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!

This week, more than 3,500 attendees from 50 different countries arrived in San Jose, California for the 2017 Atlassian Summit. Events like these are an excellent opportunity for product managers to interact with reps for popular product-oriented tools like Jira and Confluence, chat with their own customers and prospects, and interact with product folks from other organizations. LIKE.TG sponsored the event and team members were on hand to chat with visitors about roadmapping best practices, attend workshops, and more. It was a great experience and we thought we’d share some highlights from the Summit along with some advice about events in general. Here are eight tips to help product managers make the most of their next event experience: 1. Meet new prospects. Approach and chat with attendees who aren’t your customers. Figure out their motivations for attending the event, if they’re happy with their existing toolstack, or if they’re looking to solve a specific problem. Are they using one of your competitors? Why? Are they in an adjacent market you might be targeting in the future? This doesn’t mean every interaction needs to be a sales demo. Think of these chats as mini interviews and think of the event as a fact-finding mission where discovery is the primary goal. Bonus: Schedule meetings or social events with local prospects ahead of the event to ensure you make the most of your travel. 2. Be a customer for a while. If you’re headed to a large branded trade show like Atlassian Summit, you’re likely to run into representatives from other sponsoring companies. It’s a great opportunity to play the role of customer and offer feedback, discuss upcoming releases, and updates to strategy. We were happy to meet with executives and product managers from Atlassian to discuss our ongoing partnership, shared values, and enhanced integrations with Jira and Confluence. Your day-to-day life as a product manager means you eat, sleep, and breathe your product, but you also use lots of products as a customer and events can be a great opportunity to switch hats and offer feedback to someone else! 3. Meet your customers. For your existing customers, use the event as a research opportunity to get product feedback, refine your user personas, and give your customers a friendly, human face to associate with your product. Figure out why your customers are attending the event. Why are they here? What are they looking for? Are they evaluating new tools, exploring alternative solutions, or just catching up socially and collecting swag? Their answers will likely vary by segment, industry, role in the company, etc., but events are generally a great way to informally meet your customers and deepen your relationship. During Atlassian Summit, we met some of our customers who provided a lot of friendly (and useful) feedback on ProductPlan. Starting a conversation at an event means you can easily pick up where you left off when you get back to the office. On that note, it’s great to take notes during the event, both for your own reference and to share with your team after the event. We recommend creating a new chat room where you can quickly share ideas with your team back at the office during the event. One of the key points Atlassian co-founder and co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes made in his product-focused keynote presentation was that “the best way to understand a company’s culture is through its people.” We recently wrote a blog on things a product manager should do in their first 30 days at a new company and one of our recommendations was to figure out where your customers spend their time. The events they attend certainly fall under this recommendation and chatting in person is a great way to understand your customers and their respective company cultures. 4. Be transparent with fellow vendors. Atlassian emphasized during the Summit that “open work helps teams work better together.” In other words, transparency can lead to efficiency. For vendors, this means networking with other vendors, even, in some cases, your competition. You have something in common with at least some of the other vendors in the room. You probably have some customers in common. They’ve probably tackled similar challenges or opportunities that you’re currently facing, i.e. integrating with the Atlassian suite. Atlassian Summit was a great chance for us to talk to other companies about how and why they integrated with Atlassian products. Candor tends to encourage more candor and if you’re open and transparent with fellow vendors, you’re likely to learn something new. Part of your job is to understand where the market is heading and why. You can help each other understand differentiators and shared challenges, without feeling like you’re giving away your competitive advantage. 5. Ask questions. Practice describing and asking questions about your product (at light speed). If you’re spending anytime working your company’s booth, you’re going to get the chance to speak (briefly) with hundreds of people. Events are a great opportunity to hone your product’s elevator pitch, condense its features, benefits, and value proposition, and quickly identify the problem your product solves. These are all things you likely do on a daily basis with various product stakeholders, but you probably don’t do it over and over again in 2-3 minute intervals with hundreds of people in a row. That volume really requires you to cut to the chase and understand the core value of your product. Beyond describing your product, the booth also provides a great opportunity to conduct quick interviews with customers, prospects, and fellow vendors. You’re competing with hundreds of other colorful booths, flashing demo stations, snack tables, and swag giveaways, and you want to be sure when you get someone’s attention you don’t ask them about the weather. Events are a fantastic opportunity to sharpen and practice your interviewing skills, distilling your long list of product-related questions into 2-3 core questions that ensure you make the most of your time. If you’re talking to a prospect, you might ask them how they’re currently addressing the problem your product aims to solve. In our case, it might be something like “How are you currently communicating your product strategy to stakeholders?” It’s concise. It’s open-ended. It’s a great starting point for a broader conversation. For existing customers, you can ask them how they’re using your product today, and if there’s something about it you could change or update to make them more successful in their job? However brief their answer might be, this type of face-to-face, direct feedback is typically invaluable. 6. Conduct market research. Get a sense of the state of the market. Many of the sessions and keynote presentations at Atlassian Summit focused on large trends in the software industry, including a growing focus on the DevOps community, infrastructure-as-code, and issues around scalability. Since Atlassian has more than 90,000 customers worldwide, their view of the marketplace is extremely insightful. During one of the Atlassian Summit keynotes, Jira team members discussed their belief that technology companies are beginning to move “beyond agile,” shifting more toward continuous development and DevOps practices. While you’re unlikely to make sweeping changes to your product roadmap based on a single keynote address, information like this is important to take note of and investigate. This shift toward DevOps is likely to impact Product Managers that work with development teams, directly impacting how work gets done. Beyond explicit talks devoted to the state of the industry, there’s often a couple of emergent themes at each event—ideas, companies, or products that everyone seems to be talking about in the exhibition halls or during social events. These whispers can be invaluable for product folks wondering where things might be headed next year. 7. Take advantage of getting outside. Enjoy being out of the office. Any time you can get out of the office or deviate from your daily work routine is a great time to examine why you have the processes that you do. Summit had a particularly inspirational keynote on this front, highlighting how breaking your regular routine can be very energizing, ultimately reinvigorating your enthusiasm for your product and career. Bonus points if you can pass on some of this energy to your team when you get back to work. 8. Finally, remember to have fun. People do business with people. You solve problems for people. Take some time to meet other attendees outside of the exhibition hours and head to some of the social events. Grab a drink! Grab some swag! Talking to all those people at the booth is super helpful but can be a bit grueling and event organizers purposefully build in this time to unwind with teammates and new friends for a reason. If you remember to enjoy yourself, you’re much more likely to go home with a fresh perspective on your product. If you weren’t able to attend the event in person, Atlassian is making videos of some of the top sessions and presentations available here. Have more tips for product managers on their way to an event like Atlassian Summit? Leave them in the comments below!

If launching new products were easy, you’d probably be reading this post through your Google Glass or on an Amazon Fire Phone. But there’s no universally effective launch plan to follow, and even the most seasoned product managers often struggle to get new products off the ground. Getting to the minimum viable product is a balancing act—on one hand, you want to thoroughly validate against potential failure points, but on the other hand, you want to get to market quickly. For years I’ve helped define and launch products that, in the beginning, were simply concepts. My goal with this post is not to write a rigid formula that probably won’t work for your unique company—I’ve never been interested in turning an art into a science. Instead, I’ll provide some guiding principles to help you feel comfortable taking the plunge. Here are the five most valuable lessons I’ve learned from launching new products. Download the Anatomy of a Product Launch ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '0edb2611-2761-4434-90b0-f055704d9daa', {}); 1. When it comes to launching products, start before you’re ready. The nature of building a new product or starting a new company is that you don’t have very much information on which to base decisions. Established products have the luxury of history; their product managers can analyze years of usage data or survey statistically significant pools of existing customers to help make decisions. New products, on the other hand, are a clean slate. But that doesn’t give those of us building new products license to skimp on market validation. You still need to do the necessary work to get to your MVP. That is, you still need to talk to prospects and understand as much as you can about their workflows and pain points. You need to ask them how much (and if) they are willing to pay to solve the problem your product intends to solve. And you need to solicit feedback on prototypes and make changes accordingly. However, once you’re reasonably confident that your product provides value to your market, launch it. Too many entrepreneurs and product managers wait until their product is absolutely “perfect” before putting it in front of customers. Of course, you understandably want to impress the market with a robust feature set and a polished UI, but waiting until you reach “perfection” is a mistake. Getting your product in the hands of real users is precisely how you start building that knowledge base that established products benefit so much from. The more time you spend upfront building out features based on assumptions, the more time you take away from iterating on actual feedback and real-world user behavior. For example: When we were validating LIKE.TG, we uncovered the pain product managers were experiencing around communicating their roadmap. But rather than solving all the pain with our first release, we launched a product that solved just enough significant pain that customers were willing to pay for it. We’ve continued to enhance the product since that day, incrementally solving more pain with each release. Here are a few common mistakes people make when launching new products, and how they can be avoided by launching early: Misaligning with your market. It’s often the case that the people you initially build your product for don’t end up as your core customers. Sometimes adjacent markets or personas are actually a better match. For example, perhaps you thought you were building an enterprise software product, but it turns out to resonate better among the mid-sized businesses. The good news is these types of mistakes are usually correctable, given you’re willing to fail fast and adjust course. Extrapolating from a small sample size. Another common mistake happens when you interview a few people and assume their problems apply to the entire market. Small sample sizes distort data. What’s one way to open the spigot and allow more people to weigh in? Launch early! Overinterpreting positive reactions. Generally, people don’t want to hurt your feelings. If you ask them what they think of your beautiful new product that you’ve spent months working on, they’re likely going to tell you it’s great. When you’re just collecting feedback and there’s no real business transaction at stake, it’s easy for people to overestimate how often they’ll use your product or how much they’re willing to pay for it. Launching can help you avoid these false positives and get to the truth faster. 2. You don’t build products. You solve pain. People don’t buy products because they have X, Y, and Z features; they buy products to help them solve problems. Think about the products you use every day and the reasons why you use them. You probably wouldn’t say you value LinkedIn for its newsfeed algorithm or direct messaging feature. Instead, you’d say that it helps you find job opportunities or hire talented people. In general, the benefits of using a product matter much more to customers than specific features and capabilities. Your job as someone launching a new product is not to build the best features, but to solve the most important problems. The best part is, if you’re able to effectively solve someone’s problem—whether that means alleviating a pain point in their workflow or helping them get home to their family on time—they’re likely going to forgive you if the product falls short in other areas. They’ll stick with you as you work out the initial kinks because the core value you’re providing is worth it. For example: When I was part of the team validating the product that was to become GoToMeeting, we uncovered pain around the complexity and high variable cost of other online meeting solutions. We decided to launch a simpler product that was easier to budget. It wasn’t about more features. It was about simplifying the customer’s experience and reducing frustration. A lot of startups fail because they run out of money. The way to circumvent that trap is to focus on nailing the problem first. Invest in understanding the context in which your potential customers will use your product. What’s the most frustrating part of their day? What motivates them? What does it mean for them to have a good week/month/year? (Check out this list of 10 questions product managers should ask customers for additional interview ideas). Find a strong pain point that people are willing to pay to solve and pivot to building ancillary features only after you’ve started collecting your first payments. 3. The whole experience is the product. Another common mistake that product managers and entrepreneurs make is focusing solely on the application itself, instead of looking at the product holistically. A customer’s impression of your product is not confined to the time they spend in the app. The customer experience begins the moment they click on one of your ads or find their way to your marketing website, and it extends to the interactions they have with your support and sales teams. It’s important to consider the customer journey as a whole, because if you’re always heads-down working on the application, you may miss out on some great wins in other areas. Every component of the customer journey represents an opportunity to innovate and stand out from your competitors. Differentiators don’t always have to be features; they can be a unique pricing model (as in the case of GoToMeeting), a speedy onboarding experience, or superior customer support. When you’re launching a new product, take time to understand the entire ecosystem surrounding it. There are probably strings you can pull to make the customer journey smoother and simpler. For example, how can you make it easier for people to find and buy your product? And what about the way you talk about your product in demos and on the marketing website? Are you clearly communicating the value proposition? 4. You don’t know what you don’t know. Oftentimes we avoid testing new ideas because we think we already have the answers. “That obviously won’t work,” we tell ourselves. Established companies are especially guilty of this. They have thousands of customers using a given product feature, so they think it must be a good feature. Or their current pricing model has brought in plenty of sales, so they’re convinced it’s the perfect pricing model. No need to test anything new, right? Wrong. You don’t know what you don’t know, and your own assumptions can sometimes be your biggest barriers to success. An experimental approach can help you overcome blind spots and stay ahead the competition. New products and companies are uniquely positioned to approach problems with a beginner’s mindset. Be sure to capitalize on this advantage and experiment with lots of different approaches to figure out what works best. Another problem with assumptions is that they often hold us back from doing any actual legwork. You may think that customers want feature X and not feature Y. Or you may believe that message A resonates more strongly with prospects than message B. But how sure are you really? Don’t be an armchair product manager. Get out of your building and interview potential customers. Or better yet, go observe their current processes and work environments. The truth about what will make your product successful is out in the world, not in your imagination. Tweet This: “Don’t be an armchair product manager. Get out of your building and interview potential customers. Or better yet, go observe their current processes and work environments.” 5. Start with the end in mind. Before you get too deep in the trenches building a new product, it’s valuable to determine what you’d like to achieve. Just building the product and shipping it, or even gaining funding, is not a success in itself. Think about the type of business you want to be five or ten years down the line. How are you going to get there? This is the product vision. The product vision is a long term view of where your product is headed. From there, you derive the goals for the product that aligns with the features that you’ll then be releasing. Only after you have a solid feel for the potential customer’s problems is it possible to determine the solution and prioritize features. To help guide those decisions, it’s important to have a strong product vision — this is true even for existing products within an organization, but particularly for early-stage products. By creating a high-level product vision, you can get the executive team, marketing, support, engineering, and the rest of the organization on board with the strategy. This will ultimately help you get buy-in on how you plan to prioritize features.Sit down with your team to discuss the vision for your product and get an agreement on the high-level metrics you’ll use to evaluate its performance and guide your future decisions. This doesn’t mean you should define granular business and product metrics from the get-go—you’ll need some actual customer data before you can accurately forecast things like conversion rates, lifetime value, monthly active users, etc. But documenting general goals upfront will help your team stay aligned and motivated after you launch. Things are always changing in a growing business, and it’s important to be agile, but that doesn’t have to mean losing focus. Be sure you’re making changes with clear end goals in mind, and not just shooting in the dark. Do you have additional advice for launching new products? Share it in the comments below! hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"});

