE.TG integrate with existing project management tools within my organization? After signing up, customers are invited to take the product tour, participate in a webinar, and watch our video tutorials. In addition, we message them in the support chat to let them know we’re here if they have any questions. After that, users are on their own to explore the product. Employees at LIKE.TG who regularly chat with customers share that users report having different needs when getting started. While some users are ready to dive in by starting from scratch, many new customers often ask for templates or samples to get a sense for how a roadmap could be used for their particular situation. Other customers want an easy way to import their data from third party project management tools like JIRA or Pivotal Tracker. Our team thought, “Why not provide roadmap samples and make importing data accessible to users from day one during the onboarding process?” From the large number of team accounts, we know that users don’t typically create roadmaps in silos, but often do so in collaboration with their team. Looking through our customer database, we found a lot current free trial users who work at the same company and are evaluating LIKE.TG separately. In addition to analyzing our customer database, we looked at key usage metrics and discovered that a large percentage of users who purchase LIKE.TG frequently share roadmaps with others. We hypothesized that facilitating collaboration during the signup process by allowing users to invite colleagues would increase total customer engagement and awareness of LIKE.TG while getting increased buy-in from their team to justify the purchase. During our research for this project, the LIKE.TG team conducted tests on usertesting.com and ran participants through the entire sign-up flow, allowing them to explore the various areas of the product. After each test, we surveyed them and asked, “What onboarding formats do you like best in order to get started with a new software application?” The multiple choice answers included: Video Tutorials Contextual Tool Tips Educational Emails Live Chat I prefer no onboarding process The majority of users chose video tutorials and contextual tool tips. We also got usage data that the videos we send through the support chat don’t get a lot of attention. The team realized that embedding the videos in the product tour could potentially improve the customer’s learning while at the same time encouraging them to explore the interface. From surveying several hundred customers who didn’t purchase a paid plan after their free trial expired, we discovered that a large percentage of users who didn’t purchase LIKE.TG said it was because they felt they didn’t have enough time to evaluate the product. Today, we don’t do a good job of making it clear to customers how many days are left in their free trial and we don’t present an obvious way to upgrade to a paid account. We hypothesized that users’ free trials were expiring without them realizing it and decided to experiment with different approaches to this problem. Making the Customer Journey Map Actionable In my experience, stakeholders often look at a customer journey map and say, “This a great visual, but how am I supposed to use this?” That’s a great question. In our case, as soon as the LIKE.TG customer journey map was complete, the team took the insights we gathered and added them to our “First Time User Experience” roadmap. Putting the opportunities into the Planning Board helped us weigh the benefits and costs of each item. We defined our benefit categories as “Faster customer success in app” with a weight of 30 and “Increase engagement” with a weight of 20. We then defined our cost categories as “Dev team involvement” with a weight of 35 and “Other team involvement” with a weight of 15 giving us a total score of 100. Once we added our opportunities to the Planning Board and defined our cost and benefit categories, we scored the costs and benefits of each item on a scale of 1-5. We then prioritized each item according to its total score. (Tip: we regularly use Google Hangouts for our meetings and discovered an easy way to vote on the ranking for each item by simultaneously entering our scores into the Google Hangouts chat box.) After scoring each item, we moved the top 4 items to the roadmap and set about adding these items to our product backlog for future experimentation. Reflections on the Customer’s Journey LIKE.TG offers lots of flexibility to customers, but customers still need some targeted guidance based on their unique needs when they’re first getting started. With some tweaks to the process of guiding customers on day one, I believe LIKE.TG can improve overall user engagement and ultimately increase its conversion rate of free trial users to purchased plan customers. In summary, here are a few of the opportunities we discovered from the journey mapping process: Include FAQs on the sign up page Allow users to invite team members during sign up Embed video tutorials in the product tour Provide sample roadmaps from the outset Allow users to import their data right after signing up Add a friendly “Subscribe Now” button in the interface Display an indicator of how many days are left in the free trial Final Thoughts on the Journey Mapping Process There is no one correct way to create a journey map. It depends on variables such as the stakeholders involved, the UX expert facilitating the process, and of course, the business’s product or service that is being mapped. Tweet This: “As designers and product managers, we must walk a fine line between educating users while not overwhelming them.” How your customers use your product is rarely straightforward. As designers and product managers, we must walk a fine line between educating first time users while not overwhelming them with too much information. Getting people through the process from signing up to try your product all the way to becoming a paying customer doesn’t always happen smoothly. But, spending time to learn as much as you can about your users’ goals and how they’re using (or not using) your product makes for happy customers and better business. When used correctly, customer journey maps can be an effective tool in facilitating that process.

I was recently featured on a Pragmatic Marketing webinar about how product managers can become thought leaders. There was a very active QA at the end of my presentation, and I thought I’d elaborate on some of my answers in this post. Thought leadership encompasses both internal leadership in your company and external leadership in your market. As a product manager, it’s your job to drive the product vision and to be a subject matter expert in your domain. Tweet This: “As a product manager, it’s your job to drive the product vision and to be a subject matter expert in your domain.” You can be a thought leader within your company by producing a strategic product roadmap, advocating for your product vision, and focusing on innovation. Likewise, you can be a thought leader in your market by writing, speaking at conferences, and growing a social media following. Here are some tips for getting started. What tips can you share on getting invitations to speak or finding people who need speakers? Start small by speaking at local meetups, and then work your way up to getting invited to speak at larger conferences. Through this “scaffolding” you can establish your reputation and hone your speaking skills. I think that when larger conferences are evaluating speakers, they’re looking for a track record — they’re looking for people who have done it before and who have a certain amount of credibility. Of course, it also helps to have done some writing and to propose an interesting topic. But you really need to have your work done ahead of time in terms of practicing your public speaking skills and having some smaller events under your belt. Also, I want to make this point for those of you who are a little bit wary of public speaking: Thought leadership doesn’t mandate that you speak publicly. There are lots of outlets to get your message out, including writing and social media, that can help you establish yourself as a thought leader without necessarily speaking at conferences. As a thought leader, do you believe you need to have a biased opinion and not just parrot research? If so, how do we balance that against the corporate mandate to be non-controversial? Most of the thought leaders that I know have opinions and have a distinct voice. Often thought leaders are characters — people naturally gravitate towards those who take a stance. This doesn’t mean you need to necessarily choose topics that are incredibly controversial or that your company is going to object to, but you should try to take a position. And I think you can strike the right balance. I think it’s very possible for you to take interesting positions and not just toe the company line, while also not being too controversial or inappropriate. With LIKE.TG, for example, we took certain positions about product roadmaps in our book. There are so many different ways of creating product roadmaps, and there are so many different ways of prioritizing, but we have beliefs about certain ways of doing it. That’s a common thread throughout the book — there is definitely a viewpoint in it. I think opinions make for more interesting reading, and in our case, they help the book stand out in the market among all of the other content on roadmapping. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); How do you measure the ROI of thought leadership? How do track your impact on sales? It’s hard to do. I worked on a software product that was marketed toward CFOs — it was a way to organize and safely store sensitive documents, primarily for mergers and acquisitions. A lot of our marketing effort was spent speaking at industry conferences about the benefits of securing your documents. Ultimately, our activities certainly benefited the product, but it was really hard to correlate them to sales because the leads would eventually come in through different channels. You wouldn’t have proper attribution from those educational marketing efforts. AppFolio, another SaaS company I worked at, is the same way. They routinely conduct meetups where they invite property managers (both customers and prospects) to have lunch and learn about something interesting in the industry. Everyone believes that these events benefit the product, but again, it’s very hard to tie them back to sales results. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do these types of events though. Ultimately it’s the right approach — educating your market is the right thing to do. How do you execute a thought leadership role in an industry that is dominated by analysts? Analysts take a very conservative and traditional approach to thought leadership — that’s through writing papers, speaking at conferences, and so on. There are so many opportunities for you to take advantage of new mediums that analysts aren’t utilizing. I’m talking about social media — I’m talking answering questions on Quora or writing blog posts on Medium. Tweet This: “How do you execute on a thought leadership role in an industry that is dominated by analysts?” Analysts are also often very horizontal — they cover a wide range of your industry. So there’s an opportunity for you to specialize in a particular area — in any industry, there are a number of sub-markets and point solutions for you to specialize in. Then, you can promote your content through channels that the analysts aren’t using. I guarantee you that analysts aren’t answering questions on Quora. There are definitely opportunities for you to differentiate yourself, and in a sense, be more cutting-edge than analysts. I have very specialized knowledge in my domain, and I’m great one-on-one and off-the-cuff. I’m willing to speak at events, but presentations are not my strong point. What are some things I can do to work on this? Many years ago, I participated in Toastmasters. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Toastmasters, it’s a great organization to hone your public speaking skills — it’s not the only group of it’s kind out there, but it’s one that I’m familiar with. In Toastmasters you give 10 different talks over time, and you learn different techniques you can use to speak publicly. It helps you with everything from the content you speak about, to your speaking style, to even the way that you stand. I encourage you to take advantage of groups like Toastmasters — they’re a great place to start, and they’re low commitment. Plus you’re among friends and people give you constructive feedback.

We recently teamed up with Pivotal Tracker and Notion to host a product management networking event in Los Angeles called “Product Stack”. Over drinks and snacks at General Assembly’s brand new downtown location, we discussed tools and techniques with talented product managers from a variety of industries. The focus of the event was on how product managers can plan, execute and measure their way to better products. The “product stack,” similar to a development stack of commonly used technologies for developers, is meant to be an ever-evolving toolkit — composed of both literal software tools and figurative tools, like prioritization models and communication best practices — to help product managers be more successful at every stage of the product development cycle. We plan to hold more Product Stack events in the near future and to continue growing our toolbox. To start, we’re hosting a joint Product Stack webinar together with product leaders from Pivotal and Notion on March 15th — you can register here. Suzanne Abate, CEO of The Development Factory and host of 100 PM (a popular product management podcast), moderated our LA event and interviewed representatives from each of the three companies about the problem that their product helps solve. Jim Semick, one of our co-founders, discussed how LIKE.TG started after interviewing over 70 product managers and learning that communicating the roadmap was a common challenge. Below is the video (and full transcript, if you prefer reading) of Jim and Suzanne’s conversation. (You can also check out Suzanne’s interview with Pivotal Tracker GM, Dan Podsedly on the Pivotal Tracker blog.) Also in the interview: Benefits of doing exhaustive market validation before writing a single line of code Why we eat our own dog food at LIKE.TG How to stay agile — even when you’re an enterprise-level PM Full Transcript Suzanne Abate (SA): Jim Semick, welcome. Jim Semick (JS): Thank you. SA: Thank you for joining us. You are the Co-Founder of ProductPlan. What’s LIKE.TG? JS: LIKE.TG is web-based product roadmap software. We have companies all over the world using our software to visualize their product roadmap. SA: It’s interesting that you built a planning software because as I understand it, you spent a lot of time planning what kind of business you were going to build. I’m talking a little bit about the journey that you and Greg took to arrive at ProductPlan. Can you share that story here with our audience? JS: Sure. I’ve been in product management a new product development for almost 20 years. I was the first product manager for GoToMyPC and GoToMeeting, both Citrix products. Then I was part of the founding team of a company called AppFolio, which is based out of Santa Barbara, and they do B2B property management software. In all those roles, I was at the very early stages of figuring out what the product was going to be. I wrote the original PRD, for example, for GoToMeeting. At that point, you have a blank sheet of paper. You can envision whatever you want the product to be. I have a background in customer development and new product development, and in figuring out what new products are going to be. Who are the customers? What are the pain points that you’re going to solve? What are the features that it has to have? What’s the go-to-market strategy? When we decided to start LIKE.TG, it was essentially a blank sheet of paper, and it wasn’t even called ProductPlan. We didn’t have a name for the company. We had few ideas knocking around in our head, and based on my experience from starting and launching other products, we did extensive market validation. Some would say it was pretty exhaustive. We actually interviewed 70 different product managers to figure out what that product was going to be. I’m a little bit detailed I suppose. I documented every one of those interviews, and asked people if we could record the interviews, and had my matrices, and so on. I tried to figure out exactly what the problem was that we were solving. And so that was the beginning of ProductPlan. We actually had gone through this exhaustive market validation process before we wrote a single line of code. Unlike the lean startup method, where you start writing code, and then putting that in front of people, and scrapping it, and pivoting, and moving onto something else, we decided to do it right from the first moment. But before that point, Greg and I talked a lot about what we wanted to have in terms of a company. We talked about the culture that we wanted to build. We talked about the size of company that we wanted. We talked about what type of product we wanted to build. We talked about whether it would be B2B or B2C. So we had that framework before we started picking product ideas to validate. We went about it a little bit differently than I think a lot of startups go about it. I think a lot of that is because Greg and I have been around for a while and we’ve launched products before. We had an idea of how we wanted to do this ourselves. SA: You’re a practical gentlemen. I think what’s interesting about it for me is that you hear so much about the story of somebody who’s got a $2 billion idea. And the only thing between them and this $2 billion idea is a company to build it out. And then they’re going to be rich, and they’re going to sell it to Facebook. That’s rarely the actual story, but a lot of people start with the idea, and then if they’re lucky, figure out that it’s a salable, scalable idea. In your case, you said let’s just work backwards from what the market actually needs and create something compelling. JS: Exactly. The original validation that we started didn’t have anything to do with product roadmaps. We did our pivoting very early on in the process. Our original concept was another product for product managers to help them track their customer interviews, and to help them catalog and communicate the learnings that they were collecting. And while the market said, that’s an interesting idea, it soon became evident that the bigger pain point was around communicating the strategy, and around communicating the product roadmap. And so we caught on to that fairly early on, and did our pivoting early. SA: What is the primary problem that LIKE.TG is actually seeking to solve? Maybe I’ll preface it by saying, for the benefit of anyone in the room who doesn’t know what roadmapping is, what’s a high level description of roadmapping, and how does your product help? JS: Most companies have some sort of a document or some way of communicating to stakeholders, and to executives, and even to customers what it is that they’ll be building. Sometimes these are PowerPoint presentations, and sometimes they’re spreadsheets, but there is some product that they’re using. Sometimes it’s Google Docs. Every product manager in every company has a stakeholder — whether it’s your end customer, or whether it’s the CEO, or whether it’s the VP of Product, you need to communicate with those folks. And so the key challenge is that the current tools out there don’t do a good job of communicating the why. They don’t do a good job of explaining, why are we doing this in the first place? I also think that, in a lot of organizations, there’s this preconceived notion that because it’s on the roadmap it’s the right thing to do. The executives might sit around the table and say, okay, this is what we’re going to be building. That gets announced to all of the employees, and maybe the customers, and maybe the investors. And then the product doesn’t do very well. So what we’re trying to do is connect the strategy of why you’re doing something with the end result, which is building x, y, and z feature. That’s what our product does; the problem that we solve is that we help you through that process. We help you communicate the strategy effectively to stakeholders in a way that they understand. