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How to Hire with an Impact Mindset
When prioritizing items for our product roadmaps, we sort and select them based on their ability to influence key metrics, achieve strategic goals, delight customers, and generate revenue. In evaluating possibilities, we choose the initiatives that maximize ROI and make the most of the available time and resources. In short, we’re trying to create a positive impact, and one lens to deploy for these exercises is the IMPACT mindset I’ve written about in our new free ebook. But the decisions we make as product leaders extend far beyond which themes and enhancements cut the next release. In this blog, I want to talk about hiring with an IMPACT mindset. Deciding which roles our team needs and who should fill them exercises muscles product leaders don’t use that often. It’s not like we’re hiring new product managers every few weeks like some of our engineering counterparts might fill out their vastly larger ranks.
Product management hires at all, but the largest companies are relatively few and far between. And because we don’t get many opportunities, that makes these decisions that much more critical. We can’t just hire another if the first turns out to be a dud without navigating painful human resources processes. Plus, we have to find someone else to do the work while restarting another lengthy recruitment and hiring process. There’s usually a decent appetite for experimentation, ongoing learning, and trial and error in product development. But not so much when it comes to staffing. This makes our hiring decisions in many ways even more impactful than some of the choices we make around our products themselves.
Why hiring product managers is so hard
I don’t need to tell anyone in product management that finding good talent is tricky; anyone who’s ever had the opportunity knows that resumes and cover letters don’t give you a full sense of the candidate. Plus, you tend to get a flood of highly unqualified applicants you still need to sift through.
But why is a product hire so much harder than finding another engineer or salesperson, or customer service rep? It’s because we ask so darn much from product management at every level. No other job requires you to do many different things with a high level of competence and mastery.
In addition to being asked, forced, and blessed to wear so many hats, there’s also no preferred path to a career in product management. Our ranks include former developers, marketers, analysts, and customer success reps. They all bring unique experiences and skills to the table. But comparing candidates with such diverse professional backgrounds can be challenging. Especially since they may all have their own ideas about what product management actually is and what the day-to-day job looks like.
Product management also requires a broad slate of soft skills to succeed. These aren’t binary, checklist items that a hiring manager can surmise from a glance at their C.V., and your HR department typically can’t offer much assistance in this department either. It requires probing interview questions and reference checks that try and uncover the real person you’ll be working with and relying on if they join the organization.
Using IMPACT to Choose the Right Product Hire
We know product management hires are important and that it’s hard. Luckily we can apply IMPACT to this process to help ensure we make quality hires that increase productivity and cut down on turnover.
IMPACT comes in handy from the very first step—writing a killer job description—to making the final decision. Each pillar gives us something to think about and consider as we seek out additional team members.
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How to Hire with IMPACT
Interesting
You want to work with interesting people—you’re going to spend a lot of time with them, after all—so you can look for candidates with backgrounds you find intriguing. A clone army is not the goal for product teams, as every new person brings a new perspective and lived experience to the table.
More importantly, you want to hire people who are interested in things. You want people that always have another question and are lifetime learners. They should be intrigued by customers and their stories, always inquisitive but not seeking to impose their viewpoints on others until they’ve done their homework. If they’re not curious, they’re not likely to be an excellent product manager.
Meaningful
Even the most junior product manager has a lot of leeway in how they spend their time. Since you don’t want to spend all your time babysitting your staff, finding candidates that are instinctually focused on important things is key.
Their resume and how they talk about their past achievements can be indicatory in this department. Using language about “improving” or “enabling” things and “delighting customers” resonates with me far more than simply “increasing revenue” or “delivering” lots of projects.
I’m looking for a strong moral compass and recognition that they have the ability to make a difference in people’s lives through their work… even if it’s on something relatively mundane.
People
Product management is a team sport, even if you’re the only one with “product manager” on their business card. No one in this role can succeed if they don’t work well with others. So, naturally, I’m seeking evidence of past success in this area and an awareness of its importance.
“Collaboration” and “partnering” carry much more weight than simply “leading” or “running” things. Candidates must truly value the importance of working with others and creating alignment and consensus.
Actionable
Coming up with ideas is easy. Coming up with good ideas that are actually doable is a lot harder. I’m looking for team members that don’t let “perfect” be the enemy of “good.” This means actually getting things done. I also want individuals who identify doable opportunities and not just pie-in-the-sky ideas.
By ensuring candidates are grounded in reality, I know they’re going to gravitate toward opportunities that are practical and possible. It necessitates a 360-degree-view of the situation, collaboration with technical stakeholders to assess how actionable things are, and a focus on incremental progress toward goals.
I also want product managers who don’t just present information and problems. I want them to have a clear ask or solution to go along with it. This is happening, this is what it means, and this is what we need to do now.
Clear
Communication skills are one of the top requirements for successful product management, and I’m looking for clear, concise communication from candidates from the get-go. This starts with their own “elevator pitch,” as I expect them to entice me and sell me on them quickly.
This isn’t to be mean or overly judgmental. Rather, it’s an indicator of their ability to command the room and convey the essential information—and do so in a convincing way. Product management is always competing for the time and attention of stakeholders. So I want to know they’ve got what it takes to thrive in those environments.
Testable
The job application and interview process is really one big series of tests and questions. Have they checked enough boxes to warrant a phone screen? Do they still seem interested after learning more about the job? Did they conduct themselves well during interviews with myself and colleagues and distinguish themselves positively versus the other candidates?
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I’m also testing for my comfort with the hire. What do they bring to the table, and how will it positively (or negatively) impact the combined skills, experiences, and talents of the overall team. Is it filling a need or duplicating an existing strength?
But for a product management role, I will also literally put applicants to the test. These should be reserved for finalists out of respect for their time (and mine!). But for such a key hire, it’s important to see their work output and the tactics and strategies they utilize to do it. I have several examples of these test exercises in my book.
Hire with IMPACT at Every Opportunity
More than anything, incorporating an IMPACT approach into your hiring philosophy is all about making the most of the limited chances managers get to augment and improve their staff. Who we hire will have a massive impact on both the products in our portfolio and the teams we manage.
We want assets instead of liabilities, high performers, and not needy neophytes. This requires scrutiny, inquiry, judgment, and a healthy dose of gut feel (which we normally try to tamp down in this line of work).
At the end of the day, we want employees that share our values and work ethic. They should be worthy of our trust and not clash too much with our style. Using IMPACT is one way to ensure our choices match that intent.
6 Tips for Building Your First Launch Checklist in LIKE.TG
Many of the customers we work with talk about their frustration with how they bring new products and features to the market. For some, launching a new product feels like an afterthought without a defined process. For others, a product launch is tossed over the fence to marketing, and what happens after that is a mystery.
We want to help product people create thoughtful and repeatable plans for their next launch. We’ve introduced Launch Management (currently in open beta), a new space in LIKE.TG to plan, track, and share your upcoming launches.
One of the key parts of Launch Management is the Launch Checklist, where you can work with your go-to-market team to decide what needs to be done to ensure your launch’s success. But how do you build a Launch Checklist? What should you include? How do you tailor the deliverables for the needs of your product, your audience, and your team?
To help you, we’ve developed 6 tips for building your first launch checklist within ProductPlan. Read on to learn more!
1. Start Your First Launch Checklist With a List of Deliverables From a Previous Launch
After you create your first launch within LIKE.TG, you’ll see what is perhaps a daunting blank slate of a launch checklist. Eventually, we will help you get started by populating your checklist with several task ideas that you could consider to help you launch your next product. But for now, the checklist remains blank, and you’ll have to build a list of launch tasks on your own.
But fear not. Your first launch created in LIKE.TG is likely not the first launch you’ve experienced. If it’s not your first launch, we highly recommend you start your launch checklist by bringing over a list of tasks from a past launch. It doesn’t matter if they live in a spreadsheet, a slide, or even in your head.
What matters is you create something that you can see in ProductPlan. Play with it. Begin to build out a list of options for what could go into your next launch. Once you have that, you can share it with your teammates and get feedback. Every launch is different, so there will always be a bit of tweaking based on the launch goal, the product or feature launched, the target audience, and more.
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2. Start Your Launch List Early and Get Feedback From Your Launch Stakeholders
As a product person, you might feel it’s your job to decide everything that should go into your next launch. You are the product expert, after all. But as you know, many launches involve work far beyond the conventional realm of product management. For example, there will be marketing campaigns to create product visibility and adoption, sales campaigns to acquire new customers, and support articles to help current customers understand how to use the latest thing you’ve built.
You likely won’t be the expert on every task required to launch a product. So as you begin to build out your launch checklist, we encourage you to add members of your team to collaborate with you.
By creating visibility into your launch checklist, you can spark conversations about the appropriate tasks required to ensure success. Field new ideas for training your internal teams on the latest product or find opportunities to communicate changes to new and existing customers.
Successfully launching a product is everyone’s responsibility – not just the product team’s. All people involved in the launch should own the quality and completion of their deliverables and the outcomes they aim to achieve. It would help if you also involved your stakeholders early in the process.
3. Launch Deliverables Should Have a Single Owner
It’s unlikely that every launch task will only require work from one person, and there will be many instances where an individual task may have multiple contributors. Take, for example, an enablement deck for your sales team. A project like this could involve a sales engineer, product marketing, and even a select group of salespeople for shaping and feedback.
Despite this, we’ve found it is best to select one person (not one team) responsible for driving the task forward, reporting on progress, and ensuring it is completed on time. Either the selected person is doing the bulk of the work, or it could be the person who manages the team responsible for the work.
Either way, a single owner means you know who to turn to when you need an update, and it also helps you create greater accountability among your go-to-market team.
4. Create a Playbook for Each Kind of Launch You Manage
One of the best ways to create a consistent, repeatable, and thoughtful launch process is to create playbooks for each kind of launch you manage. Of course, not all launches are created equal, so they shouldn’t receive the same treatment. Some will require more resources, and others can provide a more significant opportunity for product adoption and engagement. In contrast, others are a footnote only relevant to a specific list of customers.
To spend less time planning and more time executing, it helps to come up with a system to categorize your launches. Here are a few recommended ways you can go about it:
Categorize your launch into tiers (i.e., Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3, etc.) based on the number of resources and effort required. The tiers are a great way to help you prioritize launches, especially when you have more than one happening around the same time.
Categorize your launches based on who they impact the most. Does your launch matter more to your existing customer base? Or does your launch provide you an opportunity to acquire new customers? Answering these questions can help you determine the kinds of launch tasks required.
Think about what you’re launching regarding how it helps your business. Does it close a feature gap between you and your competitors? Or does your new product create a competitive advantage? Another way to think about this is whether what you’re launching is something your market expects or finds delightful.
Regardless of how you choose to categorize your launches, the important thing is to build a playbook for each. Think about the tasks required for each category of launch and document them. Now, whenever you begin planning the launch of a new product or feature, you can categorize your launch and start running with an already-established playbook.
5. Choose Fully Deliverable Tasks
Every launch task will likely require a few subtasks to complete. For example, an in-app onboarding flow might require a series of product images. Which begs the question: what level of tasks should you include in Launch Management?
We recommend only including tasks that represent a fully completed deliverable. Because you will be wrangling a wide range of deliverables from different teams and stakeholders, you don’t want to over-clutter your launch checklist. It also gives the person responsible for the tasks the ownership and discernment to determine what is necessary and sufficient for that deliverable to succeed.
6. Create a Cadence to Review the Launch Checklist and “Check-off” What’s Complete
Timing is one of the most critical elements of any launch. From the first product development task to the final marketing material, there’s a crucial timeline for when things are assigned and completed. Knowing these tasks need to be managed by various stakeholders requires a release of control and setting expectations. When will you review the checklists as the launch owner and ensure things are running on schedule?
Whether your releases come each sprint, quarterly, or annually will determine the right cadence for you. You must regularly check in with the task owner and overall product launch owner. Whether in weekly meetings or managed asynchronously, setting expectations is crucial. You’ll want to ensure stakeholders are checking off tasks promptly. Though you need to ensure they don’t feel the added pressure of managing the minutia of each task.
Simply put, building a launch checklist aims to make your life as a product person more manageable. This provides you with a single place to oversee and drill into the details of each launch. It would help if you encouraged other team members to contribute and share ownership.
As Launch Management is currently in beta, please share your feedback and best practices you learn as you work on your Checklists!
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Product Managers Give Too Much Context
Information overload is a pre-existing condition these days. In our personal lives, we have endless streams of news stories and social media updates to scroll through. Our workplaces also overflow with facts, figures, and anecdotes that, in theory, empower us to make better decisions.
Yet, we can only absorb so much at once. We have programmed ourselves to tune out whatever seems irrelevant. This allows us to maintain our sanity.
We must balance between providing too little and too much information. Our stakeholders need just enough information to make informed decisions. And unfortunately, we’re going overboard far too often.
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Making your case
As product management professionals, our success depends on our ability to convince our stakeholders to pursue particular paths. We’ve prioritized these options based on what we’ve learned from our customers and the marketplace. From those findings, we align those insights with the business’s strategic goals.
To move forward, we must make compelling and convincing cases to support these ideas. Without solid information, we can’t secure buy-in from our peers and superiors. We know hunches, emotional appeals, and personal preferences must take a backseat to data-driven decision-making and cold, hard facts.
With the best of intentions, we want to give these stakeholders context. They require a full appraisal of the situation, the various dynamics, the ramifications of action or inaction. We want them to reach the same conclusion we’ve already reached. Though, we shouldn’t assume they need the same data and learnings we used to get there.
At the same time, we want them to be independent thinkers. They should use their own autonomy to confidently reach conclusions they themselves believe in. This forces us to create a delicate balance, keeping the pendulum from swinging too far in either direction.
Less is more when it comes to context
We hear all the time that “context matters,” but there can be too much of a good thing. When we inundate stakeholders with information, a few bad things can and often do happen:
They don’t see the forest for the trees. Context comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s easy to focus on the elements you agree with or find interesting or seem problematic. When presented with an extensive buffet of contextual elements, stakeholders can miss the big picture or give certain areas disproportionate attention and weight.
They get distracted by something non-essential. Shiny object syndrome can strike anywhere, and some stakeholders can easily latch onto a certain detail and zoom in when they should be zooming out. This might be because they’re desperately trying to poke a hole in your case because they’re not personally a fan or maybe they’d just rather go down a rathole than actually make a decision. Regardless of why, these tangents stretch the entire process out, make meetings take forever, and squash momentum.
They mentally check out. People don’t listen when there is too much information. Humans can only take in so much at once, especially when they don’t think they’re getting enough real value or benefit. When their eyes glaze over or they pick up their phone, you know you’ve lost them. After that, they’re unable to process what they’re seeing, hearing, or reading and just go through the motions, relying on instincts and previously held beliefs rather than the new information they’re receiving.
With these dangers in mind, we must instead adopt an essentialist approach to context.
Understanding Your Audience and Your Objective
Bearing in mind the risks of overwhelming your audience, the key to deciding what, how, and how much context to provide is working backward: Who is your audience and what do you want from them?
Each stakeholder, whether they’re a busy executive, a marketeer, or a seasoned sales rep, has a unique set of priorities, interests, experience, and preferences to account for. You can use a little stakeholder analysis to figure these things out and try to see the situation from their perspective.
Next, determine what it is you need from them and pre-define what constitutes success. It might be buy-in or approval for a roadmap or change request or funding, but you may also need them to actually do something new or in a different way.
If you don’t know what you need your audience to do with this new information, how can you expect them to? They must know why this matters to them and impacts their job since people also don’t listen when they don’t know how to put that context to use.
Choose Wisely and Select with Intent
From this point forward, every portion of context you dole out should be with the sole intention of getting them closer to making that decision of instituting that change. Anything extraneous only works against you.
Your product development team doesn’t need to know your buyers are price-sensitive, but your sales and marketing team do. And the executive team likely doesn’t need detailed statistics about how many people use your app on a tablet versus a smartphone, but that’s some invaluable context for the UX team.
What we edit and leave out is in some ways more important than what we leave in. As we tailor what we share and how we share it based on our different internal audiences, we must strip things down to only the crucial bits of context for that particular crowd and the business need at hand.
While this applies to discrete meetings, presentations, and emails, it extends all the way to the dashboards, reports, and automated updates we provide stakeholders. If we’re hitting them with too much irrelevant context on the regular, why should they start paying attention now? By creating limited, filtered views of data that actually matter for each cohort, we keep them focused on the most pertinent details.
Finally, you must create accountability. You can’t just give them a market overview or a tour of personas or an update on a new technology. You must set the stage before presenting all that context by explaining what they’re supposed to do with that information and then finish up by reiterating the action items and deadlines.
Tell Them with a Story
One way to limit context overload is to present information as a story. But we’re not writing a novel or meandering fluff piece, this is a straight-to-the-point fact-rich account with a clear call to action.
Relying on the inverted pyramid structure, the most important information is always first. Since the reader might stop at any point (not to mention an editor lopping off the end of the story for space or brevity), storytellers don’t get the luxury of tossing in colorful anecdotes and descriptions or sprinkling in interesting but non-essential asides. There’s still a narrative, but after a few paragraphs, everyone gets the gist and knows what comes next.
Consider sharing your context with the same ruthless approach. What must they know to make an informed decision and what’s expected of them next? If they want more details, they can ask for them, but you need to keep it short, sweet, and simple.
It might feel like you’re depriving them of immersing themselves in all you’ve learned. You may also be concerned you’re not giving a hard enough sell. But in reality, you’re giving them just enough to grant them informed autonomy, facilitating the decisions and actions the product needs without bogging them down with extraneous embellishments.
With this stingy-but-sufficient approach, each stakeholder has the context they need to decide or act and you get the results you set out to achieve. Save the rest for the water cooler.
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Access a Better Way to Collaborate in LIKE.TG
Have your big-picture roadmap discussions in the roadmap itself
Users of LIKE.TG’s roadmap app can always add comments to any bar or container in a roadmap. Users can click on an item in the roadmap and type a note or question into the comments field. The app even lets users add @mentions to their comments, to make sure the right stakeholders see them.