Many companies provide a single career path up the proverbial corporate ladder where the only way to get ahead is by moving up in the title, rung by rung. In product management, this usually takes the form of something like this: For most of my career, I worked at startups that had single-track product management career paths like this. Luckily, most of these companies were small enough that I was able to manage small teams while being hands-on, defining products, and collaborating with designers and engineers to bring those products to life. On two different occasions, though, I was faced with choosing between being a manager or an individual contributor (often referred to as an IC). Both took place at different times in my career, so depending on what stage you are at, my hope is that you find my experience useful. From Individual Contributor to Director of Product➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '9110b373-1b93-491b-8f83-5fc4b63b4b89', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Spinner I joined Spinner, the world’s first streaming music service, in 1998 as one of a dozen or so employees. This was my first job as a product manager, and I was thrilled to have finally made the transition from marketing to product management. We were a small but mighty team that grew the business and the company rapidly. Within a year, we had grown to over one hundred employees. I managed a team of product managers, designers, and front-end developers. It was an exciting time leading a collaborative team, as we created numerous versions of our music player that was branded for a variety of partnerships. AOL In 1999, American Online acquired the company. As part of the transition process, AOL brought in a few executives whose job was to evaluate their newly acquired staff in an attempt to integrate Spinner into their organization. I vividly remember the day I was called into a conference room with one of these individuals who asked a few questions about my role and responsibilities. At one point, she said, “Ah, you see, at AOL, you’re either an IC or a people manager. You can’t be both. You have to choose.” I felt like I was in the movie The Matrix, choosing between the red pill or the blue pill. I knew once I made my decision, there would be no turning back. Based on what I had seen so far of the AOL culture, I did not think I was cut out for the politics that seemed to dominate daily corporate life. Although I loved finding and hiring talented people to join my team, the work I enjoyed the most was creating something from scratch. Creating a vision, solving problems, and building products that people loved—is what drove me each and every day. I chose to give up my reins as a manager and spent the remainder of my career at AOL as an individual contributor. Looking back, I think the decision was easy because I was fairly new to product management at that time. Frankly, I wasn’t sure what the career path of a product manager even looked like back then. What I did know is that I wanted to have a direct impact on products that would be used by millions of people. Musicmatch I was eventually recruited away from AOL to join another music start-up called Musicmatch. Musicmatch was another pioneer in the digital music space with its CD ripping and burning software called the Musicmatch Jukebox. Similar to my experience at Spinner, I managed a small team while being hands-on with the product development process. One of the highlights from there was creating an in-house usability testing facility and hiring a UX researcher to help us better understand how customers were using our products and how we could make them better. Sonos Shortly after leaving Musicmatch, I was asked to join another digital music start-up called Sonos. When I joined in 2005, I was the only software product manager. The team at Sonos sought me out because of my experience with streaming music services. I had a strong network built from my days at Spinner/AOL and was able to leverage those relationships to establish new partnerships for Sonos. I also had experience developing software for hardware, which was an uncommon thing back then, before there were smartphones and IoT products. I jumped right in, wearing a number of hats. One moment I would wear a business development hat, negotiating with Pandora. Another minute, I would be working with a designer, sketching design ideas for our remote control software. The minute after that, I would be working with our acoustics team to figure out how we could tweak the EQ settings of our speakers to deliver the optimum sound quality. When I look back on those days, I’m honestly not sure how I did it all, but I loved every minute of it. At some point, however, it became clear that I was spreading myself too thin, and we needed to expand the team. To organize the work, my boss and I decided to split music service integrations into its own workstream. I hired and managed two additional people—one who would be responsible for the music service partnerships and the other who would be responsible for our 3rd party developer APIs and website. In addition to managing those new employees, I was the hands-on product manager for all other aspects of Sonos software. Again, I reached a breaking point where I was not being the best manager I could be to my staff, nor was I doing my best work as the PM for the Sonos software. I remember the CEO of Sonos telling me that one of the worst possible outcomes in promoting a great software engineer to being a manager is that you gain a mediocre manager and lose a talented engineer. The same could be said for product managers. My boss was extremely supportive and gave me a few weeks to do some much-needed soul searching to figure out what the best path forward would be for me. Tweet This: “I remember the CEO of Sonos telling me that one of the worst possible outcomes in promoting a great software engineer to being a manager is that you gain a mediocre manager and lose a talented engineer.” I am a deeply introspective person, to begin with. Having the time and space to reflect on where I was at this particular stage of my career was such good fortune. I figured out the right path to take by asking myself one simple question: What are you working on that gets you out of bed? Looking back, I realized that I was focusing my energy on redesigning our apps and defining new features. Thinking about our customer needs, collaborating with designers and engineers, and launching new products—these were the things that got me out of bed in the morning. At the same time, I was not spending enough time filling the open positions on my team. I would block out a few hours each week for phone screens and the occasional interview and then wonder why it was taking months to fill the position. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '8bd83652-2868-48a8-9b9c-ebb8e0b9c945', {}); Again, I was faced with choosing between management and individual contribution. Even though I had made this decision once before, this time it wasn’t as easy. For one thing, Sonos didn’t have a 2-track career path for product managers at the time. They did offer a dual-career path for engineers, however. Another reason this was a difficult decision was my ego. At this point in my career, I had worked as a product manager for more than ten years and had some preconceived notions about my future that were based on the continuous climb up that invisible ladder. For me, this had less to do with power and more to do with money. The loftier the title, the higher the compensation. Ultimately, I knew that money wouldn’t make me happy. What made me happy was thinking, “How can I help people listen to more music every day?” Deciding to be an individual contributor (again!) was the best decision for me because I was happiest having the most direct impact on the product. It was also the best decision for the company because they didn’t have to worry about further developing my management skills and, instead, they could unleash me on special projects, such as creating a ground-breaking retail experience for the flagship Sonos store in New York City. As Shakespeare wrote, “To thine own self be true.” In order to know which path you should take, you need to be honest with yourself. Set aside a few days for some deep introspection. Grab a journal and a pen and ask yourself these three key questions: 1) What are your strengths as well as your blind spots? Be open to the feedback you’ve been given, the good and the bad. Take a co-worker out for coffee and ask them for feedback. Review those performance reviews again. If you already manage people, provide them with a way to give feedback. 2) What do you enjoy doing the most? Ask yourself what gets you out of bed every day. Is it thinking about how to help your newest team member grow? Or do you thrive when brainstorming ideas for helping your customers use your product more easily? 3) Where do you want to be in 5 years? 10 years? Do you have dreams of becoming a CEO or starting your own company? If so, the manager track might be best for you. Perhaps you’d rather be a subject matter expert in a particular field, speaking at conferences and being sought after for your brilliant insights. Whether you decide to focus on managing or would rather be an individual contributor, I encourage you to champion a dual-track path at your company if it doesn’t already offer it. Here’s what dual-track paths might look like based on my experience: Having a track that rewards senior individual contributors helps retain a critical aspect of your company’s brain trust while ensuring people becoming managers are doing so because they want to. In my particular case, Sonos did eventually develop a dual-track path for product managers, and I was the archetype for the Principal Product Manager role. It was gratifying to be recognized and rewarded for my contributions as the most senior product manager at the company in terms of tenure and experience. After leaving Sonos, I decided to pursue yet another career path by leveraging my extensive experience to start a consulting business. Being my own boss while having a direct impact on the success of my business offers me the best of both worlds. Does your company offer different tracks for product managers? Have you ever faced the challenge of deciding if becoming a manager is right for you? What do you think?

This blog follows up on a previous post introducing the concept of systems thinking for product managers. Both posts feature a recent conversation between veteran product manager and friend of LIKE.TG, John Cutler, and LIKE.TG’s Director of Product Management, Annie Dunham. Earlier, you both referred to the idea that there’s been a shift in product management, that due to the evolution of technology, the rise of SaaS, and other factors, many product managers are more accurately managing product systems. If you’re a product manager managing a product system, what else changes beyond the “product” itself? John Cutler: Practically, you’ll also see the rise of mission-based teams, rather than the older notion of a project-based team that “completes” a project or product at some point and is “done.” The concept of a product development process that has a beginning, middle, and end is now basically defunct, especially in the context of SaaS. Your product is never complete, and the ongoing user experience associated with it is now part of your product. Annie Dunham: At this point, you have a product team with a shared mission and a shared sense of responsibility. You have a product process that doesn’t end the day you launch a product or feature. This means that everything from the way you think about your product, the way you quantify and measure success, and the way you structure your roles and teams, fundamentally changes. How does this shift change the way you approach your environment? John Cutler: Sensemaking becomes critical. You need to know what your environment is like in order to figure out when you need to let something go or cut your losses. You can think about the product team as being a team that makes bets. The more a team understands their environment, the more likely they are to successfully gauge demand, risk, etc., and make successful bets. There are two ways to think about the broader role of a product team. The first is that product needs to just keep their heads down and work on a product. The second perspective is that product needs to be involved in and understand the bigger product system we’ve been describing. The less isolated the product process is from the broader context, the more room there is for innovation. If you move away from that first feature-focused product development model, and move toward the second option, how does your criteria for success change? You’re describing a state in which there’s no objective endpoint, i.e. ship a product or feature and move on. How do you know what you’re doing is working if your product is an ongoing system? John Cutler: Well, one way to get this wrong is to assume that because a company is doing really well, it somehow means they’ve got the perfect system; they might just be doing well at the time, for now, and could probably do really well for a while, but eventually, at a certain scale or pace, things will start to break down. Don’t mistake current success (revenue, PR buzz, etc.) for the ability to adapt and succeed in the long term. As a product manager, you have to realize that each company is really playing their own game. Tweet This: “Don’t mistake current success (revenue, PR buzz, etc.) for the ability to adapt and succeed in the long term. As a product manager, you have to realize that each company is really playing their own game.” Annie Dunham: Are you a successful product manager if your company made a lot of money but everyone at the company resents the product organization and product development is a miserable process? Or, if you create a completely nimble environment in which everyone is agile and happy and can jump on any project that comes up, but you’re maybe in the wrong market or solving the wrong problems. You need broader, heads-up awareness to create processes that can scale, adapt, and hold up in the long run and align with changing customer demands. The more you’re thinking about your product as a living system that’s addressing an equally evolving market, the more likely you are to adapt gracefully. How does this impact how you think about the role of the individual contributor or the team as a whole? John Cutler: When I was at Pendo and AppFolio, I often found myself aligning around and thinking about engineers. Engineers are often some of the people on the frontlines that feel the pain of decisions made without much situational awareness. Recently, I wrote an article called “12 Signs You’re Working in a Feature Factory” that generated a ton of interest from engineers in particular. It showed me that people genuinely care about the work that they’re doing and don’t just want to show up and keep their heads down. They want to be creative and they want to think about their work in terms of the bigger picture. Annie Dunham: Agile started to really take hold about 10 years ago and people were excited not because it was a perfect solution but because it gave people a starting point to think about working iteratively. Now there’s more of a nebulous answer to how people are thinking about and approaching product development. You might have a situation where one person is great at this methodology, and another person is more familiar with another one, and these 3-4 engineers are used to working as contractors, and so on. How do you make the most of your team? The answer is not necessarily to shove them into a specific framework. You might need a more flexible methodology to balance individual creativity and experience with the broader goals of the team and organization. John Cutler: Some of that flexibility and innovative thinking would be well-applied in operations. There’s a lot of overhead in operations. It’s a commonly misunderstood idea, but Agile is really less about moving quickly, and more about moving frequently. The more rigidity there is in terms of operations, bureaucracy, etc., the less likely an organization is to adapt and remain agile. Annie Dunham: Another way to approach the topic is from an enablement perspective. Are you structuring your product organization in a way that opens the door for novel thinking, organization, activity, etc.? Is product leadership exposing key people directly to what they need to be exposed to? Rather than being the owner of this or the communicator of that, are you opening yourself up to something bigger and cooler? Are you getting more into design thinking, observation, innovation, instead of just saying “Here’s what the customer says, let’s just do that.” It’s important to leave space for the kind of emergent thinking or behavior you see in dynamic systems. That’s how product teams can break into new territory. John Cutler: I think part of the right way to approach individuals and teams working within these new systems is about creating valuable contexts. Set the context in terms of threats and opportunities, and then help people play the game, manage resources, and get work done. The product team doesn’t need to constantly hover and provide micro-prescriptive boundaries but they certainly can provide valuable context and understanding. Systems thinking and sensemaking help you devise and wrap your head around the bigger game we’re all involved in. So what do you tell new product managers entering the field, or veteran folks wondering how to best approach these new shifts? John Cutler: If we’re shifting away from tactical user stories, traditional development processes, etc., and you have a junior person coming into the product world, you’re kind of throwing them into the deep end. We should really be focusing on and teaching the core principles of product management. For new people, I want to help them build first principle skills: can you communicate to customers, can you do awesome interviews with customers, can you map the competitive ecosystem we’re working in, can you help facilitate activities that help with sensemaking, i.e. story-mapping activities? In the long term, these first-principle skills will help them as speed and complexity scales up. Annie Dunham: More than ever, product folks need to understand the “why” of what they’re doing. The basics are definitely still there in the systems context, but helping new product managers develop skills to keep the bigger picture in mind will provide the best type of orientation. Here, “bigger picture” is the broader product system we’ve been discussing: the individual product or feature, the customer challenge, the business case, ongoing updates and support, the feedback process, competition, changing markets, and so on. The core lesson is that none of the work they’re doing will be happening in a vacuum. It can be tempting to have a product manager start with a specific feature or component and work up from there, but that kind of bottom-up approach can be a disservice in the long run. John Cutler: Another takeaway from my time at AppFolio was the notion of the product presentation. Before a product manager started developing a feature, they delivered a presentation. They started with the current state of the product and then presented their desired end state, but they didn’t fill in the middle part. They just presented where they are now and where they planned to end up. If I can teach a younger PM to help facilitate the creation of this kind of presentation, wherein they need to present a compelling case of where they are now, where they’re headed, and why, that skill is going to take them super far. Another useful shift in thinking is the idea of a product manager owning an actor or a set of actor goals in a system, instead of just owning product modules or components. A product manager might be the product person for the customer success team with the goal of helping that team reduce churn through changes to the product. That’s a very different way of defining how you bring people up to speed in product but it’s an effective way to illustrate the idea of the product system and help encourage the kind of sensemaking we discussed earlier. ____ As a field, product management continues to shift and evolve in tandem with the types of products, customers, and markets it engages with. Systems thinking offers one possible framework for making sense of and succeeding in spite of these shifts. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); ____ Have more thoughts on systems thinking in the context of product management? Share them in the comments below and remember to check out Part One of the roundtable discussion.