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); SA: You brought up the simplicity of tools. A lot of what we’re here talking about tonight is tools, right? Using tools to be effective as product managers, but sometimes, we don’t have the right tools. We’re using Google Docs, or we’re using spreadsheets. So what are some of the specific challenges that you’ve seen arise in the context of roadmapping from not having the right process? JS: Yeah, and just to be clear, I’m not plugging ProductPlan. I think there are a lot of different ways of communicating the strategy. But I think some of the deficiencies that we caught on to early in our market validation process were that a lot of product managers, especially those who are new or maybe don’t have formal product management training, create a list of features — or worse, they have the backlog in their ticket tracking system — and they consider that to be the roadmap. From our standpoint, and from the perspective of seasoned product managers that we spoke with early on, that’s not an effective way of communicating. You get lost in the weeds too easily. You can’t see the forest for the trees. You aren’t able to take those details, especially those detailed stories, and roll them up into the big picture. So that was a problem and a pain point that we caught on to really early. The product managers that have been around the block know how to do it. They know how to roll up features into the theme level, for example. They know how to say, okay we’re going to be implementing these features, and this is the reason why we’re doing this; this is strategically why it’s better for our customers, or better for the product, or better for the company. SA: Can you share with us how LIKE.TG goes about roadmapping. What is your process? Take us through it. JS: Our internal process? SA: Yeah, we want all your proprietary information. JS: Sure, okay. SA: And then we want to leverage it. JS: Yeah, just so you know, we do eat our own dog food. We use our own product. We have our own product roadmap that communicates what we’re going to be doing over about the next six months or so, and it constantly updates. I think some of you here work for larger companies, and that roadmapping process is probably longer term. The most common length of roadmap that we see when we’re talking to our customers is about a year. But, LIKE.TG has been around about four years, and we’re a smaller, more agile organization, so we tend to look over about the next six months. We just went through a planning process for 2017 and communicated that to all the folks who work for us. Everything was described in terms of bigger level themes. SA: What’s an example of a theme at a big level? JS: A theme might be an API. For example, we know that integrations are important for our customers; getting data in and out of various systems is very important, and so we’re going to be developing an API. It’s in development, but we don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like at the end of 2017. Saying exactly what we’re going to be building is not really the best way to go about it for a company like ours because we are constantly learning. Our roadmap should be constantly evolving. We should be working with our customers every day to really understand the pain that we’re solving. So, that’s a little bit about our big-picture planning process. And then we also use our internal prioritization tool, we call it the Planning Board, and it’s basically a scoring matrix. We can put different items on the scoring matrix and look at them on value versus cost scale. I think a lot of product managers use some sort of a framework or a scoring mechanism to rank items. How many of you use a spreadsheet? SA: Show of hands for spreadsheets. JS: Okay, I see a few. SA: Get those sheepish hands up. It’s a good tool. JS: There are a dozen different ways of doing this. There are a dozen different frameworks that you can use to prioritize, but most product managers go through, at least in their heads, this value versus cost matrix. Of course, you want to be developing the things that are highest value and lowest cost. That’s the low-hanging fruit. So we use our product, which kind of bakes that into the process. That’s a little bit about our internal process for prioritizing. But, I’ll tell you, we still don’t know at the end of the year exactly what we’re going to be building because it’s constantly evolving. SA: It’s interesting, you brought up before that people rely on the backlog to sort of be “the thing”. This is something that comes up on the 100 PM podcast a lot — the challenge for product managers to weave between the strategic role, the the forward looking role, and then the more more tactical, execution based role. If you’re too much in the backlog, you’re only seeing as far out as what’s going to ship next week, next month, or whatever it is. And as you mentioned, you’re agile, and you’re a smaller shop, so I’m curious about your thoughts for larger organizations. How do they avoid falling into that trap of being stuck in “well, this is what we planned” mode? I’ve talked to enterprise product managers who have roadmaps that have hooks into three and five years out. I’m like, I don’t even know what I’m doing for dinner tonight. JS: I know, that boggles my mind. SA: So what advice would you offer, or what can you say to enterprise-level product managers as a tips, I suppose, for staying agile in the planning process? JS: A lot of product managers have so many things that they need to accomplish during the day — so many fires that they need to put out, a backlog that needs to be prioritized, an engineer standing at their desk asking clarification questions. There’s a tendency to fall into that tactical mode, and I’ve been guilty of it myself, where it’s really hard to come up for air. I find that baking customer development and customer discovery into your daily process helps, and making sure that you’re continually engaging with customers. Whether that’s somebody scheduling a customer call on your behalf, or whether it’s you reaching out to customers or sitting in on calls with the customer success team or whoever usually engages with the customers. I think continually listening to that constant stream of feedback from the customers is the best way to get perspective. And I know, it’s really hard. I think probably all of you have that fighting fires mentality. And that’s one of the wonderful things about being a product manager, you can have your fingers in so many different things. But it’s also a curse because everybody looks to you for the answer. I think that keeping tabs on the customers is a really important thing. And I think another thing is letting go a little bit — not letting other people rely on you for the answer all the time. I’ve been in that mode myself in the past where you’re seen as the single point of truth for everything. Letting that go and letting dev teams make their own decisions, and if your corporate culture allows it, allowing the UX team to take on more responsibility — I think that’s another important thing that you can do. By doing those things, you can bring it up a level and be a little more strategic about what you’re doing. SA: You have been around for four years, do you consider yourself a start up still at this point? JS: Yeah absolutely. I feel that even though we’re selling into enterprises — we have customers like Intuit using our products — we’re still very much a startup in two senses. One is that we are very agile. We have the big picture plan of four big things we want to accomplish this year, but how we get there is still TBD, and the exact features that we build to get there are TBD. I think the other thing is that Greg and I have a vision for the product. We have a long term vision for where this product needs to be, years down the road. There’s still more to do, there’s so much more to accomplish to fulfill that vision. And so from those perspectives, I think we’re definitely a startup. SA: I’m curious how the landscape has changed? When you did come to market four years ago, were there other products like LIKE.TG? JS: Yeah, right about the time that we came on the scene some other products started to come out — products specifically for product managers. And since we’ve launched, there have been other products that do product roadmapping, and really that’s okay with me — SA: You’re going to allow competitors? That’s generous. JS: I’m okay with it; I’m not freaked out by any of it. When we were validating GoToMeeting, there were 70 other online meeting products on the market already. With GoToMeeting, we were still able to disrupt the market with a product that was easier to use and had a unique pricing model that hadn’t yet been introduced into the marketplace. I actually think that competition does so many things. It shows you that there is a market, for one, and it gives you an opportunity to differentiate. I think that with our company and our product, we have some unique differentiators, when you compare it to other products. The landscape is changing, but in a very positive way. And most importantly, I think it’s changing a lot for product managers. How many product managers do we have here who have been at it for more than five years? For those of you who’ve been in the industry for a while, you’ve seen the difference. You’ve seen all of these new products coming on the market, and you’ve seen organizations like General Assembly that are providing more education for product managers. I think that it’s a very positive thing for all of us when there’s more education, and when there are more tools and products available to help us do a better job. The important things that we do aren’t managing backlogs or creating product roadmaps or things like that, but rather thinking strategically. It’s about engaging with customers and understanding customer pain. Those sorts of things are the important things. So anything that product managers have at their disposal to do a better job at being strategic, I think is a positive thing for the industry and for the occupation. SA: And market research is so much a part of the role. It’s not that you come out into the market and then you can close your mind. There’s always someone lurking around the corner with the next disruptive idea. I think the challenge as it pertains to roadmapping and product vision really is, on one hand, you want to make sure that you are staying current and that you are not being disrupted. And on the other hand, you want to make sure you are not being blown about by every wind. “Well, my competitor just built this feature, so we should build it too.” How do you manage that? How do you differentiate yourselves or hold true to your vision despite whatever your competitors are doing? JS: Yeah, that’s a great question because we’re faced with that challenge every day. A small example is that we are a product management software, and we think of ourselves as this strategic layer on top of project management software — products like Pivotal Tracker, for example, which manage the more detailed tasks that need to happen to develop products. But we’re always asked for project management-oriented features, and so it takes a lot of willpower on our part to say no. We want to continue to maintain what we’re good at, which is visualizing the strategy, and we want to keep that focus. It’s kind of a constant battle for us to maintain that.

Technology and design are in the midst of an exciting crossroads, where businesses are becoming aware that the products and services they provide, no matter how innovative, are competing just as much in user experience as they are in functionality. The early proliferation of dazzling consumer experiences has bred a new generation of buyers who expect even their business software to look, work, and feel the same way as the other tools and experiences they’ve come to depend on and love. Good design is good business, and over the past 5 years or so startups and established companies alike have been scrambling. Hiring a UX designer is now more important than ever to stay competitive. The problem for most companies is that, while we wouldn’t ask a product manager to hire an engineer or vice versa, these are often the groups tasked with hiring a UX designer to join the team. These groups, if being honest, may not truly understand how a UX designer will help them stay competitive, and commonly misinterpret design as simply applying a pleasing color palette or carefully selecting the right font. Businesses without an established design practice often lack the definition or understanding of design roles, leaving product development teams with a missed opportunity to incorporate design as a strategic differentiator. So, if design isn’t about aesthetics and font, then what is it? In short, good design means your user doesn’t have to think. It means the system is easy to learn, remember, and delightfully exceeds their expectations in speed and reliability. It means that every next step is carefully anticipated, building a lasting emotional connection between the user and the system that is based on trust. Great design breeds loyalty in ways your users will struggle to articulate, expressing only the sentiment that “it just gets me.” To hire successfully then, as with any position, it’s critical to focus on the outcome and not just the role. Understanding the breadth and complexity of what makes for “good design” will better position the non-designer to pinpoint the must-have qualities of a designer to join their team. Design is a Practice, Not a Function The first (and very common) mistake that businesses make in executing a strong design strategy is to focus on building the product first, with the goal of having a designer come in later to improve the user experience. But design is a practice in much the same way product management or engineering is. Having a designer come in at the end of a project to “polish” it is like hiring a product manager at the end to just work on market positioning for the product, or asking an engineer to “just hook up the back end”. It’s an all too common story for talented UX designers to be turned off from a job interview when they realize that what the company actually wants is a graphic designer. This isn’t suggesting that graphic design is somehow unimportant — it is, in fact, a hugely important aspect of a strong design strategy — rather, it’s indicative of a blatant lack of knowledge of the UX designer’s field of expertise. The misconception of “UX designer” is understandable given that it’s sometimes a heated debate even in the design community, so it makes sense that non-designers would be doubly confused. But after hours of researching the business and crafting their resume and portfolio to demonstrate how their expertise can have an impact, it can still be insulting to realize that the business didn’t even attempt to understand the role for which they had advertised. Though opinions vary, there is consensus that “user experience design” is a general term that encompasses many specific disciplines. This was made famous by Dan Saffer’s Venn Diagram, The Disciplines of User Experience Design: To simplify this and apply it to software and other digital products, think about a strong user experience design practice as one that embraces these five distinct disciplines: user research, information architecture, interaction design, visual design, and UI engineering. This illustration outlines each discipline accompanied by its various tools and deliverables. For the non-designer, it’s not necessary to have an in-depth understanding of each UX discipline. But it is necessary to have some awareness of these disciplines to best inform what to look for when hiring to establish a design practice. The first designer or UX agency you hire on the team will be critical to this evolution, so it’s important to invest in someone whose expertise covers a wide gamut of these disciplines. And as the business grows, so should the design practice. Use the scale of UX disciplines to round out the talents of a growing UX team to ensure the right emphasis in the areas that will help great design be a strategic differentiator for your business. 5 Qualities to Look for When Hiring a UX Designer: To ignite a strong design strategy for your business, your first design hire should be able partner with you to own and execute that strategy. Assuming you only have budget for one designer, then it’s also important that this person has the experience and portfolio that demonstrates their strengths as an individual contributor. Following are five qualities of a designer who can make an immediate impact as well as nurture the growth of a solid design practice for your business. Glutton for Empathy Any designer’s core skill is their ability to empathize with users so they can anticipate their expected interactions with the product. But great designers understand that, while their work focuses primarily on the end user as the consumer, engineers and product managers are also consumers of their user insights. So, designers’ ability to empathize and distill information into meaningful and relatable stories extends beyond the interface design all the way down to building relationships and trust within the teams they are supporting. Business and Strategic Thinker In some ways, your first designer should be indistinguishable from a product manager in the way they approach problem discovery. A good design leader understands how to prioritize user needs with business goals and can balance the natural tension between the business, technology, and the user. Oftentimes the role of balancing user vs. business needs falls on the shoulders of the product manager, and in a tough spot it’s usually the business that wins. But a great designer is eager to forge a partnership with their product manager and engineering leads, freeing each other up to lean on their individual biases to allow healthy debate and more rounded decision-making. Teacher and Facilitator Designers want to be respected for their unique craft, but great design leaders refuse to hoard their design skills and won’t be protective or territorial about the process or their design team. Great UX designers are eager to teach and share in their craft, and they will often do this through the evangelism of design thinking. In practice, you’ll know you have a great designer in place when they are facilitating design workshops with engineers, or if they simply roll a whiteboard up to their team and hand the marker to an engineer and ask him or her to sketch an idea. To learn more about tools experts use in product design teams, watch this recent webinar: 点击播放声音 @keyframes VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } @keyframes VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } .volume__small-wave { animation: VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite; opacity: 0; } .volume__large-wave { animation: VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite .3s; opacity: 0; } 55:49●●●●●●●AgendaBackgroundTeam StructureDesign ProcessArtifactsProduct ComparisonLive QA #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_75_wrapper .w-css-reset{font-size:14px;} #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_75_wrapper 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.w-css-reset-button-important{border-radius:0!important;color:#fff!important;} Continue WatchingFirst Name*Last Name*Job Title*Email*LIKE.TG is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy, and we’ll only use your personal information to administer your account and to provide the products and services you requested from us. 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For more information on how to unsubscribe, our privacy practices, and how we are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy, please review our Privacy Policy.#wistia_grid_75_wrapper{-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;box-sizing:content-box;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;height:100%;position:relative;text-align:left;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_75_wrapper *{-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;box-sizing:content-box;} #wistia_grid_75_above{position:relative;} #wistia_grid_75_main{display:block;height:100%;position:relative;} #wistia_grid_75_behind{height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;top:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_75_center{height:100%;overflow:hidden;position:relative;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_75_front{display:none;height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;top:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_75_top_inside{position:absolute;left:0;top:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_75_top{width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0;left:0;} #wistia_grid_75_bottom_inside{position:absolute;left:0;bottom:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_75_bottom{width:100%;position:absolute;top:0;left:0;} #wistia_grid_75_left_inside{height:100%;position:absolute;left:0;top:0;} #wistia_grid_75_left{height:100%;position:absolute;right:0;top:0;} #wistia_grid_75_right_inside{height:100%;right:0;position:absolute;top:0;} #wistia_grid_75_right{height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;top:0;} #wistia_grid_75_below{position:relative;} Strong User Researcher It’s not uncommon for designers to be a little rough around the edges when it comes to user research. Some designers, while they can design a beautiful screen layout, struggle to design structured research such as feedback loops, surveys, and usability tests without being influenced by their own bias to the design. A strong design leader can separate their ego from the raw user feedback because they are more driven by getting it right for the customer than receiving personal validation on their designs. They also put their facilitation skills to work in their research by making it a collaborative effort and inviting engineering and product management to learn through observation of usability tests and participation in qualitative interviews. Student of Agile/Lean UX The toughest spot a designer may find themselves in is as a bottleneck to their team’s ability to make fast decisions and move forward quickly. A designer’s empathic connection to the customer innately causes a sort of fear of lasting negative first impressions about a product or feature that is still a work-in-progress. This fear can be hugely detrimental to the team if their work isn’t being constantly validated with end users. But the fear can be hugely beneficial if leveraged to help teams think strategically about how to collect feedback and iterate in a way that will create lasting positive first impressions from customers. It’s important that the first designer you hire has the experience to put their fear in check and use it to encourage thoughtful iterations and smart rollout plans to achieve the desired results. Download How Agile Product Managers Can Build Better Products ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'b4eb5c0b-bf4b-4a7e-9b0a-75f92005c127', {}); A Lasting Design Strategy A strong design strategy begins with an understanding of the impact and outcome of great design, and puts the right talent in place in order to reach that outcome. To achieve this, the non-designer must first be humble enough to admit that they might not fully understand value and role of a designer, then be diligent in learning more about the craft for which they’ve been charged with hiring for. By investing in hiring a UX designer with an acumen for business, this first hire can act as a partner to establish a healthy design practice for the long term. The role of design transcends what looks good and builds and emotional connection to the end user because it also feels good to use the product. A business’ ability to leverage design to tap into the latent needs of its users is what will drives loyalty, and leaves competitors scratching their heads. J.J. Kercher shares more of her product and design leadership thoughts in Spotlights: J.J. Kercher “Return focus back to the customer and product”, below.