But what if you want to add comments or questions about the roadmap? How can you start those higher-level conversations about product strategy or other roadmap-level issues? What if your comment or concern doesn’t fit neatly into any of the roadmap’s bars or containers?
We discovered that many LIKE.TG users were creating these comment threads outside of our app—often in email and Slack channels.
Feature: Roadmap-Level Conversations
LIKE.TG has a feature that allows your team to have roadmap-level discussions within your roadmap itself.
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How does the new feature work
Look for the bell icon in the upper-right corner of the LIKE.TG app? Clicking on it brings up our roadmap-level Comments menu. It lets you filter between Open Comments and Resolved Commentsto view All Comments for the roadmap.
Now, when someone on your team wants to ask about timelines or budgets or competitive info—not for a particular theme or epic, but for the roadmap itself—they can start that conversation right here.
Note: You can even have these high-level conversations for an entire portfolio of products if you’re using LIKE.TG’s Portfolio View to consolidate multiple roadmaps.
With our Roadmap-Level Conversation feature, your team can now:
Hold and document strategic discussions at the roadmap level (rather than the bar or container level).
Review roadmaps asynchronously with your stakeholders.
Discuss and resolve issues between individual roadmap bars and containers.
Update your team on the status of roadmap initiatives, identify blockers, request additions, and document changes—all within your roadmap interface.
You can also resolve comments at the roadmap level. This way, all stakeholders quickly ensure they’re participating in the latest conversation about the current roadmap.
Make it easy for stakeholders to see what’s changed since they last viewed the roadmap
Our app does a great job of tracking all changes to your roadmaps. But your stakeholders have limited time. They want to see those changes quickly without reading through a long list of details.
Here’s how we took that customer feedback to make our app even better.
What our customers wanted
Sonia works for a multibillion-dollar tech solution company, and her team uses LIKE.TG for their product roadmaps. We’ve heard variations on her request from many customers. Here’s how she summarized the issue:
“I want to see a view of what was planned and what actually happened. It’s not a question of what was completed or not, it’s a matter of understanding how our plans changed.”
We knew we could do better. So, we created the Visualize Roadmap Changes option.”
Feature: Visualize Roadmap Changes
How it works
With this feature, you can simply click a button and visually display the differences between roadmap versions or the differences between the roadmap at any two points in time. As you can see from the screen above, clicking into the History section still allows you to display roadmap changes as a list. Those updates display on the right-hand side.
But now you can also toggle to a visual depiction of this information. As you can see in the main panel above, the app can now also display the changes to the bars and containers. For example:
Items moved show both original and new placement, connected with lines and arrows, and are color-coded with red borders.
Green borders depict items added to the roadmap.
Strikethroughs show items removed after the previous version.
With the app’s Visualize Changes feature, your team can:
Make roadmap changes easy to grasp for stakeholders.
Quickly and easily compare a roadmap between any two points in time.
Eliminate the need to manually recreate visual changes for executive and other stakeholder roadmap updates.
Visually monitor your performance and progress over time. (For example, to determine if your team is moving an items’ deadline more often than you’d like.)
Takeaway
These new features address two very different use cases in our app, but they have a common theme: improved roadmap collaboration. At LIKE.TG, we are always looking for ways that our roadmap app can help your team communicate and collaborate more efficiently—so you can build great products. Try our Visualize Roadmap Changes and Roadmap-Level Conversations features, and let us know if they hit the mark with your team.
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The Challenge of the Feature Factory
Does your product team celebrate launching that feature they’ve spent the last three months working on and then never give it another thought until it breaks? Is the senior leadership at your organization constantly ordering you to work on the top 10 priorities that change every other day? Are you too busy to reflect on how your product team can work better together? Then you probably have to begin to face the challenges of being in a feature factory.
What is a feature factory?
John Cutler coined the term feature factory upon hearing a software development friend complain that he was “just sitting in the factory, cranking out features, and sending them down the line.”
The term has gained traction ever since. And even with all the bad-mouthing that feature factories have received since John originally coined the term, they still exist.
LIKE.TG’s 2023 State of Product Management Report found that 54% of roadmaps are designed around outputs. Only 43% communicate outcomes.
Who knows what the other 3% focus on…
What happens when a product team is a feature factory
So are feature factories all that bad? After all, you’re producing a lot of features. Isn’t that a good thing? Not always, no. Your unrelenting focus on pushing features out to market results in multitasking, over-utilization, and the hard-core environment that only Elon Musk would love.
Ways to know your team is a feature factory:
You produce a lot of features, but you don’t always know how they relate to each other and if they produce a viable solution.
Your product becomes too complicated to use. You constantly add features and never remove any.
Your product becomes too difficult to maintain. When you furiously add features without considering how they work with existing features, you end up with a maintenance nightmare.
You introduce many features, but you never take the time to reflect on how to improve them. Instead of iterating, you move on to the next big thing.
You’re more likely to introduce features solely for the sake of closing a big deal, which leads to several of the issues described above.
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How does a product team become a feature factory?
Ok, so if feature factories are so bad, why do so many product teams go down that path? Our 2023 State of Product Management Report gave some clear indicators. Per the report: “Reviewing customer feature requests” is the number one source of actionable product ideas (35%).
That’s not too surprising because feature requests (usually expressed as a solution) can seem like an easy way to decide what to work on.
But when you don’t dig deeper into those requests and identify the underlying problem, you risk hoping on the feature conveyor belt – introducing features with no overarching understanding of why except for “our customers asked for it.”
Role of senior leadership
Senior leadership is also a common source of product ideas, according to the report. That source of ideas comes with a big downside – a lack of product manager confidence.
The report explained product managers are “five times more likely to rate their confidence [in their ability to identify problems worth solving] at one out of six when ideas come from senior leadership compared to respondents getting their ideas from other sources”
Suppose senior leadership tells you what to build. In that case, you’re probably not going to be very confident in your ability to identify problems to solve, and you’re more likely to focus on outputs.
Another reason teams focus on outputs and risk becoming feature factories because it’s hard to measure outcomes.
When asked if the return on product development investments meets their senior leadership’s expectations, nearly a third of PM’s responding to the survey said, “I don’t know.” Based on the low adoption of tools for post-release evaluation and reporting, you could interpret that as a sign that they aren’t measuring return on investment.
So if you don’t have a good way to measure return on investment, the path of least resistance is to measure progress by how much stuff you’ve delivered. As proof of that, 70% of roadmaps most influenced by senior executives focus on communicating outputs over outcomes.
A final cause of feature factories is a poor execution of your product strategy or lack of a clear product strategy.
Ideally, your product strategy provides the tie between your business’ goal and objectives and your plans for your product. Suppose you don’t have that guiding north star. In that case, you’re more likely to find yourself whipsawed from one emergency feature release to the next to satisfy the loudest customer or the latest HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion).
Feature factory, here we come.
How to avoid the trap
It doesn’t have to be that way. There are some simple ways that your product team can avoid the soulless monotony of cranking out features.
To start, change how you communicate what you’re building and why. Talk more about the value you’re delivering and less about the specifics of the features you’re working on.
Next, treat customer requests as feedback – Talk directly to your customers, and learn how to read into their requests to find the underlying problem. After all, customer requests are feedback, not requirements.
Finally, give product teams a mission – a problem to solve – and let them figure out how to solve it. When the outcome comes from leadership, it should be clear they care about it, so your team will look to how well they’re solving the identified problem as your gauge of success.
Want more insights like this?
Check out our 2023 State of Product Management Report to get in-depth information about where product teams are now and where they’re headed.
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Exploring the Future of Product Management: Trends, Opportunities, and Best Practices
I have been fortunate to have joined the LIKE.TG team as the SVP of Product Management in the latter half of 2022. As I experienced the whirlwind of onboarding and meeting my wonderful colleagues, I also spent much time thinking about the future of product management and the space at large.
We have seen the rise of product operations, the Great Resignation, a renewed focus on digital transformation, and challenging economic uncertainty.
However, throughout this period of monumental change, the product community continued to advance the field with shared knowledge and support, which allowed us to become more connected, even while many of us were still remote.
Part of our mission at LIKE.TG is to support the product community with insightful, data-packed content that provides actionable insights and serves as a valuable resource for product leaders and teams alike. So, I am honored to share some highlights from The 2023 State of Product Management Report.
How the state of product management report works
Our eighth annual report explores significant trends and data-packed findings on the state of our industry. We surveyed over 1,500 product professionals last October. Our largest cohorts of respondents were “product managers,” “product owners,” and “directors of product.”
A majority of respondents, 34 percent, had between 2-5 years of experience, with 33 percent reporting that they worked at an organization of 101-1,000 employees. Furthermore, most respondents reported working in “information technology and services,” while “computer software” came in at a close second.
This year’s report focuses on how product teams support the entire product lifecycle from ideation to launch. These findings fill me with excitement about the future of product management and the multitude of possibilities to push our field forward.
Keep reading to learn key takeaways from the report and how it will impact product management organizations in the year ahead.
Cross-functional alignment is one of product management’s most significant challenges for 2023
Across various industries, product leaders often need help aligning their product strategy with organizational goals. Usually, this is the result of communication breakdowns amongst various stakeholders.
According to our 2023 State of Product Management Report, 37 percent of those surveyed reported that “getting cross-functional alignment on product direction” was their biggest challenge.
Struggling to get stakeholders on the same page is nothing new, but it becomes more challenging as companies look to scale. Ineffective communication can have devastating effects, including lackluster product launches and breaking trust among product teams and executive stakeholders. One way to look at this is as an opportunity to establish better communication strategies with all departments—executive leadership, customer success, marketing, and sales. Influential product leaders engage stakeholders and ensure conversations remain productive and informative.
Best practice: use a product roadmap as a single source of truth for communicating with stakeholders
A product roadmap is ideal for capturing important initiatives that product managers can share with stakeholders throughout the product lifecycle. The right roadmapping software can provide product teams with the ability to communicate roadmap changes to stakeholders, allowing them to understand changes to the roadmap at different points in time.
A quick look back at the challenges product organizations faced has changed since 2022
As we look ahead to the new year, we must reflect on how product management trends have changed. According to our 2022 State of Product Management Report, 22 percent of respondents reported that “planning and prioritizing initiatives” was their most significant challenge. This challenge is likely the result of organizations readjusting after weathering the worst of the pandemic. We also found that 37 percent of respondents reported that they would allocate a significant portion of their budget to hiring product managers.
Tightening budgets requires product organizations to scale more efficiently
When looking at budgets for 2023 and comparing them to our 2022 report, hiring remains the primary bucket for budget allocation at 22 percent. Despite recent layoffs and the Great Resignation, the product management field continues its upward trajectory regarding new hires.
In fact, according to Linkedin, 43 percent of organizations surveyed reported the need to hire more product managers.
Though hiring was top-of-mind for our respondents, budget allocation to “change management initiatives” came in at a close second at 20 percent. Product leaders know that to execute change management effectively, they must first gain alignment amongst their team and stakeholders.
Best practice: The seven R’s of change management
Successful change management requires significant planning, strategy, and communication with all key stakeholders. To start, product leaders must focus on understanding the seven R’s of change management:
The REASON for the change
The RISKS of changing
The RESOURCES required to implement the change
Who RAISED the change request
What RETURN is necessary for the transition to be considered a success
The parties RESPONSIBLE for each aspect of the change
The RELATIONSHIP between this particular change and other recent, concurrent, or future changes
Product teams are focusing on using product metrics to measure success in addition to business metrics
Each product team is uniquely positioned to identify how to measure product success. According to our report, 33 percent of respondents concluded that their team’s primary success metric was product metrics.
Last year, our report ascertained that product managers who used “product metrics” as their primary success metric said that product experience had the most significant impact on customer acquisition.
Additionally, 32 percent of respondents reported that “business metrics” defined how they measured success.
Best practice: product metrics inform the success of the product vision
When done correctly, product and business metrics can work together to help product teams understand where they are at accomplishing the product vision. In essence, the product vision serves as a north star that helps the ever-evolving product strategy and tactics remain focused. Everything the product team accomplishes aligns with the product strategy and using the product and business-oriented metrics can inform teams of their impact.
Despite the challenges ahead, the future looks bright for product management
When product teams align their product strategy with organizational goals, the value they provide their customer grows exponentially. Moreover, when product teams own the product lifecycle, product market success tends to follow, which challenges the efficacy of the top-down approach.
I look forward to you reading our 2023 State of Product Management Report. My colleagues and I hope you and your product team benefit from the many insights found within the report.
Feel free to share with your colleagues and friends!
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Roadmapping Frameworks: How to Set Goals for Growth
Let’s imagine you’re planning a trip across the country. You know where you’re departing from, where you want to get to, and what resources you have available (like the vehicle, budget, traveling gear, etc.), so all that is left to do is to map your way there.
There are a couple of ways you can do this: you can plan your trip according to the time you have available (i.e., you need to get from point A to point B in x amount of days), or you trace your route based on the sights you don’t want to miss. Another option is to be more flexible, choosing the road you want to travel and picking the stops along the way.
Product roadmapping frameworks work in a very similar way. There are a few routes you can take to achieve your product goals. As you choose which one you want to take, you must consider how you will allocate your resources along the way and set milestones to check off as you get through. Let’s map this out.
Recap: What are Product Roadmaps?
A product roadmap is a holistic visual document that outlines your product’s growth path. A stellar roadmap includes the release of new features, key dates, product updates, and the product vision – giving context to the product lifecycle.
Product roadmaps are a good way for organizations to prepare for the future. If there’s a new product to launch, the tasks and timeframes will also be clear to everyone.
Why is roadmapping important for product led-growth?
In the era of product-led growth, the product roadmap is essential. Roadmapping helps you list all your competing priorities and narrow them down to what’s most important and relevant for the team and stakeholders.
Prioritization is another crucial part of product-led growth. According to LIKE.TG’s 2022 State of Product Management Report, it’s the most challenging aspect of product management, with 22 percent of survey respondents ranking it as their biggest hurdle.
Hence, besides electing the roadmapping framework that works best for your organization’s goals, choosing the right prioritization framework to help you determine the most important tasks and milestones along the way is also important.
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An effective product roadmap will:
Support vision and strategy
A product roadmap will outline how your product vision and strategy can become a reality. It should convey the strategic direction for your product and tie it back to the company’s strategy. But it should also be a source of inspiration, motivation, and shared ownership of the product and its successes.
Guide teams toward success
Sometimes we know what success looks like, but while managing all branches of product development, we can forget the actions needed to succeed. A product roadmap will keep you on track.
Strengthen internal alignment
Strong product-led teams have strong and well-oriented synergy between engineers, product leaders, marketers, customer support, and all other stakeholders. A product roadmap will serve as a guide to keep teams aligned and accountable for the same goals and milestones.
Help communicate with external stakeholders and customers
A strong customer and stakeholder relationship is one that acts as a partnership. Achieving that requires a transparent line of communication that can paint a picture of the company’s evolution and future.
With a customer-facing roadmap, you can address common questions from your customers like:
What is the company working on right now?
What new features and updates are coming next?
Why is the company doing what they are doing?
What to avoid when building a product roadmap
A common and unfortunate mistake made by SaaS product teams is to treat the roadmap as a static, archival document developed early in the product development lifecycle.
A successful product roadmap evolves alongside your product. Traditional roadmapping methods like spreadsheets and Gantt charts can be impractical for the team as they focus primarily on task management rather than setting actionable milestones that center on product success. A visual and collaborative roadmap can be more effective in communicating and tracking progress.
Who is Responsible for Roadmapping?
Creating a product roadmap is primarily a responsibility of the Product team, but it is also a group effort as it concerns all internal stakeholders. This combination of collaboration and discrete ownership gets stakeholders onboard while maintaining informational integrity and avoiding a free-for-all atmosphere.
Product management begins with a clear understanding of the product’s and the organization’s strategic objectives. Then, with the desired outcomes in mind, product management creates the key themes for this portion of the product’s lifecycle.
Tip: Chameleon has an excellent guide to Product Management frameworks that can help you strategize your growth path.
In a remote-first world, collaboration can become somewhat of a challenge. However, there are frameworks and tools that can facilitate successful collaboration, like LIKE.TG’s dynamic roadmapping tool that offers key features that enable collaboration:
Custom views: show stakeholders exactly what they need to see
Roadmap level conversations: hold and document conversations within the roadmap
Integrations: connect your roadmap with your tech stack to track progress, status, and completions.
Watch our webinar: Working Better Together: How to Collaborate in a Remote World
3 Examples of Roadmapping Frameworks
Let’s go back to the cross-country road trip analogy at the start of this article. If you’re starting to map your trip out, you typically ask yourself the following questions:
Where am I beginning my journey?
What is my final destination?
What resources do I have?
How long do I have to get there?
What are the routes I should consider?
Who else is involved in my trip, and what are their goals?
As you answer these questions, you’ll better understand your goals and what roadmapping framework makes the most sense, given your resources, constraints, and priorities. We’ve selected three frameworks that work well for product teams.
Timeline roadmaps
If you’re working on a new product release and have it tied with a specific date-based event in the future, the best strategic move is to use a timeline roadmap. This type of roadmap outlines every task and step your team members need to take to achieve the final goal and the timeframe to complete each milestone.
The timeline roadmap is a visual representation of a strictly time-constrained workflow. That said, this type of roadmap would suit a Scrum workflow within sprints.
To make it easy to understand, you can include the upcoming tasks that need to be completed and attach key dates and other relevant information. Share the roadmap across the teams in your organization to ensure everyone is on the same page.
Here is an example of a Release Plan Template
Swimlane roadmaps
On the other hand, if your product or feature release is not explicitly connected to a specific date, you can exclude the dates from your roadmap. Instead, you could make it quarterly-based with an overview of the planned product lifecycle development.
The swimlane roadmap is also a good choice for emphasizing what is planned, what’s in progress right now, and what has already been completed.
Here’s a template to help you build a roadmap aligned with your product development
Flexible roadmaps
Flexible roadmaps are another way of organizing the roadmap for your next product or feature release. It can be a release-based, an outcome-based roadmap, a roadmap based on customer requests, or any other type that suits your needs that aren’t strictly related to a specific timeframe.