A cornerstone of being a successful product manager is effective communication. Given the number of individuals, teams, and stakeholders a product manager interfaces with on a regular basis, mastering communication skills is something we should all be working on continuously. In my experience working with start-ups for the past 20 years, I’ve witnessed a lot of variance in the degree to which companies encourage employees to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses in order to identify how they can improve themselves. Often, these efforts center on communication. Tweet This: “A cornerstone of being a successful product manager is effective communication, and understanding personality types can help.” There are many ways to do this and, if you’re fortunate, your company has some process in place to help you. If you’d like to take things into your own hands, however, I recommend trying one of the following online assessment tools, which can help you uncover blind spots and strengths you may not even be aware of. There are many different assessment tools out there, each with its own framework and methodology. Myers-Briggs Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI) is one of the most popular personality frameworks, having been used since 1943. This framework is based on four dichotomies: whether you’re extroverted or introverted, whether you rely primarily on sensing or intuition, whether you’re a “thinker” or a “feeler,” and whether you rely more on judgment or perception. The results are boiled down to one of 16 personality types, such as ISTJ or ENFP. My test results indicate I’m an ENTJ, which means I’m matter-of-fact, decisive, and quick to make decisions. ENTJs also excel at helping people get things done with a focus on getting results in the most efficient way possible. Sounds like a product manager, right? So do many other MBTI types. ISTJ’s, for example, tend to be serious and earn success by thoroughness and dependability. Practical, matter-of-fact, realistic, and responsible, this also sounds like a product manager. If someone on your team is an ISTJ, she may not thrive in a chaotic, all-day brainstorming session. You may want to think of some alternative ways to solicit their input, such as having everyone write their ideas on post-it notes instead of saying them out loud. There is no right or wrong personality type. The key is to find your type and take advantage of the strengths you have. StrengthsFinder Speaking of strengths, StrengthsFinder is another popular assessment tool. As the name implies, this test is all about finding your top strengths so you can better take advantage of them. The methodology is based on understanding which of the 34 “talent themes” best represents your strengths. My top 5 strengths are Achiever, Activator, Positivity, Futuristic, and Learner. If you didn’t know me, but read the results from the StrengthsFinder test, you probably wouldn’t be surprised to find out I’m a software product manager. Another product manager I know is a Maximizer, Strategic, Learner, Individualization, and Arranger. Sounds like a great combination for a product manager! In this case, I might ask this product manager to take the lead on conducting data analysis along with presenting it to the organization since the Arranger trait makes him well-suited to identifying patterns and trends and perceiving how things fit together. DISC DISC is another framework I recently discovered which appeals to me because of its simplicity. It’s based on answering a set of 12 quick questions about how you respond to challenges, how you influence others, and how you respond to rules and procedures. I also like how it can easily be applied to understanding what makes other people tick without already knowing whether they’re an ESTP or an Activator. DISC is a quadrant behavioral model based on these 4 personality dimensions: Decisive (Ds): This type is best described as direct, strong-willed, and forceful. If you’re a fan of the Seinfeld TV show, Jerry would fall into this theme with his direct, skeptical, and impatient nature. Interactive (Is): If you’re sociable, talkative, and lively, you’re likely an I. Another I would be Jerry’s friend, Elaine. Stabilizing (Ss): Gentle, accommodating, and soft-hearted people are considered to be Ss, much like Kramer. Cautious (Cs): Questioning, analytical, and stubborn types enjoy accuracy and stability. Jerry’s best friend, George, certainly comes to mind when you think of the Cs. Once you know what your DISC type is (mine is D), you can easily start applying the framework to those around you. Does this require some generalization and stereotyping? Perhaps. However, it’s human nature to make judgements about people as soon as we meet them. This is rooted in our animal instincts to judge friend from foe, threat from opportunity, etc. By leveraging these insights to better understand your colleagues, you’ll be able to better communicate with them and be more successful in your product career. Take a moment now and think about someone on your team that you work closely with. Without giving it too much thought, which DISC type comes to mind? Once you get the hang of it, you can start using this in a more strategic fashion, such as tailoring your one-on-one meetings based on the DISC behaviors your colleague best represents. Grabbing coffee and having an informal chat would work well with an I style colleague. However, if you’re having an important meeting with an individual who is a C, then you need to prepare yourself by allowing enough time to go over the details with that person so that they can fully digest what you are presenting to them. You may even want to think about the types of questions he may ask you, since you know they tend to be questioning and analytical. A practical and creative use of this framework is to apply it to how you present your product roadmap to stakeholders. I always try to meet 1:1 with my stakeholders to socialize my roadmaps, to give everyone a chance to ask questions and dig deeper into what the vision is and what is driving our priorities. By tailoring these roadmap socializing sessions based on the DISC personality types, you’ll be able to much more effectively communicate product direction and build consensus. For example, you could choose different roadmap templates based on who you’re meeting with. If you’re meeting with someone who’s a D style (direct, fast-paced, impatient), you may want to share a streamlined version of your roadmap with a focus on results. If you’re meeting with a C style (think of George), come prepared with a more detailed roadmap with back-up slides to address their need for understanding the analysis behind the roadmap. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); Tailoring your roadmap presentations to your audience is a key to your success as a product manager. Better understanding your audience with the use of frameworks such as these can help you ensure your product has the best chance of being successful. Have you used other personality assessment tools? Please share them in the comments below.

At LIKE.TG, we’re lucky to work with product managers on a regular basis. One thing we’ve noticed is that product managers are pretty avid consumers of content: books, blogs, podcasts, etc. Often, they’ll distill their learnings and insights from all these sources into 140 (or 280!) characters and tweet it out to the product community. We put together a handful of our favorite product-focused tweets from the past year and included some commentary below. Check them out and let us know which tweets you liked or retweeted this past year! From @johncutlefish: We really appreciated this perspective from John Cutler. It offers a great reminder of the unique dynamics of a product manager’s role. Product managers exist in a position where they’re expected to propel the product forward and facilitate progress, but they often don’t have any direct authority over the members of the various teams required to do this kind of work. But product managers are still part of the team. They facilitate. They strategize. These aren’t “pure management” roles and most product managers aren’t writing code or building prototypes themselves, but they produce “the big picture,” the strategy around which the rest of the team can contextualize their work and align their efforts. It’s a unique role, and one that’s worth thinking about from this perspective. From @ttorres: This tweet from Teresa Torres really rang true for us this past year. In 2017, a common theme in product management discussions was the idea of bias, assumptions, and misconceptions about the market. Teresa puts it really succinctly here, suggesting that, as a product manager, it’s extremely important to try and check your own bias when you take on your customer’s perspective. That’s not to say you shouldn’t have your own individual thoughts and feelings or instincts. These are, after all, some of the best tools a product manager has to make those tough-to-call decisions when the data, customer interviews, etc., aren’t offering a clear strategic direction. What Teresa is suggesting, rather, is to stand back and take stock of your own personal biases, or your organization’s biases and assumptions, and approach the development of your customer’s perspectives as objectively as possible. Sure, you might have a hunch about how your customer interacts with the world in their profession, but why not approach an interview or market problem with an open mind. It’s highly likely your customer knows their day-to-day life better than you do and making too many assumptions about it will prevent you from discovering genuinely new insights. From @lissijean: Story points are a valuable part of modern software development. They’re a helpful tool to express the estimated complexity and time involved in taking a backlog item from to-do item to usable feature. But, as Melissa Perri points out in this great tweet, story points are not the final product or feature. Your customers aren’t concerned with story points. They’re concerned with how your product helps them move seamlessly through their work and delivering that experience should be your primary focus as a product manager. At LIKE.TG, we often discuss and write about metrics. With all the metrics and tracking available to you throughout the product development process, it’s easy to keep your head down and stay focused on the data. This tweet helps remind us that you’re building products for users, and part of the estimation process for features should involve not just story points (complexity, risk, effort), but also the amount of perceived value item will deliver to your customer. From @destraynor: These types of process-oriented questions always present a great opportunity to examine your product management approach. Though it’s obvious there’s a lot of complexity that’s being boiled down here to just two choices, it’s a powerful question: Is your process so risk averse it’s preventing innovation, or is it flexible enough to encourage experiments that might not always pan out but potentially deliver great results? It seems pretty clear that the tweet’s author seems to be leaning toward option B, but it’s also likely that option A will feel familiar to lots of product managers. It’s important to think about the balance between getting good work done, avoiding waste, etc., and holding enough space for discovery, experimentation, and true innovation. This is a great prompt to think about the way we generally define success and waste, and reminds us that product management is a long-term, strategic process. There will be some short-term ups and downs, bets that pay off and bets that don’t, but product management is about delivering long-term value to customers. Sometimes delivering something truly new and delightful to customers involves taking chances and re-thinking your product process. From @christianism: We thought this was a great sentiment. Smart product managers know that their product’s success (as well as their personal professional success) hinges on their ability to work with other teams: designers, engineers, business stakeholders, marketing, sales, etc. As we think more and more about the product in terms of the entire customer experience, this becomes even more crucial. Christian’s tweet boils this complex point about working cross-functionally down to a very practical piece of advice. As a bonus, the part about speaking to designers and engineers to figure out how to attract great designers and engineers also reminds us of a similar point: we should get out of the office and talk to customers about customer goals, desires, etc. Just like it doesn’t make sense to ask other product managers about how to hire a great UX designer, you’re going to have a difficult time solving your customers problems if you never talk to them directly. From @jefflash: “Random acts of enhancements” has to be one of the pithier lines of the year for the #prodmgmt hashtag. Jeff’s tweet does an excellent job of articulating the link between work, strategy, and your product roadmap. Any one of these things on their own is not entirely helpful. If you don’t have a strategy, you’ve got nothing to put on your roadmap and you’re likely going to waste a lot of resources on work that’s not furthering any particular goal. If you have work and strategy, but no roadmap, you’re going to have a difficult time communicating that strategy to your stakeholders and getting their buy-in on how you plan to allocate resources. Bottom line: you need all three. We also loved the nod to agile, and to the frequency with which the methodology is misunderstood, sometimes even by very experienced product folks. If agile is all about moving frequently, working lean, and regularly shipping new code, then you definitely need a product strategy and a roadmap, otherwise you’re going to be “committing random acts of enhancements” at a faster or more frequent rate than you would in traditional waterfall. From @jimsemick: This one’s mostly just for fun. But it’s actually a really interesting prompt to think about product management as a profession, especially as we really break into 2018. It may be that product management is hitting a milestone on its maturation curve as a discipline, but we’re seeing more and more interest in the product manager career path, topics around interviewing, advancing, changing roles, so much so that we recently published a book-length Career Guide for Product Managers. Though it’s kind of funny to imagine how you explain product management (or UX design or QA engineering) to your in-laws, Jim’s tweet is also a good prompt to think about how you define it for yourself, for your stakeholders, and for the other teams involved in your product process. Which parts of the role do you emphasize the most? Strategy? Metrics? Delivering the product itself? However you explain it to others, take some time this year to reflect and consider how you define product management for yourself. What were some of your favorite #prodmgmt tweets from 2017? Share them in the comments section below!

This has been quite a year for the LIKE.TG blog. We’ve published more than 100 articles on a variety of product management-related topics like roadmapping, product strategy, agile development, and more! As the year comes to a close and the holidays approach—and many of us get stuck in airports—we thought we’d offer up a useful roundup of our ten most popular blog posts of the year. Tweet This: “Check out LIKE.TG’s roundup of their 10 most popular articles of the year!” 1. 14 Must-Read Books for Product Managers This blog post is a great place to start. It compiles an excellent list of books we think are relevant to product managers. Not all of the books are laser-focused on product management itself, but many of them are full of insights all product folks could benefit from. The books cover topics like entrepreneurship, productivity, research methods, and even presentation skills! Bonus: we recently published a follow-up list of books for product managers based on recommendations our readers left in the comments section of the original post. Check out both of these lists and start building out your reading schedule for 2018. 2. 5 Things You Should Never Say to Your Customers As a product manager, you are your product’s primary spokesperson both to internal audiences and to the general public. What you say to customers and how you manage that relationship is as much a part of your product as its user interface. As the title suggests, this blog post lists five things you should never say to customers and explains why you should avoid each one. 3. What is the Product Manager Career Path? This has been one of the most popular blog posts of the year. We regularly receive questions from product managers about all manner of career-related topics. In fact, we have an entire blog category dedicated to career-focused articles. We also recently published a free (140 page!) Career Guide for Product Managers to distill some of the insights we’ve collected over the years. This specific article focuses on the different stops along the product manager career path, outlining each role—Associate Product Manager, Senior Product Manager, Director of Product, VP, CPO, and so on—and its goals and responsibilities. This article also offers some insight into how a product person might know it’s time to step up to the next level. 4. 3 Things All Product Managers Wish They Could Say Out Loud Product managers are often characterized as having a lot of responsibility without much direct authority. You’re expected to work with other teams, answer to stakeholders, and interface with customers on a regular basis, all while reconciling your product’s usability with business goals and customer requests. It’s a great job, but it’s not always easy. This blog post is a fun one and imagines some of the things product managers wish they could say (but never actually would) to these different groups. 5. How Product Managers Can Better Tie Metrics to Product Strategy Almost all product managers agree that metrics are critical to effectively managing a product. But there are a lot of metrics out there and not all product managers know which metrics to track, or why, or how to connect those metrics (and data points and charts and spreadsheets!) to their product and their broader strategy. This article outlines some tips for effectively tying specific metrics to your product strategy. Rather than offering a glossary of acronyms from MRR to ARR to LTV to CAC, this post instead outlines a couple of different business goals and then suggests ways to link metrics and product strategy to those business goals. It’s a helpful reminder that product managers are tracking metrics to inform a strategy and ultimately accomplish a set of business goals. 6. Product Managers: Don’t Waste Your Time On These 6 Things Product management consists of a lot of different activities: talking to and interviewing customers, planning and prioritizing product features, tracking metrics, presenting your roadmap to stakeholders, etc. There are a lot of interesting discussions to be had around how much time product managers should spend on each of those activities, but there are definitely some time-wasting activities product managers (and pretty much everyone) should avoid. This post describes six such activities and explains why they’re detrimental to your productivity and long-term effectiveness. 7. Why Your Minimum Viable Product Sucks As a product manager, you’re under a lot of pressure from stakeholders, customers, and the market to develop excellent products that differentiate your organization, delight customers and send profits through the roof. You’re also under pressure to do this quickly and under budget. Agile development and the concept of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) have made this easier in some ways but also riskier. This blog post explains why your MVP might not be living up to your expectations. Read it to find out why there are many ways to interpret and misinterpret the notion of an MVP. 8. Product Manager Career Paths: 3 Myths Debunked Whereas the third entry on this list outlines the product manager career path, starting with Associate Product Manager, this blog post is focused on how people arrive at the field of product management in general. We’ve received a lot of questions from smart individuals in engineering, marketing, user experience, data analysis, and other roles adjacent to product management that want to know how to break into the field. This post outlines three common misconceptions about how people become product managers and explains some of the broader personality and character traits that product leaders look for in job candidates. 9. Product Launch Checklists: From the Oscars to a Software Product Release, They’re Necessary Launching a product involves managing several parallel timelines and product launch checklists help you ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. We suspect this article was popular because it offers a useful product launch checklist to help product managers prepare for the unexpected. Product launch checklists help you think through all of the processes, steps, and assets you and your team will need to prepare for and complete prior to your product launch. Use it as a starting point and adapt it to fit your own launch routine. 10. 10 Great Podcasts for Product Managers Product managers are busy. But they also love to learn. Podcasts (and audiobooks) are entertaining, informative, and thought-provoking, and they let you keep your hands free! These podcasts represent a sample of what’s out there and cover topics ranging from entrepreneurship and marketing to sales, optimization, time management, and more. Some of them are product-focused, while others are full of insights from adjacent fields that product folks should still find quite useful. Some of them are just fun! Check out our list, download a couple of sample episodes, and enjoy! _____ We hope you enjoy the articles on this list and that you make your flight! Did we miss one of your favorite posts? Leave us a comment and let us know!