I recently did a webinar with Pragmatic Marketing on the topic of thought leadership for product managers. One of the most interesting questions I received from our audience was actually not about thought leadership at all, but about about internal product advocacy. The question was essentially, “How do you win executive buy-in to work on an innovative idea that risks cannibalizing some of your existing product line?” Although a portion of my webinar — called How Thought Leadership Can Elevate Your Products and Career — was about becoming a better internal product advocate, the majority of my focus was on why it’s so valuable for product managers to establish themselves as public thought leaders in their industries. That portion of the webinar unveiled a lot of great questions as well, and a lively discussion. But that attendee’s question got me thinking about what I believe is an important part of product management: Learning how to be an effective internal product advocate. Yet in all of our discussions about the many important roles of product managers — learning about customers, knowing the competitive landscape, communicating with stakeholders and developers, championing their products publicly — I think we often forget just how vital it is to champion those products internally as well, across the entire company. As a product manager, you are your product’s internal champion—whether you realize it or not Another interesting insight that came out of our Pragmatic Marketing webinar was that more than 60% of attendees, whom we polled in real-time, said that it was the product manager who most often promoted the product internally in their organizations. In fact, the next most common internal product advocates — marketing and sales — were cited by just 16% of attendees, while product executives were cited by only 12% of attendees. This tracks with my own experience in product management, where I’ve helped to launch several products. It’s also consistent with what I’ve learned as a founder at LIKE.TG, where I’ve had the chance to work with product managers across dozens of industries. Tweet This: “As a product manager, the responsibility falls on you to be your product’s internal champion.” The bottom line is this: As a product manager, the responsibility will likely fall to you to be your product’s internal champion. Which means if you don’t advocate regularly and persuasively for your products across your organization, your products will likely have no internal champion. Here’s why that can be detrimental for your products and your company. Why your products need an internal advocate Ultimately, being an internal advocate for your products will help you build better products. As a product manager, you are often facing competing agendas within your company, budgetary and resource constraints of your own, and general inertia across your company during the long process of bringing a product to market. By being an ongoing advocate of your product with executives, developers, the marketing and sales departments, the customer success team, your investors, and other relevant groups within your organization, you will create a much better chance that your product will receive the benefit of everyone’s A-game throughout its development. As we’ve asserted in previous posts here at LIKE.TG, like this one, it’s easy for everyone to feel enthusiastic and optimistic during an initial strategy meeting. But that early-stage excitement will inevitably wane, and it will then fall to someone — that means you, the internal product advocate — to maintain the advocacy and cheerleading throughout the development process that keeps everyone pumped for the product’s eventual release. Another reason an internal product advocate is so vital to the product’s success is to help ensure everyone involved stays focused on the big-picture strategic goals — and teams don’t get lost in the tactical details and minutiae. Because you can’t oversee every aspect of your product’s development, you will need to trust your various teams to make some strategic decisions in real time — and the more you are there to advocate internally for your product’s vision and strategic objectives, the more likely those other teams’ decisions will reflect those bigger-picture goals. How to be an effective internal product advocate So how do you pull it off? How can you become an effective product advocate within your company? Here are some suggestions. 1. Share with your company your product’s high-level strategic vision. When you speak with colleagues across your organization about your product in terms of features, you’ll have a hard time generating and maintaining enthusiasm — particularly among those groups who don’t understand all of the details of those features, or your market’s need for them. So instead, try to keep your communications across your organization higher-level — talk about the market problems your products will solve, the value added to your customers, and how the product will earn your company market share, revenue and a leadership role in the industry. Also, if the teams working on your products push back on your objectives or requests, and you can tie those requests back to the product’s larger-picture strategic vision, you’ll have a better chance of bringing those teams over to your side. 2. Tailor your product advocacy specifically to the people and teams you’re talking with. At LIKE.TG, in our conversations about roadmapping with product managers, we often find that executive stakeholders don’t want to hear about a product’s details. That’s just one of many examples of why it’s so important to tailor your conversations about your products to the groups you’re speaking with. You’ll be a much more effective advocate for your products if you advocate for them in a language that resonates with your audience. When you’re talking with sales or marketing, for example, you’ll want to emphasize how your product will help solve problems for the personas they’ll be selling and marketing to. For your executives, on the other hand, your product advocacy should emphasize the product’s eventual revenue to the company, or its ability to bring your company into new markets. This is also why we at LIKE.TG are big advocates of visual, web-based product roadmaps. When you’re speaking with several different audiences — developers, executives, etc. — you don’t want to have only one view of your roadmap. You want to be able to quickly change the focus and the level of detail based on who you’re talking to. Build a Visual Product Roadmap ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'a81908bd-d7dd-4be2-9d7e-cb09f3f90137', {}); 3. Make a habit of weaving product advocacy into everything you do. Becoming an effective internal product advocate means you’re always an internal product advocate — not only when you’re called on to speak. You have to make it a part of your job to be on the lookout for opportunities to champion your product across your company. And you can find these opportunities everywhere. Tweet This: “Make a habit of weaving product advocacy into everything you do as a product manager.” Let’s say you find a blog post or industry research report about the fact that your customer persona is on the rise, or that a problem that your product will ultimately solve is growing. Copy people across your company — your development team, your sales team, your leadership team. Let them know, “Hey, looks like we’re onto something here!” Don’t expect your teams to stay internally motivated from day to day. Life gets in the way of that. So use these pieces of market data wherever you can to help keep your teams’ enthusiasm levels high, and give them the day-to-day incentive they’ll need to keep doing their best work, during the long period between that exciting kickoff meeting… and release day. 4. Spread good product news across your company every chance you get. Another great way to keep your internal teams motivated and enthused about your products is to share good news about those products as often as you can. If your sales team closes a big deal, send that news out to the company. If your product gets an honorable mention in the trade or business media, share that across the company. And if you find a positive comment or quote about your product from an actual user? For goodness sake, jump up on your desk and shout it to everyone within earshot. (Or just email or Slack it to everyone.) Hearing that your product is succeeding out in the marketplace, solving real problems for your market and winning fans among your customer personas, puts a human touch on what otherwise might often feel like abstract work for your teams. Let them know that the work they’re doing is making a positive difference in people’s lives. 5. Hold regular product meetings to keep everyone informed. Often the simple act of bringing everyone together to discuss your product’s progress and to remind them about the big-picture strategic goals can provide a tremendous boost in company enthusiasm for the product. One of the things I encourage product managers to do is to hold regular meetings with the various stakeholder groups, such as marketing, sales, customer support, engineering, etc. These get-togethers are also a great chance to give both progress updates and much-needed context to the work everyone is doing. It’s in these meetings, for example, that you can discuss what you’ve learned from your trips out to talk with customers — what your users like about your product, for example, and what they’d really like to see added to it. Again, what you’re doing here is taking what might otherwise feel like a series of abstract disconnected tasks — adding this feature, changing this screen, fixing these bugs — and turning them into important projects that will be improving the way real customers, real people, will be able to work (or play or do whatever your product lets them). I also recommend that product managers record their sessions with customers. This gives them something to show their internal teams back home, and those videos can really help teams put a human face to the problem they’re being asked to solve with their product development work. The more real-world information you can share with your internal teams, the more they’ll have a chance to see the big picture — and the more enthusiasm they’ll be able to bring to their work. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); Advocate, Advocate, Advocate for Your Products! Bringing a product to market successfully is an incredibly challenging balancing act — weighing priorities, limited resources and pressures against other priorities, limited resources and pressures. The more support you can elicit from across your company, the more your disparate teams are aligned in their mission to bring your strategic goals to reality, and the better your chances of a successful product. But that takes internal product advocacy — ongoing championing of your products every chance you get. So if I had to sum up my advice here in one sentence, it would be this: Always be advocating. Have you found other methods of internal product advocacy that work for you? Please share them below.

This post is part of a series of interviews that we are conducting with product leaders across various industries. In this interview series, product leaders share their advice with their fellow product managers. We hope this series will shed light on trends and challenges in the profession, and be helpful to new and experienced product managers alike. The following is a conversation with Chris Leckie, Product Design Director at FanDuel, a fantasy sports company. Chris has been at FanDuel for two years — or “two NFLs” as FanDuel employees would say — during which time the company has grown rapidly and implemented new processes to accommodate their distributed teams. Tweet This: “Listen to our interview with Chris Leckie of FanDuel and learn about the state of product design.” We talked to Chris about the maturation of product design as a discipline, and about how FanDuel has transitioned from employing a few siloed designers to embedding designers in their cross-functional teams. We also discussed the skills that make designers successful and some design trends we can expect to see in 2017. Listen to our full conversation and learn what Apple and Uber in have common (hint: they’ve both invested heavily in beautiful user experiences), why Amazon’s Alexa represents the next frontier in design, and much more. Also in this episode: Transitioning from a hands-on design role to a leadership role Building trust and unity when your team is distributed across the Atlantic Why friction between designers and product managers is a good thing Listen to the full interview or, if you prefer, read the transcript below. Full Interview Transcript: LIKE.TG (PP): I’m here with Chris Leckie, Product Design Direction from FanDuel. Chris, thank you so much for being here this evening and doing this interview with us. Chris Leckie (CL): No problem, it’s always my pleasure to be here. PP: Please tell us a bit about yourself and what you do at FanDuel, and give a brief overview of FanDuel. CL: I’m the Product Design Director at FanDuel — that’s traditionally taking control of the design of the products themselves, so that’s the iOS application, Android application, and web application. FanDuel is a fantasy sports company, more specifically, a daily fantasy sports company. And I’m based in the Edinburgh office in Scotland. I think what a lot of people don’t realize about FanDuel is that it was actually co-founded in Scotland before we opened up our New York headquarters. So we’re kind of split up. We have a really unique situation where engineering, product design, a little bit of UX, and project management is in our base and skull on the cross, our two offices in Edinburgh and Glasgow. And then, we have product, marketing, and UX based out of New York. We’ve got customer service in Orlando, and then we’ve got some marketing down in LA as well. So it’s really split across the board, which presents nice opportunities for travel and meeting other people, but also some unique problems that come along with that. Transatlantic relationships and just generally working together. We don’t have the ability to sit together all the time, so we have to adapt our processes a little bit. PP: Very interesting. Being from Europe myself, and living in the US, I have to ask the question: What is more popular on the FanDuel platform? Is it American football or is it European football? CL: Well, I mean, we didn’t actually even do European football until very recently. When I originally joined FanDuel, which is just coming up on two years ago, we only offered American sports, and, at that time, we’d done some market research on the possibility of launching a UK-oriented application. It’s something we’d wanted to do for a while. It’s our home turf. We’d done the American thing and we wanted to open it up a little bit. We did exactly that. We had a separate project. We did an entirely new product, instead of just working on the original code base that we had available. And we launched the EPL, which is the English Premier League, application for iOS, Android, and web in the UK. Subsequently, because we share the same sort of backend, we were able to launch EPL in the States as well. It’s still a minority sport for us. NFL is definitely like our Amazon at Christmas moment. It’s funny, you’ll find a lot of people actually identify themselves and how long they’ve worked for the company by how many NFLs they’ve experienced. So it’s like, how long have you been here? Two NFL’s. PP: Earlier you mentioned about that FanDuel is a very distributed company, and I know FanDuel has grown quite a bit over the last years. How has that growth impacted your team? In particular, the different product managers and other designers that you’re working with? What are some of the processes that you had to put in place in order to successfully collaborate with other stakeholders? CL: It’s a really interesting question. It came with its own unique set of challenges. I think anyone will attest to the fact that growing is difficult. I’m having to deal with that process. I’d like to say that everything went really nice and smoothly for us, but actually, it was quite bumpy. We grew really, really quickly, and we had to work as we were growing to set these processes in place to facilitate growth. I mean, if I use design as an example, when I joined, there were only a couple of product designers on the team. FanDuel, when they were scaling the teams, made a conscious effort to scale engineering and marketing and things like that first of all. They did that because they wanted to insure that they had a company that was able to support a larger design team. When I tell this to designers, they’re like, well, that’s not what I believe — I think you should have a really big design team. A lot of people talk about this engineering/design balance. We didn’t do that, and I think it was the right thing to do. When I joined we had this traditional view of design being this walled garden and it was quite wonderful. They would make some designs, and then they would throw it over the wall to engineering. There was no collaboration. So we knew we needed to fix this. We knew we needed to open up our processes, and this wasn’t going be an overnight fix. But we needed to get immediate things in, so we opened up a variety of different tools. We used Wake, which is effectively like a very strict version of Pinterest where designers can share everything that they’re working on. You needed to share early and you needed to share often, so everyone in the company had access to this. Immediately there was visibility into what was going on. We opened up reviews, and then we started implementing a more stream-based way of working. When I say a stream, a common similarity is with the tribes and squads model. For those that don’t know, effectively it’s a cross-discipline team that is assigned to an area of the business. For instance, we were working on, at that time, private leagues, which we call Friends Mode. It’s effectively a social way of playing on FanDuel that we never really had before. Some of the processes we put in place as well were things like design sprints, and as I mentioned, we have cross-team reviews and we have showcases. All of these things were designed to impact inclusivity and collaboration. And it’s something that we’re still working on. Our streams are getting quite big, so we’re looking at exploring splitting them into two, which is more akin to the tribes and squads model. We’re constantly working on it. I don’t think you’re ever going to have it totally perfect. We’re always willing to change based on our circumstances. PP: I’ve heard about the squad model quite a bit. Actually, we’ve covered it here on the LIKE.TG blog before. Spotify was one of the companies that really promoted the model. How many different squads do you have at FanDuel, and how many different people are part of them, and what types of job functions are part of a squad? CL: At FanDuel we call them streams, but they’re quite similar. I guess a stream would be more applicable to a tribe in the tribes and squads model. I think we have about five streams, off the top of my head, and they change. They could change quarterly, or they could change yearly, based on the company’s OKRs and what we’re trying to achieve. Our social one is probably the longest-running one, because we’re very, very committed to doubling what we started there. We have other ones centered around, for instance, a new sport. We’ve announced that we’re going to be launching golf in the product. And then we have other ones based on back-office compliance, which is a really big thing for us. States set up particular rules that we are being legislated on as a company. We need to ensure that we’re abiding by state law, so our compliance team works to ensure that we are completely compliant in every single state. And then we have some other ones. There’s native revenue, which will work on improving revenue in our native platforms. But, like I said, these can change every quarter so we need to ensure that we have processes in place to facilitate people moving about. PP: So what types of members are part of those streams? It sounds like a designer, and probably people from the development team I would assume? CL: It’s effectively a completely cross-platform team. The way I have the design team set up right now is that I have at least two designers on a stream. And the idea there is that they can work as a unit. There’s always a designer that can work with another designer and they can bounce ideas off of each other. One thing we used to have was a traditional split on mobile versus web. They would work on iOS, iPad, Android, or they would work on a web, but we’ve slowly moved away from that model. The idea now is that a designer will cover everything, so they can really rely on each other to bounce ideas back and forth without having to split up their work in any particular way. Then we have our front-end engineers, backend engineers, a business analyst, a project manager, and a product owner. So it’s effectively that kind of setup, and depending on the stream requirements, we might be more heavily loaded on one rather than the other. PP: I know that before you joined FanDuel, you were working for RightScale, an IT management B2B company. And now you’re working for FanDuel, and ultimately selling to consumers. How does design differ working for a B2B versus a B2C company, if at all? CL: In a lot of ways they’re actually very similar. At the end of the day, you’re trying to design something to accomplish a task for a particular person, an end-user. So there’s always that user-orientated process. But I think the one biggest difference is the access to users, or certainly, that’s been my experience anyway. At FanDuel, we have millions of users and we have users coming into the New York office almost every single day. That gives us a really nice forum for presenting anything we’re thinking about, or anything we’re working on, and getting early feedback. Early feedback is critical to ensuring that we’re building something that actually is for the users. We know if we’re going in the wrong direction very, very quickly. In a B2B business, what we tended to find was that people were incredibly busy, and they bought because they wanted to accomplish a task. Trying to get their time was incredibly difficult, so you didn’t always have the opportunity to speak to people that you wanted to. So, and if I use RightScale as an example, I was working on the analytics application, and we would have CFOs using it. Anything that they could give us would be really beneficial, but you can imagine how busy a CFO is. Getting that feedback was quite difficult, so you had to run on your intuition a lot more. Which was good and bad, I guess. You were more liable to make mistakes. For me, I would say that’s the biggest difference. Fundamental design is quite similar. PP: You talked about customer interviews a little bit, which I assume is probably a very important skill for a designer. If you could only pick one skill, what would you say is the most important skill for a designer to have? CL: There are a few, but if I had to pick one, I would say empathy. The ability to put yourself in the shoes of the user — and it sounds like a very simple thing to do, but proper empathy is actually quite difficult. We’re in a situation — and when I say we, I mean the populace of product managers, product owners, designers, developers, etc. — where we’re in our little bubble of understanding. We don’t actually pick up an application or website and fumble about a little bit until we understand it. Whereas your traditional end-user does. I think it’s easy to say that we can put ourselves in their shoes, and we understand that, but experience tells me that’s not the case. A really good designer is able to do that. And I think it bleeds outside of just empathy for the user’s perspective, and also into empathy for how other people in the company work — how you interact with your team members and understanding their requirements versus your requirements. PP: It sounds like there were a couple more skills that you feel are important for a designer. What were some of the other ones that came to mind when I asked that question? CL: Well, I guess as you step beyond empathy into actually trying to solve a problem, the problem-solving aspect becomes an important one. Designers aren’t just people who put a skin on things and make them pretty. They need to take an idea and put form around it, and then create an experience that is incredibly simple, even though some of these things are inherently complex. You need to ensure that you’re actually able to solve the problem. So problem-solving is a huge one. Communication, as I sort alluded to before, is important as well. And that’s not just communication when you’re doing user interviews, it’s actually communicating your ideas, communicating your work effectively, and just being able to speak to people. It’s a huge part of designing and it’s only becoming a bigger part of design as our roles start to shift and evolve. A couple of others ones might be the traditional keen eye for detail. A designer needs to be able to look at something and — it’s that sort of gut instinct — know if it looks right or wrong. This is different from personal taste because personal taste is also a big one, but your more traditional trend designers are able to look at typographic hierarchies, alignment, and these little things that you need to stay on top of if you want a really polished application. If you get those fundamentals right, it sets you up with a really nice system that will bleed throughout your products, so you need that keen eye for detail. And then the last one, it’s quite a big one as well, is the ability to take feedback. Most people don’t like getting negative feedback, but it’s a big part of a designer’s job because people have different views on what good design is. You could create something that’s actually beautiful, but someone is just not going to like it and they’re going to give you some really negative feedback, and you need to be able to take that on. You need to peck through it and decide which parts you really need to listen to and take into account — tweaks or changes or whatever you need to do to make the product better. PP: Even if you master all those skills like you do, there’s always challenges we encounter. What’s a challenge that you’ve encountered in design, and how did you overcome it? CL: Every day is a new challenge. There’s always something. I don’t think I could point to one particular challenge by itself, but if I were going pick one off the top of my head, I would probably say it was the transition from being a traditional product UI general designer, whatever title you want to put on that, into more of a leadership position. I was basically picking myself up and putting myself in a position where things were less about myself and more about the team as a whole. I was doing more management led stuff as well. I’ll be honest, some of the feedback that I got, to begin with, wasn’t great. I had to take that feedback and change the way that I would approach working with individual people. It was about taking in everyone’s feedback independently and trying to put that together as what the team wanted and then trying to set a direction around it. It’s something I think I’ve gotten a lot better at over the last couple of years. But every single day there’ll be something that crops up that I hadn’t anticipated — some demand from an area of business or some person on the team who is having a unique challenge that I’ve never ever actually dealt with before. And how I deal with that, from their perspective, and ensure that they feel like their needs are being met and they’re happy as a person and that I’m not actually having a detrimental impact on the team as a whole — it’s definitely an interesting challenge. It’s something that, when I started as a designer, I never thought that I would get satisfaction from that side of it. I always felt that I needed to be crafting something constantly. I always wanted to be designing something or involved with the team at that level. But I get a lot of satisfaction from trying to make other designers’ jobs easier. I want to remove any level of friction that they have so that they can actually just accomplish what they need to accomplish. It was a challenge to get to a level where I thought I was doing it effectively, but the payoff was nice. PP: It’s a challenge that I can personally relate to as well, and I think it is a very common challenge as one matures in their career. CL: Yeah, I guess you never really know what’s next. I mean, that’s the whole point of a challenge, right, it comes at you. I think, if I were to go back a little bit, one of the biggest things for me was when I went from a product designer to a lead to a director. I transitioned through those. One of the things that I didn’t do to begin with, that I realized more and more as time went on, was that I’d try to do too much myself. I tried to approach these problems and challenges by myself because I thought that if I accepted help, I was proving myself incapable of this role. But that wasn’t actually the case, and it was actually Rob Jones who’s the VP of Design at FanDuel, he was really good at being a forum for feedback and giving really good advice. And I probably should have done that more to the begin with, but I didn’t. You can look back and say I should have done this, but you can’t change it. PP: Was there some mentorship going on within FanDuel? Or was it just an epiphany that you had and you realized, hey I need to shift from being hands-on to being more of a lead? CL: I think there was a progression, and yeah, it definitely was mentorship. Rob had gone through it himself. He was one of the co-founders of FanDuel, so he’s seen it from the very beginning into something that is so much bigger than what it started as. I don’t think they even knew themselves how big FanDuel was going to be, or how much it was going to take off in the States. So, he got really unique experience from seeing this company bloom. I came in a bit later, obviously. He was really good at providing feedback for me. He had gone through that change — the exact same one where he was taking on more of a leadership role and he was having to deal with people more. And I don’t think I leaned on him enough to begin with because I was trying to do it all myself. But there’s no shame in accepting help and advice, which I learned. PP: For sure, but let’s talk about design some more. I’ve noticed that a very common problem is that design is subjective. It’s not unusual, if you have several stakeholders, for different opinions to be mentioned. What advice do you have for uniting stakeholders around a particular design direction, or even a particular design? And what do you do in order to get stakeholder buy-in? CL: There are a few things that you can do. Number one is to build some level of trust. You need to ensure that there’s trust in your team, and also trust that, even though sometimes you will be asked or told something that you don’t necessarily agree with, it is the right thing to do. As I mentioned, we’re broken up into streams. We’ll traditionally have a product owner, and some designers, and that stream needs to run as a unit. If there’s no trust there, you’re going to get friction. So anything that you can do to ensure that things run smoother, you should be doing it. The meaty answer is to ensure that people sit together and that they’re socializing together — that’s how you build relationships. We can’t really do that in FanDuel, and other remote teams won’t be able to do that either. We have a massive ocean between us, so we need to do it in a variety of different ways. Some of it is process-driven, which we talked about before. We decided that we were going do a few things. One of them was weekly reviews — the idea being that every single person in a stream has the ability to actually give feedback on design itself. Once a week we all get together. Now it could be that not everyone is going to attend, but there should be a representative from engineering, and a representative from QA, and a product owner and a project manager as well. So you’ve got a smattering of everyone, and design can present what it’s thinking. And then you can get the feedback from everyone. If you do that, everyone feels involved in the process. Everyone feels like they’ve had their say in what’s going on. It gives the designer a forum to actually communicate what they’re thinking and to get feedback on focused areas. It’s incredibly useful. We’ve also been building what we call a design system, which is effectively almost like a guidebook to what product design looks like at FanDuel. It explains each part. We’re having to balance our day-to-day workloads with the creation of this, so it’s not going as fast as we might like it to, but we are seeing constant progress on it. You’ll see other companies doing the same thing, as everyone seems to be talking about it right now. Companies like Airbnb have whole teams dedicated to it. We don’t have the ability to do that, but what we do is carve off a little bit, and that gives people visibility into, not just this tiny little part that they’re looking at and giving feedback on, but rather the broader thing. It’s like this holistic view of how all of this stuff stitches together. And that gives a little bit of foresight into the decisions that we make and why we make them, and it can help them give focused feedback as well. All these little things add up to a bigger picture, and people feel more involved as a whole. You’ll generally find that people are more united. PP: For sure, I think relationships built on trust is definitely key. CL: Yeah, and it takes time, and we will probably still stumble. I know we’ve stumbled, but the biggest piece of advice I could give you is, if you see a problem, deal with it head-on. Sometimes the solution to that problem isn’t one that people will like, but you need to be resolute. You need to say that this decision is being made for a particular reason, and we think it will work. You just have to commit to it. And if you do that, then I think in the long run people will be more on board with it. PP: Great advice, thank you. Chris, you have been involved with product design, in particular UX and UI design, for a number of years. Are there any common design principles that you think successful products have in common? CL: Maybe not a principle per se, but what you will tend to see with successful products is a general belief in design as a whole. And this is often aided by a co-founder being a designer, or at least a member of the co-founders having some sort of design sensibilities. If I track it back a little bit, you can always have the Apple example, right? Apple was able to sell products at a premium and offer sometimes less features than the competition, and they were able to do so because they’d invested in a beautiful product. Now, this is the same with any sort of a product-oriented company as well. You can use, for instance, Uber as an example. Part of Uber’s success isn’t that it just enables people to easily hail a cab, but also because it is such a seamless experience. They’ve invested in the experience as a whole. That’s something we are very committed to at FanDuel as well. As I mentioned, we had quite a small design team before. We’ve bulked that up, and we’re very committed now to trying to build an experience that delivers a world-class entertainment product. Yeah, so it’s not necessarily a principle… I don’t think I’ve really answered your question properly. PP: No, I think you did. If I may comment on something that I picked up on, and this really hit home because it was a revelation that I had at a conference I attended last year. Having worked most often for software companies and technology companies in my career, I feel like there is an immense focus on features and capabilities. But when I went to the conference, something that really hit home was this idea of the experience as the product. There is so much more than just the application that makes up the customer experience. It’s also how they feel based on the design, and how they interact with customer support, for example. So I think that’s definitely something that people need to keep in mind. I think that’s what successful companies do — they understand there’s more to the product than the application itself. CL: Yeah, I think you touched on a few bits there that are pretty important. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s just all about the experience. There is a balance. You could have the most beautiful experience on the planet, but if you’re not fundamentally delivering what the user wants, then you don’t have a product. And that’s the same with marketing as well. You can have the most beautiful product with all the features on the planet, but if you’re not marketing it correctly, then you don’t have the customers. You need the whole thing, which is really difficult. If I use as an example a conversation with Wilson Miner, who is a creative director — he is incredibly committed to delivering a world-class experience, and he has. Most of the best bits of Spotify and Apple Music were born out of avid exploration and commitment to the user. But, at the end of the day, Spotify steamrolled them with marketing, and just general aggressiveness. I think it’s a prime example of a company that might have actually been better, but just didn’t have all the pieces in place. PP: Yeah, that’s a good point. I mean, you have to have your bases covered for sure. CL: Yeah, absolutely. PP: Chris, you have been part of product management teams for a number of years now. I’ve seen friction between designers and product managers. Sometimes there are different goals for designers or different projects that they are working on, compared to product managers. Have you seen those frictions, and if so, how have you overcome them? What can you recommend to our listeners for improving interactions between designers and product managers? CL: I think you’re absolutely going to get friction. I don’t necessarily think friction is a bad thing. People should be opinionated if they’re truly driven and they believe in what they’re doing. They will have a strong opinion one way or another. But it’s being able to step back a little bit and question the fact of like, is my opinion really worth aggressively going after here? I think it goes back to that trust aspect that we talked about before. If you work with someone and you trust them, and they are incredibly sure of what they are pushing, then you should be able to say, look, I might not agree with what you’re saying here, but I trust you and I trust that the decision that you are making is right for either the product or the team, and I will wholeheartedly go into it. If I use RightScale as an example, we were a small team that was acquired, and we were working on an ancillary product. We had this really tight bond, and I worked with Hassan. He was in a product manager role at that time, and we had a very close relationship. I knew if he was coming to me, telling me something against what I was saying, that he was probably right. And Hassan knew that if I was calling bullshit on whatever he was saying, he was like, right, I trust you. You were hired for a particular reason, so I should trust that you’re trying to do the right thing. PP: Great answer. Like you said, it boils back down to relationships and trust. If you understand that you’re all working ultimately towards the same goal, then friction isn’t a bad thing because it means that both people are motivated and want to do the best for the product and company. CL: Yeah, everybody has goals — everyone has something that they are being held to, and there might be a revenue figure that you need to hit. Sometimes you might be more willing to take the quick route or release something that might not quite be at a level that you would be comfortable with releasing, and for me, that’s the point at which a designer or a developer has to say, I don’t think we’re doing the right thing. And that’s when you have a conversation about like, well, what is the right thing to do here? Do we delay this by a week, hoping it’s fundamentally better? Or is there really going to be that much of a detrimental impact? Do we need to get this out a little bit quicker? PP: Chris, we’ve arrived at our last question. We’re at the beginning of the year, and if you don’t mind sharing with our listeners your crystal ball — if you had to predict what we can expect this year or even in the next few years, what are some design trends that you feel pretty strongly about? CL: Absolutely. It’s interesting, I’ve got two parts to this answer because I think there’s trends in the way that the people traditionally looked at trends. And then, there’s the other part, which I think is the growth and the maturity of the product design — like the discipline and what’s next there. On your server-client traditional trends, I think we’ve hit a point now where there’s just a little bit of an evolution every single year. We transitioned to flat design. I think, piece by piece, we’ve kind of been moving back to adding depth, and sort of a physicality to interfaces. I mean the way that you look at material design, for instance, is all based on levels and cards. That’s the way that we’re looking at it as well. And what I often say to some of the designers on the team is that I like to think that you can actually just take a piece of paper and cut up your interface, and then actually be able to move around. Think about it in a physical dimension, and how does this all stitch together? And I think we’ll see a little bit more of that — it’s looking at things in more of a holistic manner. How that plays out in actual visuals, I think, is open to interpretation. We’re seeing a lot of people playing with fire because they’re bringing in more shadows and things like that. Again, we’re seeing a lot more exploration and much more rich experiences. So to be honest, it can go any way, but I think we’ll just see a subtle evolution from what we’re already seeing now. A lot of our decisions now are actually based on the operating systems that are provided to us by the likes of Google and Apple. So unless they do something completely drastic, then who knows? I guess there’s this whole augmented reality. Things sitting on the horizon with VR and whatnot which could throw things up in the air a little bit. I think that maybe leads a little bit nicely into my next point, which is the maturation of the designer’s role and what a designer should be doing. What we’re seeing is that designers are less and less just your typical pixel pushers — where you’re handed a brief and you create a flat visual, and then you throw it back and that’s it, done. I would say that 50% of your time is traditional design, and the other 50% of your time is driven around communication, documentation, working with stakeholders, and working with engineers. It’s a much more involved process. And I can only see that continuing, especially as our tooling starts to change as well. We’re seeing a lot more prototyping tools that allow us to visualize things in new ways, and that’s going to change the way that we actually approach design as a whole. And then, you bring into the blend the fact we’re actually approaching a stage where we’re having to design for things that don’t actually have a physical interface. Take, for example, Amazon Alexa — that is something that you are interfacing with. You still have this relationship with it, you still need to accomplish a task. That still requires a designer’s mindset, that empathy that I talked about before, of how do I accomplish this? And there’s nothing being created there. It’s this whole new thing. And then, you’ve got virtual reality. It doesn’t sit within the confines of what we viewed as design before. And who knows what’s next? So it’s an evolving discipline, and I think we’re gonna see that more and more over the next year and onwards, as these new territories start to evolve. PP: Yeah, I completely agree. It sounds like design will leave the screen, and go into all kinds of different devices and shapes. CL: Yeah, it’s really interesting. I mean, you have Google Home as well. It’s a little bit 2001 how it’s going to take over what’s going on, but it’s interesting to think about. We’ll eventually some sort of a voice command in every single part of the room. I’m going to use phones as an example. We traditionally have to always be willing to jump on new mediums. So we had our Apple Watch app out really, really quickly. We briefly went to smart TV stuff. We’re always willing to think about how we can use the platforms better. And it’s interesting to think about how you could actually draft your team just by walking around the house, speaking to your Amazon Alexa. Or do we investigate sort messenger chatbots, where you’re actually just speaking to something in a very human way to accomplish the same task, but without the fanciness of this interface? I think that’s gonna be a tough pill to swallow for a lot of people, because you’re not gonna have these days, months, whatever the timeline is, to craft this really beautiful visual experience, but you can craft this really nice human experience where the process is actually much nicer PP: For sure. I think it’s a really interesting time to be a product manager or a designer. There’s so much disruptive technology going on right now that there are so many new opportunities available. It’s amazing. Chris, thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed our conservation and thank you so much for sharing your valuable advice with other product managers and designers. CL: No problem at all. I hope it was at least a little bit useful. It was good having a chat about it anyway.