Besides that, in our guide to flexible roadmaps, we also talk about the value that lean, feedback-oriented roadmaps can bring to your team – and your customers.
You can use in-app surveys to evaluate customer satisfaction, include them in feature ratings or request voting, and collect feedback to make better-informed decisions. Use the insights you gain to validate your feature ideas and further iterate your roadmap.
Product landscapes vs. roadmaps
While a roadmap answers the questions of “what” and “when” to build, a landscape answers the question “why”. In other words, a product landscape gives a broader picture of the product’s context. It includes the product mission, go-to-market strategy, and the overall position of the product in the market, along with the desired vision of where the product is going.
Tools for Successful Roadmaps
Alright, now that you know what framework works best for you, it’s time to build your roadmap. Here are a couple of tools to help you in the process.
LIKE.TG: Build your roadmaps
LIKE.TG is a roadmap platform that aligns team members in a visual, dynamic, and intuitive interface that concentrates your roadmapping efforts in a single, customizable space.
Chameleon: Gather user feedback
Chameleon is a Digital Adoption Platform that allows you to create code-free and native-looking in-product experiences that boost product activation and adoption. You can run in-app surveys to gather contextual user feedback and use it to inform your strategy.
Choosing the Right Framework
Whether you’re starting your roadmap from scratch or revisiting and updating your existing one, we hope this guide will help you choose the right framework.
Before you get to it, let’s just recap some key points:
Use your product strategy and vision to guide you in the roadmapping process.
Prioritize tasks and milestones that will get you closer to your ultimate goal.
Avoid static roadmaps that do not evolve alongside your product.
Leverage collaboration in the process of building your roadmap.
Use different SaaS tools to optimize your roadmapping process.
See you at the end of the road!
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Grounding Your Product Roadmap With Themes and a North Star
We are excited to welcome guest writer John Cutler to the LIKE.TG blog. John is a product coach with Amplitude, where he collaborates with internal teams, customers, prospects, and the broader product public.
Product teams are no stranger to the ever-changing and continuous demands of consumers and executives alike. When you create and update a particular product, it’s important to make sure the product does “things” that people need it to do. A list of available features holds obvious value to a customer—you can see in one quick bulleted view what the product has to offer and how it will fit your needs.
But are features truly the only beacon of light for high-impact product work? Do the constant feature requests (and the ongoing efforts to communicate progress on those requests) distract developers and product managers from being able to create a more sustainable and meaningful product?
We asked those questions, and more, in a recent interview with expert panelists Abbie Kouzmanoff, product manager for Amplitude, and Jim Semick, veteran product manager and one of the founders of ProductPlan.
What are the pitfalls of focusing myopically on features while creating and communicating roadmaps? How do you avoid feature-fixation, and instead use themes and “north stars” as the guiding light for creating long-term value not only for customers but for product teams as well?
Features and Inertia
Feature-based roadmaps have long been the norm of product development, they put product managers in the hot seat to “deliver” the roadmap “to plan.” While in many ways it makes sense to first answer the question of “what are we building, and in what order?” the key is balancing that need against the upside of taking a less prescriptive approach.
Certainty and surface-level predictability come at a cost. Once the team has converged on a specific feature—or set of features—it can be difficult to change course. We become less likely to respond to new information, and we don’t work in ways that elicit new information. We all have difficulty counteracting inertia, confirmation bias, and escalation of commitment.
For example, Jim shared a past experience where his team helped develop software in the property management industry that would help property managers move tenants into their apartments faster. They created a roadmap based on an idea about what they were going to build and all the features it would encompass. Unfortunately, they were overly optimistic and got stuck. It took a long time to deliver that first feature.
With this feature-based roadmap viewpoint, it was very hard to shift priorities along the way. Alternatively, Jim noted, “Had we created a theme-based roadmap, we could have delivered value to customers a whole lot faster. We could have learned faster. We could have introduced features more iteratively to our customers, and it might have re-prioritized what we did.”
It’s really important to be able to test the riskiest assumptions first before committing to specific features. Instead, Abbie recommends, it’s better to treat features as options and give yourself the time for iterative learning—testing out and learning what features will have the biggest impact and save time in the long run.
The end game is outcomes, rather than outputs. You might have an idea for a great feature to build, but that feature doesn’t necessarily create a business outcome or solve a customer problem. And in the end, as Abbie asserts, “[A feature-based roadmap] doesn’t set you up for really evaluating yourself once that feature has actually gotten out there.”
So what is the alternative?
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Product Themes and North Stars
Themes and the North Star framework can be used by themselves or in tandem to address the traps above. Importantly, both can still be used even if your roadmap is currently feature-based. The key goal is coherence and shared understanding.
Themes
With a theme, features connect to an overarching idea for that work. Themes are a great nudge to see the bigger picture, link to a particular strategy or companywide objective, and allow for stakeholder buy-in. You can create a theme-based roadmap in several ways. The important part is tying together your theme with certain features to illustrate the benefits.
A theme does a couple of things.
It helps you earn stakeholder buy-in because—ideally—it is tied to the objectives of the company, in addition to the outcomes that you want to create for customers. Talk with your stakeholders about themes first and come to a consensus together. Then you can begin to plug your features into that theme.
It helps you stay strategically on track. Jim notes, “You’re going to get distracted. You’re going to get distracted by a loud customer. You’re going to get distracted by the next shiny object. Someone’s going to come to you with a fantastic idea, and that idea is often phrased in terms of a feature.” With a theme, you are less lured by flashy ideas because the feature inevitably requires alignment. That way, even if you get distracted by a fantastic idea, you can decide whether to put the effort into it if it doesn’t fall in line with the theme.”
Think back to the property management feature-based roadmap example, had Jim and his team started with a theme, they would have created a more innovative product. “If our theme was about moving in renters 50% faster, we could have started to measure our progress against that. It’s a lesson that I learned along the way and one that I would encourage you to do.”
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North Star Framework
In contrast, a North Star Framework represents your product strategy with a primary (North Star) metric and a series of inputs. Together, this “tree” of metrics serves as an effective way of capturing assumptions, beliefs, and known causal relationships between different components and subcomponents of a product strategy.
For example, Amplitude’s North Star, Weekly Learning Users (WLUs), has three inputs related to activating customers and encouraging users to create and share their insights. Each input is a key facet of their team-focused, learning-focused strategy.
Zeroing in on the right North Star metric can be a bit of a challenge. However, it forces you to ask hard questions related to your product strategy. How can you tell if you’re on the right track?
Here are the key characteristics of an effective North Star, according to Abbie:
It focuses on customer value and the exchange of value. For example, daily active users (DAUs) don’t really tell you anything about the value that was exchanged.
It represents your unique product strategy. It is not generic.
It connects the customer value you are trying to create as a product team with the business impact that the executive team in your company ultimately cares about.
Once you have a strong North Star in place, it has an exponential impact on decision-making.
With WLUs as a guide and reminder, Abbie’s team was able to take a routine feature request (the ever-popular in B2B “Bulk Editing of Records”), and ask “How does this impact learning and WLUs?” By asking that question, they’re able to see past the surface request to understand the deeper impact on how teams create and share insights. Abbie explains, “It’s a tool to communicate and say, ‘Hey, we still want to solve this customer pain, but we all know that we’re working toward this metric. This alternative path will really get us to that metric faster.’”
Themes North Stars
At a high level, both Themes and North Star Frameworks are tools for alignment and sensemaking. They are complementary. A team might use the North Star Framework to create alignment around a product strategy, and then attach Themes to North Star “inputs.” Themes are flexible and can be used to describe any number of dimensions related to the work. The job you’re hiring both to do is very similar: inspire aligned autonomy, encourage the best solutions and decisions, and foster a shared language.
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How to Get Started
Wondering how to integrate themes and a framework like North Star Framework into your roadmapping process? Here’s where to start.
Have lots of conversations, brainstorms, and “testing.” See if your proposed themes and/or North Star metric and inputs withstand extra scrutiny, like the “yeah buts” and “what ifs.” These tools will only be useful if people can actually use them, so they must be “usable,” even if that means a little less theoretically correct.
Buy-in is one of the biggest hurdles to adopting a feature-less roadmap. Abbie and Jim recommend that your first goal be to establish themes alongside your entire team—not just the key product decision-makers. Get everyone from design to dev on board with your themes and see where the journey takes you!
Above all, keep the “why” in mind. Don’t remove features from a roadmap just to scratch a dogmatic itch. The reason you do this—along with Themes and North Stars—is to inspire better decisions. This, in turn, delivers more value to your customers and leaves your team happier and more proud of their work.
Check out the webinar to learn more about feature-less roadmapping.
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John Cutler shares more of his product leadership thoughts in Spotlights: John Semick “The most daring thing I’ve done is shut up and observed”, below.
Standouts vs. Status Quo: 10 Traits of an Elite Product Leader
Product teams are as diverse as the products they help bring into existence. While backgrounds and experience can vary broadly, all product managers come to work with a similar core foundational skillset that organizations rely on to build successful products.
Product leaders (e.g., CPOs, VPs of product, head of product, etc.) have the weighty challenge of bringing these diverse PMs together to form a cohesive team with a unified vision and aligned goals.
Of course, not all product leaders are created equal. Some stand out from the rest as exemplary in the role.
What separates the average product leader from the superstars who energize their teams and provide the right leadership, support, and space to enable teams to create and steer products to successful outcomes? In this post, we’ll explore some of the key skills and qualities that elite product leaders share, and we’ll also identify what separates the standouts from the status quo.
What elite product leaders have in common
Truly great product leaders share ten key attributes we’ll examine more closely here.
1. Driven to lead
Elite product leaders are natural-born leaders. They are driven to lead. Not only do they know what needs to be done, they know how to get it done. They make prioritization look easy. But they also trust their team and nurture their people to lead. Leadership in and of itself is a core value.
Bill George, the former CEO of Medtronic and senior fellow at Harvard Business School, knows a thing or two about cultivating an environment of leadership. (George wrote several books that explore leadership: True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership and Discover Your True North.) “The role of leaders,” he contends, “is not to get other people to follow them but to empower others to lead.”
2. See alignment as a cornerstone
An elite product leader stays firmly aligned to vision, strategy, and an organization’s goals. The alignment of all three is considered sacred and unshakeable. But more important: this alignment is shared. And it becomes the glue that unites the product team.
“It’s no longer good enough to build products customers love. Elite product organizations must work across multiple dimensions, building products customers love, that achieve the company’s objectives at the lowest cost and best use of resources. Elite product leaders are the multi-dimensional connector across teams, functions, and all levels of the company hierarchy.”
(Connie Kwan, How to Run an Elite Product Organization)
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3. Powerful storytellers
A product leader holds a strategic and visible spot for the product team within the company and has a great deal of power in setting the tone companywide. An elite product leader understands the power of effective storytelling and why getting the story right and telling it well are so important for product teams. They use stories to simplify, engage emotions, and be memorable. And when these three boxes are checked, that story becomes shareable–an ideal outcome for a product team.
In Building a Storybrand, Donald Miller suggests that the job of product is “not simply getting products to market, but also communicating why customers need those products in their lives.” Without a strong story that persuades and sticks in people’s minds, even the best products can be drowned out in a crowded marketplace.
4. Seek meaningful engagement
Elite product leaders know how to motivate members of their team by meaningfully engaging them. They also encourage, support, and mentor their team members. They understand their people and know what makes them tick. And they see team members as individuals who bring unique skillsets and experiences to the group.
Elite product leaders understand that building a great product begins with building a great product team that scales alongside product vision and goals.
5. Offer ongoing connection
Product leaders are often responsible for hiring. Building the right team culture begins here but doesn’t end here. It’s an ongoing, intentional effort to cultivate the right culture. That intention might take setting a weekly goal for customer interactions or a daily time to check in on product usage. (Note: Elite leaders use their products.)
Building a truly great team must be as intentional as building a truly great product. Elite product leaders know that “great product teams don’t build themselves or come together by chance or accident. Instead, it takes a dedicated leader to envision, shape, and nurture the team and its members so it can grow and scale with the products they manage.”
6. Intentionally build community
There are many ways to generate an intentional product community. The easiest way is to relevant read books and articles and listen to podcasts. Join groups that create an external product bridge. Connect internally within the product group by launching a book club or setting up a casual monthly or biweekly meetup to talk shop. Merge internal and external communities by attending conferences together.
7. Data-driven (but not data-obsessed)
Data is essential for a product team to make informed decisions. But sometimes, there’s so much data coming at the team; it’s challenging to know what to focus on or how to manage it so that it can be useful.
Elite product leaders can skillfully balance the flow of data, get the right systems to manage it, and identify what’s most important.
8. Extraordinary communicators
It really can’t be overstated just how essential strong communication skills are to the entire product team, but especially product leaders. Elite leaders can strike a strategic balance in knowing what to say, when, how to say it and to whom. Getting it right (or wrong) can make or break a product.
9. Amplify efficiency
Increasing efficiency across product teams and organizations is the hallmark of product operations. To elite product leaders, this means long-term sustainability and effectiveness. This efficiency stems from “implementing standardization around metrics, infrastructure, business processes, best practices, budgeting, and reporting.” Further, it means enabling product teams with the tools and processes they need to do their jobs successfully.
10. Customer-driven (borderline customer-obsessed)
Being customer-driven is a hallmark of a successful product organization. That being said, an elite product leader might be seen as more customer-obsessed. They take customer feedback and the customer experience very seriously. And they use this feedback to inform strategic product decisions about which goals to pursue.
How do elite leaders view mistakes?
Elite product leaders are not superhuman. They certainly make mistakes along the way. But they don’t bury those mistakes or distance themselves as quickly as possible from their mistakes. They circle back and poke at them, dissect them, and hold them up to the light to learn from them. Mistakes become teachers. Mistakes provide valuable insights. Leaders know this, embrace this, and put this value into action.
“Failure is not the opposite of success. It’s a stepping stone to success.”
Final Thoughts
Effective product teams that build great products are a direct result of an elite product leader.
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The Secret to a Successful Product Launch: Tying Your Launch to Your Roadmap Strategy
Product professionals spend countless hours researching, prioritizing, and planning, all in the name of creating a successful product launch. And while they may know the problem space like the back of their hand, what we’ve heard time and time again when speaking with product folks is that no stakeholders involved have great visibility into what happens during a launch. And that is true for the product professionals themselves!
In fact, a significant number of go-to-market efforts are entirely coordinated by a separate team without the direct involvement of the product organization. To add more complexity to this issue, these teams handling the launch processes typically coordinate their efforts in a tool that is entirely separate from the product roadmap. Therefore, it is no surprise that these teams have information gaps.
Communication silos in the product launch process are a recipe for disaster
It can feel worrisome to spend all this time developing a product based on a strategic vision and then have to turn the launch of your precious product or feature to a separate team to bring it to market. However, product professionals care deeply about the success of their product. And the product launch remains a crucial factor in determining overall success.
You may solve the customer’s most significant pain point with a feature you just released, but how will the customer know about it? It doesn’t make much sense for the product team to own the research and strategy, disappear during the launch phase and come back to analyze the success.
As a result, launch coordinators may have to create time-consuming reports to give updates on the launch. For instance, they have to repeatedly answer which upcoming items have launch plans, when the launch is happening, and if it’s on track. In addition, the siloed launch contributors often have to ask for updates on a release so they can adjust their launch plans and dates accordingly.
In short, it becomes one big tangled mess of communication. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way.
Putting all the pieces together: Your roadmap strategy and a successful product launch
What if your launches were all in one place, and they tied directly into your roadmap strategy? With LIKE.TG, this is a reality! We wanted to create a deeper connection with your launch planning and roadmap strategy so that your teams have all the information they need in one place.
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Our product and engineering teams have been hard at work enhancing our Launch Management solution with additional functionality for our customers. As you add bars and containers to the “Included in the Launch” section of your Launch Checklist, it will trigger the launch name to display on your Roadmap and Portfolio, reducing the need for you to have to update stakeholders on which items have planned launches and how they’re going. The information is front and center for all who need it.
Keep reading for a quick recap of recent enhancements and capabilities to our Launch Management solution.
1. See associated launches in the Table View for roadmaps and portfolios
On the table view, a new column displays associated launches. Here, your product leaders and stakeholders can easily look at all items on a roadmap or portfolio and understand which have an associated launch and which don’t. They can dig a little deeper by clicking on each Launch to find the status updates.
2. Launch information can also be accessed in the Timeline View for roadmaps and portfolios
This concept extends to the timeline view for roadmaps by connecting associated launch information on hover and showcasing upcoming launches as milestone-like flags at the top of your timeline. These flags are designed a little differently to stand out but can be turned off via a toggle at the bottom of your roadmap if you need a more focused view. All of this happens when you connect a bar or container to a launch. You can now focus your time on more pressing needs.
3. Target dates for bars and containers display within the launch checklist
Lastly, we know that coordinating launch tasks is a feat in itself. Your team must complete all the tasks in time for the launch. If you’re not involved in the day-to-day development, this may mean following up with a product manager or engineer to ensure that the item is still on track and adjusting your plans accordingly.
By displaying target dates for bars and containers within your launch checklist, you eliminate the status updates and follow-ups. If you have your roadmap integrated with JIRA or ADO, this may be even easier as the dates now pass through from your development tool to your roadmap items, and finally, to your launch.
Try Launch Management today!
Launch Management is available as a part of our Enterprise plan and our two-week free trial. If you’d like to learn more, schedule 45 minutes with us, and we’ll tailor a demo to your unique launch goals and challenges.
We’re looking forward to turning your next product launch into a success!
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Top 5 Ways to Mine Your Digital Customer Experience to Strike Insight Gold
As a product manager, you spend a lot of time trying to dig into the minds of your customers and unearth exactly what the experience of using your product is like for them. Which needs or wants are they trying to address? How easy or difficult is it to complete their task? Where, specifically, do they stumble and why?
The answers to these questions are worth their weight in gold. That’s why product managers are turning to a wider array of technologies to help them survey every nook and cranny of their customers’ digital experience.