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

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

In an ideal, data-driven world, every product, project, and program would come gift wrapped with its own precise set of goals, objectives, and KPIs. There would be no bad strategy. The rationale would be crystal clear, as would measuring its success. Bad Strategy Happens The world is a messy place. There are many occasions when half-baked ideas get greenlit, fuzzy concepts are approved, and individual initiatives are largely disconnected from the corporate strategy. If one even exists at all. These are not the stories we like to tell ourselves, but they’re far too often the realities we face. A lacking strategy or bad strategy is nothing to celebrate. However, it’s not necessarily a forgone conclusion that it will all fail. In fact, it may even be an opportunity for the lucky/unlucky soul who has one of these incomplete ideas dropped on their desk. But it will require a little research and detective work, some insightful analysis, and a dash of storytelling savvy to bring it all home. 5 Product Strategy Tips from a VP of Product If and when you find yourself inheriting something with no concrete, measurable connection to the business’s desired outcomes, it’s your job to connect the dots and ensure the product actually ends up being helpful in the end. Here are some pointers for making lemonade from that bag of lemons. 1. Get to the why. First and foremost, you must figure out why this product matters to the business. The executives who lobbed it your way might have their stated reasons, but those should be taken with a big ol’ grain of salt. Instead of blindly following orders and assuming there must be a good reason to build what was requested, take a giant step back. Create two columns, and in the first, jot down what’s important to the company. If there are shared goals, objectives, targets, etc., use those as a starting point. But don’t hesitate to peel back the onion and get to the heart of the matter. Treat this just like you might a customer request for something specific. You must understand why they’re asking for it in the first place. To start, list out everything that matters to the business. In the other column, start coming up with everything this particular product could do for the business. Do this even if they don’t immediately line up with those corporate goals. It’s not yet time to rule anything out. Just get all the possibilities on the table. For example, let’s say someone asks you to build out user review capabilities for an e-commerce site. But the only reason they gave was that “everyone else has one.” While keeping up with competitors is a valid rationale, user reviews could obviously offer more benefits than simply checking another box in your competitive analysis table. In this case, one additional benefit would be increasing confidence for potential buyers. This could lead to increased gross sales, more new conversions/customers, or better search results. Those could then be linked with existing (or even unstated) business goals. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '1f74539e-d4fc-4cb3-97c6-fd86de2bf62e', {}); 2. Define your own version of success. If you’ve found yourself with no targets, KPIs, or other measures of achievement, it’s time to draw up your own. While this might feel daunting, it’s a unique opportunity to define your own goals for a change. Your homegrown KPIs should make sense in the context of the larger business. If the revenue model is based on subscriptions, then “increasing page views” is a lousy thing to track. However, it’d be excellent for an ad-based model. So concentrate on what you can measure that really matters. At the same time, you want to be sure you’re measuring things relevant and actually influenced by the product in question. While the company’s goal might be landing a strategic set of clients, for instance, your product probably can’t do it by itself as that’s really a sales effort. Ensure anything measuring product success is within the control of the product itself. Luckily, you don’t have to start from scratch in this area. There are well-established metrics that products and companies rely on. Ones that you can crib from, borrowing what’s best for your situation and dodging anyvanity metrics. Download Product Success Metrics ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '18f5a8aa-393b-4397-9fd4-f7758c1edf55', {}); Then, once you’ve decided what you’re going to measure, it’s time to pick some targets for your product metrics. They should be a stretch but attainable and realistic. Quantitative measurements are always easier, but a dash of qualitative might be appropriate as well. You’ll eventually need to secure buy-in from other stakeholders. But now you’re giving them something to react to and OK versus asking them to figure it out themselves. Even if you’re wrong, you’re going to end up with more information than you had before. For a busy executive, this mode of interaction is often preferable. Even if it’s not exactly the most rigorously researched method. 3. But track everything. Even if you have a pretty good handle on which metrics matter for the product and the business, you never really know what the future holds. Tracking absolutely all data and everything is absurd, but tracking what’s reasonable to the goal will ensure you have flexibility. It’s always a good idea to be sure the reasonable instrumentation is in place for every reasonable data point. This way, instead of answering “I don’t know” when someone throws a curveball at you, you can at least counter with “we’ll have to run a report on that.” You may even get curious yourself about something that wasn’t originally on your radar, so the more available data the better. However, how much information you’re communicating and socializing should remain narrow and relevant to those previously identified goals. You don’t want to open yourself up to second-guessing by churning out reams of reports no one ever looks at… until someone does and you’re caught on the back foot. 4. It’s OK to be wrong. Figuring out what success looks like for a new initiative is an ongoing process. At the start, you’re mostly operating on assumptions. Over time, you can course-correct based on what you’re seeing once real people begin interacting with the product. But kicking things off on unsure footing can be an extremely uncomfortable feeling, especially if you’re still trying to establish your credibility. So come right out and say that you’re unsure if these are the best ways to measure success. You’ve got to start somewhere, and over time there will be many opportunities to adjust the goals and measures of success. Making this a collaborative exercise versus trying to perfect it all yourself can also help. Not only are two heads (or more) better than one in this case, but you also create some cover if a higher-up is less than pleased with your proposal. 5. Make a plan to circle back Since you’re going to market with less than 100% confidence, it’s key to acknowledge this reality and formulate a timetable for revisiting it. Confirming your strategy’s efficacy, the relevance of your metrics, and the alignment with corporate objectives should be a standard operating procedure. But in these cases, it’s optimal to acknowledge the elephant in the room and establish a cadence and process for how things will be evaluated on an ongoing basis. Not only does this keep you from barreling in the wrong direction for too long, but it also lets everyone else involved know they’ll have ample opportunity to assess and chime in early and often. This openness to feedback and nimble approach can make any foray seem a little less risky. Bad Strategy isn’t Unusual A temporarily aimless product or company might seem like an anomaly, but it’s far more common than you’d think. Old or bad strategies can die off before new ones are happened upon. Business models can fail without the company folding. We’ve seen far too many examples of companies rising like a phoenix from the ashes of a mediocre existence. In the late 1990s, no one would have pegged Apple to turn into the juggernaut it is today, despite its early successes and subsequent stumbles. And there are just as many cases where a product’s original purpose fizzled out, but an “off-label” use case turned it into a success, such as bubble wrap, which was originally intended to be wallpaper. You’re also not alone. When we asked product managers how they felt about strategy, plenty of folks didn’t think their company was killing it. 60% sought more clarity regarding their company’s vision, while 40% felt their current strategy communication was pretty average. A lack of strategy isn’t the same as being saddled with a bad one. You don’t have to fight against inertia and momentum heading in a bad direction. You need to kickstart things and give them a push toward what you hope and believe is a success. Adopt a growth mindset. Establish a culture that prizes experimentation. Prepare for and accept that failure, missteps, and setbacks may come your way. Most importantly, start somewhere and push forward—you don’t know where you’ll end up until you get there. 点击播放声音 @keyframes VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } @keyframes VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } .volume__small-wave { animation: VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite; opacity: 0; } .volume__large-wave { animation: VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite .3s; opacity: 0; } 1:00:16●●●●●●●●●●●Meet the PanelAgendaPoll #1Product KPI vs. Strategy KPIProduct Strategy GamePoll #2How do you identify early adopters?What does a good strategy look like?How do you communicate strategy?Live QAThank you! #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_71_wrapper .w-css-reset{font-size:14px;} #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_71_wrapper 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After working in the product management space for a few years, I realized that I needed to take some classic product management advice and apply it to my own life—nothing good happens in a vacuum. I’d been spending far too much time living strictly within the small bubble that was my comfort zone and not enough time exploring new things, things that truly challenged me and broadened my ways of thinking. Being a creature of habit, I knew I’d have to take drastic measures to break out of the bubble in which I lived. So, I told my landlord I was moving out of my rent-controlled apartment in Oakland, sold most of my possessions, and made my way to Quintana Roo, Mexico where I trained to become a cave diver. While it was the scariest thing I could think of doing at the time, to this day it is the best gift I have ever given myself. I had to laugh when a former co-worker from California recently referred to me as the “navy seal version” of my old self upon hearing about some of my adventures under the Mexican jungle. Contrary to popular belief, cave diving is not a sport for adrenaline junkies or daredevils. Rather it’s a sport for people who like to think, explore, and solve problems. As I was pondering this one day while gliding weightlessly through the underground, it dawned on me that product management and cave diving actually have a lot in common. If you can think like a product manager, you can learn to think like a cave diver (and vice-versa). Many lessons I’ve learned while cave diving can be applied directly to product management. Today I’d like to share a few of those lessons. 1. Never lose sight of objectives Poor prioritization and lack of focus can and will kill you, which is why we must define and live by key objectives. In cave diving, that’s easy. Regardless of where you’re diving and who you’re with, the main objective for any dive remains the same: Get out of the cave alive. Product managers’ key objectives can vary far and wide based on industry, company stage, and business strategy, but the guiding objectives are simple. Build a product that generates profits, stands the test of time, and solves a problem worth solving. All decisions we make in cave diving are made with our key objective in mind. We must constantly ask ourselves whether our actions, whether large or small, align with and support our objectives. Only when you can meet your core objective with 100% confidence should you accept the addition of potentially distracting secondary objectives such as underwater photography, survey, and exploration efforts. Safely prioritizing around objectives means maintaining an acute awareness of the impact of every decision we make. In both product management and cave diving, meeting key objectives requires us to exhibit some serious focus and restraint in the face of temptation. For PMs, that temptation may come in the form of a “shiny object” feature idea that emerges during a roadmap planning meeting — of course you can build it, but is it the right thing to do right now? For cave divers it may come in the form of a mysterious unexplored passage you discover when nearing your turnaround pressure. Sure you can explore it, but given your objective and remaining gas supply, should you explore now or come back later with a new set of tanks? While something may be tempting in the moment, you must think critically about whether the timing is right, given all other factors. If it jeopardizes your key objective, simply don’t do it. Tweet This: “In both product management and cave diving, meeting key objectives requires us to exhibit some serious focus and restraint in the face of temptation.” 2. Stay cool and level-headed under stress One of the marks of both properly trained cave divers and experienced product managers is being exceptionally good at making decisions under pressure. In cave diving, every decision is made quite literally under pressure. For every 10 meters/30 feet of depth, the atmospheric pressure underwater doubles from that experienced at the surface. In the less literal sense, cave divers are keenly aware that a single bad decision while navigating, or a momentary lapse in judgement can have fatal consequences. We absolutely cannot allow stress and task-loading to blur our judgement. Product managers are put under a great deal of pressure as well. At times it can seem like everyone around wants something from you. And surprise! They all want something different. Customers want you to improve your app’s sharing functionality. Stakeholders want you to build that new gizmo a key competitor just released. Sales is hounding you to build that feature they promised a huge prospect last week. Oh and they all need it, like…yesterday. Meanwhile, your inbox is overflowing, your performance review is approaching quickly, and suddenly your head is spinning because there is simply too much going on. I’ll be first to admit, I am terrible at managing stress. However, through my cave diving training, I’ve been able to gain more effective tools for stress management. By far the most useful lesson I learned was when my instructor intentionally made several things go wrong at once and then closed the tank from which I was breathing. At first it felt like there were a million things that needed to be fixed RIGHT NOW. But as soon as I realized I could not breathe, I was forced to think critically and prioritize which fires to distinguish first. I realized in that moment that the only actual fire was the closed tank; the rest of the problems were simply minor annoyances that I could take my time solving. When pressure is high, it’s easy to forget that (unless you can’t breathe) you have every right to hit pause for a moment so you can land on the most informed, thoughtful solution. If you’re stressed out, you’re more likely to make rash or foolish decisions. Consider this next time you’re sitting in the hot seat. Stop and think before you act. The extra moments, hours, or days you spend thinking, researching, and making educated decisions are far less costly than fatal errors. 3. Don’t be afraid to say no I’ve learned hundreds of new words since moving to Mexico and picking up Spanish as well as a little bit of German. But regardless of what language I’m speaking, the most useful word I’ve learned to use here is one I should have mastered ages ago: “No.” I used to be what you’d call a “yes person,” especially at work where I often would take on a heavier workload than I could manage. I was too afraid to say “no” to my bosses, or perhaps I didn’t know how to say no. Cave training has finally helped me break that habit. It helped me realize that it is my right to say no. And it taught me to be more thoughtful about where the intersection of “can” and “should” lies. All (decent) cave divers abide by something we call “the golden rule,” which states that any diver can call any dive at any time for any reason with no questions asked. Of course, product managers who say “no” will most likely need to prepare some explanations. But it’s important to remember that as the strategic leader of your product, it is not just your right but also your duty to say “no” when it is warranted. Some things are easier to say “no” to than others; these are things we simply cannot do, regardless of whether we want to or not. But beyond saying “no” to the many things we simply cannot do, we also need to learn that “can” and “should” are not one in the same.There are plenty of things we can do, but that doesn’t mean we should do them. We need to recognize this and act accordingly. 4. Be curious. But explore responsibly. Curiosity can either be a cave diver’s best friend or their worst enemy. Without it, there would probably be far fewer cave divers out there, and there would definitely be significantly less explored caves in the world. If it weren’t for curiosity, the team of cave divers who recently connected Dos Ojos and Sac Actun cave systems to create the largest underwater cave system in the world wouldn’t have spent 10 months working on their vision. The exploration aspect of cave diving and caving in general is perhaps one of the most exciting parts of the sport. Some exploration expeditions start with a hunch, while others are more spontaneous. In either case, exploration means getting your hands (literally) dirty with no guarantee that you’ll find what you’re looking for. Whether you find a dive-able cave or not, you should look at your efforts as a success because they teach you lessons that will inform your next expedition. But exploring the unknown doesn’t come without risks. Underwater caves are hostile environments; places where human life is not meant to exist. With unexplored caves, you truly don’t know what you don’t know. And you often don’t know much more than what meets the eye at the surface. While venturing into an unexplored cave will always carry a certain amount of risk in itself, cave divers who live to tell their tales of exploration are keenly aware of what is at stake. They go to great lengths to minimize their risk as much as possible. Product managers must take exploration seriously as well. There is no innovation without exploration and no exploration without some amount of risk. We can be more calculated about our risk by thoroughly researching before experimenting and designing. We also must be keenly aware of what is at stake at all times, and whether we are willing to face any associated risk. Sometimes we can’t simply dive right in to an experiment. Instead we must test things little by little until we have enough information to confirm that an experiment presents limited risk. Finally, we must remember that even if our experiments don’t lead us to a desired conclusion, all knowledge picked up along the way is valuable. 5. Use the right tools for the job (one size does not fit all) Cave diving is a sport that requires a LOT of highly specialized and personalized equipment for safe participation At 153 cm and 41 kgs, I am substantially smaller than your average cave diver. As such, I’ve learned there is truly no such thing as “one size fits all,” no matter what marketing materials claim. Finding equipment that works well for me has been a long and frustrating process of trial and error. But it has also shown me the true value of having the right tools for the job. One should not settle on solutions that are merely “good enough.” Whether you’re a product manager or a cave diver (or both!) you’ll be exposed to countless tools. Within both communities you’ll find opinionated advocates making their cases for the “best” tools. While suggestions from others can help you establish a starting point, it’s important to understand that the “perfect” tool for one person or organization may not be the perfect one for you. And that’s ok. Take your time experimenting with different options until you find something that works exactly as needed. Avoid looking for the cheapest option or the most highly recommended one. Research and test thoroughly; in the end, you’ll be grateful to have a toolkit that serves your specialized needs. Finally, once you’ve settled on your chosen tools,, invest time getting to know the ins and outs of how they work so you can ensure you’re making the most of them. At the end of the day, the tools and equipment you use don’t make you a good product manager or a good cave diver. But if chosen carefully, the tools you work with can help optimize your potential. 6. Give thorough briefings Every dive begins with communication. A proper briefing can mean the difference between a smooth, relaxing dive and a chaotic one. So I make it a point to be extremely thorough in my briefings. I never start a dive until everyone in my team is on the same page about the plan. During a dive briefing, I start by explaining where we are going, why we’re going there, the specific roles of everyone in the team, and the limits and scope of the planned dive. I then remind everyone of our primary objective and describe the sequencing of events planned for the dive. I also address any possible hazards, challenges, or concerns that may arise. After that, I make sure all questions are answered before giving the signal to descend into the underground. Even if I am diving alone, I make it a point to share every detail of my plan with someone else. Just the act of articulation helps me identify any gaps that I may have overlooked. As product managers, we cannot expect others within the organization to understand the who, what, when, where, and why of our product strategies. So we must take the time to explain and provide proper briefings. If you fail to articulate your plan to your team, how do you intend to get buy in and support from them? Finally, communication doesn’t begin and end with the briefing, it’s a continuous process. Your briefing or kick-off meeting is a fantastic time to discuss how to handle follow up communication. In dive briefings we often review the communication signals we’ll use while underwater. In product briefings, you can explain what methods you’ll be using to keep the whole team up to speed on product news and updates. 7. Always know where you are, where you’ve been, and where you’re going Product managers have product roadmaps to tell them where they’ve been and where to go next. Cave divers navigate the sea by using personalized navigational markers as “breadcrumbs” to help them find their way back. One of the first rules you learn as a cave diver is that you always must have a continuous line leading you to your exit. A cave diver without a line is like a product without a product roadmap; both are unlikely to last very long. A cave line is more than a piece of string to follow. It’s your lifeline. No matter what happens in the cave, you never stray away from your line. In the event of a silt out ( when sediment particles in the cave get stirred up into the water, reducing or even completely eliminating visibility), the line serves as a tactile, concrete guide back home. If our lights somehow manage to fail and we’re left in darkness, we can use the line to feel our way out with confidence. For product managers, your roadmap is your product’s lifeline. It is a living document depicting where you have been, where you need to go, and the objectives you need to meet. Even when distractions blur your vision, a well built roadmap helps refocus your attention on the objectives that matter. 8. Debriefings are the best learning opportunities The pursuit of perfection is growth’s greatest enemy. There is no such thing as a flawless product or feature launch, and any decently trained cave diver is unlikely to tell you they’ve had a perfect dive. While product managers have retrospectives, cave divers have debriefings. I personally believe no cave dive or product initiative is truly complete until there has been a proper debriefing. Product managers and cave divers who opt to skim through or completely skip debriefings miss out on important learning opportunities. And if we aren’t learning, how can we expect to improve? Have you found product management inspiration in other aspects of your life? Share what you’ve learned in the comments below!