This article is for recent graduates with an entrepreneurial mindset who are thinking about what would be the perfect job for them. It’s also for people thinking about moving into product management. I’m going to start with a question. Raise your hand if someday: You’d like to start your own company? Be your own boss? I’m visualizing lots of hands raised out there. I mean, dang, who wouldn’t want to have their own company, be their own boss, and call the shots? For that reason, I’d like to introduce you to a job title you may not have heard of before, but that could give you some runway to practice the skills you might need to start your own company someday — while you still get a great paycheck, benefits, and learnings from a more established company. That job title is Product Manager. Here’s why product management should be your career choice. You’re in great company. There are some famous people out there who were first product managers before they started being CEO. Here are just a few: Jeff Bezos – Amazon Kevin Systrom – Instagram Marissa Mayer – Yahoo And while I’m nowhere close to those three groundbreakers, I have worked at Citrix for over 14 years, leading teams developing and releasing the GoTo branded software that generates millions of dollars in annual revenue. Do I have a degree in computer science or human-computer interaction? No. What might surprise you is that I was a Liberal Arts major in college; I studied Spanish. Long story short, by taking various jobs in the software industry and constantly learning and moving up, I was able to grow my career from web designer to user interface designer to product manager. I ultimately became a product manager because of some of the skills below that I realized I always had. Loosely put, the product manager sets the tone for a product, understands the customer’s pain points, leads a team, takes various forms of input, and ultimately makes the product-related decisions. The elephant in this picture is the leader of the pack. It’s almost like her trunk and her feet are pointed in one direction, and as if she is saying: “Follow me” “We’re going that way.” “We are passionate and are we’re on a mission.” Ok, I’ve got you to this point and so you ask, “What companies need product managers?” Kind of a simple answer, but any company that has a product or service needs someone to truly understand the needs of its customers and to set the vision and tone for the product and for the people who work on it. In a small company of 1-20, it’s usually the founders, but at some point, the founders have other things to do and may appoint a product manager. In larger companies, there’s almost always a need for many product managers. Quick gut check. Searching on LinkedIn TODAY, I found (obviously subject to change on the day of search but this gives you a sense): 1,019 Product Management jobs at Amazon 455 at Google 303 at Facebook Before I go too far, let me just say: different companies call “product managers” different things. You find similar jobs under the following names: Product Marketing Manager Program Manager Project Manager Product Owner Use those terms and you’ve just expanded your search 3x. So now that you know what it is and what it might be called. Let’s see if it might be a fit for you. Are You a Ringleader? Then product management might be the career choice for you. People who like other people, who have the ability to wrangle and lead various folks, (while respecting their opinions and differences) are what I might call Ringleaders. If that’s you, take note. Ringleaders make great product managers because they: Recruit other passionate people who never give up to be on their team. Enable their teammates to shine and do their best work incorporating their feedback. Gather champions and mentors to guide them along their product journey. Buy the pizza, bring the donuts, and make sure everyone is fed — literally and figuratively. If anyone needs something or is blocked, the product manager is the first one to help. As servant leaders, they eat last and let others go first. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'a6df8971-315b-4e8c-ad02-5e133239bfda', {}); Are You a Curious Observer of Life? There are some people who love observing the curiosities of life and work. They wonder why things work a certain way and if there might be another way. This is just how they tick — all the time. If that’s you, good news: constant and relentless curiosity is the most essential tool in a product manager’s toolbox. They use it to: Ask a lot of questions about their customers, their teams, and the market. Why? is their favorite question. Lean in and listen to the answers thoughtfully, without bias. Observe people in their natural setting (because “actions speak volumes”). You’ll hear them say, “Huh, isn’t that interesting.” Do You See Opportunities? Once you spot a problem or something that could be made better, do you instantly go into thinking, evaluating, and what-if mode, running quick calculations in your head, sketching rough ideas on the back of a napkin? Do you brainstorm with a friend asking, “How might we…?” or “What if…?” If yes, you really should think about a career in product management. Because product managers constantly: Narrow in and focus on the most pressing problems that offer the biggest opportunities for their customers and their companies. Believe, hypothesizing the possible ways they can make a difference. Experiment and iterate rapidly so they can learn fast if their beliefs are true or false and how they might make their solution more irresistible. Tell stories that are easy for anyone to comprehend and get onboard. Are You Problem Maker or Problem Solver? And then there are people who don’t make problems but solve problems. They’re the first ones with an idea, a fix, or a plan. They are not phased — in their eyes, if there’s a will, there’s a way. They aren’t complainers but doers, makers, fixers, and dreamers, envisioning a better or new way. Does that sound like you? If so, product management is all about solving problems; jumping through, around, over, and under obstacles; and asking questions like: How might we solve this? What’s the one standout thing that makes our solution different, better, easier, or cheaper than what is out there today? What competitive advantages do we have that we can run with? While I was at Citrix, we had the opportunity to come up with a startup app idea when the company was interested in developing lean and scrappy ideas to compete with ankle-biting startups. Along with 4 teammates, we came up with a phone app called Convoi that was targeted at everyday business people who were tired of using their personal cell phones for work but needed a mobile phone number for texting, calling, and business voicemail with clients. Our one standout thing was that within 15 seconds of downloading our free app, we got you any phone number in any area code. You could immediately be calling and texting from it. It was a magical experience for people. We had a trusted audience from GoToMeeting that we could advertise for free. In the app store, we could be a sister app to GoToMeeting that had over millions of downloads each year. We could ride that wave and get eyeballs and attention without spending a lot of money on marketing. We had the advantage of being part of a large company that had resources we could use to build the app, validate it, and get it to market fast. We knew the company was interested in the virtual phone system business but hadn’t yet pulled the trigger on a large scale development project. We could afford to offer something as freemium to test the interest. We found mentors and champions internal and external to the company to guide us on our way. You Understand That You Have to Show Proof Because they have so many ideas, these kind of people are anxious and want to know if their solution will work — if it will hold water. The bosses funding these projects also want to see proof that they’re on the right track. They usually come up with metrics, triggers, or tests to tell themselves and their teams whether they’re on the right track. Is that you? If so, product managers routinely ask themselves and their teams: How will we know it’s working? What does success look like at certain points in our journey? What are some success metrics or numbers we hope to hit? In the Convoi example above, we had some metrics we held ourselves accountable. Here were just a few of ours: 25 interviews of our target audience saying that they had this problem and were actively looking for a solution Time To Value < 30 seconds First text sent/received < 5 mins > 5% new users per week Net Promoter Score > 50 40% Daily Active Use (It was a business phone so in order for it to be successful you had to use it every week day) By hitting these we knew we were on the right track. Are You Adaptable? Then product management might be the career choice for you. Some people crave change, love the challenge of it, and can turn on a dime. They actually thrive on the adrenaline. They love hard things that might not have been done before. They are on a relentless pursuit of “yes”. The word “no” doesn’t phase them for too long. “No” might be a no for today, but tomorrow the game is different. Product managers know that: Change will happen. Companies, plans, roadmaps, and management change. You have to be willing to pivot when the data is telling you to do so. They are constantly iterating and reinventing themselves. They will ask and be turned down 80x. It’s part of the journey. They write their own playbook when there isn’t one (which is quite often). They learn from others. They figure, why reinvent the wheel? In short, a product manager’s job is all about solving problems for people. If your life has led you to creative thinking, problem-solving, and curiosity, it’s quite possible product management is the perfect career choice and you’d be a perfect fit for a role where you can practice, learn and grow a ton. A role in product management will look terrific on your resume, and the learnings will be great while the risk is minimal. What’s more, you will likely earn a favorable salary (check GlassDoor for product management salaries — not too shabby) and be instilled with the confidence that you might just start your own company someday. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); About the Author Carey Caulfield (@careycaulfield) works at LogMeIn in the GoTo business division previously part of Citrix Systems in Santa Barbara, CA as a Principal Product Manager. Her background is in Software Design, User Research/Experience, and practicing LeanStartup within large companies. She’s helped to design and launch three of their flagship products – GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, and GoToTraining. Most recently, she and four other hackers lead from behind with a tiny startup idea called Convoi that turned your personal iPhone into a second business phone, influencing the decision to go into the virtual phone service business. She mentors user researchers, product managers, and Engineers unfamiliar with the principles of LeanStartup to be 120% customer focused at leanproductcoach.com.

Technology and design are in the midst of an exciting crossroads, where businesses are becoming aware that the products and services they provide, no matter how innovative, are competing just as much in user experience as they are in functionality. The early proliferation of dazzling consumer experiences has bred a new generation of buyers who expect even their business software to look, work, and feel the same way as the other tools and experiences they’ve come to depend on and love. Good design is good business, and over the past 5 years or so startups and established companies alike have been scrambling. Hiring a UX designer is now more important than ever to stay competitive. The problem for most companies is that, while we wouldn’t ask a product manager to hire an engineer or vice versa, these are often the groups tasked with hiring a UX designer to join the team. These groups, if being honest, may not truly understand how a UX designer will help them stay competitive, and commonly misinterpret design as simply applying a pleasing color palette or carefully selecting the right font. Businesses without an established design practice often lack the definition or understanding of design roles, leaving product development teams with a missed opportunity to incorporate design as a strategic differentiator. So, if design isn’t about aesthetics and font, then what is it? In short, good design means your user doesn’t have to think. It means the system is easy to learn, remember, and delightfully exceeds their expectations in speed and reliability. It means that every next step is carefully anticipated, building a lasting emotional connection between the user and the system that is based on trust. Great design breeds loyalty in ways your users will struggle to articulate, expressing only the sentiment that “it just gets me.” To hire successfully then, as with any position, it’s critical to focus on the outcome and not just the role. Understanding the breadth and complexity of what makes for “good design” will better position the non-designer to pinpoint the must-have qualities of a designer to join their team. Design is a Practice, Not a Function The first (and very common) mistake that businesses make in executing a strong design strategy is to focus on building the product first, with the goal of having a designer come in later to improve the user experience. But design is a practice in much the same way product management or engineering is. Having a designer come in at the end of a project to “polish” it is like hiring a product manager at the end to just work on market positioning for the product, or asking an engineer to “just hook up the back end”. It’s an all too common story for talented UX designers to be turned off from a job interview when they realize that what the company actually wants is a graphic designer. This isn’t suggesting that graphic design is somehow unimportant — it is, in fact, a hugely important aspect of a strong design strategy — rather, it’s indicative of a blatant lack of knowledge of the UX designer’s field of expertise. The misconception of “UX designer” is understandable given that it’s sometimes a heated debate even in the design community, so it makes sense that non-designers would be doubly confused. But after hours of researching the business and crafting their resume and portfolio to demonstrate how their expertise can have an impact, it can still be insulting to realize that the business didn’t even attempt to understand the role for which they had advertised. Though opinions vary, there is consensus that “user experience design” is a general term that encompasses many specific disciplines. This was made famous by Dan Saffer’s Venn Diagram, The Disciplines of User Experience Design: To simplify this and apply it to software and other digital products, think about a strong user experience design practice as one that embraces these five distinct disciplines: user research, information architecture, interaction design, visual design, and UI engineering. This illustration outlines each discipline accompanied by its various tools and deliverables. For the non-designer, it’s not necessary to have an in-depth understanding of each UX discipline. But it is necessary to have some awareness of these disciplines to best inform what to look for when hiring to establish a design practice. The first designer or UX agency you hire on the team will be critical to this evolution, so it’s important to invest in someone whose expertise covers a wide gamut of these disciplines. And as the business grows, so should the design practice. Use the scale of UX disciplines to round out the talents of a growing UX team to ensure the right emphasis in the areas that will help great design be a strategic differentiator for your business. 5 Qualities to Look for When Hiring a UX Designer: To ignite a strong design strategy for your business, your first design hire should be able partner with you to own and execute that strategy. Assuming you only have budget for one designer, then it’s also important that this person has the experience and portfolio that demonstrates their strengths as an individual contributor. Following are five qualities of a designer who can make an immediate impact as well as nurture the growth of a solid design practice for your business. Glutton for Empathy Any designer’s core skill is their ability to empathize with users so they can anticipate their expected interactions with the product. But great designers understand that, while their work focuses primarily on the end user as the consumer, engineers and product managers are also consumers of their user insights. So, designers’ ability to empathize and distill information into meaningful and relatable stories extends beyond the interface design all the way down to building relationships and trust within the teams they are supporting. Business and Strategic Thinker In some ways, your first designer should be indistinguishable from a product manager in the way they approach problem discovery. A good design leader understands how to prioritize user needs with business goals and can balance the natural tension between the business, technology, and the user. Oftentimes the role of balancing user vs. business needs falls on the shoulders of the product manager, and in a tough spot it’s usually the business that wins. But a great designer is eager to forge a partnership with their product manager and engineering leads, freeing each other up to lean on their individual biases to allow healthy debate and more rounded decision-making. Teacher and Facilitator Designers want to be respected for their unique craft, but great design leaders refuse to hoard their design skills and won’t be protective or territorial about the process or their design team. Great UX designers are eager to teach and share in their craft, and they will often do this through the evangelism of design thinking. In practice, you’ll know you have a great designer in place when they are facilitating design workshops with engineers, or if they simply roll a whiteboard up to their team and hand the marker to an engineer and ask him or her to sketch an idea. To learn more about tools experts use in product design teams, watch this recent webinar: 点击播放声音 @keyframes VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } @keyframes VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } .volume__small-wave { animation: VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite; opacity: 0; } .volume__large-wave { animation: VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite .3s; opacity: 0; } 55:49●●●●●●●AgendaBackgroundTeam StructureDesign ProcessArtifactsProduct ComparisonLive QA #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_75_wrapper .w-css-reset{font-size:14px;} #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_75_wrapper 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.w-css-reset-button-important{border-radius:0!important;color:#fff!important;} Continue WatchingFirst Name*Last Name*Job Title*Email*LIKE.TG is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy, and we’ll only use your personal information to administer your account and to provide the products and services you requested from us. From time to time, we would like to contact you about our products and services, as well as other content that may be of interest to you. If you consent to us contacting you for this purpose, please tick below to say how you would like us to contact you:I agree to receive other communications from ProductPlan.In order to provide you the content requested, we need to store and process your personal data. If you consent to us storing your personal data for this purpose, please tick the checkbox below.I agree to allow LIKE.TG to store and process my personal data.*You may unsubscribe from these communications at any time. For more information on how to unsubscribe, our privacy practices, and how we are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy, please review our Privacy Policy.#wistia_grid_75_wrapper{-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;box-sizing:content-box;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;height:100%;position:relative;text-align:left;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_75_wrapper *{-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;box-sizing:content-box;} #wistia_grid_75_above{position:relative;} #wistia_grid_75_main{display:block;height:100%;position:relative;} #wistia_grid_75_behind{height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;top:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_75_center{height:100%;overflow:hidden;position:relative;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_75_front{display:none;height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;top:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_75_top_inside{position:absolute;left:0;top:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_75_top{width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0;left:0;} #wistia_grid_75_bottom_inside{position:absolute;left:0;bottom:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_75_bottom{width:100%;position:absolute;top:0;left:0;} #wistia_grid_75_left_inside{height:100%;position:absolute;left:0;top:0;} #wistia_grid_75_left{height:100%;position:absolute;right:0;top:0;} #wistia_grid_75_right_inside{height:100%;right:0;position:absolute;top:0;} #wistia_grid_75_right{height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;top:0;} #wistia_grid_75_below{position:relative;} Strong User Researcher It’s not uncommon for designers to be a little rough around the edges when it comes to user research. Some designers, while they can design a beautiful screen layout, struggle to design structured research such as feedback loops, surveys, and usability tests without being influenced by their own bias to the design. A strong design leader can separate their ego from the raw user feedback because they are more driven by getting it right for the customer than receiving personal validation on their designs. They also put their facilitation skills to work in their research by making it a collaborative effort and inviting engineering and product management to learn through observation of usability tests and participation in qualitative interviews. Student of Agile/Lean UX The toughest spot a designer may find themselves in is as a bottleneck to their team’s ability to make fast decisions and move forward quickly. A designer’s empathic connection to the customer innately causes a sort of fear of lasting negative first impressions about a product or feature that is still a work-in-progress. This fear can be hugely detrimental to the team if their work isn’t being constantly validated with end users. But the fear can be hugely beneficial if leveraged to help teams think strategically about how to collect feedback and iterate in a way that will create lasting positive first impressions from customers. It’s important that the first designer you hire has the experience to put their fear in check and use it to encourage thoughtful iterations and smart rollout plans to achieve the desired results. Download How Agile Product Managers Can Build Better Products ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'b4eb5c0b-bf4b-4a7e-9b0a-75f92005c127', {}); A Lasting Design Strategy A strong design strategy begins with an understanding of the impact and outcome of great design, and puts the right talent in place in order to reach that outcome. To achieve this, the non-designer must first be humble enough to admit that they might not fully understand value and role of a designer, then be diligent in learning more about the craft for which they’ve been charged with hiring for. By investing in hiring a UX designer with an acumen for business, this first hire can act as a partner to establish a healthy design practice for the long term. The role of design transcends what looks good and builds and emotional connection to the end user because it also feels good to use the product. A business’ ability to leverage design to tap into the latent needs of its users is what will drives loyalty, and leaves competitors scratching their heads. J.J. Kercher shares more of her product and design leadership thoughts in Spotlights: J.J. Kercher “Return focus back to the customer and product”, below.