With tools like session replay, heatmaps, on-the-fly funnels, and customer event tracking, today’s picks and shovels are more sophisticated than ever. Finally, product managers have what they need to prospect for the insights that will help them optimize the customer experience to a flawless shine. The only question now is how do you use this technology to sift through mountains of data to find the nuggets that are truly valuable?
In this post, we’ll focus on the specific ways analyzing your customer’s experience can help you understand and optimize customer interactions on your site or app like never before.
What Is the Gold Standard for Understanding Your Digital Experience?
Imagine the benefits of being able to observe how real customers engage with your product.
Modern session replay makes this possible by seamlessly capturing the experience of what it’s really like to use your site or app, allowing you to observe video-like reenactments of individual user sessions in their entirety. In other words, you can see what your visitors experienced, cheer for their successes, and relive and learn from the pain of their failures.
So Many Sessions, So Little Time
However, for product managers on the hunt for answers, this staggering amount of digital experience data begs a crucial question: Where does one begin to look? If you have thousands, tens of thousands, or even millions of users in your online product or app, how do you know which sessions to watch?
You need to narrow your scope—and find only the sessions that matter. Here are five ways you can use to quickly put replay to work.
1. Find the Rage!
Session replay registers the digital equivalent of aggressive, rapid-fire button mashing on your site or app. These “frustration signals” indicate a user’s cry for help when they encounter something confusing or unexpected, and they’re all indexed and made searchable so you can quickly find and replay the sessions containing them.
As you watch these sessions, you’ll see what the entire sequence of events looked like to the user, and you’ll learn exactly when, where, and how your product failed to meet their expectations. If you’re starving for real insights, you’ll get an understanding of the steps you can take immediately to make your digital experience better.
Frustration signals are low-hanging fruit: Your users are letting you know quite clearly what they wish to do on your site, and all you have to do is pave their desire paths.
Session replay captures the following frustration signals:
Rage Clicks: The digital equivalent of rapid-fire button pushing, Rage Clicks are digital body language indicating that a user has clicked multiple times in the same area. Perhaps they are frustrated because a video is taking forever to load, or a string of text or product icon looks like it should link somewhere but doesn’t.
Mouse Thrashes: The digital equivalent of rocking the vending machine, Mouse Thrashes signify erratic or circular mouse movements. Perhaps the user is still waiting for that video to load.
Error Clicks: The digital equivalent of getting an “out of order” or “out of stock” message, this type of click triggers a client-side JavaScript error.
Dead Clicks: The digital equivalent of the vending machine not responding at all to your selection, this type of click has no effect on the page and happens for one of two reasons: 1) A button, link, or other element isn’t working, or 2) A user clicks an element that isn’t supposed to do anything, indicating that something on the page is misleading or confusing.
Tips to Get Started
Timebox an hour to replay sessions that contain Rage Clicks, Mouse Thrashes, Error Clicks, and Dead Clicks. Take notes on what users are doing or trying to do before their experience goes south. Note any patterns and rank issues to triage based on their frequency.
2. Watch Why Users Fail to Convert
Now that you’ve investigated the issues that are causing customers to pull out their hair, it’s time to aim your sights on what may be causing you to pull out yours: low conversion rates.
Because session replay automatically records everything that happens on your site, (so long as your replay service indexes events) using it to build funnels and investigate trouble spots is incredibly easy. You don’t have to worry about setting anything up in advance. All you have to do is search for the specific engagement (such as visited URL or “Add to Cart” clicked text), user identification (such as “return customer”), or properties (such as “product SKU”) you wish to include.
Oh, and remember our frustration signals? You can add them to your funnel to narrow your investigation even further. Basically, you can get as granular as you want and set up your funnel to include any combination of events in the order you specify, or in any order.
Once you’ve drilled down to the sessions that match your exact criteria, it’s time to watch and learn from the firsthand experiences of individual users who failed to act in the way you wanted them to. As you watch exactly what they did before abandoning a shopping cart or ignoring a CTA, for example, you’ll gain the context needed to explain why drop-offs are happening.
Tips to Get Started
How about diving right into your most consternating conversion issues first? For example, what’s the story behind users who add items to their shopping cart and enter their purchase information but still bounce before completing their purchase? Build a funnel and replay these sessions to find out.
3. Find and Fix Buggy Code
What other ways can your team use session replay to quickly find golden insights? It’s time for your engineers to put on the headlamp.
Few things send users scrambling away from your site faster than the sight of an ugly, scary-looking software bug. And few things are more time-consuming for your engineers than trying to reproduce a bug and find the source of the problem. It’s a painstaking process requiring a ton of guesswork.
Replay, however, helps eliminate the need for guesses—and almost all the work. When engineers can see exactly what the error looks like to the user and exactly what caused it, they no longer have to waste time on trial and error. This first-person perspective, combined with a detailed console log of JavaScript errors, also provided with every session recording, gives engineers all the information they need right from the beginning to reproduce and solve bugs fast—often in a matter of minutes.
Engineering teams at thredUP, GenM and Sixty rely on session replay to understand and replicate bugs.
Tips to Get Started
How do you find the replays that shine a light on where bugs live? Simply integrate your session replay platform with your bug reporting tool to automatically include a link from each ticket to its associated session. Or you can manually bring up all sessions with JavaScript console errors by searching for “Error Clicks.”
4. Optimize Onboarding
Another way to dive right into using replay for a specific purpose is to analyze the behaviors of your prospective customers: specifically, ones who signal interest in demoing your product. You want your demo to be as easy as possible to complete and for them to fully grasp the value of your product so they’ll sign up.
When you watch the sessions in which users interact with your demo, you can easily pinpoint the sources of frustration that may be preventing them from taking the next step.
The team at Classtime (formerly Go Pollock), an online education tool, did exactly that. K-12 teachers use Classtime during lessons to quiz their students (who answer on their own devices) and gain immediate feedback on their level of comprehension.
The Classtime UX team was curious why so many of the teachers who visited their demo page failed to make it through the setup process and actually start the demo.
As they watched user after user gets tripped up in certain areas, they quickly diagnosed the reasons why and developed a list of improvements:
After implementing these solutions, Classtime saw their conversions to the next page immediately increase by 25%. Class dismissed!
Tips to Get Started
Whether you’re looking to optimize a demo, tutorials, or other onboarding features, session replay can help you make sure users learn how to use your product with as little friction as possible. You can find these sessions by searching for users who visit a specific URL (such as the demo page) or who engage with a specific element (such as onboarding pop-ups).
5. Search Their Search
Our last way to mine your replay data is to use it to make your knowledge base significantly more helpful. Indeed, watching users interact with the search bar in your knowledge base is a powerful learning experience. Viewing these sessions can help you find insights into helping your site visitors find the answers they’re looking for—quickly, easily, and with no frustration.
Case in point, eCommerce platform Shopify used session replay to unearth the gaps in their knowledge base and fill them with relevant content. First, the Shopify UX team discovered that users commonly entered questions into the search bar, such as “What can I sell on Shopify?” and, based on this knowledge, they created dedicated answer pages to address frequent queries.
The team at Shopify also used session reply to provide additional context for the feedback they received for articles on their help center. At the bottom of each article is a section where users can provide optional feedback on its helpfulness. These ratings and comments often fail to paint the full picture of why users are dissatisfied. With replay, Shopify can fill in the missing context around negative user feedback by watching the sessions that prompted it.
Tips to Get Started
Playback digital experiences to pick up trends on how users look for answers, and if you notice common searches that are coming up empty, start compiling a list of missing content to address.
Search and Replay Their Digital Experiences to Find Insights You Can Take to the Bank
Session replay offers a way to see the digital experience “through your users’ eyes” exactly how your product is fulfilling—or failing to meet—their expectations. And with these tips, you’ll be able to narrow your scope and extract the most valuable nuggets from this data goldmine, which will in turn help inform exactly what ends up on your product roadmap.
Want to learn more about session replay? Check out FullStory’s Definitive Guide.
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The Most Under-Appreciated Product Management Skill
Thanks to the Internet, there is no unfindable fact. As information is always at the ready, there’s no excuse not to check sources, find corroborating evidence, and research every decision. Our well-instrumented products are delivering a steady stream of data ready to be sliced, diced, and analyzed — leaving many of us with a bad case of analysis paralysis.
We can learn from others, quantify opportunities, and calculate results. We can experiment, tweak, and modify whenever we’d like; gauging the effects based on hard numbers instead of guesses and anecdotes.
But the challenge is sorting through it all. With so many inputs relentlessly adding to our data, it’s hard to know what’s valuable. We could analyze 24 hours a day and never “finish” anything.
You Have Analysis Paralysis
Our job as product managers requires us to make decisions, prioritize, and plan. While we could theoretically analyze forever, our employers need us to make up our minds and move forward.
But how do we know when enough is enough? When do we need to make up our minds instead of conducting another round of research and review? How do we balance backing up our recommendations with data and making those recommendations?
Despite everyone telling you not to, sometimes you DO need to listen to your gut. Listening is one of the under-appreciated skills of the trade.
How did we get into this situation?
Analysis paralysis is a bit of a self-inflicted wound. For decades, thought leaders, investors, and board members have been championing getting out of the office, talking to customers, and performing extensive market research.
Thanks to analytics packages, we also now get reams of real-time data on exactly how customers are using our products. We can see how users navigate, their dwell times, and where they click. We can tie back behaviors to conversions and purchases. We can cross-reference it all with demographics, personas, and more.
And don’t forget our newfound love of testing and experimentation. We’re no longer restricted to focus groups. We can unleash A/B testing on the masses to measure real-world reactions to various messages, features, and visuals.
We’ve armed ourselves with this supporting data to make our cases bulletproof and overcome imposter syndrome. We don’t want to make mistakes, we want everyone to be happy, and we never want things to be our fault.
No one would scrap these tools to go back to the old days of crystal balls and analyst reports. But it has had some pretty significant side effects. Our workloads have grown when it comes to sifting through all the available data. Plus there’s now an expectation that every move we make has statistical evidence predicting its impact.
hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '5894a003-79ce-4ea3-9804-dae280a96106', {});
How Analysis Paralysis Negatively Affects You
When too much data breeds indecision, it takes a toll on your ability to be an effective leader and get your job done.
It reduces your confidence. Once upon a time, you felt sure of yourself. Now you only feel prepared if you show up armed with a PowerPoint chock full of charts and graphs backing up your ideas.
It slows you down. When challenged, you retreat and pledge to “look at the data” even when the answer is obvious. When there’s a crisis requiring immediate action, your quick-twitch mental muscles have atrophied. As a result, you’ll either make poor decisions or no decisions at all.
It presents too many options. There’s a time for data, and a time for common sense. Narrowing the field down to a few choices shouldn’t take long, but overanalyzing things makes this a far more daunting task than necessary.
It leaves you unsatisfied. But if you’re always seeking the best solution, you’re never positive there’s not an even better choice still out there. Although there may still be room for improvement, this can rob you of both decisiveness and happiness.
How Analysis Paralysis Negatively Affects Your Roadmap
When you’re trapped in this unfortunate state, roadmapping becomes an unproductive grind. Instead of using rational, logical thought, you begin scrutinizing everything. You poke holes in perfectly adequate decisions.
You are obsessing over the details.
Once you get in the habit of analyzing everything, it’s hard to take any shortcuts. Yet the demands of the job require you to use your time wisely. If you divert too much energy toward items with minimal impact, you either won’t finish, or you’ll give important things short shrift. It simply isn’t scalable.
You are aiming for perfection.
There’s no point trying to create a perfect product roadmap because there’s no such thing. Even if you somehow manage to do it, that perfection will be short-lived as we know things will change. Shoot for “pretty good” and don’t sweat the small stuff.
You are leaving everything on the table.
When your backlog is overflowing with dozens (or hundreds) of items, it’s not easy to whittle things down. But quickly dismissing the undoable, unrealistic, and unnecessary items lets you spend more time on stuff that has a shot of making it on your roadmap.
You are damaging your credibility.
While you should leverage data where appropriate, you’re also supposed to be an expert when it comes to your product. If you’re unable to be authoritative about your domain, you’re sowing doubts amongst colleagues and stakeholders.
Read the Strategic Roadmap Planning Guide ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '06f68ad8-23a4-4d4e-b15a-e578f0f8adaf', {});
The Key to Defeating Your Roadmap Process Analysis Paralysis is Intuition
Shepherding your roadmap along takes a combination of critical thinking and visionary instincts. Here are some tips to keep you from drowning in data by utilizing your intuition.
Take baby steps.
Roadmaps are not built in a day— at least they shouldn’t be. A roadmap breaks down the steps to create the ultimate vision of the product, and your roadmapping process has levels of its own. Make them as small and manageable as possible. By notching incremental progress, you can bust through those mental blocks and build momentum in the process.
Save in-depth analysis for the big stuff.
Not every decision requires the same level of rigor and research. Data should inform critical strategic moves. But smaller items with limited ramifications can be made without exhaustive study.
Lean on your product vision.
With well-defined goals and objectives, many decisions about prioritization should be no-brainers. Don’t make things harder than they need to be. Referring back to themes and North Star metrics can also help.
Eliminate bad options quickly.
Don’t waste time considering things that you know are bad ideas or unrealistic. Sorting through viable choices is hard enough as it is!
Embrace deadlines.
While roadmapping shouldn’t involve split-second decisions, it shouldn’t drag on needlessly. Allocate a limited amount of time for each phase of the process. Force yourself and your stakeholders to make up their minds and move forward.
Get out of your head.
Sometimes it’s hard to break the cycle of self-doubt and panic about making the wrong decision. So take your quandary to a colleague or trusted friend and bounce it off them. An outside opinion can help you snap out of it and push things along. If you’ve got a team under you, you can also try delegating decisions while retaining veto power.
Mitigate the impacts.
Don’t put all the available development resources onto a single initiative you’re not quite sure about. Hedge your bets and get to an MVP with a skeleton crew. This way, if it doesn’t pan out, you haven’t gone “all in” on a questionable call.
Remember, nothing is permanent.
Near-term items on your roadmap are pretty likely to play out according to plan. But after six months it’s a fair bet that things are going to get shaken up. You’re going to be frequently reviewing and updating your roadmap again. There’s less need to shoot for perfection for those longer-term items.
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Trust yourself.
You talk to customers all the time, so you know their problems. Don’t couch statements with “I think.” Command authority and be decisive based on what you know from those conversations.
Free Yourself from the Analysis Paralysis Trap
When you’ve reached a decision standstill, take a step back. Contemplate whether you genuinely need more information, or if you need just to make a judgement call with your gut and move on. Don’t fear making the “wrong” decisions on your roadmap. Pivoting will happen whether you do all your research or hardly any at all.
Need more help deciding what to put on your roadmap?
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Product Management 2019: Year In Review
What a year. There are so many changes happening in product management as I write this, and the evolution only seems to be accelerating.
Our LIKE.TG community of writers and speakers (and you) have led the charge behind these trends. With your support, we dove into the most result-driven strategies, popular frameworks, and groundbreaking leaders who changed the product management landscape.
And in 2020 we will more than double what we’ve done to keep up with all the changes.
As the year comes to a close, I’d like to reflect on some product management trends I’ve observed and reveal a few exciting things we’ll be writing about next year in the product management space. I’m excited to watch it all unfold.
Well-Defined Success Metrics are Key to Product Success
In 2019, most product managers are using metrics to make decisions. Sure, product managers need numbers to report up the chain to track progress around goals. And now product managers are communicating the strategy using data-driven roadmaps. Companies define the metrics that matter. Then they use them to determine whether or not a feature makes the cut. In our upcoming 2020 Product Management report, 34% of product managers said that their primary product success metric was business-oriented metrics.
The availability of data and machine learning is partially driving this movement. But what’s driving this approach is realizing that gut instincts alone don’t get you winning products.
We bring too many biases to the table. We make snap decisions based on our personal feelings and experiences instead of letting the data inform our choices.
Data allows us to calculate product and business metrics continually. Hypotheses can now be proven or disproven in days versus months. There’s no excuse to rely on a hunch when you’ve got metrics for everything under the sun.
This abundance of data also allows organizations to adopt OKRs to enlighten stakeholders. Each product enhancement and initiative has measurable, predefined objectives, and the key results can be tracked accordingly.
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Employing Blended Frameworks
Intuition-based judgment calls are still part of the planning process, but priorities are more often being informed with prioritization models. Ideas and projects can be scored and stacked against each other, merging quantitative and qualitative thinking.
We see increased usage of frameworks like MoSCoW, DACI, and RICE, but product teams also realize that one framework must not rule them all.
In our upcoming 2020 Product Management Report, we found that they’re relying on a handful of options depending on the scale and scope of the exercise and which stakeholders are included. There are so many choices, and product managers can experiment until they find frameworks that resonate within their organization.
Returning the Power Back to the Customer
Worrying about customers is nothing new for product managers. Meeting their needs, anticipating their desires, and increasing customer value is what the job is all about. But customer-centricity is being embraced now more than ever.
Customers are no longer “trapped” with vendors they don’t want to stick with because moving data between systems is easier. So companies are working harder than ever to build customer loyalty.
There are also more choices than ever. Cloud computing and technological advances make it cheaper and faster to bring a viable product to the market. Companies simply need to be more competitive and offer more value over time.
This means established firms must double-down on creating and maintaining a superior customer experience.
They’re realizing that customer experience goes beyond the product and customer support. Every interaction along the customer journey influences how a customer feels about the product and the company. So organizations are making customer-centricity a core value.
This is all culminating in organization-wide customer-centricity. It’s no longer relegating it to specific departments. It permeates every decision, making the entire company more sensitive to the impacts and benefits of their actions. They now strive for customer delight, not just satisfaction.
To ensure they put the customers first, companies are also investing more time and resources into gathering customer insights. They’re valuing the actual voice of the customer (not just what internal stakeholders “think” the customer wants).
The Growth and Specialization of Product Roles
Product management was once the domain of generalists. You needed to be good at everything, given their broad portfolio of responsibilities. But as the profession matures and establishes its importance, more discrete roles are emerging.
The primary factor is that companies now have product management teams versus only product managers assigned to specific products. C-level roles for product managers are more common than they were five years ago.
With larger groups, some product leaders are creating more specialized roles.