Making a shift to product-led growth sounds pretty appealing, especially to product managers. Knowing your baby is the driving engine behind the entire company’s success puffs up our egos and makes our jobs seem more important than ever. But unless your company offers paid services along with its line of products, how is this different from “regular” growth? And what does it mean for the product leaders steering the ship and plotting out roadmaps? Wes Bush of the Product-Led Institute has literally written the book on product-led growth and joined LIKE.TG co-founder Jim Semick on arecent webinar to discuss this and other related topics. What is Product-Led Growth? The traditional sales model for almost anything is a potential customer interacting with a salesperson. That salesperson may have proactively reached out to the prospect or they might have strolled into a showroom or called up the vendor themselves. Regardless of who initiated the interaction, the model is one where the salesperson is driving the conversation. They’re assessing what the prospect is looking for, what problems they’re trying to solve, and the overall context of the potential purchase. The salesperson is also doing a lot of education as they tout various features and functionality, reference other satisfied customers, and highlight the ease of use or simplicity of implementation and integration. Whether it’s a new car, ERP software, or a timeshare, they’re doing most of the talking. Product In aproduct-led model, it’s the potential buyer that is leading the charge. They’re actively seeking a solution, shopping around to explore their options, doing their own research, and ultimately experiencing the product before they ever plunk down their credit card or issue a purchase order. In these cases, the product is essentially selling itself. Prospects try it out, see how it works, and eventually make their own decision whether to convert their trial to purchase or upgrade to a paid tier of service. Growth The “growth” part of product-led growth kicks in via the scalability of this model. It would take an army of salespeople to call on all these potential customers, walk them through the value proposition, and hold their hand while they try it out. But when you’re trying to close dozens or hundreds of thousands of deals per week, the salesperson-driven model falls apart. It’s simply too expensive to grow at the desired rate and creates scenarios where the payback on thecost of acquisition is to create a sustainable, growing business. When the customers are doing most of the legwork themselves, growth happens organically and the product itself is its best spokesperson. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '57ff7e42-ccfa-4d9e-b5be-8a0f6ba69363', {}); Why Product-led Growth is Having A Moment “Whether it’s your cellphone, your Internet, everything in tech is deflationary. That means consumers want to pay less for your software tomorrow,” Bush said. While this has always been the case with any new technology, the low barrier to entry in today’s marketplace has greatly accelerated the trend. That means it’s much cheaper to start new companies and attack both existing and emerging markets. “It’s easier to start your business, but it’s harder to grow,” Bush added, referencing the fact that the cost of acquisition has increased 50% during the past five years. Simultaneously, there’s been a distinct change in shopping behavior. “The buyer has changed. We prefer to self-educate,” Bush said, referencingresearch from Forrester indicating an overwhelming majority of buyers prefer to self-educate than talk to someone in sales. Semick echoed this sentiment, citing LIKE.TG’s own experience. “We discovered really early on that they don’t want to have their handheld, especially by a human,” Semick said, citing the tendency of product managers to do their own research. “You can figure it out for yourself, the product speaks for you. You can discover new features in the product as you use the product.” This dynamic dovetails especially well with SaaS companies that are able to offer free trials or adopt a freemium model. Letting customers “try before they buy” creates a much wider sales funnel, and the product itself is now an integral part of the buying experience. Is Product-led Growth a Fit for Your Product? It’s still early days for product-led growth, as only 16% of the webinar’s attendees had adopted it to date. And while product-led growth isn’t a perfect fit for every product, there’s a fairly quick way to assess its viability. In a nutshell, you’re choosing between three options: 1. No touch 100% self-service as customers can research, evaluate/try the product, and make a purchase without any interaction with company staff. 2. Low touch The sales team only reaches out after there are “product-qualified leads” that come in after a prospect has started using the product. Sales are answering questions and “closing,” but not “hunting.” 3. High touch Traditional sales-led approach. These models aren’t mutually exclusive, however, and there can be a mix within the same company, often based on the size of the potential opportunity. To evaluate whether or not to shift to product-led growth, Bush recommends using the four-step MOAT Framework. Market Strategy: The first step is defining your market strategy and how you’re trying to grow in your particular category: Differentiated strategy You’ve created a superior product for a specific market niche that stands apart from the current offerings. This allows you to charge a premium, but because it’s a more confusing and complex product you might need salespeople to educate prospects. For example, a real estate-specific CRM versus HubSpot. Dominant player Your product is better than the competition and you can charge less for it than other offerings. In these cases, a free trial or freemium model is the only way to keep acquisition costs low enough to serve all those customers. Think Netflix or Spotify. Disruptive strategy In this case, you’re offering a “worse” product but charging less. This doesn’t mean it’s a “bad” product, just one that doesn’t do as much as the competition because it’s aimed to serve a specific kind of need. This prevents customers from having to purchase a product that’s really overkilling for how they’ll use it, disrupting that product’s market dominance. In this case, it’s Canva for the casual user and Photoshop for the hardcore professional. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '1f74539e-d4fc-4cb3-97c6-fd86de2bf62e', {}); Ocean Condition: The “O” in MOAT asks you to determine which kind of market you’re entering: Blue Ocean A new, uncontested market requiring lots of customer education, which necessitates sales reps to inform and cultivate. Red Ocean A vastly competitive, well-established space. Here, the product-led model is the only one that makes sense to achieve any market share or growth. Audience. Next, it’s time to determine who is being targeted during the sales process. Are you going after the buyers or the end-users? Is it a top-down sales approach or a bottom-up? Product-led growth can only work when the company targets who will actually use the product. Time-to-value. Finally, you must assess how quickly a user will have that magical moment where the value all clicks. Product-led products require a quicker path to this realization. For a complex B2B product, the time-to-value might take weeks or months. This can be overcome by mapping out theuser journey and concentrating on how to start solving pain points faster to shorten that journey. At the end of the day it all comes down to this, Bush said: “Does sales add value or is it adding friction?” The Best Benefits of Product-Led Growth There are many reasons to embrace product-led growth if your product passes the previous MOAT Framework test above: It is not the dominant growth engine in the SaaS economy The top of the sales funnel gets much wider It lowers customer acquisition costs The sales cycle speeds up, accelerating revenue Growth is compounded versus linear You can rapidly achieve growth on a global scale Higher revenue per employee Generates better user experiences Any of those would be good reasons to take the leap, but Bush particularly emphasized the importance of compound growth. In a traditional sales model, each salesperson can only have a relationship with so many prospects, which means you must hire more and more salespeople to achieve any kind of exponential growth. However, in a product-led growth model, there’s no relationship between the number of salespeople and the number of closed deals. Growth comes by improving the product experience so more trials convert and by removing friction from the self-service sales process. Each incremental tweak and enhancement gets compounded month over month. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'e1e87713-3763-4c27-8f73-f817614e5f52', {}); Show Versus Tell When done well, product-led growth comes down to the communication and execution of thevalue proposition. This has worked well for LIKE.TG, where the product itself is experiencing organic growth within existing customer organizations. Semick said the increased share of wallet thanks to offering free viewer licenses. This exposes other parts of the business to LIKE.TG’s roadmaps and planning boards before they even use the product themselves. “All of this is occurring without humans,” Semick said. “All of this is occurring because they’re having a great product experience.” Bush recommends the UCD model for successful product-led growth: Understand your value Communicate it to the market Deliver it This multifaceted process views the product experience along three axes: 1. Functional With this product, the user can do something specific 2. Emotional Using this product makes them feel a particular, positive way 3. Social Using this product (or completing the tasks this product facilitates) positively influences how the user is perceived by others. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3aa6cb5b-cf9b-4527-a6f0-4492930dea99', {}); Onramps to Shift to Product-led Growth Not every organization has the opportunity to begin with a clean slate, but even existing products can pursue this approach. Bush highlighted new product launches and product line extensions as the prime candidates to start this journey, rather than converting an existing product to this model. He recommends trying out both freemium and free trial models and then following one with the otherSaaS pricing model. In practice, this would be either offering a limited version of the product with the opportunity to try out the fully-featured paid version for a limited time or starting with that free trial and then downgrading users to the limited free version after an initial period of time. Both of these approaches give users a free taste of what a paid experience would look like while retaining those customers for the long term, even if they’re not paying for anything right now. This provides further opportunity to convert them to paying customers down the line, perhaps as new features and functionality are introduced that they’d be willing to pay for. To learn more about how to shift to product-led growth and whether it’s the right fit for your company, watch the entire webinar for free or tune into the ProductLed Institute’s podcast episode featuring Jim Semick.