Developing an effective product roadmap requires more than a product manager’s intuition and vision, although those elements are crucial. But equally important for an effective roadmap will be evidence, real-world data, and a scientific approach to analyzing that data. In this post, I’d like to share with you some ideas for identifying, tracking, and leveraging the right metrics to help shape your product strategy. These are some of the ideas that I shared in a recent webinar that we co-hosted with Pendo, called “Building Data-Driven Product Roadmaps”. Not All Data Are Equally Valuable (Beware of the Vanity Metric) Before we discuss how to leverage data in prioritizing your product roadmap, I want to caution you upfront that not all data is equally useful. Some data, in fact, is a distraction at best, and a source of misleading information at worst. In particular, I want to warn you against focusing too heavily on “vanity metrics.” Vanity metrics are stats that look great in a press release but don’t necessarily translate in any meaningful way to business results. Examples include the number of Twitter followers or how many people have watched a clever video your company posted on YouTube. In reality, these numbers give product management very little insight into how the product will resonate with customers or how much revenue it will generate. Tweet This: “Not all data are equally valuable (beware of the vanity metric).” Worse, when you rely on these sorts of metrics — which can be tempting because they suggest interest and engagement with your company — you risk developing a very skewed view of the actual level of interest in your products. People watch YouTube videos and follow companies on Twitter for lots of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with an interest in those companies’ products or services. Download Product Success Metrics ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '18f5a8aa-393b-4397-9fd4-f7758c1edf55', {}); Limit and Prioritize the Metrics You Use in Your Roadmap Decisions Another important point to keep in mind is that with services like Google Analytics, it’s possible to track many different types of data. And that’s great. But trying to make sense of an overwhelming amount of data can also lead to confusion. You probably have a firehose of information available to you right now, so you should first try to figure out what the most important metrics for your product are. This includes the data that will lead to the most valuable and actionable insights into what’s working with your product, what isn’t resonating with users, and how you can continually improve your offering. The ideal number of metrics to track will vary from company to company, of course, but a good rule of thumb is to focus on roughly five metrics that you can monitor over time and discuss regularly with your executive stakeholders. Assuming you’ve identified the five most revealing and strategically advantageous metrics to concentrate on, the data you compile from these metrics over time should give you valuable intelligence into how to proceed with your product and what to prioritize on your roadmap. First, you have to set your product’s strategic goals. Before you can begin sifting through all of the noise and determine which handful of strategically useful metrics to focus on, you need to define your product’s strategic goals. Then, when you’ve set those goals, you can start looking for the right mix of metrics to track and analyze, the metrics that will help you achieve those goals. Next, start compiling data — here are some great places to look. If you already have a product on the market, with an installed base of users, you can choose from a wide range of real-world metrics to track, which will help you take a more scientific approach to decide where to focus your resources. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); Customer-Oriented Metrics A great way to start is to use the data being generated every day by your prospects and user base to learn what’s working with your product or your efforts to promote it, and what you need to change. These types of metrics might include: Product usage or adoption Percentage of prospects or leads who take a specific action in response to your marketing campaigns (e.g., sign up for a trial, download a white paper, etc.) Percentage of users who take specific action in the product itself (e.g., use a given feature) Customer retention or churn rate Quality (e.g., the number of bugs reported by users, and whether those numbers are going up or down over time) Business-Oriented Metrics You can also track and analyze important high-level business data relating to your product to help you shape and improve your strategy. These business-oriented metrics will come not from how your customers interact with your product but rather how their actions affect your product’s bottom line. These types of metrics could include: Cost to acquire a new customer (CAC) Customer lifetime value (LTV) Monthly recurring revenue generated by your product (MRR) The average revenue per user Conversion (e.g., the percentage who convert from free-trial users to customers) To use my own company as an example, at LIKE.TG we pay close attention to a handful of these metrics all the time, and they are extremely helpful in guiding how we pursue and adjust our strategy. One of the great things about offering a SaaS-based product, which we do with our product roadmap software, is that because you are continually tracking everything in the cloud, you can view and analyze an incredible amount of detail about how your customers are interacting with your product. Even though we don’t have access to our customer’s roadmaps for security and privacy reasons, we are aware, for example, of how many product managers using our software to share their roadmaps with others across their organizations. This helps us to determine whether our tool is encouraging communication across the company and whether there are things we need to do to make the process easier or more intuitive for our customers. And if there is a common point in the roadmap development process where customers tend to reduce their interaction with our product, that gives a signal that we might need to revisit that part of the user experience and streamline or refine it. Where to Find Useful Metrics for Your Roadmap Before You Have a Product The examples of metrics that I listed above work well when you already have a product out there, generating data that you can track. But what if you don’t yet have a product on the market? What if you are in the strategy stage, just preparing to build your product? Where can you look for the metrics that will inform your strategic decisions? Here are three useful sources of information: Experts in Your Industry These could include industry experts, or the widely read columnists and commentators who write and speak about trends in your industry and review your competitors’ products. Industry Analysts The researchers who cover your industry are an excellent source of information about which metrics offer the most significant clues as to what will constitute a successful product. These are the people, after all, who spend their days listening to briefings from your competitors about the things they’re finding resonate with their customers, and who then write detailed reports about which products are enjoying the most success in your industry, and why. Your Competitors Unless you’re planning to create an entirely new category with your product, chances are you have competitors with products already on the market. And chances are those competitors have done a lot of the research into the most strategically useful metrics relating to their products and their customers, and may have public information available, especially if they are a publicly-traded company. You can leverage this information in developing your own set of metrics to focus on. You can find your competitors’ discussions of what they deem important data points in their press releases, on their earnings call with analysts (assuming they’re publicly traded) and even in their own business filings online. Download Product Success Metrics ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '18f5a8aa-393b-4397-9fd4-f7758c1edf55', {}); How to Communicate Your Metrics-Driven Strategic Goals To this point, I’ve been discussing the importance of using a small set of key metrics as a way to help you shape your product strategy. But another important reason to track and analyze these metrics — equally important in helping you successfully bring your product to market — is that they will give you a set of concrete evidence to share with your executive stakeholders over time, to help them understand and support your strategic decisions for your product. One of the most effective ways to communicate your product strategy with your stakeholders, and to share with them the evidence that supports your strategy, is with a visual, intuitive product roadmap. As you can see from the screenshot below, depicting a roadmap developed using LIKE.TG, when you use the right roadmapping tool you can visually articulate your product’s strategic goals and then build into the roadmap the data points that support your decision to pursue each of those goals. Conclusion: The 6 Steps to Data-Driven Roadmaps So, to recap, my advice would be to always build your product strategy, and to develop your roadmap, based on key metrics that support your strategic decisions. And to accomplish this I suggest the following steps: 1. First, establish your product’s strategic goals. (You can always adjust these goals in light of the evidence you’ll be gathering.) 2. Next, make a list of possible strategically advantageous and illuminating data points to track — such as customer-oriented metrics like product usage, and business-focused metrics like customer acquisition cost. 3. If you don’t have a product already on the market (or even if you do), you might also want to research your industry for strategically important metrics to focus on. To find these metrics, check in on what your industry’s luminaries, media, analysts, and competitors are focused on. 4. Now it’s time to limit your metrics to a handful or so that you determine will give you the most strategic insights for the time and energy you’ll invest in tracking and analyzing them. (Too many data points can lead to confusion and can dilute whatever strategic insights you might uncover.) Tweet This: “Tie metrics to strategic goals, and if the data shows you need to adjust your strategy, do it.” 5. Next, tie these metrics to specific strategic goals you established in step 1. (And if your data points lead you to adjust your strategy, now is the time to do that.) 6. Now you can build this strategy (including the data points supporting it) into your product roadmap, which you can then share with your executive stakeholders — demonstrating to them that you’ve brought evidence, and not just your intuition, to these strategic decisions. At the point, I’d typically wish you luck with your product’s success. But now you’ve got evidence backing your strategy — so you won’t need luck. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '80219c5a-32c2-4135-9575-4b84ed7bd4a4', {});

In this episode of Product Lessons Learned, Marc Foglino (formerly of Amazon, Telefónica and Samsung) walks us through the process of launching a mobile payments product in the European Union. The process involves nine steps, covering topics applicable to bringing a product to market in a highly regulated industry. Here’s what Marc had to say. While working at Amazon, I had the privilege of leading the go-to-market activities for the UK beta launch of the Amazon Pay mobile payments SDK. In this post I will be walking you through the high-level process of bringing Amazon Pay to market in the UK, as well as sharing some of the key lessons learned from our product launch. Background on Mobile Payments Before diving into my learnings, it might be valuable to clarify that we intended to launch an in-app payments product. The idea was to provide over 300 million Amazon account holders with the ability to pay with their existing Amazon account “online” and within an “app” on third party sites. Planning and launching a mobile payments proposition is highly regulated and more complex than most product categories because you are handling sensitive information. A number of actors are involved in a payment transactions, including banks, acquirers and payment processors. What are the key mobile payments use cases? In-store with an NFC-enabled phone (like Apple Pay): This is a crowded market with many players such as Apple, Google and Samsung. Just touch and pay. In-app payments: There is less hype around this use case, but it has growth potential as you can pay seamlessly from anywhere. No need for any payment terminals. Nine Main Steps We Took to Launch Amazon Pay in the United Kingdom Tweet This: “Read the nine steps involved in launching Amazon Pay in the UK.” 1. Define Suitable Target Merchant Segment This is the most important exercise to nail down which customers you are targeting before progressing further with your go-to-market plan. When planning to enter the in-app payments market, we defined early on which merchant categories were the ideal target retailers for our product. We focused on merchant categories that aligned well with our product capabilities, otherwise we would have wasted our sales resources trying to sell a product that might not have been the ideal fit. Typically the majority of Amazon Pay customers are in the physical goods and services category. Defining which merchants you are targeting is a good start, but to find and select suitable retailers, you need to know which merchant has an app or is working on developing an app. One of the best resources to find this information is App Annie. App Annie is a business intelligence company focusing on mobile applications. The premium subscription gives you access to a lot of interesting data such as downloads and revenues by app. This gave us the opportunity to approach the best performing merchant app owners in the selected categories. 2. Launch in Phases to Validate Hypothesis Launching in phases gives you the ability to test your assumptions and see whether your prediction was correct or not. Also if you don’t launch in phases, you put yourself at too much risk. If you launch publicly straight away, you might end up with a poor launch and no sales. Because in-app payments was a new market for us, we only had a vague idea of how merchants would react. It was, therefore, important to test out our assumptions with merchants and gather some feedback. We opted to launch in two main stages, starting with a beta program first and then moving to a public launch. To be more specific, we split the beta into two stages by releasing two different app versions with incremental features to better understand the market expectations. The first version was a limited, invitation-only program available in the US. We extended the second version across key regions where Amazon Pay was operating such as the UK, Germany and Japan. We also gathered a lot of valuable insights from our App Store team. A warm introduction to the right brands and teams saved us a lot of time and gave us the opportunity to get more feedback. In the end, we felt that there was a significant interest in providing consumers with a one-tap payments experience to make it as easy and quick as possible to pay. 3. Incentivize Your Beta Launch Partners The payments market is already crowded with many companies competing for market share and growth. Do you think you can recruit beta partners without any incentives? Why would they take part in your beta and invest time and resources to support you? We found out that when launching a new feature such as in-app payments, it proves to be harder to secure launch partners if you are not providing them with an incentive to take part in the beta. Integrating payment services requires more effort than just a couple of days development work. The easiest way to soothe the pain is to find a way to support your beta partner financially. Additionally, to make it more appetizing, it can be effective to put a co-marketing plan in place. We ran a test that very quickly revealed that it’s not sufficient to just enable Amazon Pay on an App and wait for consumers to use it. The best way to drive consumer usage is to work with merchants on a co-marketing campaign to drive awareness and let everyone know that you support a new alternative payment option on your app. For example, we prepared a joint press release for the beta launch with Vueling Airlines. Vueling used the opportunity to announce that they are the 1st airline in Europe to use Amazon Pay. 4. Create a Sense of Exclusivity You might be thinking that the more beta partners you have, the easier it will be to gather more data and get plenty of feedback. This approach might work well with consumer products, but it’s not as effective in the B2B payments market due to the integration effort. The reality is that it requires more effort to convince merchants. Beyond incentives which we touched on earlier, placing a limit on your a number of launch partners gives them a sense of exclusivity. Looking at the science of persuasion, Dr. Robert Cialdini teaches us that “scarcity” is a powerful way to influence people. Even before reaching out to merchants, we all agreed on a set number of beta launch partners across all regions. As a guideline, if you look at five to ten beta launch partners, you should be able to collect enough data and feedback. 5. Get Solution Providers on Board Your job is not done by simply securing your beta launch partners. What do you do if an e-commerce brand wants to work with you, but doesn’t have the resources to integrate your service? What if all development work is outsourced? A significant amount of e-commerce merchants are outsourcing their in-app development work to external agencies or solution providers. That is the reason we also focused on collaborating with solution providers to integrate our service into their mobile development platform and to gather some additional product feedback. The beauty of integrating into an existing mobile development platform is the broad access and distribution. That gives you immediate access to new additional e-commerce merchants and helps accelerate your growth once you launch publicly. For example, up and coming mobile platforms such as Shopgate give you access to over 4,300 live native apps globally. 6. Prepare a Demo to Get Them Excited Even though your product beta is not ready yet, you still need to help merchants visualize the user experience. Initially, we tried and tested if a pitch deck with screenshots would be sufficient, but very quickly we realized that we needed a demo to visualize the entire user experience from start to finish. We recorded a video to show the journey end to end and included in the pitch decks all possible user scenarios to gather feedback on whether our approach was meeting the expectations of merchants. This was quite useful as we could easily share the video over email to give them more time to review the journey in detail and gather the feedback from all stakeholders. 7. Provide Access to Sandbox to Gain Commitment Providing access to your sandbox environment and distributing integration guides might not seem that important, but in reality, these elements are key to gaining commitment. Even though we defined all the relevant items such as incentives, demos, and timelines, it turned out to still be challenging to get a formal commitment until we were able to provide merchants with a working Sandbox environment with all the technical documentation. Most merchants who were interested in working with us requested an Android and iOS integration guide to explore the integration effort in more detail. Only after having clarified these elements, we were able to find a suitable agreement. 8. Adopt Culture of Ownership Why is your company culture an important factor in the success of your product launch? Success is a team effort. Skills and experience are certainly important, but not enough to succeed in our day and age. Ownership is one of the most important leadership principles at Amazon and a great contributor to Amazon’s success. It’s a reminder to look at the long-term value instead of short-term results. More importantly, everyone is encouraged to take ownership in stepping in and helping others to drive projects forward. This also means adding value beyond their team. We had the intention to expand Amazon Pay into France, Italy and Spain, but we were still missing sales resources for this beta launch because hiring took longer than expected. You can find the recent announcement on that here. One of my colleagues in Germany and I stepped in to drive the beta launch forward by defining missing processes, and hiring and securing launch partners until new hires were in place. This helped to keep the set deadlines. 9. Be Aware of Market Shifts Even though you might be planning your next launch, it’s still important to keep an eye on the market to anticipate any changes. This is exactly the situation we faced. The market didn’t evolve as expected. The market opportunity was smaller than expected mainly because of these two reasons: A. Consumer Adoption More recent stats reveal that the consumer adoption of mobile payments is lower than we initially expected. I am not taking into consideration P2P payments because sending money to friends is a different use case than paying a merchant/retailer. From a top level perspective, the mobile payments consumer adoption was below industry expectations. According to a recent study from Globalwebindex only 6% of consumers used Apple Pay in Q4 2016. Particularly in the UK the high adoption of contactless cards is impacting mobile payments. For small purchases up to £30, it’s quick and easy enough to use your contactless cards. Even though the majority of UK consumers use their phones to browse, they don’t yet trust their phones enough to make a payment. Recent stats show that consumer trust for mobile wallets has even gone down. Moreover, consumers still trust their contactless cards over their mobile phones. Market feedback revealed that few consumers are using existing retail apps for their purchases. Most consumers are using chat, social, and entertainment apps. Moreover, there are also a couple of restrictions that impacted the market size. Most in-app digital purchases would occur via the iOS or the Android app store, like in-game purchases or digital purchases such as Spotify music subscriptions. That meant that our main playing field was smaller than expected. B. Retail focussed on In-store Mobile Payments The majority of e-commerce retailers were concentrating on implementing Apple Pay and Android Pay to drive more in-store sales by enabling their contactless terminals to support NFC payments with your mobile phone. It also appears that the vast majority of e-commerce retailers preferred to choose payment providers who can cover multiple channels at once such as in-store, web, and app. Six Takeaways From Launching In-app Mobile Payments Launching an in-app payments product is complex. The more you can soak up market feedback and be flexible in adapting your go-to-market approach, the greater your chances of success. Here’s six key takeaways from my experience: A phased launch will protect you from any major failures. Be prepared to set aside a budget to incentivize your beta launch partners. Get solution providers on board early to scale your reach and penetration quickly, once you are ready to launch publicly. Don’t underestimate the importance of providing a sandbox environment early on with all the necessary technical documentation, and be open minded about reviewing your product feature prioritization. By fostering a culture of ownership within your team, you will be able to face challenging moments and come out victorious. In the heat of the moment, never forget to have an eye on where the market is evolving. The ideal scenario is to gather quantitative and qualitative feedback to shape your product according to the market demand.