Technical product managers are common within larger organizations as one of the original subcategories of product management. But the rise of product ops has created a new class of product managers dedicated to this area of the business. There’s still plenty of debate regarding just how technical a product manager must be.
And while product marketing managers have been around for ages (often confusing people thanks to their title), there are now even product managers assigned explicitly to growth.
We’re Roadmapping Differently
With agile, the prioritization and roadmapping process may have changed, but the roadmap is still necessary in an agile world.
For product managers, this is more frequently meaning they shift away from date-driven roadmaps, especially those roadmaps that project a “known” future state several months out. These roadmaps are instantly out of date the moment they’re distributed.
We’re now seeing more roadmaps that are feature-less. Instead of spelling out exactly which functionality comes out when product managers are communicating their product visions and priorities. They’re relying on themes that aggregate features into a higher level, and we’re also seeing more product organizations using north star metrics to guide the way.
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Meeting the Needs of a New Landscape
At LIKE.TG, we’re in a great place to observe the evolution of product management. We track the trends shaping our profession.
We know the problems and challenges facing product managers are changing. Product managers embrace lifetime learning, so we’re producing valuable, informative content that isn’t just repackaged sales pitches. In 2019, we launched our Product Management Glossary, where we defined nearly 200 essential product frameworks, roles, and terms. We also created nine books and guides.
In case you missed them, we were proud to release:
2019 Product Planning Report
Career Guide for Product Managers
The Product Manager’s Complete Guide to Prioritization
How Agile Product Managers can Build Better Products
The Customer Interview Toolbox
From Product Manager to Product Leader
The Essential Feature Kickoff Checklist
The Power of Pricing Experiments
The Anatomy of a Product Launch
We also launched our email courses:
Prioritization
Roadmapping
Metrics Data
Building a Product Team
Putting Our Money Where Our Mouth is
As product people ourselves, we must walk the talk. All these things that we talk about in our content (best practices, company building, experimentation, building products that customers truly love, simplicity first) and promote as concepts in the product management community, we are actively working to incorporate ourselves.
We want to make the first-time user experience rewarding. We’re improving onboarding, so new customers get value from our products quickly. We’re also formalizing and improving this process, to ensure that every LIKE.TG user is positioned for success.
And as we build out our team and add more specialized roles to the organization, we’re importing even more expertise in building roadmaps. These folks are flush with best practices for communicating vision, setting goals, and aligning stakeholders… all the things we know you’re doing daily.
Setting a Course for 2020
Our roadmap for the coming year is focused on continuing to deliver great content and education while expanding the capabilities of our roadmapping software, so it’s even more valuable to you.
You’ll see even more activity around prioritization frameworks, growth product management, and customer-centricity. We know these are areas of great importance to our community.
We hope you’ll continue that journey with us as you create your own roadmaps for 2020 and beyond. And if you have any feedback you’d like to share, we’re always listening.
So on behalf of the entire LIKE.TG team, thank you again for a fantastic 2019. We can’t wait to see where you help take us in 2020.
Want to get ahead of the curve for 2020?
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The Key to Defeating Analysis Paralysis on Your Roadmap
Thanks to the Internet, there is no unfindable fact. As information is always at the ready, there’s no excuse not to check sources, find corroborating evidence, and research every decision. Our well-instrumented products are delivering a steady stream of data ready to be sliced, diced, and analyzed — leaving many of us with a bad case of analysis paralysis.
We can learn from others, quantify opportunities, and calculate results. We can experiment, tweak, and modify whenever we’d like; gauging the effects based on hard numbers instead of guesses and anecdotes.
But the challenge is sorting through it all. With so many inputs relentlessly adding to our data, it’s hard to know what’s valuable. We could analyze 24 hours a day and never “finish” anything.
You Have Analysis Paralysis
Our job as product managers requires us to make decisions, prioritize, and plan. While we could theoretically analyze forever, our employers need us to make up our minds and move forward.
But how do we know when enough is enough? When do we need to make up our minds instead of conducting another round of research and review? How do we balance backing up our recommendations with data and making those recommendations?
Despite everyone telling you not to, sometimes you DO need to listen to your gut. Listening is one of the under-appreciated skills of the trade.
How did we get into this situation?
Analysis paralysis is a bit of a self-inflicted wound. For decades, thought leaders, investors, and board members have been championing getting out of the office, talking to customers, and performing extensive market research.
Thanks to analytics packages, we also now get reams of real-time data on exactly how customers are using our products. We can see how users navigate, their dwell times, and where they click. We can tie back behaviors to conversions and purchases. We can cross-reference it all with demographics, personas, and more.
And don’t forget our newfound love of testing and experimentation. We’re no longer restricted to focus groups. We can unleash A/B testing on the masses to measure real-world reactions to various messages, features, and visuals.
We’ve armed ourselves with this supporting data to make our cases bulletproof and overcome imposter syndrome. We don’t want to make mistakes, we want everyone to be happy, and we never want things to be our fault.
No one would scrap these tools to go back to the old days of crystal balls and analyst reports. But it has had some pretty significant side effects. Our workloads have grown when it comes to sifting through all the available data. Plus there’s now an expectation that every move we make has statistical evidence predicting its impact.
hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '5894a003-79ce-4ea3-9804-dae280a96106', {});
How Analysis Paralysis Negatively Affects You
When too much data breeds indecision, it takes a toll on your ability to be an effective leader and get your job done.
It reduces your confidence. Once upon a time, you felt sure of yourself. Now you only feel prepared if you show up armed with a PowerPoint chock full of charts and graphs backing up your ideas.
It slows you down. When challenged, you retreat and pledge to “look at the data” even when the answer is obvious. When there’s a crisis requiring immediate action, your quick-twitch mental muscles have atrophied. As a result, you’ll either make poor decisions or no decisions at all.
It presents too many options. There’s a time for data, and a time for common sense. Narrowing the field down to a few choices shouldn’t take long, but overanalyzing things makes this a far more daunting task than necessary.
It leaves you unsatisfied. But if you’re always seeking the best solution, you’re never positive there’s not an even better choice still out there. Although there may still be room for improvement, this can rob you of both decisiveness and happiness.
How Analysis Paralysis Negatively Affects Your Roadmap
When you’re trapped in this unfortunate state, roadmapping becomes an unproductive grind. Instead of using rational, logical thought, you begin scrutinizing everything. You poke holes in perfectly adequate decisions.
You are obsessing over the details.
Once you get in the habit of analyzing everything, it’s hard to take any shortcuts. Yet the demands of the job require you to use your time wisely. If you divert too much energy toward items with minimal impact, you either won’t finish, or you’ll give important things short shrift. It simply isn’t scalable.
You are aiming for perfection.
There’s no point trying to create a perfect product roadmap because there’s no such thing. Even if you somehow manage to do it, that perfection will be short-lived as we know things will change. Shoot for “pretty good” and don’t sweat the small stuff.
You are leaving everything on the table.
When your backlog is overflowing with dozens (or hundreds) of items, it’s not easy to whittle things down. But quickly dismissing the undoable, unrealistic, and unnecessary items lets you spend more time on stuff that has a shot of making it on your roadmap.
You are damaging your credibility.
While you should leverage data where appropriate, you’re also supposed to be an expert when it comes to your product. If you’re unable to be authoritative about your domain, you’re sowing doubts amongst colleagues and stakeholders.
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The Key to Defeating Your Roadmap Process Analysis Paralysis is Intuition
Shepherding your roadmap along takes a combination of critical thinking and visionary instincts. Here are some tips to keep you from drowning in data by utilizing your intuition.
Take baby steps.
Roadmaps are not built in a day— at least they shouldn’t be. A roadmap breaks down the steps to create the ultimate vision of the product, and your roadmapping process has levels of its own. Make them as small and manageable as possible. By notching incremental progress, you can bust through those mental blocks and build momentum in the process.
Save in-depth analysis for the big stuff.
Not every decision requires the same level of rigor and research. Data should inform critical strategic moves. But smaller items with limited ramifications can be made without exhaustive study.
Lean on your product vision.
With well-defined goals and objectives, many decisions about prioritization should be no-brainers. Don’t make things harder than they need to be. Referring back to themes and North Star metrics can also help.
Eliminate bad options quickly.
Don’t waste time considering things that you know are bad ideas or unrealistic. Sorting through viable choices is hard enough as it is!
Embrace deadlines.
While roadmapping shouldn’t involve split-second decisions, it shouldn’t drag on needlessly. Allocate a limited amount of time for each phase of the process. Force yourself and your stakeholders to make up their minds and move forward.
Get out of your head.
Sometimes it’s hard to break the cycle of self-doubt and panic about making the wrong decision. So take your quandary to a colleague or trusted friend and bounce it off them. An outside opinion can help you snap out of it and push things along. If you’ve got a team under you, you can also try delegating decisions while retaining veto power.
Mitigate the impacts.
Don’t put all the available development resources onto a single initiative you’re not quite sure about. Hedge your bets and get to an MVP with a skeleton crew. This way, if it doesn’t pan out, you haven’t gone “all in” on a questionable call.
Remember, nothing is permanent.
Near-term items on your roadmap are pretty likely to play out according to plan. But after six months it’s a fair bet that things are going to get shaken up. You’re going to be frequently reviewing and updating your roadmap again. There’s less need to shoot for perfection for those longer-term items.
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Trust yourself.
You talk to customers all the time, so you know their problems. Don’t couch statements with “I think.” Command authority and be decisive based on what you know from those conversations.
Free Yourself from the Analysis Paralysis Trap
When you’ve reached a decision standstill, take a step back. Contemplate whether you genuinely need more information, or if you need just to make a judgement call with your gut and move on. Don’t fear making the “wrong” decisions on your roadmap. Pivoting will happen whether you do all your research or hardly any at all.
Need more help deciding what to put on your roadmap?
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What Your Executives Want to See When You’re Presenting Your Roadmap
As a product manager who now sits on the other side of the table as an executive, I’ve had lots of experience both presenting executive-facing roadmaps and receiving those presentations. I understand how much thought (and possibly anxiety) goes into these roadmap presentations.
They’re the culmination of months of work, customer conversations, and experience. There’s no need to be afraid of your roadmap, either. They’re the capstone for a product manager’s vision and strategy. I want to share my thoughts from being on both sides of the process. I hope it gives you some inspiration to help you present executive roadmaps that align, guide, and facilitate the right conversations. And of course, to help you deliver a better product to your customers.
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Mistakes I’ve Seen When Presenting Executive Roadmaps
The most common mistake product managers make in the roadmapping process is assuming they know exactly what to build without building consensus first. Of course, you are the customer expert, but leading with the assumption that you alone know the ideal priorities has consequences that might sabotage your well-intended agenda.
The best way to overcome this is through curiosity and communication. Have informal discussions with executives and other stakeholders before the executive planning meeting. That way, you’ll present a roadmap with the right priorities and align those to the company’s business goals. It will help you to have a seamless review and approval process.
Another key mistake: over-optimism. Believing your team can deliver more done than is realistic sets everyone up for disappointment in future planning meetings. If you must create a roadmap with delivery dates, try to keep broad timeframes such as quarterly. Things are always more complicated and take longer than you and your team think, right? It will help your cause if you educate executives over time to know that you can only estimate fuzzy delivery dates and that priorities will certainly shift.
How to Present Your Executive Roadmap
Delivering a winning roadmap presentation to the executive team isn’t just about the hour or so you get in the conference room. It takes a combination of preparation, execution, and follow-up to get your plans blessed and leave a room of satisfied and confident stakeholders in your wake.
What to do before the roadmap presentation
With so much focus on the roadmap itself, many people overlook one of the fundamental secrets to success: laying the groundwork for when you present your executive roadmap.
The goal of a roadmap presentation isn’t to wow the audience of stakeholders. You’re not trying to knock them off your feet with bold new ideas and surprises. In fact, if stakeholders are seeing things for the first time during your presentation, you’re setting yourself up for failure and frustration instead of praise. A big reveal during a roadmap presentation puts everyone on the defensive and opens yourself up for a debate of whether it’s the right thing to build
Alternatively, prepare everyone in advance for what they’re going to see. Build enough support and consensus that the presentation itself is an official sign-off opportunity.
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Continuous communication and conversation
Remove the element of surprise and set the stage for broad acceptance and support by maintaining a dialogue with each stakeholder in advance of the presentation. You want each person to be familiar and comfortable with each item on the roadmap. Schedule time with each stakeholder at least a couple of weeks in advance.
You can most effectively get alignment by linking each item back to the overarching business goals guiding the prioritization and roadmapping process. Don’t tell people that something’s essential—explain why it’s crucial – why it will add customer value or delight customers in some way. Then justify its priority and a rough timeline.
Moreover, remember that these should be two-way conversations. The aim is to solicit feedback from your stakeholders at this stage. Again, curiosity goes a long way. Give them enough time to solicit feedback from their own organizations.
While you may not agree with everything you hear, you’ll have the opportunity to incorporate their suggestions when warranted. Ideally, any dissent or open issues are dealt with and resolved well before everyone gathers together for the actual presentation.
Set the agenda
The objective of an executive roadmap presentation is to get their approval. Your agenda should reflect that. Provide enough context about the strategic goals to set things up and then efficiently communicate the elements of the roadmap itself. Address any outstanding issues or questions that require the entirety of the executive team to settle. Finally, get a solid green light to move forward (or particular action items if they’re not yet ready to provide that).
Your slides or visual aids should move the conversation along accordingly, with a firm eye on the clock as you go. You only have so much time with the entire group assembled, so stick with the important topics and table everything else.
Scope it out
A quick way to reduce your credibility is to predict specific ship dates. As a product manager, you’re only one input into the development effort. You and your engineering team may also be unaware of dependencies that can impact a schedule.
Do your homework, huddle up with tech leads, and develop rough estimates for each initiative (and have an idea of the minimal version for each one). Preparing this information will prevent you from overpromising and under-delivering. Plus, it’s helpful when you’re prioritizing. It might also come in handy during preliminary conversations with executives (or during the meeting itself) if there’s a request to reshuffle some things.
During the Roadmap Presentation
The main event is all about meeting executives wherever they are. They are not obsessing over your product roadmap. They’re trying to figure out how to achieve the business goals and want to see how your roadmap helps get them there. Show them.
Keeping the strategic goals top-of-mind helps create and deliver a productive and successful roadmap presentation. Stakeholders want to walk away confident in the path you’ve plotted and excited to see your plans come to fruition.
The power of a visual
Using graphics and pictures to connect the roadmap to the rationale behind it is helpful. It ties the initiatives in the roadmap to actual customer value, business goals, and meeting real needs.
Big picture thinking
Executives have a lot on their plates and generally, try to stay as high level as possible. While you might want to take a deeper dive into the platform details with the CTO or the new messaging opportunities with the head of marketing, this isn’t the forum for those interactions.
Those more specific conversations can take place before or after the presentation itself. This meeting is all about consensus, buying in, and signing off. Sticking to the big picture avoids thorny topics or detours that might lose the audience or make them question if the plan is fully baked.
Levels of certainty
Product managers aren’t psychics, so every roadmap item sits somewhere on the spectrum between “definitely going to happen” and “definitely a possibility.” However, without the proper context, executives will view everything on there as equals when it comes to delivery expectations. Unfortunately, people hear what they want to hear.
Don’t be afraid to acknowledge that there are unknowns. Communicate your level of certainty for each initiative during the presentation.
There are two dimensions to this. The first is more prominent, in that the further out you go, the less certain things are for everyone. You can mitigate this by creating roadmaps that don’t extend as far into the future. However, beyond that, there may be uncertainties driven by things other than the calendar.
There may be unknowns lurking, such as dependencies, regulatory issues, expected new technologies, or customer commitments. If these could impact the roadmap and leave you less certain about some items, be sure to call that out. Product managers will often color code or identify roadmap initiatives based on how positive they are that it will all fall into place.
Tie everything to business goals
This audience cares about top-line business goals. While they may not embrace a “by any means necessary” mentality, they also don’t have time to worry about all the details.
Therefore the context of the entire conversation should be about the KPIs they care about and how the roadmap moves the needle in the right direction. For example, how does a particular feature accelerate growth or decrease churn? How does a roadmap initiative influence progress on a strategic objective?
Your presentation should both ask and answer those sorts of questions, as that’s what interests executives. Everything else is a detail.
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There will be questions
If you’ve done an excellent job beforehand, your presentation shouldn’t have a bunch of “gotcha” questions. You’ll already know the hot button issues before the meeting and will have addressed them in previous discussions or during the meat of the presentation.
You, of course, should be asking consensus-building questions during the meeting. And you will likely hear a few different types of questions from executives:
Clarifications and deeper dives. An executive may want to drill down on a particular element of the presentation. It’s OK to answer, but if it’s going to derail the momentum offer to meet with them later to discuss things in detail.
A direct challenge. Maybe you didn’t quite have the consensus you thought you did, or perhaps you had a holdout you were hoping would be won over by the crowd. Ask questions to uncover the real concern. Don’t be afraid to let an ally on the executive team chime in with their support.
An impromptu change request. Despite all your preparatory work, an executive may decide the roadmap review is the time to ask for something to be added, dropped, or swapped. It might be totally valid and based on new information, or it could be a bright shiny object that will fade under a more in-depth examination. In the end, it’s possibly a good idea, but it’s your job to educate them that there are other higher priorities.
After the Presentation
Follow up and follow-through
Chances are you walked away with some sort of to-do list. It could be sharing the roadmap with other parties, further research, providing more data, or clarifying something.
Don’t let those open issues fester; get on them as quickly as possible so they can be closed out. Closing the loop, maintains momentum and shows you’re responsive and were paying attention.
You can also formalize any final decisions by sending out a follow-up email outlining what was decided and the expected next steps. For executives, this is the “speak now or forever hold your peace” opportunity as they realize this roadmap is now ready for execution.
Changes to roadmap priorities are inevitable. Alert the executive team when these changes happen as part of your job. Also, if any of those disruptions require executive input, don’t put things off any longer than necessary. You don’t want to have that hanging over your head for the next meeting.