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

Mind the Product has certainly established itself as a premier event for product people to connect, share, and learn from their peers. For 6 years now, the conference has drawn product people together from all corners of the globe. Last year, we were thrilled to attend, and published a recap blog post of what we learned (10 Takeaways from Mind the Product 2017). Unsurprisingly, this year did not disappoint, as we were once again reminded what we love about the product management community. There were plenty of nuggets of wisdom shared throughout the day. Topics ranged from the product management career path, to improving customer interview questions, to product launch best practices. After digesting the rich diversity of insight shared, we thought we’d share our own list of four themes that really stood out at Mind the Product 2018. 1. Product Managers are generalists in a world of specialists. Martin Erikkson kicked off the day with a brief but humbling perspective on our roles as product managers. He admitted that he often feels the effects of Imposter Syndrome. As product people, we’re surrounded by brilliant engineers, creative designers, and motivated marketers. Amidst the brilliance, it can be hard to feel like you belong. That feeling, or awkwardness as Martin called it, is important, and product managers should embrace it. As he said, “In order to be innovative, we have to end our addiction to always being right”. You can’t solve everything, and often times you will be wrong, but with the support of a team (your specialists) you can turn those failures into opportunities. Building on that notion, the next speaker, Christina Wodke, suggested that as a product manager, you have 3 jobs: You’re a business owner, a vision holder, and a team coordinator. We all know there’s no set path to product management – we come from diverse backgrounds and experiences. For example, Christina was managing a restaurant before she became a product manager. This experience taught her valuable lessons that transferred over to product management. For example, she realized that any effective team must have: Mutual accountability A common purpose Performance goals Complementary skills You’ll often depend on other departments (and more importantly, other people) to help you achieve your goals as a product manager. Teams should be collaborative and they should work to help each other. After all, we make products to make people’s lives better. People are at the heart of our products, and should be at the heart of how we work, too. 2. Data, data, and more data Leisa Reichelt, Head of Research and Insights at Atlassian, started off her presentation with a simple question: Is bad research better than no research? Product managers love data. After all, who doesn’t love a good graph? But as Leisa astutely reminded us, “Just because you can put information on a graph, that doesn’t make it science.” She said we should be more critical of what data we trust, and what we don’t. We rely on data to define our successes—and our failures. So shouldn’t we make sure it’s as useful as possible? As an example, Leisa examined how to conduct better customer interviews. She pointed out that the answers you get depend on the questions you ask. When interviewing, she advised: Start with a wide context. Be user (not product or feature) centered. Invest in analysis. Treat this like research. Preceding Leisa’s talk, we heard from Cindy Alvarez, an expert in customer research. Cindy offered great, tactical suggestions for how to reframe your interview questions to avoid confirmation bias. As she mentioned, “Any yes or no questions will have an obvious socially preferable answer.” Instead of simply asking “Do you want this specific feature?” rephrase your question to maximize its utility. For example, “Tell me about a feature that would improve your experience”. But Cindy also pointed out that before you can ask the right questions, you have to ask the right people. A sobering point she made is that “we look for evidence that proves us right, and we avoid or ignore evidence that contradicts our beliefs.” Cindy dubbed this the “Happy Customer Bias”. What we should be doing, she suggested, is talking to our churned customers, customers with low usage, and those who use our competitors’ products. From this we are reminded that the context and source of your data is just as important as the data itself. Focus on a data set that tells the whole story. Fail to do so and you’ll never know where opportunities might exist. 3. We have a responsibility to our customers – and the world! It’s a little telling that two different speakers independently chose to include the same quote in their presentations: “With great power, comes great responsibility.” Dan Olsen delivered an interesting perspective with this quote. He pointed out that while product managers might not feel like they hold great power, they certainly hold great responsibility. Dan conceptualized the product development process by breaking it into two categories: the problem space, and the solution space. As he advised, “Don’t jump to solutions. Start in the problem space”. Doing this helps remind us that the products we build are meant to serve people’s needs. We should provide solutions to real problems—not create problems for which we reactively offer solutions. Once we understand the problem, we can take steps to address it. Dan referenced the Kano Model as a useful framework for linking potential solutions to the problems they address: Touching on the importance of ethics in developing products, Mariah Hay spoke about the potential ramifications of the products we build. Her philosophy is “First do no harm”. Mariah reminded us that we are serving people, and that “focusing on human-centered ethics will pay dividends”. As she said, “Product managers are problem finders and solvers. But if we’re not careful, we’ll be problem creators.” She cited companies like Volkswagen and Cambridge Analytica. Clearly, the decisions we make in building products can have dire effects on our communities and our society. 4. Successful products do not require divine intervention Not every company is going to be successful. In fact, most of them will fail. So what is the secret to building a product that prevails? A few speakers tackled this topic from different angles. One was Nir Eyal, who delivered an energetic and insightful talk questioning how we handle distractions. Why are we distracted? Nir considered that we are trying to escape from discomfort, and he challenged us to acknowledge our own distractions. He even recommended time management products like Forest (a mobile app that encourages less smartphone usage) and SelfControl (a web app that helps you avoid distracting websites). To be “indistractable” is today’s ultimate superpower, he said. Avoiding distractions helps create a better work space. And according to Tom Coates, the final speaker of the day, the best ideas we have require work. Innovation doesn’t strike from the divine. Rather, it comes from hard work and perseverance—sometimes over the span of many years. In his presentation, “How to find the product”, Tom recognized that everyone is capable of having good ideas if they’re willing to put in the work. One thing that may help build better products, according to C. Todd Lombardo, is reconsidering how to utilize a roadmap. Todd was preaching to the choir for us LIKE.TG folks in attendance. As he said, “A roadmap is not a list of features or a detailed release plan.” Roadmaps are strategic, and they may look different for everyone. His recipe for an effective roadmap has 5 parts: Product vision Business objectives Timeframes (long term, or short term) Themes A Disclaimer (a way to manage your audience’s expectations) Sarah Tavel further added to the discussion on what makes a successful product. We know that eliminating distractions and building a clear roadmap is key. But Sarah also gave us a way to measure our success. As she explained,“What matters is not growth of users. It’s growth of users completing the core action.” Her point was that the best products are the ones where, if they no longer existed, we would have the most to lose—products like Instagram and Pinterest that create a library of memories and interests. If these disappeared, we’d be devastated to lose all the energy we’ve put into them. Successful products are the ones in which people find continued value. And no, it doesn’t require divine insight to build them—we just have to be willing to put in the work. Final Words on Mind The Product 2018 Much like last year’s conference, Mind the Product 2018 focused a lot on the human elements of product management. The speakers satisfied our desire to learn with actionable advice and compelling data. But more importantly, they inspired us with their personal stories and experiences. We may all build unique products for a variety of people, but at the end of the day, product people are people too. We can all learn something from the motto at Slack HQ: “Work hard and go home.” As product managers, it can be easy to forget to take some time for ourselves. And who knows, maybe your next big feature idea will come from focusing a bit more on your own life and the ways in which you personally interact with products!

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending HubSpot’s INBOUND conference in Boston. The conference marked my first trip to Boston (go Sox!) and was a delightful mix of education, networking, and hot buttered lobster rolls. All three were immensely satisfying. INBOUND 2018’s theme, “Grow Better,” was thoughtfully incorporated into every track of the event. Many talks focused on empowering marketing, sales and customer success teams to help their respective companies scale up and grow their customer bases. As modern marketers, we have the tools available to deliver personalization at scale, and it’s our responsibility to create a customer-centric growth strategy and deliver value to our users with every touchpoint. As a product marketer myself, I believe that product marketing plays an important role in acquiring and retaining customers. INBOUND 2018 left me feeling inspired and ready to create a better experience for visitors and customers. In the spirit of paying it forward when you’re gifted useful knowledge, here are 5 key takeaways for product marketers. 1. Marketing deserves a seat at the product table (but sometimes it needs to fight for it). In my first breakout session (and one of my favorites from the entire week), Matt Hodges from Intercom shared advice from his experience surviving as a marketer at a product-centric company (slides here). Matt was the first marketing hire at Intercom, a high growth SaaS company that focuses on customer messaging. He shared his experience building out a product marketing team at a company with a product that the founders believed “sold itself.” One of Matt’s main points was that marketing leadership deserves a voice in discussions about product. It’s easy for product managers at a product-centric company to think they have everything figured out. And it can be extremely difficult for marketers to gain respect and prove value in that environment. Matt shared three solid tips for earning respect from product management: Know your product better than anyone at the company. Know who you sell to and who you’re up against (customers, current competitors, future competitors). Know how your product team works. Embed yourself in their process when you can. The fact of the matter is, product teams that don’t take advantage of talking with marketing are missing out on extremely valuable front-line product feedback. But it is largely up to marketing to prove their value and earn the right to share their feedback. Suggestion: If you are a marketer at a product-centric company, don’t just expect clout from the outset. Put together a tangible plan for proving value, gaining respect, and making your voice heard. 2. Customer Success is part of the product (and should be part of your launch strategy). A major theme discussed at INBOUND 2018 was the continuous shift from a more traditional funnel-centric mindset to HubSpot’s concept of the growth flywheel. The flywheel is essentially a continuous circle where the customer is at the center and sales, marketing, and customer success work in tandem to grow and support that customer base. I personally see a few challenges with HubSpot’s idea of the flywheel. One being that it forces you to lose the concept of an input, and that there’s no easy way to visualize the customer journey. But, I like seeing customer success finally receive the respect it deserves. Not only is customer success an important component of the product (as Peter Merholz famously noted, “the experience is the product”), but also, it plays a vital role in growing MRR and therefore should be included in your overall growth strategy. Alison Elworthy, VP of Customer Success at HubSpot, spoke about this in her talk, “How to Evolve Your Customer Success Strategy to Fuel Your Company’s Growth” (slides here). One section of her talk especially resonated with me: using customers as a go-to-market lever. As customer acquisition costs (CAC) rises—CAC has risen 50% in the last 5 years across all industries—-and buying behaviors change—customers don’t trust businesses anymore, they trust their networks—customer success teams play a massive role in growing a company’s customer base and increasing customer lifetime value (LTV). At HubSpot, net promoter score (NPS) is a key business metric. which continuously gets measured at various stages in the customer journey. As results are measured, they’re shared across the organization (HubSpot, like LIKE.TG, has a designated Slack channel for NPS responses). But the team at HubSpot knows that customer delight is not solely the responsibility of the customer success department. It is a team sport influenced by a wide variety of levers. HubSpot took specific steps to ensure this is the case, including: Creating a dedicated customer marketing team. Tying sales commissions to customer performance (commissions are taken back if a customer churns too early) and promoting sales team members based on them bringing in *successful* customers as opposed to just gross volume. Making NPS a performance metric for product teams in addition to product line-specific revenue. The end result was a customer success team that not only prevented churn but created a contingent of successful customers that expanded their usage and served as important reference customers. Suggestion: Make sure your marketing goals are tied to long-term customer success. Try measuring campaigns against the lifetime value they generate for the business as opposed to just looking at lead volume or customer count. 3. Don’t overthink it. In a refreshing talk on the viral side of B2B marketing, Nathan Rawlins (CMO at Lucidchart) shared his experience creating and publishing a series of viral videos showcasing Lucidchart’s product in an accessible fashion (slide here). First off, his videos are fantastic and should serve as inspiration for any creative B2B marketer trying to figure out how to make their product relevant to a wide target market. Here’s their most popular video to get you started: Second, I loved one of Nathan’s key takeaways from his experience: don’t overthink it. Lucidchart’s most successful video took two days to create. One of their biggest flops, however, involved a significant amount of resources to create and launch. Part of the “don’t overthink it” mantra is creating an environment where experimentation is welcome and failure is accepted as part of the game. Nathan’s team never imagined their video series would be as popular as it was. But if it wasn’t for the culture of experimentation at Lucidchart, they might have never created the first video. Suggestion: If you lead a marketing team, make sure everyone feels comfortable experimenting and making mistakes. Build experimentation into your DNA. Better yet, write it down and make it a part of your company values. 4. Marketing is becoming more and more conversational. Whatever your opinion might be about chatbots, there is no denying that marketing has trended more towards conversations over the last 5 to 10 years, and this includes product marketing. In his talk, “Introduction to Conversation Growth Strategy,” Brian Bagdasarian, Senior Conversational Strategist and Inbound Professor at HubSpot, talked about the evolving role of chatbots and conversations in the customer journey (slides here). One of the most important takeaways from Brian’s talk was the importance of context, especially when it comes to live chat. He outlined a number of don’ts to consider when rolling out chatbots: Don’t have a chatbot suggest a visitor to view a webpage that they are already on. Don’t use a bot for tasks that are highly custom and require a human touch. Don’t have a bot lie about whether it’s a human or not. The end goal is creating a conversational touchpoint that delivers the right message at the right time. While chatbots and live chat can be useful, one main challenge is figuring out when to use them (as opposed to a different medium, such as email or one-way messaging). At LIKE.TG, we have a simple cheat sheet for determining what medium to use and when. Live chat for a message that is likely to elicit a response and spark a conversation (we use Intercom). A slide-in or pop-over with a short form for a message promoting an asset or content offer (we use Hubspot). A formless tooltip or pop-up for messages serving to educate or quickly share new features (we use Pendo). We have seen great success with launching new features via live chat messages. These feature launches serve to re-engage leads or inactive conversations, and the ensuing conversations often result in an increased number of conversions or (at the very least) important feedback on the feature that is being launched. Suggestion: Experiment with using live chat in appropriate situations. Decide ahead of time what the goals of your experiment will be and make sure they are tied to creating a great experience for your user. 5. Your marketing strategy needs to by in sync with your sales process. Prospects today expect a custom, tailored approach when it comes to marketing and sales outreach. But one of the challenges of creating this personalized customer journey is maintaining that personalization as your company scales. It’s easy to chat live with customers when your customers number in the hundred. But what happens when you have 100,000 customers? In their session at INBOUND, Jamie Sloan, Director of Marketing Operations and Automation at InVision, and Francis Brero, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at Madkudu, shared their experience moving the marketing and sales teams at InVision to an account-based model as opposed to a traditional MQL-type model (slides here). InVision’s smarketing (Sales + Marketing) model is actually quite similar to ours at LIKE.TG: they are a SaaS tool with a portion of free users, a portion of self-service customers, and a portion of enterprise customers. The challenge InVision faced was building a marketing and sales process that worked for their enterprise leads. Because the purchase journey was so different, the traditional model of scoring individual contacts and assigning them to sales just didn’t work. InVision ended up working with Madkudu to implement an account-based model of marketing and sales that worked. I think there are two very important takeaways from Jamie and Francis’s experience: First, you need to find a smarketing process that works for both sales and marketing. And they need to stay in sync. And you can’t be afraid to change them as your company grows. Second, you need to find a smarketing process that works for your customers. Individual contributors don’t want to get calls from sales trying to sell them on a company-wide enterprise deal. Marketing messaging to c-level executives should be different from the messaging aimed at one-person-shop designers. Suggestion: Evaluate your current smarketing strategy and see if an account-based approach might help address the challenges you’re facing. Inbound 2018: Some Final Thoughts There were of course plenty more takeaways from INBOUND 2018, but these were the 5 which I found most useful as a product marketer. Periods of growth are always exciting times for marketers and product people, but they tend to come with their own sets of unique challenges—growing pains, if you will. During these times it’s always useful to hear stories and advice from people who have made similar journeys themselves. But at the same time, it’s important to remember that every team is different and what works for others might not be the best solution for you.