Product management isn’t a very well-known occupation—at least among college students. On top of that, it seems like unless someone has been a product manager or has worked directly with a product manager, people have a hard time defining what exactly a product manager does. I first heard about product management in my freshman year of college, and since then, I’ve had the amazing opportunity to work at both AppFolio and LIKE.TG as a product management intern, learning firsthand what product managers actually do. At both LIKE.TG and AppFolio, I’ve been able to observe many successful product managers, and it seems like there are several similarities they all share. 1. Cross-Functional Collaboration First, they work cross-functionally with several different teams, mainly with UX/UI, sales and marketing, and developers. From my perspective, a product manager’s job seems to involve developing a strategic vision and then actualizing that vision, which involves the help of all the different teams. At LIKE.TG, product managers actually seem pretty hands-on, taking on some of the responsibilities of the different teams, and mainly helping with UI design and assisting with quality assurance testing. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'a6df8971-315b-4e8c-ad02-5e133239bfda', {}); During my internship, I was able to experience this cross-functional teamwork. I worked with the UX/UI team, reviewing designs and suggesting changes. I also worked with the QA team to help test new features before they went out to customers, and helped write several Pivotal Tracker stories to document bugs and fixes. For some of my other projects, I worked with sales and marketing to improve lead generation and I helped with user data analysis. Interestingly, according to our 2017 Product Planning Survey Report, the most common challenge PMs face involves working with different teams. 2. Customer Interview Skills Second, product managers are expert interviewers. They’re constantly asking customers for advice and feedback. Don’t know what functionality a feature should have? Ask a customer. Don’t know which interface is better? Ask a customer. Want to know how to expand the product to fit user needs? Ask a customer. Since it’s the customers who are ultimately using the product, it seems like good product managers actively listen to their customers and build their feedback into the product. That being said, sometimes the customer is not always right, and a product manager’s job is to analyze customer feedback to find the root of the problem and implement a solution with the biggest impact. Tweet This: “Good product managers are expert interviewers. They’re constantly asking customers for advice and feedback.” A large part of my summer internship actually involved interviewing customers. Some of these calls were exploratory, some were for validation, and others were simply to ask for feedback on existing features. Finding customers to interview leads us back to the idea of cross-functional teamwork. Customer support, sales, and marketing are departments that are very customer-facing and, as such, can provide valuable input as to which customers PMs should contact or highlight feedback they’ve already received. Since LIKE.TG is a startup, it’s easy for product managers to go directly to each department since they know everyone on each team so well. At AppFolio, it seemed like product managers had one or two go-to people in each department that they sought advice from. 3. Prioritization Practice Third, product managers know how to prioritize features for implementation. How product managers prioritize varies from product manager to product manager, but I’ve noticed that the PMs I’ve worked with tend to prioritize features based on customer demand and company goals. At the root of it, product managers oversee a product, or parts of a product. They’re in charge of determining what features the development team should build, working with UI and UX to figure out how to streamline the interface and overall user experience, and ensuring the product makes it to market. Once the features are out for the customers to use, product managers must compile customer feedback and ensure the success of the features, iterating and changing the features to meet changing customer needs over time. After working as a product management intern, I now have new insight into what it is product managers actually do. I’ve enjoyed my internship at LIKE.TG very much—so much so that I now know I want to become a product manager after finishing my computer science degree. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"});

LIKE.TG asked product managers from hundreds of companies about their product planning process. We collected their responses and crunched the numbers to give you an exciting glimpse into the current state of product planning with our 2017 Product Planning Report. The full report is broken down into five detailed chapters covering everything from planning and prioritizing product initiatives to communicating them on your product roadmap. We thought it would be helpful to cover some of the highlights here on the LIKE.TG blog. Download the full report below to get even more product planning insights! Overall Trends One of the themes we noticed was a shift toward a more agile approach to product management. The days of massive requirements docs and static roadmaps are gone. A majority of the product managers we heard from update their roadmaps on a monthly basis—a far cry from a fixed, annual plan. Regardless of company size, industry, etc., product managers are changing and sharing their roadmaps more frequently. Beyond dealing with faster product development cycles, product managers identified staying aligned with other teams, most notably UX/UI, as a major challenge. This makes sense, given the cross-functional nature of their role—part product owner, part consensus builder, part communicator, etc. It’s hard to keep everyone on the same page, but roadmaps can help! “Keeping internal teams on the same page is our biggest challenge.” — Product Manager at a medium-sized software company with 2-5 years of experience Here at LIKE.TG, we were happy to see that many product managers are adopting dedicated product roadmap software. For the 2017 Product Planning Survey, specialized roadmapping software surpassed PowerPoint, Excel, and other tools, as the primary way product managers are creating their roadmaps. As product managers continue to face the challenges involved in managing a constantly growing backlog, faster development cycles, and an increasing number of stakeholders, the benefits of roadmapping software are becoming more obvious. Planning Prioritizing For product managers, planning and prioritization is as critical a part of the product development process as ever. Our survey findings indicated that companies that utilized some dedicated model, whether that was value vs. effort, the Kano Model, opportunity scoring, etc., were more likely to accomplish their strategic goals. This would suggest that it’s less about the specific planning and prioritization methodology used, and more about the team making these activities a critical part of their workflow. Tweet This: “Companies that use a dedicated roadmap prioritization model are more likely to accomplish their strategic goals.” Our survey indicated that strategy is primarily set at the top of the organization, with 85% of companies stating that the executive team is responsible for setting strategic goals. Goals become more granular as they trickle down to functional teams, moving from executives, to product teams, and finally to sales, marketing, engineering, and finance. Though strategy starts at the top, we found that teams at all levels are more likely to meet their goals when they allot the time and resources required for effective planning and prioritization. Another interesting detail around planning was that most teams used a 3-12 month timeline for strategic planning, signaling the need for more frequent roadmap updates and more dynamic product management tools. In short, product teams need flexible tools that can keep up with their organization’s pace of innovation. Crafting the Plan Part of our report focused on the methods, tools, and timelines companies are using to build and maintain their product plans and roadmaps. As mentioned above, the use of dedicated roadmapping software has doubled compared to our 2016 survey. Roadmapping-specific applications have overtaken PowerPoint as the primary way companies build and manage their product roadmaps, driven by the need to update and share their roadmaps more frequently. On the other hand, our survey found that teams that use drawing tools to create roadmaps are more likely to be unsuccessful at meeting their goals compared to companies using other tools. In terms of timing, significantly fewer roadmap owners updated their roadmaps on an annual basis, compared to 2016. The most popular cadence for updating roadmaps in 2017 was monthly, followed by quarterly, then weekly. We found that product managers who plan with timelines less than 6 months are more likely to meet their organizational goals. With this faster cadence for strategic updates, it’s not surprising that product managers are adopting more specialized, product-oriented apps. Communicating the Plan Beyond planning and prioritization, we asked our survey participants to let us know how they’re approaching the communication of their product strategy. For product managers, roadmaps ensure that teams within an organization are in alignment with high-level strategy. Many participants emphasized the importance of having a roadmap that is easily and quickly understood by non-product stakeholders. Interestingly, the primary goals for roadmaps shift a bit depending on company size. According to our survey respondents, small and mid-market companies are mainly using product roadmaps as a means of prioritizing features and initiatives. Enterprise companies, on the other hand, are typically using roadmaps to communicate high-level strategy. With more functional teams and stakeholders, communication across Enterprise organizations becomes more challenging and more critical. Despite their differing use cases, all three market segments—78% of respondents—identified the executive team as the primary audience for roadmaps. Looking Forward Product managers face a significant set of challenges moving forward. Faster and faster product cycles. Continuous development. Competition. Market shifts. Looking ahead, success seems to hinge on adopting a more dynamic and adaptive approach to product management. At the Enterprise level specifically, product managers face more stakeholders, geographically distributed teams, and other concerns for security, seamless integration, etc. These factors, coupled with multiple product lines, makes having a single, standardized process around product strategy and communication crucial. Thank you to all of our survey respondents for their participation. Stay tuned for the next survey participation request in the coming months! Click here to view and download the full 2017 Product Planning Report. How do our findings compare to your day-to-day experience as a Product Manager? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Why Do Product Managers Assemble a Roadmap? As a product manager (PM), you need to know where you are, where you’re going, and what needs to be done along the way. A good PM moves fluidly between the resolutions of now, next, and later to avoid getting stuck in tactical execution. But, product managers are tired of spreadsheets, presentations, and wikis to communicate their product vision. They want to convey the big picture but are stuck in the weeds. You might relate to the struggles below: Spreadsheets are great for organizing and prioritizing but bad for communicating a vision Presentations take time to produce and are static documents that are hard to share Wikis and other documents are disjointed and hard to keep updated Getting company alignment is an uphill battle There is rarely a single source of roadmap truth In that sense, a good product roadmap is a polestar for product teams. It keeps us connected to the longer-term vision so that we don’t get lost in the day-to-day. It’s the strategic counterpart to task lists and opportunity backlogs. A Step-By-Step Guide to Assembling Your Product Roadmap 1. Collect Inputs We start by collecting inputs. Inputs come from different sources. Customers are constantly giving their input. We’re gaining insights and gathering information from our key internal stakeholders (like the sales and marketing teams), as well as key external stakeholders (like our investors). We have to collect data and analyze that data. We’re looking to our competitors, both existing and new, and we’re looking to the cultural landscape and the technology trends that are emerging. All of that information is coming at us constantly, and as we gather it, it forms the foundation for our plan of action, which is what the roadmap really is. 2. Establish Objectives Once we have collected our inputs, we need to parse the information into clear objectives. Objectives may be set for the company itself, for the department that we’re working in, for the specific product that we’re involved with, or even the specific feature that we own as part of that product team. Objectives are broad, ambitious goals that can inform meaningful discussions about what kinds of projects or releases might actually realize those goals. 3. Determine Outcomes A core tenet of Agile is “outcomes over outputs.” The objectives we establish are only as good as the impact we expect them to make (to our customers, to our business, to our future). Determining outcomes helps us set and prioritize the right objectives. 4. Measuring Outcomes / Iterating As (and after) we execute our planned roadmap activities, we should be measuring the actual outcomes of our work. Those results become new inputs to inform the process. This is the cyclical nature of roadmapping. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '53ae44b5-ec4d-4ff8-9d1c-56626297bb4c', {}); Roadmap Iteration Frequency Different organizations iterate on their product roadmap at different intervals. Some teams might update their roadmap quarterly or every couple of weeks. Early-stage startups experimenting their way to product-market fit typically don’t even roadmap beyond six months into the future. By contrast, enterprise organizations and hard product manufacturers may be working with five or seven-year-long roadmaps. Whatever the frequency, however adaptive the team, the contents of a roadmap are highly subject to change, but the process remains relatively constant. Vision Before you can establish objectives, you have to have a vision. It’s altogether possible, depending on where you are in your own product lifecycle or at what point you joined the current team that you’re working on, that you may be inheriting a product vision that’s already been established by the company, or it may be incumbent upon you and your team to help reinvigorate that vision. If you’re a founder or product manager in a new startup, you may very well be part of the team that’s trying to establish the product vision. The product vision is like an umbrella that spans over the top of the entire roadmap. It’s the ultimate state of being we are perpetually working toward. There are a few really great techniques you can try for determining your product vision: Press Release Format Elevator Pitch Vision-Box Magazine Review These exercises may seem corny to some, but envisioning is a necessary process for going beyond granularities toward big-picture thinking. At 100 Product Managers, the vision is to become the most beloved place to gather product managers in community and conversation. Today, we’re articles, and we’re podcasts, and we’re free tools, and we’re resources, but the vision that stretches out over our entire roadmap is to create a robust community of highly engaged individuals sharing ideas and supporting each other. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '5894a003-79ce-4ea3-9804-dae280a96106', {}); Annual or Quarterly Themes Months and years are the temporal increments that help you realize your vision by tackling it in smaller bits. We call these smaller bits, themes. Establishing themes is a powerful way to get entire teams or departments sharing the vision. And for that exact reason, themes should generally be succinct and actionable so that people can get excited, not confused. I like to think of themes as locker room cheers. Short sentences that end with exclamation points and result in teams charging the field. In his book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, Verne Harnish sets up a really simple framework for both establishing and limiting roadmap themes. He suggests that for any given period you should have one internal and one external focus, and not more. Obviously these rules can change depending on the scale of the organization, but in general, the practice of limiting themes is important for promoting focus. External themes drive outbound efforts. Some examples are “get funding!” or “keep employees!” or “drive referrals!” Internal themes drive operational behaviors. Some examples are “better production!” or, perhaps, “cheaper production!” or “improved process!” Whereas the product vision is highly unlikely to change from year to year, or even at all (if it’s big enough), themes should change annually and quarterly. Themes create the bedrock of your roadmap. Mapping Projects to Themes Once you have determined the annual and quarterly themes, you can begin to map your planned releases, projects, or initiatives to those themes, or brainstorm new ideas out of those themes. Mapping your initiatives will help you better identify those projects which are just simply out of focus. However, most organizations don’t suffer from too few planned initiatives. If your initiatives are starting to pile up, this is a good opportunity to leverage a prioritization framework such as 2×2 grids or weighted scoring to further eliminate low impact ideas. In my opinion, it doesn’t really matter what framework you use for prioritization, so long as you use a framework. What I’ve discovered in working with teams, is that nothing deflates morale more than a seemingly arbitrary process of prioritization, which doesn’t typically foster good team relations. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'e1e87713-3763-4c27-8f73-f817614e5f52', {}); So pick an approach, establish and agree to it with your team, and release the low priority ideas from purview. Now is the time to execute! Backlogs are not Roadmaps Some organizations refer to their product or opportunity backlogs as their product roadmap. A backlog or a list of feature ideas inform roadmap planning, but should not be confused with a true product roadmap. Bottom-up tactics don’t typically lead to a coherent upfront strategy. If you’re using great tools like LIKE.TG for your road mapping and Pivotal Tracker for your software delivery process, you can integrate them together and easily “telescope” (a term that I like to borrow from Amazon’s Jason Meresman, which describes the act of switching focus between present and future) between your backlog and roadmap while keeping progress in sync on both sides. Measuring Outcomes Using OKRs Themes and initiatives give direction and priority to our roadmap but generally fall short in providing quantitative or qualitative measurements for assessing outcomes. This is where the OKR framework can help. OKR stands for Objectives + Key Results. OKR is a syntax for goal setting that anchors broad, ambitious goals (objectives) to specific measurable outcomes (key results). Here is some example OKRs: Objective: Widen the appeal of the product! Key Result: Increase new registrations by 10% Objective: Create a best-in-class experience for our vendor partners! Key Result: 50% adoption rate for online vendor orders Objective: Become a better product manager! Key Result: Attend 3 product management workshops in Q4 The idea behind OKRs is to define a way for the team to understand (and share in the understanding of) where the finish line is. OKRs tell us how we will know when we have accomplished our objective and when it’s time to set new targets. If you’re keen to learn more about the concept, I can’t recommend a better book for understanding OKRs than Christina Wodtke’s Radical Focus. Best Practices for Documenting and Sharing Your Product Roadmap Guide So you have a roadmap, you’ve defined your OKRs, and you’ve established a shared understanding. There’s one more piece that you need, and that’s actually sharing the information with others. In fact, one of the biggest reasons roadmaps fail is because most people in the organization never get to see them. Good roadmaps: Are easily shareable Are easily refactored Provide transparency Remove obstacles to change (which is inevitable when roadmapping) and embrace tools that make your roadmap easy to share, update, and access. Timelines Keep your timelines high-level. The roadmap is usually the worst possible place to make specific commitments like, “Yes, go ahead and put in that media buy,” or “Yes, go ahead and take out that loan,” or “Yes, go ahead and hire that whole new developer team.” Because when we’re roadmapping, we’re in the widest part of the cone of uncertainty—usually out in front of project details by several weeks or even by several months. For that reason, we want to keep projects and timelines high-level and conservative across larger slots of time. In fact, some organizations remove specific timelines altogether in favor of the Kanban approach, which really means, “We’re working on what we’re working on until it’s finished, and then (and only then) will we work on whatever is next.” Regardless of format, resist the temptation to use roadmaps for providing absolute deliverables, and instead use them to communicate the direction. Why Do We Assemble a Roadmap? So what are some uses for a product roadmap? Share the product vision and tell the world where we’re headed. Identify possible resource gaps…in advance! Communicate when certain features are going to be released. This is super helpful for sales and marketing teams that are busy trying to grow and maintain customer interest. Declare End of Life plans. Google is notoriously bad at this. Microsoft is great at it. Be like Microsoft. Indicate when a new market segment is going to be addressed, for creating shared understanding amongst teams, and for getting buy-in from stakeholders. Keep outside partners informed. Takeaways Roadmaps start with inputs, which we collect from various sources. Then, inputs lead us to a series of annual and quarterly themes, which can inspire many epics or project initiatives. You should prioritize releases based on impact and made measurable using accountability frameworks like OKRs. If you’re new to product management or the process of roadmapping, you may discover that roadmapping is hard. Roadmapping is a highly strategic kind of exercise. It’s business-driven and necessarily holistic. If most of your experience to date has been in coordination roles, or you’re an associate product manager, or you’re new to the process, or you haven’t really been invited into the “war room,” a lot of you may struggle to try to put all these pieces together. That’s ok. Know that it’s to be expected. Let yourself off the hook and consider this advice: Sign up for a free trial of LIKE.TG. Use it to build a roadmap for your own personal or career goals. Bookmark this article and revisit it as often as you like. Practice. Trust the process. Download Building Your First Product Roadmap ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'a81908bd-d7dd-4be2-9d7e-cb09f3f90137', {});

In my 12 years as a software product manager for Sonos, I benefited from an established company vision and strategy-based team roadmap. As a result, we created innovative and highly successful products. The Sonos vision, which has stood the test of time, is straightforward: to fill every home with music. From there, my fellow product managers and I developed a set of product strategies that allowed us to identify the products and initiatives that would translate to an executable product team roadmap. What is a Strategy Roadmap? Before diving in, I thought I’d quickly align on what I mean by “strategy-based roadmap”. This particular roadmap serves as the link between the product strategy and the execution plan. The main content on this roadmap is the key outcomes and the timing around their delivery. A strategy roadmap expands on the “why” around upcoming product changes in order to achieve the strategic vision. I’ll explain how to convey these outcomes on your roadmap further in this blog. My Experiences With a Strategy-Based Team Roadmap A vision statement illustrates why the company exists. From the vision statement, product managers can derive specific strategies that cover different areas of the product. For example, at Sonos, one of our product strategies was focused specifically on apps, and we used it to help determine which platforms to support. Keep in mind this was before the days of iOS and Android. It was a strategy that served us well for many years; however, after the emergence of smartphones, we floundered a bit because that strategy no longer helped us effectively prioritize our customers’ problems. Therefore, it was incumbent upon us to replace that outdated strategy with something that would serve us for the next few years. This is no small feat, by the way. (If you need help defining or redefining your strategy, I highly recommend using Matthew May’s Playing-to-Win framework as a starting point.) Tweet This: “Grounding your roadmap in strategy can help you grow your team by showing the value each person can add.” To better illustrate how Sonos’ roadmap was guided by strategy, we structured our roadmap based on its strategies. This allowed us to tell a compelling story about the roadmap that was clearly tied to the company vision and resonated more easily with our stakeholders. Strategy Based Roadmaps as the Lone Software Product Manager When I first joined Sonos, I was the only software product manager, and I was responsible for the entire software roadmap. I managed everything from the software running on the speakers to the apps that controlled the music to securing music partnerships and leading them through API implementations. Over time, we grew the team and decided to hire product managers specializing in specific areas, such as music partnerships. Because we grounded our roadmap based on our product strategies, it was easy to show the value that each new hire would bring to the team. In addition, they would be responsible for a dedicated set of initiatives within our roadmap. Read the Strategic Roadmap Planning Guide ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '06f68ad8-23a4-4d4e-b15a-e578f0f8adaf', {}); 4 Steps to Creating a Strategy-Based Team Roadmap 1. Lead with your vision and strategies. Have you ever seen a group of tourists following a tour guide waving a brightly colored flag? As a product manager, you need to be like that guide. It’s your job to make sure a) everyone following you know the right direction and b) that you’re all moving together as a team. Learn more about developing and communicating your product strategy in this LIKE.TG webinar: In every presentation you give, don’t even show a glimpse of your strategy-based roadmap until you’ve reminded everyone of your company’s vision and product strategies. Yes, this may seem very repetitive, but if you work at a growing company, for example, you need to use these meetings to educate everyone about why you are here. But, again, this is crucial for making sure everyone is moving in the same direction. 2. Tell your story thematically. Let’s use an imaginary example and pretend we work at a company that is creating the next generation of car stereos connected to the internet. The company’s vision is “Enjoy your favorite music, everywhere you go.” To achieve this ultimate result, we’ve come up with the following product strategies: “Enjoy easy access to all streaming audio services.” “Superior sound quality” “Smart displays for a better experience” As you contemplate how to create your roadmap, remember that it should not be a long list of product features. Instead, the roadmap should be high-level, and it should help you tell your product’s story. Consider breaking the phases of your strategy roadmap into themes. As LIKE.TG co-founder Jim Semick explains, “…by grouping initiatives together into themes, you can organize your roadmap in a way that describes the value to customers and other stakeholders. In addition, themes can help you put together a roadmap that creates a story–the why behind what you’re proposing.” Themes also allow you to present what your team will deliver. This could enable your marketing team, for example, to plan their stories for driving customer acquisition and user retention. Have you ever had a conversation with your counterpart in product marketing about some shiny new object your team is building, only to see their eyes start to glaze over as they try to understand why what you’re describing will matter to your customers? Socializing your roadmap based on themes allows your stakeholders to quickly understand the value your team (and company) will deliver. Boil your strategies down to their very essence to create a set of themes. Tweet This: “Boil your strategies down to their very essence to create a set of themes.” In our example, this could look something like this: Tips for Creating Themes: Limit the number of themes you have. Two is probably too few; seven is probably too many. Keeping it simple and concise allows you to capture what really matters and focus on the higher-level goals. Details such as mock-ups belong in your backlog. Involve stakeholders in the process. Of course, you should involve your stakeholders in the roadmapping process but start earlier by including them in the theme identification process. I recommend doing this by first identifying key parts of your product’s experience, such as set-up and onboarding. Include people from your customer success team, too. Often, they can help identify pain points that may otherwise be overlooked. Themes should be directly tied to clear outcomes. What are the KPIs you will measure? For example, if your company measures success based on a Net Promoter Score, can you tie one or more themes to that? Based on the themes and KPIs, you and your team can work together to identify the tactics. Your tactics could map to your team’s backlog. Include a description of your themes to avoid any possible ambiguity. For example, the theme ‘Voice Control’ from above may mean different things to different people. Provide a brief description that helps your stakeholders understand what you mean. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '5894a003-79ce-4ea3-9804-dae280a96106', {}); 3. Focus on problems, not solutions. Another easy trap to fall into, especially if your company is used to shiny object syndrome, is feature-based roadmaps that focus on the solution, not the problem. Here’s another example of why being a product manager at Sonos was so awesome: we clearly defined the role of the product manager as the one who defines what needs to be solved and why. Our UX team and our software developers were responsible for defining how those problems were solved. Together, we were able to create great products our customers love. 4. For every strategy, a swim lane. Continuing with our example of smart car stereos, you could create a roadmap with each of the three strategies in its own row (or swim lane, as I like to call them). For example, it could look something like this: Strategy Based Roadmap Takeaways Now and then, a tour guide sees something of interest or encounters a roadblock and decides to change direction. One of your many responsibilities as a product manager is to lead teams through those moments of ambiguity and change. Although your company’s vision should be evergreen and serve as the anchor that holds everything together, your strategic roadmap needs to be a living document reflecting current conditions. Things change. Priorities will shift. It would help if you were out in front, leading the way. Themes that are strategically focused allow you to get buy-in from your stakeholders more effectively. Just remember, feature-specific roadmaps can get you into trouble by focusing on tactical solutions rather than strategically focused outcomes. So keep your eyes focused on the bigger, strategic picture, wave your flag proudly, and make sure everyone is following you on your path to success. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '1f74539e-d4fc-4cb3-97c6-fd86de2bf62e', {"region":"na1"});

You’ve carefully curated your product management career trajectory. You’re a full-grown professional with valuable life experience. You know what makes a great product manager and you’ve carefully studied product management strategies and insights from industry thought leaders. But there’s one group of product management gurus you’ve overlooked: Kids! Many adults will humbly admit that kids can teach us so much about life, like how to slow down and enjoy a moment, how to find beauty in simplicity, and just how loud mom can yell when she really makes an effort. Truth be told, there’s a vast amount of knowledge to be gained from kids on the product management side of things, too. Here are 12 valuable lessons kids can teach you about being a better product manager. Product Manager Lesson #1: Be curious. Kids are naturally curious. Spend five minutes around one and the barrage of questions will literally make your head spin. They want to know how things work and why they work that way. As a product manager, you’ve got to rekindle that long-suppressed desire to know everything about everything and really get to the heart of who, what, when, where, and why. Lesson 2: Don’t get stuck in the past. Kids aren’t stuck in the past. How could they be? Their past consists of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich they ate for lunch. As a result, they don’t get tangled up in the dangerous “this is how we’ve always done things” creativity killers. Sure, product managers should look to the past to learn from past product failures, but not to create a narrow view of the future. Lesson 3: Find creative solutions. Being a kid is a tough job. They have no personal experience to fall back on. And despite the fact that adults were once kids, too, it’s sometimes hard to help because most of us have forgotten what it’s really like to be a kid. Yet, kids bravely tackle challenges by immediately seeking creative solutions that aren’t bogged down by rules. Tweet This: “Product managers, take a cue from kids! Seek creative solutions and don’t be afraid to fail.” The solutions don’t always make sense to adults and, yes, the solutions might even defy logic and gravity or break a few basic safety rules, but they are nothing if not creative. Kids take their ideas and run with them full throttle. Product managers don’t have quite the same level of creative freedom, but you should still be brave and flex those creative muscles. Lesson 4: Don’t be afraid to fail. Imagine if kids were afraid of failure. They’d never grow up. Kids learn to do almost everything by failing (or falling) first. And when they are very young, they aren’t embarrassed about failure either. What a blissful period of life. As they grow, they continue to build a skillset born of bruises and skinned knees. Focused and determined, they keep trying until they get it right. Sitting up. Crawling. Walking. Running. Riding a bike. Holding a pencil. Writing their name for the first time, shaky letters floating across the page. The list goes on and on. Kids might cry real tears in a frustrated heap on the ground, but they get back up, dust themselves off, and try again. Be fearless in the face of failure (and of learning). You were once that child who looked failure and fear in the face and pushed forward to stand tall on wobbly legs. Lesson 5: Observe the world. Kids are keen observers. From an early age, they carefully watch and study the people and activities in their environment. First, it’s to create a blueprint for their own development; later it’s a form of espionage to hold adults accountable for the occasional salty word muttered during a hectic morning commute. Product managers need to practice this art of observation to understand how their people (aka product users) navigate their products. Lesson 6: Leave your mark. Kids are intrigued by the impact they have on the world around them. From moments as simple as walking through a puddle and leaving wet shoe prints on the sidewalk to more complex social situations like knocking over another kid on the playground and then seeing him or her cry, kids marvel at their own power to leave their mark. Product managers have the power to impact and change the world, too, in significant ways. Marvel in and take advantage of that opportunity. Be mystified by your ability to leave your mark. Lesson 7: Get a little obsessed. Dinosaurs. LEGOs. Captain Underpants. Kids can get really obsessed. And they like to talk about their obsessions ad nauseum. In the product world, you might call this process evangelizing an idea. Kids talk about and explore their latest obsessions with anyone and everyone who qualifies as a lifeform: you (even if you’re not in the same room, haven’t had coffee yet, are sleeping), cashiers, librarians, the neighbor’s dog. It really doesn’t matter who the idea is shared with. The point is to share the latest obsession with the entire world. If you’re a passionate product manager, this shouldn’t be a problem. Lesson 8: Unify the masses. In-laws, spouses, great aunts, and second cousins once removed don’t always see eye to eye on family matters, but despite sometimes complicated family dynamics, kids have a way of bringing everyone together. Think of the school play that runs a little long. Or a soccer game in the rain. If the kid is there, there’s no better reason for everyone else to be there too—unified and focused on the same goal. Relationships within companies can be similarly complex, and product managers have the power to bring everyone together, working towards a unified goal. Lesson 9: Be optimistic. Kids sometimes have a hard time taking no for answer. To kids, no almost always means maybe. This ability to see possibility, however remote, is key for product managers—especially when facing stakeholder pushback or an idea that just isn’t quite polished. Lesson 10: Don’t limit yourself. Give a kid an option or two, and she’ll think up three or four more on the spot. Kids are idea generators, and their creative minds aren’t limited by much of anything, which means ideas just spill out, often in the moment. Peel away constraints like common sense, hard-earned experience, and your collection of filters and internal sensors, and see what happens to your ability to think of new ideas on the spot. Lesson 11: Never stop learning. From birth onward, kids are students of life. They have to be for their own survival. But somewhere along the way we adults lose this sense of curiosity about the world around us and the insatiable drive to learn more. Once we establish ourselves as functional adults in the world, our pace of learning can slow down. Product managers need to resuscitate that hunger for knowledge and reawaken their craving for greater understanding. Lesson 12: Make connections. Last but not least in our product manager lessons, kids learn through connections and do best when interacting with others—parents, teachers, and friends. Product managers, too, do best when connecting and collaborating with others. Your ability to do your job effectively depends heavily on your ability to bring people and ideas together and move things forward. Kids have a lot to teach adults about the fundamentals of product management. Put these 12 lessons to use and see what happens. And don’t forget: You were once a kid, too. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); What valuable product manager lessons have kids taught you about product management? What other unexpected sources have been helpful throughout your product management journey? Share them in the comments!