Finally, if it turns out some of the business goals that drove the prioritization and roadmap planning have evolved, be sure to re-engage with the executive team and grapple with their impact. Don’t assume you should stick with the existing plan.
Product management is hard. But presenting your roadmap to executives is your opportunity to shine and show why you were hired in the first place.
Learn how to build an executive-facing roadmap with these 8 tips.
4 Phases of a Successful One-on-One with Your Product Team
We are excited to welcome guest writer Carlos González de Villaumbrosia to the LIKE.TG blog. Carlos González de Villaumbrosia is the Founder of Product School, originally based in San Francisco. Product School was founded in 2014 and now maintains 20 campuses around the world where they offer certifications in Product Management. They organize events discussing innovations in the software and technology space.
It can be easy, especially within large businesses, to take someone’s skills for granted. From the outside, a Product Manager (PM) is a resolute individual responsible for completing a product’s development. This involves (among other things) careful data collection, design awareness, and business knowledge. But today we’re going to talk about one of the most important traits a product manager needs. Product management leadership requires an ability to support their teams to victory! This comes from a combination of collective management and individual relationships; every PM must be equally good at both.
You might be able to electrify audiences at the launch of your latest feature, but then find yourself struggling to strengthen relationships within your teams. This is a problem because stakeholder management work is very much bottom-up: it doesn’t come from your claim to authority but from a slow build-up of respect with each team and team members across the company.
One very good moment to establish or improve professional relationships with specific team members is on product team one-on-ones.
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What are the 4 Phases of a Successful Product Team One-on-One?
Phase 1: Look for the signs that your team communication isn’t working.
Silence in the room: Did you just propose a pretty radical change of direction and nobody said a word? That’s a sign your team needs better communication. A healthy team should at least wonder why you are doing it.
Lack of dissent: If you’re being knowingly tough on a particular project and nobody questions you, then you cannot learn or collaborate.
Unexpected pitfalls: Milestones are not reached, there are undetected bugs, and there’s an impossible deadline. A normal office should feel free to communicate these pitfalls in advance.
Putting out fires: Rather than acting, you spend a lot of your time reacting. Again, this is a sign of poor team planning.
Conflicting communication: You speak to your team, and everything’s good and normal. You speak with other teams or even superiors, and everything’s falling into pieces. This sort of mismatch calls for one-on-ones.
Open challenges: It’s one thing is to get constructive feedback. It’s something different to be contradicted in front of everyone. That’s a sign that something has gone wrong in your communication.
Individual isolation: If one member of the team seems removed from collective activities, operations cannot really function.
Every situation will be different. It’s not the same to work at a small startup compared to a big enterprise. It’s not the same to seek a discussion with a colleague you have known for a long time compared to a new hire. And it’s definitely not the same to hold a product team one-on-one during a normal check-in compared to a huge failure. Keep these different parameters in mind and apply some common sense.
To have the most successful product team one-on-one in all of these contexts, we recommend the following.
Phase 2: Prepare for your product team one-on-one.
Gather information and data that back-up your claims.
Situation, action, result. What’s the situation that you wish to correct? What‘s the action that this person can do to help you out? What’s the intended goal?
Be tactful. A private meeting with your Product Manager might sound intimidating. According to a study performed by Google, one aspect of their most successful teams is psychological safety. “The safer team members feel with one another, the more likely they are to admit mistakes, to partner, and to take on new roles.”
Open the communication stream both ways. Make it clear to your team that they can also use this time to voice their own concerns and ask their own questions. This is as much for them as it is for you.
Phase 3: Run effective product team One-On-Ones.
State the topic from the start.
Have an action point at the end of the meeting.
Begin with a positive discussion. Then, bring up “negatives” in a constructive way.
Listen, don’t anticipate. Clear your mind of what you’re expecting to hear, and really hear them.
Phase 4: Close the loop after your One-On-One.
Create a shared document that you both have access to and can edit.
Write down the key takeaways and actionable steps from the product team one-on-one immediately and share them with your colleague to make sure you’re on the same page.
Be patient. Many times, Product Managers lack the authority to act straight away. On the other hand, if this is something that you expect to become routine; share!
Put your insights together and find a common narrative that you can explain to the team.
Transform this qualitative information into actionable metrics. Set relevant targets from the meeting. Are you trying to decide on the need for future hires? Did a team member request further training to be funded by the company?
How to Know Your One-on-Ones are Working:
Teamwork and organizational trust are critical to operations, but as they are abstract concepts they can be difficult to measure. Paul J. Zak, the author of Trust Factor, came up with some simple metrics you can use to measure communication:
Energy: How much communication is happening. Are your Slack channels silent? Is the lunchroom full of people staring at their phones?
Engagement: What reaction do you get when you say something to your teams? If your messages are met with apathy and disinterest you may have a problem.
Exploration: Does your team talk to anyone outside of the project, in the company, or in the industry?
Now go forth and run your own one-on-ones with your product team. Read, 12 Traits of High Performing Product Teams, to learn more.
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How I Overcame Imposter Syndrome as a Product Manager
No matter how far into your career you might be, you’re never too old for imposter syndrome to make an appearance. Imposter syndrome is a feeling of inadequacy that persists despite the evident success, according to Harvard Business Review. ‘Imposters’ suffer from chronic self-doubt and a sense of intellectual fraud that override their feelings of success or external proof of their competence. Sound familiar?
So, to level the playing field. Even after years into my career as a product leader and founder, every so often, I too suffer from feeling like an imposter. We sometimes need to make decisions with imperfect information. Despite years of experience in this field, it still feels like I am taking risks as I lead LIKE.TG into the unknown.
For example, with a recent project, the data wasn’t playing out the way we expected. We had to decide whether to adjust or stand pat, with no clear “right” answer in front of us. As an expert, I should know how to do all this. However, at that moment, I felt like an imposter. However, I’m not — and neither are you.
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Why Product Managers are More Susceptible to Imposter Syndrome
Product managers (PM) are particularly vulnerable to experiencing imposter syndrome. The nature of our profession is nebulous. There a few reasons why product managers might be more susceptible to the feeling.
First, no one gets a degree in “product management.” You don’t train for it. There’s no set path to becoming one. There also isn’t a universal definition of success for product managers. With no pedigree or success validation, it’s natural to feel like an imposter.
Colleagues also look to their product managers to have all the answers. Of course, we don’t have them all—nobody does. But we’re expected to know just enough about everything that we can speak intelligently and have an opinion on nearly every subject. It’s important for our role. This creates very high expectations, which plant the seeds of doubt in our minds.
Product managers also wield power in their organization, even if it’s not always reflected in the org chart. We have an awesome job to decide what’s in and what’s out. Others have input, but view us as the gatekeeper. Unfortunately, that puts a target for blame if things don’t succeed. This fear of letting people down compounds, so we start to second-guess ourselves.
With the weight of the product on our shoulders, we’re the ones to say “no” to various stakeholders. We’ll say no to customer ideas or inform the CEO that their pet project won’t make it onto the roadmap. All while wondering who decided we’re qualified to make that call?
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How I Overcame Imposter Syndrome (and How You Can Too)
There’s no magic bullet, but I have found a few things that helped me get over the hump.
1. Humanize your counterparts
Everyone is in the same boat. We’re all human and we all have fears that we have to push through. That means regardless of how much success or failures our peers have had, they’re still putting on their socks one at a time. By humanizing your counterparts, it takes away the fear and intimidation that people are inherently better or more qualified to do your job.
2. Opportunity always comes again
Once it’s done, it’s done. Once a decision is made and acted on, then that ship has sailed. If it works out, great! If it doesn’t work out, there will be another chance to make another decision again. At that point, I’ll have learned from this mistake and be even better. There’s always tomorrow.
3. Nobody knows everything
As disheartening as it is to realize, I will never have all the answers. Nobody knows everything. We’re all always operating with an incomplete data set and no guarantees. That’s not a defense to solely trust our gut and wing it. However, it does mean you need to move forward and believe that you’ve done enough homework to make an educated decision. Inaction due to uncertainty doesn’t breed innovation.
4. Embrace collaboration
Embrace collaboration. The lone wolf product visionary that trusts no one, issues proclamation, and finds success is exceedingly rare. Most successful PMs learn fast that leveraging the knowledge, experience, and instincts of others makes things a lot easier. Not only are you operating with more information, but the decisions you make aren’t yours alone. Moreover, when others are involved in the process, they’re less likely to be resistant to the final decision.
5. Use data to make decisions
Metrics matter. You can use data to make decisions and convince others to get on board. This is a valuable tool for PMs. Not everyone is going to trust you. They might have their preconceptions and biases that you’ll be challenged to sway. However, with an argument based on facts instead of feelings, it’s much easier to build consensus, not to mention instilling confidence that you’re on the right path.
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6. Vulnerability shows you have humility
Honesty is the best policy. I prefer to be the person that is open and has good relationships with people versus the one who bulldozes their way through. No one likes a bully or a know-it-all. Don’t be afraid to tell people you’re not positive about something or are still seeking input from others. Others will appreciate if you expose your vulnerability, it shows you have humility.
What I’ve Learned from Overcoming Imposter Syndrome as a Product Manager
Everyone’s trying to figure it out, just like you. Once you realize and accept this, you can be much more empathetic to others. That forgiveness is contagious, and I’m certain will circle back to you.
The only way is to outgrow your doubts. It doesn’t happen overnight. But over time, as you have more successes under your belt and more positive experiences in your rearview, you begin feeling like you belong.
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It’s hard to do. But, try to stop caring about what other people think. When you’re confident in your abilities, you know you’re doing good work, and are treating people well then it becomes second nature. Now with all that free time you’ve created for yourself, you can do the fun stuff.
You don’t need that kind of stress. I’ve met plenty of older, successful people that are still racked with worry. Despite all they’ve accomplished, they can’t be content and convinced of their abilities. To them I say, “Relax, you’ve made it this far, and it wasn’t by accident.” Typically, this industry doesn’t put up with underperformers, so if you’ve made progress in your career, then you’re doing something right.
Let your guard down. People can tell when you’re forcing it, so don’t bother putting on airs. You are who you are, and you’ll do a good job or you won’t. Have humility, take the time to figure things out based on the input of others, and have faith that you’ll make the best decisions you can.
You can’t lead or even garner the respect of your development team, you have to believe in yourself. Not unreasonably or unwaveringly, but with general faith in your competence and abilities. Without it, no one’s going to have your back or want to follow you into battle.
Conclusion
Don’t let your insecurities hold you back! If your team didn’t think you could do the job, they wouldn’t work with you. Your requests for help are appreciated and not annoying.
Imposter syndrome is real and unhelpful to your career. Moreover, you can beat it. We’ve all been there. When you make mistakes, you’ll learn from them and be better for it.
Patterns of Pain: How Product Managers Solve High-Value Problems
The most successful product managers think of themselves as finders of pain, not finders of products.
In my experience launching LIKE.TG and prior products, I’ve learned that talking early with potential customers to identify pain can lead you to create better, more innovative solutions. Although it may seem obvious, that’s not how many companies start—they often start by building a product and then later seek out problems for it to solve.
It’s this “product-first” thinking that is at the core of many product failures.
When the up-front pain-finding doesn’t happen, products miss the mark and can waste countless hours in development effort. Unfortunately, I’ve witnessed this first-hand.
My philosophy: Find the patterns of pain first, and you’ll be able to create better products.
Ultimately, what you’re seeking is a market with a consistent problem area. Then, you can obsess about that problem. Thoroughly validate it and confirm it’s a problem you can solve. Moreover, if you find that solving this pain is at the top of your customer’s priority list, you have a much better shot at creating a winning product.
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Finding Pain through Customer Discovery
People buy products to reduce pain or create a gain. You can uncover this through customer discovery. Through customer discovery, you can learn what it would mean to a customer if you solved that problem.
Your goal is to uncover the value proposition of solving problems. A value proposition represents the value that the customer gets out of using your product. So a value proposition could mean:
Saving money.
Saving time.
Making money.
Lifestyle benefits or professional benefits such as looking good in front of your boss.
I believe a “product” is more than the product itself; it includes the pricing, services, the way it’s sold, and so much more. With this broad definition, you have much more room to discover frustrations that customers are facing with their current solutions or the way they’re solving problems today.
My recommendation: start by speaking with at least ten prospective customers. Even at low numbers, these interviews will give you incredible insight, especially if you start hearing a consistent pattern of pain.
Ask the Right Questions
One of the techniques that I recommend is asking open-ended questions. Open-ended questions allow people to include more information in their answers, including how they feel, which will lead you to ask questions you hadn’t considered.
“Why?” is by far the most powerful question you can ask, so ask it often. Rarely accept a customer’s initial response. By asking “why?” as a follow-up question, you can extract an enlightening answer and get to the crux of an issue.
Once you find a problem to solve, it’s essential to understand how high on the priority list this falls for your prospects. An even more basic issue to understand is whether the customer is aware that they have a problem. If you need to educate customers that they have a problem in the first place, that’s a sign it could be tough to create awareness and acquire customers in the future. And if they are aware they have a problem, is the problem big enough, pervasive enough, and painful enough that someone would be willing to pay you to solve it? Do they even have the budget and the decision-making authority to purchase?
If you’re solving problems that people don’t care about solving, or worse, they’re not willing to pay, then you don’t have a business model that’s going to work for your product.
Pattern Recognition
A lot of people think the validation of a new product is a scientific process. For instance, if you conduct 30 or 40 interviews, then somehow, you will achieve a statistically valid result that gives you the truth. But this process is subjective, and biases abound.
You have to read into the nuance of what people say, and that is anything but scientific.
When you conduct about 15-20 interviews, you will start to hear the same things again and again. You’ll hear patterns. So by the 21st interview, you’ll ideally hear something similar to what you’ve heard previously.
However, if you do not hear a pattern of pain after a dozen interviews, then there might not be a problem to solve.
There is no magic number for the right amount of interviews. However, for every additional interview you conduct, you’re incrementally lowering your risk of failure. You can conduct ten interviews and reduce your risk of failure somewhat, or 20 interviews and reduce it even further. After 90 interviews, assuming you’re asking the right questions, you can reduce your risk substantially. That is the main point of the process.
Also, as I interview, I pivot my questions and the pitch along the way. So my fourth interview is nothing like my first. Once I learn where I missed the mark, I adjust and move on. This flexibility is especially true if you’re validating a solution for a domain where you have limited experience. It can be a little awkward if you’re not speaking the same language for the field. If that’s the case, you’ll learn how to phrase questions, use the right industry buzzwords, etc.
How We Found Patterns of Pain at LIKE.TG
At LIKE.TG, we discovered pain around the product roadmap process by initially conducting 30 interviews with product managers from a variety of companies. Most of these discussions focused on their day-to-day challenges, and the pain they were experiencing planning, prioritizing, and communicating their product roadmap.
We discovered significant pain around product roadmaps. Product managers were spending hours every week on the roadmapping process, and they still weren’t able to prioritize effectively. There were disconnects communicating the roadmap with internal stakeholders.
They found it hard to get alignment within their organizations and found it challenging to tie the roadmap back to strategy. We also discovered that, because they wanted their roadmap presentation to look good, they spent valuable time making their roadmap look great for stakeholders and executives. The visual aspect mattered.
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Based on discovering this pain, we built and launched a product that hit the pain head-on. We didn’t try to solve every problem they had but focused on reducing the pain around product roadmaps. We also created a gain by helping product managers communicate with and align their teams better. Ultimately, we help them ship better products, and we help them look good with beautiful roadmaps.
We spent hours coordinating and conducting those initial interviews. By the time we launched the product, we had done over 70 interviews. But because of all of this up-front work, we got our roadmap software to market quickly, on a tight budget, and we made no significant pivots along the way.
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You can read more about finding patterns of pain and product-market fit in our book: Find Product-Market Fit Faster, Lessons for Product Managers
When to Declare Backlog Bankruptcy
A few years ago, I was the acting product manager at a startup, developing an enterprise software product. Building the product was hard: it was taking longer to develop than everyone expected (of course). The complexity of what we were trying to accomplish became more evident as each day passed.
The product backlog I managed grew daily. I heard requests from customers, domain experts, consultants, our development team, and internal stakeholders. And I diligently added the stories to the backlog. Feature request? Add it to the backlog. Bug found? Add it to the backlog. Corner case we needed to handle one day? Backlog.
Declaring Backlog Bankruptcy
I diligently prioritized and managed the epics and stories, moving them into the next two or three sprints in the sprint backlog. As the months passed, it became clear there was no way we’d be able to develop what was in the product backlog over the next few months. There was rising frustration from the whole team at the pace of development, partly from the perception that we would never get to everything.
And every day, my stress grew as the backlog ballooned.
What was the point of diligently managing the backlog when it would be impossible to accomplish it all? Especially when everything a few months in the future would likely be different?
So along with the CTO, I made a decision – we’d declare backlog bankruptcy.
Every story, issue, bug, and idea that we weren’t planning to release in a near-term sprint, I would delete. Clicking Delete was one of the harder things I’ve done. Over 600 items… gone.
But then something interesting happened. There were no repercussions from that decision. And I got a sense of relief after eliminating the cognitive overhead created by the backlog. And after ruthlessly prioritizing and limiting what we added to the backlog, we got the product to market faster. Starting from scratch felt GOOD.
The lesson declaring backlog bankruptcy taught me was that if an idea has high enough value for customers, it will come back. It will bubble up to the top. I no longer keep massive lists of all the ideas and things I want to do in the future. Sometimes the simplicity this creates in your product is a positive experience for customers.
It also taught me more about the purpose of the product backlog – it’s not a place for every future opportunity. We needed to have a process around what gets added to the backlog.
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What Does a Healthy Backlog Look Like?
Every organization doing agile software development does it a little bit differently. My approach isn’t for everyone, especially for organizations that need to have more certainty about their product roadmap more than a few months out.
For me, I’ve been a part of startups using only some variant of scrum. We plan the stories a few sprints ahead, guided by the epics and themes on the product roadmap. That’s typically enough for any product manager. Ideally, there aren’t hundreds of stories in the backlog.