When I joined Sonos in 2005, I was the only software product manager. The company, known for its wireless smart speakers, was founded 3 years earlier and had just recently launched its first product. At the time, Sonos had 3 offices in Santa Barbara, California, Cambridge, Massachusetts and Hilversum, Netherlands. When I left the company in 2017, the company had expanded to 12 locations worldwide, as well as a boutique retail store in SoHo, New York. During my tenure, the company grew from about 50 employees to nearly 1,500. Fortunately, the co-founders of Sonos started, led, and scaled the company successfully. Many leaders, however, have failed to scale their companies for reasons that can be explained by the following myths. Myth #1: Scaling fast is the key to success. Many people believe in the mantra “Go big or go home.” While this saying might make sense if you’re a professional athlete, this is usually not the best way to build a successful, long-lasting business. In fact, scaling too soon is often the cause of death for startups. Zynga is often cited as the poster child for scaling too fast too soon. As part of their rapid growth as they sought to dominate the mobile gaming market, they hired a massive number of employees from competitor gaming company Electronic Arts while spending hundreds of millions on acquisitions such as OMGPop. The company didn’t compensate for scaling other parts of the business which became even more critical as the corporate culture tried to absorb thousands of employees from different companies. Birchbox very recently sold a majority stake of their business because they were running out of cash. Birchbox’s co-founders have talked about how they quickly scaled the company by doubling in size each month and being relentless about feature changes. They were so focused on growth and change that they overlooked two very important factors: First, they failed to successfully diversify their revenue from selling full-size products (which was part of their original business plan). Second, they didn’t keep their eye on the competition and lost market share to newcomers such as Ipsy and Fabfitfun. Generally speaking, growth cannot be forced. Sure, scaling is often an indicator of a company’s recent success, but be careful not to believe that a causal relationship exists between the two variables. The companies that scale effectively are patient, and they strike when the timing is right. Tweet This: “Companies that scale effectively are patient, and they strike when the timing is right.” Myth #2: More developers = fewer problems. Somewhat related to myth number one, is a problem that I encountered during my early days at Sonos. It was one of the few times I saw the company struggle to scale. There was a point when the ratio of software developers to product managers at Sonos was 50:1. It was recognized that this was a problem and there were even jokes made about cloning me. The fact of the matter is that it was really hard to hire good software product managers who met the high quality bar that Sonos had established. When I asked the head of engineering to scale back on hiring until we could bring on more product managers, I was laughed out of his office. The ratio did improve over time, but it took a long time to get there. A key lesson from my experience is that companies that are focused on doubling the number of employees month over month or year over year need to be careful not to overlook certain functions or departments. When you add more engineers to crank out more features, you’ll need more designers to create the user experiences for those features, you’ll need more marketing people to tell the stories behind why those features matter and you’ll probably need more customer success people to help your customers deal with changes. Myth #3: Innovation slows down the more you scale. As companies get larger, especially once they go public, their appetites for risk usually grow. Public companies become laser focused on hitting their quarterly numbers and limiting risk is a big part of their strategy. However, it doesn’t have to be this way. Just look at Google. Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have stayed closely involved in the management of the company while maintaining a commitment to innovation. They have done this by committing to research as well as fostering internal idea incubation. When Apple announced the iPhone SDK in 2008, the Sonos product team quickly reacted to what would be a huge market change by making the bold decision to embrace mobile and launch a free mobile app despite selling its own remote control product for hundreds of dollars. By pivoting quickly and spinning up a product team that could design and develop for a completely new software platform, Sonos was able to ride the wave of innovation that was enabled by the iPhone. Sonos eventually phased out its hardware controller in 2011. Myth #4: Money makes it easy to expand to new markets. This myth is also similar to growing too big too fast. Often when companies receive an infusion of funding in their early years, they are tempted to spread themselves thin and introduce products and services to address adjacent markets. But when you are scaling your company, it’s best to stay true to your mission (and hopefully, your company has a clear mission) and stay focused. Think about the great startups that have grown into huge businesses. Google was all about search. Amazon just sold books. When I was at Sonos, we would often be asked by customers, retailers and the press when we would have a product for video or for cars. This is when our leadership team really shined because we would always stay true to our mission of filling every home with music. That has allowed the company to successfully scale in a very intentional way. The odds of being truly great at one thing are low. Don’t make it even harder by spreading yourself too thin. Warby Parker is a great example of a scaling company leading with its mission statement. Since launching in 2010, Warby Parker’s founders stayed true to their roots by offering designer eyewear at a revolutionary price, all while leading the way for socially conscious businesses. They haven’t launched a shoe line and they don’t sell handbags. They just do one thing and they do it extremely well. If you are a product manager at a startup, you are likely to see your company struggle with some of these myths. If you want to be a great product manager, use your skills of influence and critical thinking to identify these potential dangers before they arise, and help your leadership team understand these pitfalls. One way to do this is to create and share a well-planned roadmap that explicitly outlines your company’s core initiatives for the foreseeable future. While this is a great way to explain to your team what you will be working on, it also communicates what you will not be doing. For example, if you are a product manager at Warby Parker, you could explain “We’re not launching a shoe line” in the next 3 years. Letting your stakeholders know what is off the table can be just as helpful as letting them know what you do plan to build. Another thing you can do is to be aware of your company’s hiring plans and speak up if you detect any imbalance in projections. There is no magic ratio of product managers to developers, but knowing the pitfalls of unbalanced teams will help you advocate for what is best. Finally, be willing to let go. Be willing to let go of your ideas. Be willing to let go of your preconceived notions. Be willing to let go of that product that sustained the business, but will ultimately become an anchor that drags down your business. Stay focused and stop chasing unicorns and rainbows. Because the best way to scale like the Amazons and Googles of the world is by doubling down on what works, just like they did.