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When the product backlog is too long, it clouds the vision and creates underlying stress of what’s not getting done. A shorter backlog frees you up to think about what’s most important. It improves creativity. Think in timeframes of perhaps three to six months out.
Think about your process for what gets added to the backlog. It’s not for every possible “future” idea that you haven’t necessarily committed to. Yet you still likely want to track ideas and inspiration you’re getting from customer interviews. And you might want to remember who asked you for a particular feature so that you have context. For those situations, I recommend creating a separate “future opportunity” list, so you have a place to add your learnings as you proceed with customer discovery on the idea.
After having been involved in launching multiple products over the years it’s clear to me that things you think are super important today aren’t as pressing a few months from now. So by adding every idea to the backlog, you’re doing yourself a disservice.
But the stories and epics that you believe will add lots of customer value in the short term go for it. Also, it’s good practice to include bugs, tracking them and peppering them into near term sprints.
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Warning Signs Your Backlog is Unhealthy
As a product manager, how do you know you’ve entered the dangerous territory with your backlog? Here are some of the things I’ve found to watch out for:
Your backlog has become a dumping ground for every random idea from every stakeholder. Sure, it feels good to be able to tell a vital stakeholder you’ve “noted” their opinion, but is the minuscule, incremental cognitive overhead worth it if you do that 100 or 1,000 times?
You’re adding ideas that you’d like to implement “someday.” This thinking is long-term, and because everything is guaranteed to change from a product, customer, and competitive standpoint, what’s the point? I suggest deleting anything in your backlog that is older than six months.
You’re spending hours every month prioritizing items that aren’t winding up in your short-term sprint backlog. Be thinking every day about what will provide customer value in the short term.
Sometimes You Need to Add More
Now, to be clear, there are many situations where you might want to add something to the backlog even if it’s not going into a near-term sprint. For example, if your CEO believes a feature has merit, and you want to validate the idea and at the same time let them know you’ve noted it in the product backlog.
If you absolutely must keep a long product backlog because it’s necessary from a corporate or process standpoint, try organizing it or grouping it by a theme, such as “near term” and “long term.” That might help a little bit with your sanity.
As I mentioned previously, you don’t need to track everything that goes into your product backlog. You can use a separate “opportunity” or idea backlog, such as the Table Layout in ProductPlan. This approach is a great way to capture ideas that you haven’t committed to, and that need further validation.
My decision many years ago to declare backlog bankruptcy has yielded so many lessons for me since then. By the way, out of extra caution, before I clicked Delete, I exported my product backlog. And I never went back to look at it.
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How I Learned to Embrace Uncertainty: Tips for Product Managers
I’ll admit it, in the past, I’ve wrestled with needing to control uncertainty.
For years I thoroughly planned most everything and felt the need to know the eventual outcome of decisions. I had expectations, and if the expectations weren’t met, I was disappointed.
Whether it was a product I managed or a vacation I took, I wanted to control the inevitable uncertainty.
Uncertainty is uncomfortable.
As a result, I found myself with a lingering sense that things were out of control. As a product manager, the uncertainty manifested in really detailed and lengthy Product Requirements Documents. I know I’m not the only product manager with this challenge.
Over the years, I’ve realized through observation and personal experience that the most successful and happy people are those who are willing to embrace uncertainty. They are the ones who make “risky” decisions without knowing 100% of the information. It’s especially true for product managers, entrepreneurs, and others who want to launch products or ideas.
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I’m much better now about letting things unfold without needing to know how the plan eventually will materialize. And yes, I get the irony that I’m the co-founder of LIKE.TG, software that helps product managers visualize their plan. More on that later.
The Psychology of Uncertainty
The fear we all feel from uncertainty – and the feeling that we can control it – can cloud our thinking. After all, research consistently shows that humans are wired for seeking comfort, safety, and loss aversion. Our inner cave-person wants to avoid getting eaten by the tiger.
A couple of years ago, our team read the fantastic book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize Winner in Economics. His research demonstrated that we choose options to avoid loss. We don’t behave logically when presented with the same choice framed in different ways.
In one example from the book, a disease that kills 1,286 people out of every 10,000 is considered more dangerous than a disease that kills 24.14% of the population. In studies, we believe the first disease to be more threatening even though the actual risk is significantly less than the alternative.
We also tend to overestimate our ability to control events – and this feeling that we can control a situation is an illusion. If we can stop for a moment and change our thinking that we’re not in as much control as we think, and surrender to it, we’re more likely to succeed because we’re open to change and opportunities we wouldn’t see otherwise.
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I’m not saying that we never need to plan. I think two ways of living can co-exist – it’s possible to have outcomes-based goals and, at the same time, take decisive action without knowing the exact path with certainty.
And I’ll add that it’s a lot more fun to work once I learned to live with the uncertainty.
Lessons for Product Managers
I think there are many lessons for product managers in this philosophy. Here are a few thoughts for how product managers – especially those in an agile development environment – can embrace uncertainty and live with the inevitable discomfort. Hopefully, these ideas will help you focus on what matters.
Make decisions based on outcomes
One way to live with uncertainty is to relax about the exact plan, and instead make decisions based on an outcome-driven goal. For example, rather than creating a list of arbitrary and disconnected features for your product, instead, focus on what your desired outcome is for customers – what is the goal you want them to achieve?
By focusing on an outcome-driven roadmap, you (and your team) have room to think about new possibilities, about different ways of achieving the goal.
Focus on today (and maybe a few sprints out)
There’s an expectation of product managers to spell out the vision for our products and what the product looks like one or two years down the road.
But it’s problematic if this planning is too detailed. One or two years out any plan is only a fantasy. There’s no way things will go exactly to plan, and the goalpost will probably change along the way. You’ll never achieve perfection. This detailed planning, unfortunately, sets an expectation in your head (and your stakeholders’ heads) that simply won’t come true. It sets up everyone for disappointment.
My advice: Don’t plan too far ahead. Focus on the big picture vision in broad terms. Then, focus on what is in your control today to meet that vision. For your product planning, a few sprints out are far enough.
Get comfortable with the discomfort
Stop spending as much time dwelling on problems at work and what-if thinking. You’re causing stress, which will affect you in all areas of your life. Spend more time working to solve the problems your customers are facing. Those are the fun problems.
For all the worst-case-scenario planners out there… cut the negative thinking. Why worry about all the endless gloomy scenarios that your (fearful) mind can conjure up? Plus, I believe that if you expect the worst, you’ll put yourself in a position of being close-minded to recognize new options and opportunities.
I’m not saying that you should avoid realistic contingency planning, but truly, the five percent chance of a worst-case-scenario is unlikely to unfold. Spend your brainpower toward an optimistic outcome. Positive thinking really does affect. And your nights will be more restful.
Embrace confrontation
Another tip: Embrace confrontation. Stop avoiding the conversations you know you need to be having. I’m not saying to pick fights, but rather address conversations directly. Rather than avoiding conflict, micromanaging, or trying to prove someone wrong (controlling), have an honest upfront conversation about the situation.
Incorporate stress reduction daily
The last bit of advice on another way I’ve found to embrace uncertainty at work and in life: give myself time for exercise and other mindfulness practices daily. I’m finding that when I prioritize this above other items, the rest of my day (life?) is happier, even when I get thrown a curveball I hadn’t expected.
Takeaway
In the end, will you be a product manager who embraces uncertainty or one who plays it safe and avoids unpredictability? While it’s not a guarantee of success, I think I know which one stands a better chance.
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I’m Predictable in an Agile Environment
“Being Agile” and “being predictable” may seem mutually exclusive, at least when it comes to product management. A good sprint cadence creates a predictable frequency of software releases but divining what’s actually in them feels harder. Isn’t the whole point of Agile that we can continuously adjust, making on-the-fly tweaks to seize opportunities? Contrary to some prevailing opinions, managing products in an Agile environment doesn’t mean surrendering planning to the whims of the development team. In fact, Agile can help you be more predictable in some ways. I say this speaking from personal experience. I’m predictable in an agile product environment.
Agile ≠ Chaos
Those unfamiliar with Agile often have some misconceptions about how it really works. Let’s start by dispelling a few Agile myths:
Agile is a free-for-all.
Developers don’t code what they feel like, and the software doesn’t just ship at random points of time. Agile is merely empowering the product development team to make iterative progress while adjusting to incoming data.
Product managers don’t have a role in an Agile environment.
Product managers are still prioritizing features, gathering and synthesizing customer feedback, defining a strategy and product vision, and offering input to the implementation process. None of these tasks go away. You’re no longer writing lengthy product requirements documents with the same exacting detail as before. But developers still both need and value your input.
Dates don’t matter.
Agile certainly embraces a more fluid approach to project management. But if something needs to ship by a specific date, there’s nothing in the Agile Framework preventing it. In fact, by iteratively developing the software over multiple sprints, chances are the desired functionality will ship with fewer defects. Unlike in the waterfall model, it’s reviewed numerous times during the process.
There’s no visibility into what’s happening.
With waterfall, there are often project plans detailing what every resource is doing all the time. Anyone can take a peek and know precisely what folks are up to and how things are progressing. This type of visibility may be murkier during the actual sprint, but that’s not the case before and after. Setting sprint goals before a single line of code is written, and retrospectives (or micro-retrospectives) provides an opportunity to dig into what transpired and improve things going forward.
Plans are useless as everyone chases the latest shiny object.
First of all, once a sprint begins, what the team is working on for those two or three weeks shouldn’t change. The sprint goals remain locked. However, if something new does come up, the sprint planning team (including the product manager) can decide whether it’s worth altering the course for future sprints.
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Applying Agile Values to Product Management
The Agile Manifesto has four core values. These Agile Values are the central tenets that drive everything else. Looking at each one, we can see their potential to make product management (and product managers) more predictable in agile environment.
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
At first glance, you may already be scratching your head. How does this make a product manager more predictable? But note that this value uses the word “over” and NOT “instead of.”
There is still plenty of room for tools and processes. Agile needs those to be in place to avoid developers idling and things from getting out of hand. But it also elevates the importance of communication and addressing stakeholder concerns.
By creating more frequent dialogue, there is an increased level of transparency; when people know what’s happening and why they can better predict what’s to come. There’s no black box, no guessing about when things might ship.
In an Agile world, things may change a little more often. But everyone will also know about changes much faster and understand any potential ramifications.
Working software over comprehensive documentation
By removing the requirement for, well, detailed specifications, teams can deliver updates and new functionality faster. This process shortens the distance from prioritization to ship date.
When there are fewer hoops to jump through and hurdles to clear, it’s easier to predict availability. After deciding to build, product managers should have a solid sense of when things will debut. They can then provide clear communication to coworkers and stakeholders.
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Customer-centric companies are committed to doing everything with the best interest of customers in mind. They’re continually processing user feedback and turning those requests and complaints into a better product.
Guess what gets in the way of that kind of responsive, ongoing progress? Having to renegotiate a contract every time something changes. When the lawyers get involved, there’s no telling how long things can get held up.
Removing those entanglements lets teams focus on building a great product. It removes this common source of uncertainty from the equation.
Customers need to pay for things, and a contract might be required. But Agile-friendly companies structure those agreements, so they don’t hinder innovation and iteration.
Responding to change over following a plan
Of the four values, this one seems the most contentious with our thesis. Plans make things predictable, don’t they?
Well, executing a plan properly is predictable. But while the plan’s elements are predictable, you can’t always predict what transpires after a product ships.
Adoption, usage, churn, reviews, net promoter scores… there’s no way to know what’s going to happen until it happens. If you’re operating with an inflexible long-term plan, it’s hard to adjust based on the product’s reception. When the cruise ship is chugging along, it’s tough to change course.
The best part of Agile is being able to measure, learn, and adjust. That means plans must be a little more dynamic instead of plotting out every single move for the next 18 months. That’s why roadmapping is a predictable product manager’s best tool for managing expectations and hitting target goals while still utilizing the benefits Agile has to offer.
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The Art of the Agile-Friendly Roadmap
One reason some product managers can turn negative toward Agile is that their “capstone” project (the product roadmap) might seem at odds with the framework’s fluidity. Well, if your product roadmap is chock full of particular features and exact dates, then you’d be well within your rights to be frustrated.
However, including that level of detail and specificity isn’t the only way to build a roadmap. We’d argue that approach isn’t doing anyone any favors, including product managers.
Feature-Less Roadmap
Instead, product roadmaps featuring goals and themes are usually a much better way to go. Themes illustrate what parts of the product will be worked on at different times, along with the desired outcomes of those efforts. You can escape the trap of promising features and dates—which are inevitably destined to change in an Agile environment—while still communicating the direction and priorities for the product.
If there’s concern that a feature-less roadmap is too vague and open to interpretation, add milestones as specific scheduling targets. This change doesn’t guarantee a particular feature will be available by a specific date, but it conveys that you’ll reach a goal by that time.
Remember, a roadmap’s primary purpose is communicating a vision for how the product strategy will become a reality. Implementation details and schedules aren’t required to build stakeholder alignment.
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Getting on Board with Agile
We get that Agile can sometimes feel like it’s taking control away from product managers and handing over more power and decision-making to the implementation side of the house. But wary PMs should take comfort in a few Agile principles that simplify their ultimate goal of delighting customers.
#1) Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. Customer satisfaction is the first principle of Agile. Not “building cool stuff” or “unshackling the creativity of our development team.”
#2) Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project. We used to throw requirements “over the wall” and see how things shook out. But the ongoing dialogue between product and development should result in products meeting expectations and delivering customer value. Moreover, you get the chance to stick your nose into things every day!
#3) The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face communication. We mean, you might need to attend daily standups. But it also means you’re not spending as much time writing lengthy documents no one ever reads. You can continually assert yourself as the business owner and voice of the customer.
You can be Predictable in Agile
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What is the Learning Center?
Our library of content helps thousands upon thousands of product people every month continue their education and understanding of the product space, thought-leadership, best practices, and trends, all for free. You’ll find over 500 blogs and articles, 250 glossary terms, 50+ webinars, 30 books/guides, 15 checklists, and counting live in the Learning Center.
Educating the product community has been a core tenet of LIKE.TG for nearly a decade, and we’re so excited to revamp the experience to empower you with better product education.
What is LIKE.TG’s Learning Center?
The Learning Center is the central hub of LIKE.TG’s content to educate the product community on best practices and industry trends. Similar to Google Search, you can search for anything product management-related. For instance, we have content on topics from product strategy examples to Agile, presenting a roadmap to stakeholders, change management, and so much more. Of course, if you seek best practices for using LIKE.TG’s roadmap platform, you’ll also find tips in the Learning Center.
You can find light, skimmable reading, more extended downloadable readings, in-depth webinars, and quick video tutorials. You can also filter by a category you’re interested in, like roadmap and roadmap management, product leadership, and Agile or development. Finally, you can also filter by your skill level (beginner, intermediate, and advanced) to elevate your educational journey.
What’s happening to the LIKE.TG blog?
The LIKE.TG blog is also still live. As such, you will find pieces on LIKE.TG’s culture, thought leadership, and product releases on the blog.
Our Most Popular Pieces of Content to Get Started
Dive in and explore the pieces that readers keep coming back to.
The 2021 State of Product Management Report
Product Roadmaps: Your Guide to Planning and Selling Your Product Strategy
The Product Strategy Playbook
From Product Manager to Product Leader
What is MoSCoW?
What is Product Development?
The Ultimate Guide to Product Management?
Learning Center Takeaways
Finally, the Learning Center hub is easy to navigate to find your favorite product management topics in one place. Let us know your favorite piece of content you’ve read in the Learning Center in the comments below.
Implementing an Effective Product Transformation Strategy for the New Year
The new year is right around the corner, and digital transformation continues to be the rage as companies evolve to seek relevance – modernizing systems, procedures, and mindsets for the modern world. CEOs tout the benefits and hype up their planning and investment. Product leaders swoop in to shepherd these efforts. Finally, customers eagerly await the benefits of the shift. Yet 80% of digital transformations fail. What’s causing so many failures? One key factor is a fundamental lack of understanding of product transformation relative to traditional operating models. Many leaders fail to realize that digital transformation must be synonymous with product transformation and the ability for an organization to be successful.
Remarkably, the COVID crisis accelerated the importance and availability of digital customer-facing touchpoints by five years. Companies that stayed on the sidelines face a major uphill battle when they decide to attempt a transformation strategy.
“The COVID crisis accelerated the importance and availability of digital customer-facing touch points by five years.”
For the small group of companies who successfully pivoted, will their product transformation continue or revert back to traditional ways of doing business? The global pandemic has taught us that businesses that remain agile and open to digital transformation will be successful, but that doesn’t guarantee changes in how a company operates.
Digital transformation and product development’s relationship
A strong response during a crisis isn’t a transformation but a reaction. And as soon as the dust settles, many companies risk going back to traditional ways of doing business. The status quo ultimately holds their transformation back. Why not leverage the new year to help your team adapt to this brand-new world?
First, break the mold of top-down management expectations
When facing intense adversity, successful leaders break the mold by loosening the reins and relinquishing their control in the name of survival. Yet top-down management styles quickly return to normal after a crisis. Most companies fail because they revert back to this leadership style.
“A strong response during a crisis isn’t a
transformation but a reaction.”
Gartner reports that 85% of organizations surveyed had adopted or intended to adopt a product-centric delivery model. Open collaboration and creative problem-solving in this delivery model dissolve traditional and rigid operating patterns. You need trust to establish product processes. A well-formed roadmap is your best ammunition to create space and respect.
Implementing an effective product transformation strategy
Fundamental product transformation requires a permanent embrace of effective management strategies and tools to achieve alignment. These strategies help organizations withstand a crisis. Team autonomy is an essential pillar of digital transformation. And many product and technology leaders and executives fail to embrace this concept.
Shift to a product-led mindset
Busting down silos via cross-functional teams and collaboration limits empire-building. C-level executives may not always be a fan-favorite of eliminating silos. Toxic leaders find it uncomfortable to empower individual contributors to make decisions independently.
To effectively manage this scenario, as a product leader, you should shift to a product-led mindset. Your organization can foster the development of an actual product management organization. The organization guides the process and changes the dynamic. A product-led mindset helps to diminish a toxic environment where diverse voices and opinions are pushed to the background.