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

Not every product manager is lucky enough to work with a purpose-built roadmapping tool. But those that do seldom return to their old methods of managing the product roadmap. The great benefits outweigh other roadmapping options such as spreadsheets and presentations. When we asked Jay Hum, Director of Product for Autonomic, the first open cloud-based platform for connected vehicle data, about his experiences during a webinar ‘‘What’s in Your Product Stack: Roadmaps,” he expounded upon the pros of creating and maintaining roadmaps in a tool designed for the job. Not only does it make his job easier, but he sees how it helps the entire organization. The 5 Key Pros of Switching from Excel Spreadsheets to a Roadmapping Tool A purpose-built roadmapping tool is seldom among the initial investments a company makes. They typically only realize there’s a true need for this solution after finding cobbled-together workarounds lacking. Starting out with the pain of long roadmap spreadsheets and presentations. Hum’s experience at Autonomic was the same when they found the old way of doing things didn’t scale as the company grew. “We started with PowerPoint and decks and of course Excel, which is the universal tool that does pretty much everything for everybody,” Hum said. “When I started at Autonomic we were a small, scrappy little startup and we’ve grown in terms of people and numbers of teams and spread out across geography.” Hum found that even though Google Sheets were easy to share, thelimitations of using a spreadsheet for roadmapping started to impinge on the company’s ability to execute and forced him into labor-intensive ongoing maintenance. Finding a new roadmapping tool that is easy to maintain. “It was really tough to communicate a really rugged and overall strategy across several teams and different offices, as well as to be able to quickly react to some of the changes that were coming up both from a number of these teams and with the customer,” Hum continued. “The last thing that anybody ever wants to do—specifically product managers—is go back and update roadmap spreadsheets every single week or every single month, and it is immensely painful.” Startups and product managers can be the most resistant to investing in a roadmapping tool because it’s not where their attention lies. “They tend to focus on action, the building, the writing of the stories, the testing, and the designing, like all the ‘fun, sexy stuff’ of being a product manager coming up with ideas,” Hum said. “Planning and looking at dependencies, it’s a grind, it’s tedious, it’s not the sexy stuff that everybody reads about in the blogs.” Eventually, many organizations find their lack of a comprehensive tool leads to disconnects. There are too many inefficiencies when things get too big to keep all in your head or a spreadsheet roadmap. “There’s a point of no return, where they’re building and moving quickly, but then the teams start getting misaligned because teams get bigger or they’re more spread out. Or there are more things they need to prioritize,” Hum said. “They need to go to a tool that’s more flexible and will actually help them drive the discipline to elevate the planning and the strategy and the communication thereof as a very, very high priority.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'c7d13196-bc0a-4522-8c86-b1fd59c56fb0', {"region":"na1"}); Pro 1: Building Alignment Getting everyone on the same page is an essential task for product management. A well-designed roadmap can expedite this ongoing need. “New product development, especially in startups, it’s messy, it’s ambiguous, it’s unpredictable, Hum said. “The roadmap or roadmapping tools really provide that North Star, not only where the company’s going but where the teams are going.” With a roadmap providing the desired end state, the rationale, and the target audience, product management can loosen the implementation constraints and not be so prescriptive. “You just want to show the high-level goal and get the hell out of that team’s way,” Hum said. “As long as you’ve given them that high-level goal and they know where to go and potentially when it should be delivered, that’s all you need to do, and let them go.” Ideally, a roadmapping tool can elevate the product strategy to something inspirational. “If someone comes to you with a roadmap that is fairly defined for the next three-to-six months, then I see that as very inspiring to the team because you know where you’re going or where your angle is, what success looks like,” Hum added. “It allows the team to understand how either the product manager or leadership is thinking strategically and then how that’s broken down to allow them to execute methodically.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '04400104-0283-44c3-92be-cf2464e248d5', {"region":"na1"}); Pro 2: Saving Time Now that Hum has a purpose-built roadmapping tool at his disposal; he doesn’t actually spend too much time using it. Every Monday morning, he holds an Iteration Planning Meeting, with the roadmap tool open alongside Pivotal Tracker. He can make sure everyone knows the high priorities and whether they’re working on them, then dig into any refinements in Pivotal Tracker as needed. Other than that, he only spends time on the roadmap once per quarter for more strategic planning and prioritization. Not only has the tool cut down on manual tasks, compared to roadmap spreadsheets, but it’s saving him time in other areas as well. Cutting down on meetings. “It’s cut down on meetings and communication because, within the tool, I can really put in the cross-dependencies,” Hum said. “We have a number of different teams across a number of different offices and time zones, so sometimes just being able to jump on a call is very hard.” Now he can tell them to go into the tool and add their comments to see everything and coordinate asynchronously. There’s less room for interpretation and lower chances of things descending into chaos with things written down. It also gives him more time to spend on more valuable tasks. “Creating and communicating a roadmap is a high-level task in terms of thought process,” Hum continues. “But manually going in with these small little steps is not a high-value task, and having a dedicated roadmapping tool allows product managers to leverage their time much, much better.” Working across multiple teams. Hum cherishes the flexibility roadmap tools provide, as well as how quick it is to make changes. “I work very closely with engineers, and we’ll get into the nitty-gritty details, but then half an hour later I may turn around, and I have to give a presentation to the leadership around what is our Q2 and Q3 objectives,” Hum said. “Being able to quickly go into a tool and change the view and hide stuff where I know they don’t need to know about or I don’t want to show them because they’re going to ask me irrelevant questions for a particular thing is an excellent advantage of having a dedicated roadmapping tool.” Pro 3: Single Source of Truth Deciding what item goes into scheduling or the backlog can be a major source of contention within a business. Everyone has good intentions, but a lack of clarity can lead to factions, mistrust, and doubt. Humuses the roadmapping tool as a single source of truth to minimize these issues. Issues idle in the parking lot before a prioritization exercise, which includes weighting via customer feedback in the tool itself. This leads to greater transparency in the entire prioritization process. “It’s important to figure out the ‘why’ of what makes it on and what doesn’t and really communicating the matrix or weighting system,” Hum said, emphasizing the importance of having that context come through in the roadmap. “A roadmap will allow you to show that visually, and most tools will allow you to drill down just by clicking on it, and you can add little notes or the rationale behind a certain priority.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '9e6140b2-e382-45fd-ace0-16435228cf7b', {"region":"na1"}); Pro 4: Adapting for Different Audiences According to ourmost recent product management survey, 56% of product managers are unhappy with their process for communicating product strategy.Finding that Goldilock’s sweet spot for a roadmap presentation requires a solid understanding of what your audience cares about. Give them too much, and they’ll be bored or derail the conversation with detours, but if it’s too skimpy, they won’t have enough context to assess its merits properly. “When you’re talking to the executive level, they’re thinking more in quarters and the three big objectives that you’re trying to achieve,” Hum said. “They don’t really need all this fine-grained detail.” In contrast, crafting these customized versions of roadmaps in spreadsheets can take up hours and produce outdated artifacts before the meeting’s even over. “We work very closely with external partners and customers, and we want to be very transparent with them,” Hum continued. “As we go higher up concerning the seniority, we are summarizing more and more of our roadmaps.” However, not every presentation warrants exposing the audience to the roadmapping tool itself. “We’re looking just to hit the really high notes or the big epics or big features that we’re trying to do within a particular quarter,” Hum explained, referring to why he sometimes uses other presentation tactics. “That’s why it would just be two or three bullet points in a deck or just showing quarter out where the big features will land.” Pro 5: Empowering Engineering Hum’s product management approach is based on the simple premise that “alignment enables autonomy.” His goal is to empower individuals so they can make their own informed decisions and execute. That means they need three things: What: What are we building Why: What is the purpose of this thing we’re building, and what that end state means (i.e., users saving time, the business increasing revenue) Who: The target customer “Engineers want to go off and solve the hard problem,” Hum said. “So you provide that independence and, obviously, you’re working with a lot of smart people, so get out of their way. Let them work on what they need to work on because they’re all aligned. They have that North Star.” Proving the context behind the product story. This runs counter to more traditional product management. This is not where a product manager writes many user stories and schedules each feature release. “If they don’t have the proper context, they may go off and blindly build something because this is what they’re supposed to do. They’re supposed to go build,” Hum continued. “But if you give them the proper context and end goal, you’re allowing the engineers a bit more freedom and a bit more creativity to think about how they would actually approach the problem that they are trying to solve without you being too prescriptive.” But that freedom only comeswhen engineering is aligned with the business and understands the rationale behind product managers’ direction. Hum says many product managers make the fatal mistake of thinking that they’re responsible for the solution, but he doesn’t see it that way. “I’m responsible for the problem… I’m just defining the problem. You go figure out which way you want. Here’s the outcome that I want. The rest is up to you,” Hum continued, adding that while he may provide ideas and feedback, that’s not the main part of his job. “My whole goal as a product manager—and especially with roadmapping—is to lay out that grand vision, where we go and what’s aspirational,” Hum said. “I’m not here to draw out every single little path and dot to get there. That’s not our job as product managers.” Download Get Buy-In on Your Product Stack➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'c4f7dcc8-378e-4b20-9c16-637fcb9589a5', {"region":"na1"}); Listen to the full webinar here: 点击播放声音 @keyframes VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } @keyframes VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } .volume__small-wave { animation: VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite; opacity: 0; } .volume__large-wave { animation: VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite .3s; opacity: 0; } 55:32●●●●●●●AgendaWhy Roadmap Tools?Current Tools ProcessesUnderstanding the Why: Selecting a Roadmap ToolSpeed RoundLive QAAdditional Resources #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_71_wrapper .w-css-reset{font-size:14px;} #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_71_wrapper 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When you think of company-sponsored events, a few scenes may come to mind. There’s the holiday party where coworkers schmooze over food and drinks, be it in the office kitchen or at a fancy hotel with significant others in tow. There are fun activities where silos are temporarily broken down, giving way to bowling matches or scavenger hunts. And there is, of course,the company all-hands meeting where leadership shares future direction and celebrates past achievements. These everyday work rituals translate poorly for the new normal of remote work and often result in a negative experience. When your team participates in video calls all day, the idea of an extended virtual gathering may fill your team with dread. Here at LIKE.TG, we believe we’ve cracked the code on making these events fun, engaging, informative, and meaningful. We wanted to share our experience and inspire others to plan or improve their own virtual events. Why Events Matter to Your Team Rituals and stories create a team identity. Ritualized gatherings build a cultural heartbeat and team identity. Gatherings are a huge part of life, and they’re a part of the human experience. But the time we spend in them is often underwhelming and uninspiring. Invest the time, energy, and attention-to-detail to make them great. Humans are story-seeking creatures. One key to great events is creating a shared experience that generates stories your team can tell months or years from now. It’s rare to go to a conference or a social gathering and find that the event organizers have given serious thought to how guests will connect and get something meaningful from the event. We tend to focus on the mechanics like Powerpoints and Zoom logistics more than we think about people and human connection. Thinking about the connections that can result in storytelling is where the “magic moments” exist. Gatherings help build trust in relationships. Interacting with our peers creates empathy and humanizes our coworkers, building trust. They’re not just an email address or a Slack handle, or a voice on video chat. They’re real people with homes and pets, and families, trying to pay their bills, have a little fun, advance their careers, and do interesting work. This is particularly true for cross-functional relationships where conflict may commonly arise. Gatherings build flexibility, grace, and resilience in your team relationships. Team members are less likely to judge or jump to conclusions once we build deep connections through effective events. Our humanity is reinforced via these interactions – especially face-to-face. Whether at the coffee station, small talk before a meeting starts, or riding in the elevator together. These micro-interactions are a huge part of our relationships in an office environment. When distance reduces or eliminates those casual exchanges, intentionally create similar opportunities for similar interactions to happen. Doing so not only leads to increased social contact (and the corresponding mental health benefits) but also helps people work better together. The more familiar you are with a coworker, the better you’ll understand their communication styles, motivations, and concerns, which leads to more productive interactions where people don’t stick to niceties. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '35d36a84-b157-43a1-acb7-b972dcb1d1ad', {}); How LIKE.TG’s ‘Fest’ Started Like many programs at LIKE.TG, “Fest” began in our Engineering department, which was remote long before a global pandemic. For five years, Fest was a semi-annual engineering event and was an opportunity to give face-time with the entire remote engineering team within our Santa Barbara office. This eventually evolved into a full-fledged cross-functional event to create alignment across ProductPlan. Each discipline developed tracks on exciting topics. It became a shared experience and tradition that forged deeper relationships among employees. Those connections lead to grace in their business interactions instead of everyone jumping to their own conclusions. While LIKE.TG had an advantage as Fests began pre-COVID-19, there’s no reason other organizations can’t make these types of virtual gatherings a success starting from scratch. You can use elements of past in-person events as the springboard for planning a new virtual gathering. Carryover activities and sessions that translate well to a remote environment while also using some new virtual activities. 7 Lessons from LIKE.TG Virtual Event Success 1. Do your research. We began the planning process by conducting an employee survey to tease out key themes that spoke to the new remote team’s needs and combine feedback themes from our previous on-premise events. This helped us identify which tracks would be popular and relevant to the team’s needs and which external speakers would be a good fit. It also reassured us that employees wanted to participate in the event versus begrudgingly attend. Develop a Clear Purpose and Shared Assumptions. Our synthesized goals became clear based on our collective team feedback. First, we needed to create an aspirational vision and alignment coming into 2021. Secondly, the agenda had to be dedicated to team-building activities. Lastly, we needed to figure out how to provide opportunities for professional development. 2. Hosting intentionally is more important than being laid back. In modern life, being chill is often treated as a virtue. As a result, we’re hesitant to tell people what to do, even at events we are hosting ourselves. Being laid back, not imposing on our team members feels like the right thing to do. But when it comes to gatherings, being a “chill” host is an abdication of your responsibility to your gathering and guests, and it’s a sure-fire way to let things fizzle out. Feel empowered to be hands-on and drive because it will only serve to create a better event. Build up anticipation and excitement. Recognize that your team will form impressions about what to expect from your event before it’s even started. So prime them with the right expectations. LIKE.TG intentionally provided a “drip” of the agenda each day to foreshadow and build excitement for the event. Start and end on a high note. A strong start and solid finish are also key to a great gathering. You want everyone to be pulled in immediately, so think high energy to kick things off. Then save the best for last, so your team goes out on a high note. Incorporate physical elements in the virtual event. A principle in executing great gatherings is honoring team members on arrival. What a better way than providing a “mystery box” full of surprise gifts, some related with portions of programming with “don’t open” stickers to make sure the element of surprise and anticipation was maintained throughout the event. Our mystery box was a vessel to tie us together in the virtual world and made our event more special. Other items included new LIKE.TG swag for the team to enjoy, materials required for our fun events such as a deck of cards, gummy sushi candy (-a special homage to our in-person fests tradition in which we usually enjoy a full table of sashimi), and a lightbox to share our collective experience. 3. Shift expenses to provide new opportunities. Because we knew the event would be virtual, we wouldn’t have some traditional expenses to worry about. We would not need to rent meeting space or provide food and drinks all day long (although we did give employees gift cards to order in). This let us spend a little more in other areas, such as investing in our guest speakers’ quality from around the world! 4. Incorporate dead space. We did a survey, and that pulled themes out of the needs of remote workers. For instance, Zoom fatigue is a thing – People only have so much tolerance for videoconferencing. So instead of spending all day on Zoom, we took a different approach. We elected to limit the event to four half days with Friday off. This less-is-more approach ensures you’ll get everyone’s best versus a raging case of Zoom fatigue. 5. Provide quality and contrasting content. The latestFest agenda focused on career development. It was important to employees and a way to show that management cares about them as people and not just the role they currently fill. We included many great external speakers, including CEOs and executives from other companies, product management thought leaders, authors, and executive coaching consultants. 6. Leave room for fun. This formal agenda was augmented with some fun, including trivia contests, magic shows, and escape rooms. We include a fireside chat with our leadership team and breakouts for each discipline. It added up to a half-day full of great content that employees rated highly in their post-event survey responses. 7. Be ready to adapt. Never be afraid to change things up if your formula or adjust the event elements as you go. Room For Improvement There is always room for improvement. Approaching each event as the next one in a series creates a growth mindset for everyone. That said, we do have some things we wish we’d done differently and a few more suggestions for a successful virtual event. 1. Become even more inclusive. Ourteam spans across multiple time zones, and we didn’t do the best job of making sure it was convenient for everyone to attend. Try to find the best overlap opportunities for most participants. Although for a truly global organization might not have had other options. If you really need to, you could also have special sessions for employees too distant to take part and record some of the content they can’t access live. As previously mentioned, feel free to “call an audible” when needed. Whether it’s a session running long or one that doesn’t resonate with the crowd, it’s OK to shake up the agenda on the fly. The most important thing is an engaged audience, not the schedule. 2. Include more bonding time. Build-in breakout sessions, so people get a chance to participate one-on-one or in smaller groups. While some staff may feel comfortable speaking in front of the whole company, others may prefer a smaller venue. Plus, it helps make sure everyone gets a chance to contribute to conversations. 3. Perform a retrospective. The post-event survey is a definite must-have to continue improving and iterating on the event while it’s still fresh in their minds. Perform a retrospective on the virtual event to improve the next event and talk to the other organizers about what worked and didn’t. Create benchmarks from event to event to measure whether or not you are improving the planning and facilitation You can compare their responses to those conducted during the planning stages to see if what people asked for was what they actually enjoyed. The next virtual event will be halfway planned with some good feedback before you’ve finished rehashing this one! 点击播放声音 @keyframes VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } @keyframes VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } .volume__small-wave { animation: VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite; opacity: 0; } .volume__large-wave { animation: VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite .3s; opacity: 0; } 1:02:52●●●●●●●●●●●●Meet the PanelToday's AgendaAre you currently working from home?Our Remote AwakeningsAre you temporarily working from home, or do you always work from home?Remote Work Best PracticesRemote Key TakeawaysWhat tools do you use to create sources of truth?Managing AlignmentHow effective is your team's communication?Staying Connected and Having FunLive QA #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_57_wrapper .w-css-reset{font-size:14px;} #wistia_chrome_23 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Collaboration” and “remote work” may not seem like a perfect match. But teams can’t skimp on group work because the days of everyone being in the same room are a distant memory thatmay never return in quite the same way. There’s still no real replacement for real-time, dynamic discussions and exercises to foster stakeholder alignment. Asynchronous apps have their place, but sometimes you need everyone to debate and sort through things together. According to Isabelle Berner, Director of Product Management at Def Method, the secret is intentionality. She shared her suggestions and tips during our recent webinar “What’s in Your Product Stack: Collaboration.” Berner, 12-year product management career included stints at Pivotal and Betterment, joining the software development consultancy specializing in Lean and Agile. She is a true believer in the importance of working together on these fundamental product issues. As a consultant, Berner has seen a wide range of collaboration challenges. But she firmly believes “collaboration is the foundation upon which great products are built” and that product managers can be effective catalysts for this activity. “The role of facilitating a lot of remote collaboration conversations comes to the product manager. Often product managers have been part of a lot of different teams, and so they maybe have a better read on where collaboration is flawed.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '57ff7e42-ccfa-4d9e-b5be-8a0f6ba69363', {}); To Drive Alignment, First Look at Your Team Establishing rapport and respect. An essential ingredient in successful remote collaboration is creating familiarity, comfort, and trust with colleagues before attempting true collaboration. “It’s good to spend time with each other one-on-one. Even if it’s on work-related items so we can appreciate each other as human beings,” Berner said. “I love to do walking one-on-ones. Just moving in a direction together and talking about something—it’s nice to stretch your legs and really good for building rapport.” Berner also finds standups can be another forum to get teams more comfortable with opening up and talking about important issues. “I started seeing the value of standups when I worked at Betterment,” Berner said. “Being tuned in to what everyone’s working on and being able to air any challenges that we’re up against quickly. I’ve carried that with me and never stopped doing standups whenever I’m on a project.” However, standups come with their own risks to the team dynamic, especially when they become placeholders that morph into some of the larger meetings and conversations the team should have in a more intentional and dedicated forum. “Something to mitigate that is to have someone in your standup that’s responsible for putting a pin in those conversations and making sure that they happen because they’re important,” Berner said. “But keeping the standup short and moving along is essential.” Creating a feedback-friendly culture. Being open and honest in a work setting doesn’t always come naturally. People don’t want to step on any toes or offend anyone, both out of civility and protect their own careers. But an environment that encourages authentic dialog is essential to avoid groupthink-driven disasters. Organizations need people to challenge assumptions, ask “why” more often, and voice their opinions. And while a suggestion box or an “open door” policy might try to set that tone, people need to walk the walk as well. “A great way to establish a culture of giving and receiving feedback is to ask for it. Ask for some specific feedback. Then listen to it and hold yourself accountable to respond to that feedback and show the team how you do that. That’s an easy way to show that feedback can make a big difference.” Berner is a big fan of Team Speedback. This one-hour activity is for everyone on the team. Each person writes down a piece of feedback for every other member. They then share that feedback one-on-one in a speed-dating type of format. “You have an opportunity to give and receive feedback with every single member of the team. ” Berner said, adding that holding these once every month or two “sets the expectation that this is an OK thing to do, and it makes it a lot less scary if you’re doing it regularly.” Conduct a Stakeholder Analysis ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3eb23c05-aee3-46a4-9662-df983ee6cc53', {}); Drive Alignment with Stakeholders Remote Collaboration Exercises Define goals and anti-goals. A lack of alignment on the objectives of an initiative creates a shaky foundation for any product team. But if the group hasn’t put in a concerted joint effort to build a consensus, chances are team members are operating under various assumptions. One of Berner’s favorite exercises to ensure everyone agrees on what they’re trying to do (and not do) is defining Goals and Anti-Goals. “This is a very tactical piece of collaboration. But it really sets teams up to collaborate effectively and build on that if they have an obvious understanding of what their goals are and also a sense of ownership of those goals,” Berners said. The very act of going through this exercise together and putting in the work also strengthens the team’s bonds. This co-laboring creates a stronger consensus since they all witnessed and took part in the process. “Working together to achieve a shared objective and a shared set of goals is important towards driving that ownership of goals,” Berner said. “That ties into group idea generation and how to facilitate collaborative conversations.” Have a remote collaboration group meeting. This group exercise takes about an hour and requires no preparation. Get the team, and any stakeholders get in the same real or virtual room. This meeting’s goal is for everyone to agree upon what they’re trying to accomplish in the next three-to-six months. First, give each attendee their own color sticky notes to write down what they understand to be goals. They should also add what they don’t consider essential for this timeframe. This is why it’s essential to establish those dates upfront. Then after everyone’s scribbled ideas down, the group shares their goals or anti-goals round-robin style. This way, each person has an opportunity to share what they think is most important. “If people have something similar, group other people’s stickies in that category. And you end up with a series of categories for things that might be considered goals.” Berner said. “Then, from a facilitation standpoint, you can take these goals, summarize them, refine them, and then ultimately vote on which ones are most important as a group.” Download Get Budget Approval on Your Product Stack➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'c4f7dcc8-378e-4b20-9c16-637fcb9589a5', {"region":"na1"}); Include ownership The benefits of this exercise go far beyond alignment. Inclusivity in the process also creates a sense of ownership. “Being part of the process of coming up with the goals is really empowering for the people on your team,” Berner said. “They’ll understand the goals a lot better because they’ve had these conversations, and they’ll care about them a lot more because they had a hand in choosing what was most important to accomplish.” Anti-goals Agreeing on the anti-goals is also sometimes even more valuable than the goals themselves. “What is something important down the line or something that might be seductive and distracting but that isn’t actually the most important goal for us right now?” Berner says calling out these out-of-scope goals brings additional clarity and focus for everyone and might be the most important discussions of all. “When someone in the room thinks an anti-goal should be a goal, surfacing and bubbling up this misalignment and then being able to talk through it and to talk about the relative priority of goals and then make a decision together that something that one person thought should be a goal is actually an anti-goal,” Berner said. “This is where the trickier, more sensitive conversations happen.” The final step is each participant “dot voting” on how to prioritize those categorized goals. “You want to have clarity about not just what your goals are, but what your most important goals are,” Berner added. If this sounds hard or even undoable in a remote or distributed environment, using a virtual whiteboard such as Miro can recreate the actual pen and paper feeling. As an added benefit, there will now be a “permanent” digital record of the exercise’s outcome for newcomers to the team or when someone wants to revisit a decision. That isn’t usually possible since someone else will need the IRL whiteboard for the next meeting in that conference room. What’s at stake is what matters. By collaboratively aligning around goals, this common understanding filters down into every other aspect of product management. They can even show up in user stories tying small, incremental work to the big picture and laddering up to the business and user value. Berner also cited product roadmaps as another instance where this coherent vision can play a role. “Focusing on outcomes versus outputs, but really telling the story through your roadmaps of what those outcomes are, what they mean to your users, and how they benefit the business helps with that communication and connecting people with what they’re building and why it matters.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '5894a003-79ce-4ea3-9804-dae280a96106', {}); It’s also wise to revisit things regularly. Priorities and goals might change or evolve but not automatically flow down through the rest of the organization. Berner recommends using stoplight check-ins to keep everyone on the same page. “Have your stoplight check-ins, or just your ten-minute ‘is this on-track/off-track and then address the things that are off-track,” Berner said. “I’ve seen goals sit and get dusty in a corner, and it’s not pretty.” Berner also recommends excluding stakeholders from these stoplight check-ins and retrospectives. “You want the team not to have to worry about any repercussions if a goal is off-track and just be able to have transparent, problem-solving conversations about getting it back on track,” she said. Spending 15 minutes per week every week or two isn’t much time to confirm things are still headed in the right direction. Other Tips for Remote Collaboration Challenges Replacing the natural interactions that occur in a physical workplace doesn’t happen by itself. Creating surrogates for watercooler time requires some real effort. Berner’s biggest concern is that a distributed workforce isn’t celebrating wins like they usually would, which can impact morale and take some of the fun out of working on an exciting project with peers you like and respect. “Getting everyone energized and excited about what’s being accomplished is important,” Berner said. At Def Method, they’ve carved out time in their weekly company meeting for that and have also madelittle gestures of gratitude, such as sending contributors a care basket after completing something big or putting in the extra effort. To learn about other ways remote collaboration teams can work together, you can watch the entire webinar for free.