Bottom-up strategy
Customer-obsessed perspectives drive change and alignment. It’s bottom-up from the customer to the product to the leadership; instead of a versus battle of egos and seniority. Product leaders should understand that the typical customer journey begins pre-purchase—a potential customer identifies a need, researches potential solutions, and ultimately selects a product. Companies are applying various digital tools to cut through the clutter and win customers at this critical stage.
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Digital transformation and Agile methodologies are one and the same
Understanding customers’ needs drive the conflict and set the stage to genuinely embrace Agile and embracing digital transformation. The market dictates what the company should build next. There’s no better way to address that quickly and efficiently than Agile practices. There’s less pushback when the benefits of a shorter time to market and quicker reactions and customer feedback are the impetus.
Iterative development accelerates learning, which is key to product transformation. Product and digital transformation are synonymous with one another. If you want to go through digital transformation, you need to introduce product management as a discipline.
Shorter feedback loops facilitate more efficient resource allocation. It provides early indicators of whether or not a given initiative is on the right track. Few companies have the runway to put all their eggs in one basket while also sustaining asymmetrical attacks from various competitors.
How to set the stage for success with stakeholders
To execute change without adding extra drama and resentment, it’s key to handle the current state properly. Who are the actual stakeholders, and how do they feel about things?
Many important stakeholders may feel hesitant to implement a digital transformation. To mitigate this issue, you’ll need to dig in a little deeper to uncover their pain points. Your product vision should help them see how the product transformation can resolve their pain points.
From there, a clearly articulated vision creates some boundaries and a destination for the process. Below we explore how roadmaps, understanding product transformation, and effective communication can address customer’s pain points and get stakeholders on board.
Roadmaps aid your transformation
In my experience, the best weapon to combat this backsliding and increase the comfort level for stakeholders is a solid product roadmap. This illustration displays the key steps the team will take to achieve strategic goals and objectives and provides a structure for leadership to wrap their heads around.
Complimenting this well-defined roadmap process for crucial product development ensures that things won’t become a free-for-all. Most product teams would rather have a flexible, responsive approach grounded in shared core principles, as well as an adequately socialized strategy aligned with key stakeholders.
The power of visual roadmaps
When a visual roadmap is focused on outcomes versus deliverables, strategy shines through instead of the shiny objects that distract stakeholders and the product team from their actual goals. The roadmap also drives home the transition from thinking about “projects” to focusing on “products.”
Although visual roadmaps may be light on the details, it’s much easier to get stakeholder buy-in, trust, and support when the plan is positioned in terms of themes and objectives rather than dates and specific features. Stakeholders may also relish the opportunity for additional measurables and metrics. They only work when the product is tied to strategic goals and objectives.
Understanding product transformation improvements
Product transformations themselves may also deserve a roadmap of their own. While these might detail the steps required to achieve success, they’re even more valuable by describing the progress these initiatives can make.
By describing both the current and desired state and the mid-transformation improvements along the way, stakeholders can better grasp the importance of this work and the benefits it brings. Each bit of progress must address stated goals for the product or current organizational and operational deficiencies. Rewarding those who greenlight the transformation with tangible, measurable gains.
Targeted transformational change
Product and organizational transformation need to be targeted. These improvements reduce customer support inquiries and increase recurring revenue. The shift speeds up onboarding and cuts down on churn. The shift can bring stakeholders on board and calms their fears about the digital transformation, which for them may seem like a radical change away from traditional manners of business.
Milestones
Regardless of which roadmap you’re working on, milestones are one way to make it real. They demarcate, passing from one gate to the next. Moreover, they provide a sense of accomplishment and achievement that doesn’t always shine through when everyone’s plowing through one sprint after the next.
Avoid communication breakdown during product transformations
So many problems and misunderstandings in organizations stem from communication breakdowns. When embarking on a product transformation, it’s more important than ever to keep folks in the loop and feeling included.
Keeping stakeholders informed
Less is seldom more in these cases since even the biggest proponents of product transformation may still have concerns about particular aspects of the change. Create consistent channels for sharing updates and make sure it’s a two-way street. You may not want their feedback and input, but it’s essential that everyone feels like they have a voice in the process.
If stakeholders remain hesitant about an overall digital transformation, you can ease the process by walking them through the transformation. Stakeholders may also find it helpful if you take the time to explain to them the importance of the Agile process.
Agile eases communication and helps everyone come to a single source of truth, especially stakeholders. Oversharing allows you to avoid having to clean up avoidable messes in the future that might damage stakeholder confidence in the new ways of doing things.
Throw away those outdated playbooks and embrace the future with a product transformation strategy
Change is hard, particularly when things don’t seem particularly broken. But even if a product or business is managing at the moment, digital and product transformation are necessary to survive and succeed in the coming years.
As you fight this uphill battle in preparation for the New Year, take solace in the fact that you’re not alone. Countless organizations continue to resist, dig in their heels, and count on past successes to continue.
Getting stakeholder holdouts to come around requires a multi-pronged effort. Benchmarking against peers and competitor points demonstrates that the old way of doing things holds the organization back. Meanwhile, product leaders can convince the old guard that getting from the current state to the desired destination won’t happen using the rigid top-down rules of yesteryear.
Organizations resistant to embracing product transformation may remain confident that their tried-and-true methods worked before, so they’ll work again. But there’s little evidence to support that. Industries and dominant players continually disrupt other companies willing to use these new tools and techniques. It’s only a question of when—not if—one will come gunning for them as well.
Ready to jumpstart your product transformation strategy? We’re here to help! Schedule a demo to connect with our team of product strategy experts.
The Key to Achieving Change Management Buy-In
Getting change management buy-in is not easy, but we’re only delaying the inescapable when we resist change. Whether it’s driven by economics, technology, politics, or the environment—those massive undercurrents can at best be held at bay before reality sets in.
Most organizations are resistant to change by default. Inertia, process, bureaucracy, and governance are often cited as the primary hurdles. But fear and uncertainty also play an often unspoken-yet-prominent role. The bigger the company, the harder it can be to make even the smallest fundamental shifts.
Yet, those same large organizations face the most risk by not adapting quickly and intentionally. Smaller, younger firms are by nature more agile, and it’s easier to get change buy-in. But small teams also have less to lose. It’s because larger, older companies have so much more at stake that failing to change can be that much more consequential.
For example, my mission in my previous role at a company with over 30,000+ employees was to create a formal change management process or track record to lean on for their CRM system, Salesforce.com, and create a center of excellence around optimizing the firm’s usage of this critical tool.
This wasn’t my first time helping an organization improve its Salesforce.com utilization. I’ve done this for multiple firms from a project management/PMO perspective. I’ve also had experience in change management, having spent eight years previously facilitating those.
Let’s look at the critical steps that can affect the fate of significant transformations for organizations and successfully change management buy-in.
3 Critical Considerations That Affect Change Management Buy-in
1. Intentional thinking from the start.
One fatal flaw many big change initiatives make is letting things “into the wild” before they’re fully baked. However, there might be a follow-on phase to tweak and tailor new tools and processes to the specific impacted groups. Employees won’t always wait until the paint is dry to begin using things.
I’ll use Slack as an example. The asynchronous communication tool can be a huge boost for efficiency and collaboration. But when left to their own devices, early adopters can create some bad precedents.
In this case, if you don’t create the correct channels and train staff how to use Slack properly, it can get out of control. This can both create bad habits and turn people off to the tool before it’s spun up. Yet, a productivity boon can end up as yet another system people use inconsistently.
2. Anticipating downstream ramifications.
Management often initiates changes. A CFO, VP, or a Director thinks there’s a better, cheaper, or faster way to do something. Then they issue an order, and everyone beneath them in the organizational chart deals with the consequences.
But managing change by edict is often a recipe for disaster on the ground floor. Executives frequently don’t have much insight into the day-to-day operations of various teams. Thus they can’t begin to recognize the disruption such a shift might cause.
The power of working groups is effective. People on the ground are the ones that know what’s going on.
Ideally, before a suggested change is even approved, the organization conducts a full forensic analysis of the implications for everyone impacted. That includes employees across the company, as well as strategic partners and even customers. The exercise might uncover potential unintended consequences.
Regardless of how big or small it might be, every change requires a proper communication plan. The key is figuring out how you’re going to engage with everyone, drive adoption, detail the benefits, and get everyone on board.
It should detail the rationale for the move along with any new or modified processes. If necessary, hold training or QA sessions to ensure the roll-out goes smoothly with minimal turmoil during the transition.
3. Centralized change management.
Another key to successful change management is running it all out of a single unit, be it an ad hoc team, a more permanent center of excellence, or a formal PMO. There are many benefits from this kind of organizational structure.
First, it breaks down silos in a way that’s often unattainable organically. This unit can both communicate across the organizational matrix and identify redundant efforts.
This also puts trained practitioners in charge of structuring and facilitating these activities. Since this is what they do, they have the skills, tools, best practices, and resources to make things as seamless and standardized as possible. They also possess the institutional knowledge and expertise to anticipate friction points in advance thus minimizing potential damage via education and well-documented processes.
Most importantly, utilizing a dedicated change management entity gives a holistic view of every major initiative. Regardless of where it began, keep in mind the entire organization and larger ecosystem during execution.
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4 Steps to Achieve Change Management Buy-in
These are the steps for starting things off on the right foot.
1. Survey the landscape.
Until you’re on the inside, it’s hard to know who the real players are. Nor do you know where the power centers lie and which baggage and political legacies influence projects. You see which names are being dropped, who people defer to, who made previous critical decisions or threw up roadblocks.
At one point, I conducted 40 interviews across various groups to get the land lay but could have done more. Once I’ve identified these stakeholders, then I can understand how to best engage with them.
I want to emphasize that it’s imperative to make sure you get things right when evaluating senior management. You need to know their motivations, concerns, and what they value most.
Emotional intelligence is such a key factor as a leader. You can talk about industry knowledge and business process. Still, if you don’t have the emotional intelligence of people around you and their drivers, then you can’t figure out how to motivate them in the best way.
Additionally, not everyone wants to receive information in the same way, nor do we all process it similarly. I make a point of asking key stakeholders right off the bet how they like to be communicated with, so I can try and meet them where they want to be.
2. Define and articulate a vision.
No one’s a fan of change for change’s sake, so the value and purpose of this new role must be crisp, clear, and concise. From the C-suite to the cubicles, everyone should understand why this is important, the steps required, and which benefits the result will bring.
Ideally, present tailored messaging for different audiences to connect with their pain points and address their concerns. But to do this, you need to know who you’re dealing with.
I use the Insights method. To follow this method, first place stakeholders along a color spectrum, and then based on that designation, you can see what triggers stress along with the best ways to remedy that state. I do this to create the best chances for a successful interaction by acknowledging their feelings and speaking to them constructively.
It’s also critical to not immediately dive into the details but rather to establish broader themes that the change will encompass. These themes might seem obvious at times, but a smart and accurate tagline for the initiative can become a helpful mantra and reference point for the project’s life.
3. Get change-buy in with a roadmap.
Significant changes have a lot of moving pieces and dependencies. To get change buy-in, a project or program roadmap can help illustrate exactly how everything will happen. Using a purpose-built roadmapping tool is the answer to keeping everything organized and a clear vision to stakeholders.
Using LIKE.TG, I capture every possible backlog item to ensure no requests or requirements get lost in the shuffle. In this central repository, we used LIKE.TG to prioritize initiatives. I categorize various things up for consideration before putting them into “buckets” to develop and ship together to create incremental value associated with a particular theme.
Then I use a cost and complexity versus impact method for evaluating which items should get to the front of the line, and are happy to slot the low-hanging fruit in the front of the queue to deliver more value to stakeholders faster.
With prioritized themes set, I build my roadmap. I use lanes for “containers” of specific items, which allows me to keep the roadmap clean and straightforward. Less is more about the level of detail presented to most audiences, but there’s always the option to drill down and get more refined information on a specific roadmap element.
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4. It’s all about people.
While tools, frameworks, and processes get a lot of attention, at the end of the day, what determines a significant change’s success or failure is how it is embraced and supported by the individual it impacts.
The key to change management buy-in is having a clear vision and structure people understand so they see the impact of what you’re trying to do and how it affects them. If you don’t think about how they’re going to go about it, it will never be successful. Without engaging with the people who will use it, that will be your number one failure.
Roadmapping with an IMPACT Mindset
The IMPACT approach to product management’s primary goal is creating the maximum value for the broadest target audience while remaining aligned with the company’s mission, vision, and goals. Filtering everything through the IMPACT lens can be extremely beneficial. It helps product teams level set every action, process, and decision to ensure they’re staying true to that objective.
But if there’s one part of product management that needs IMPACT more than anywhere else, it’s roadmapping. Roadmaps set the tone for the coming months and years. They typically direct dozens—sometimes hundreds—of people involved in the implementation and rollout of product releases. Not to mention they dictate what marketing and sales will be able to promote and sell going forward.
No one wants a plan for the future that isn’t exciting, inspiring, and positioning the product for growth and success. Yet far too often, bug fixes, custom client requests, and features of dubious value take up valuable bandwidth. These items snap up spots on the roadmap that would be better filled with innovative, value-added customer benefits and revenue-goosing enhancements.
Where trouble begins
Most product teams don’t set out to create lackluster roadmaps, but they’re often dealt a sub-par opening hand. You ideally begin with the company’s mission and vision. However, many organizations aren’t great at strategy, so there’s often a disconnect between those lofty ideals and reality. Senior leaders’ KPIs and metrics fixate on don’t always align with the long-range objectives and key milestones required to get there.
This leaves the next crucial steps up to product managers. Yet PMs are sometimes given little direction when it comes to setting priorities and goals. This doesn’t prevent them from being met with withering criticism or—even worse—deafening silence when coming up with and presenting a plan. So these roadmappers need a rubric to continually measure the overall impact of their blueprint for the product, and IMPACT can do just that.
Laying the groundwork for a roadmap with IMPACT
IMPACT doesn’t begin with the roadmap. It must be part of the process in earlier stages of product development, particularly during prioritization. According to its own impact, vetting and judging each potential roadmap item culls the herd and eliminates requests and ideas that won’t move the needle where it matters most.
IMPACT also shouldn’t be thought of as a component of the roadmap. There shouldn’t be any swimlanes dedicated to each letter of the acronym. Nor should “Clear” or “Actionable” appear in the legend.
IMPACT’s value comes into play in a few other ways. First, by utilizing the IMPACT scoring approach during prioritization, there will be far more confidence it consists of worthy endeavors stakeholders will agree on merit inclusion.
The roadmap’s overarching themes should also stand up to the IMPACT test. Each major goal and the desired outcome should meet the same criteria that any individual development items have already attained.
You can also judge the roadmap as a whole based on its IMPACT. Looking out six, nine, or twelve months, will the planned themes and projects deliver results that adhere to this credo? If not, what’s driving the prioritization of work that doesn’t improve things along these lines?
Staying true to a roadmap’s true purpose
Product roadmaps aren’t projected plans, schedules, or a laundry list of deliverables. Not that stakeholders don’t try to turn them into that occasionally. You can’t necessarily blame them—these folks are desperate for updates and information that they can use tactically to do their own jobs.
Despite this frequent bastardization of purpose, product roadmaps are supposed to be about why you’re doing something as much as they explain what it is and when it might show up. To shift that mindset, product managers must change up the internal conversations around roadmaps and evolve the organization’s product culture. And here’s one more opportunity for IMPACT to play a role.
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The roadmap is a canvas to tell a story, not a checklist or Gantt chart. And that story is laced throughout with IMPACT. Everything on there should fit the narrative, benefitting users while advancing the corporate strategy.
I personally structure our roadmap by value areas—the value we want to deliver to create that impact. I then structure the legend to reflect our differentiators. Before I actually put anything on the roadmap, its bones already indicate what’s most important for our business.
With that foundation, I can start looking at opportunities, resources, and investments. Combined with using IMPACT for prioritization within each area, I know the product delivers value in all of the most impactful areas.
Interesting
Roadmaps are a way to tell your story visually. They connect your audience with the journey, so they walk away with the most pertinent information. Regardless of what the roadmap contains, it all comes back to why you prioritize that work and tell a story that belies the successes and victories to come after implementation.
Meaningful
Tailoring your roadmap to specific audiences is key by leaving out anything that distracts from the narrative or isn’t relevant to each stakeholder. External customers need to see which problems you’ll solve for them in the coming year. And internal stakeholders want to connect the dots between what’s on the roadmap and their impact on OKRs and KPIs.
People
Put yourself in the shoes of the different people your roadmap is for. Next, customize it for their own areas of interest and concerns. With this relevance top of mind, decide which parts of the roadmap you want to share, how far into the future it should go, and which methods are most effective to communicate your plans.
Actionable
Every roadmap is “actionable,” assuming things are implemented according to that plan. But I tend to worry about what I expect the audience to do with the information they’ve just received? I’m looking for customer validation and feedback, sales and marketing to update their pitches and collateral, customer success to anticipate how they’ll roll this out to customers, and how the technical teams will determine feasibility and make things happen. That means my roadmap needs the necessary information and context to enable these behaviors and actions.
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Clear
Roadmaps should answer existing questions and not raise too many new ones—you’re shooting for generating excitement, not doubts. That’s why conveying the why is vastly more important than the what. Measure their engagement and comprehension based on the questions they ask.
Testable
Roadmaps can also be tested by trying them out on different crowds. Socializing your proposed plan with small groups can generate valuable feedback instead of waiting for a grand reveal and falling on your face when presented with a tough question. Creating that space for failure and challenges gives you additional opportunities to polish things up while also acknowledging that your course may vary based on an always uncertain future.
Impress them with IMPACT
If your roadmap holds up to the IMPACT test, you can confidently enter any presentation. You’ll know that even if everyone doesn’t agree or approve, they can’t argue with your rationale or reasons. You could still get overruled by an executive or a flagship customer, but you can still stick to your fundamentals even if a few wrinkles are thrown your way.
Most importantly, you’ll have value creation on your side as you lobby to retain the items you know will create the most impact for customers and the business. For more examples of how IMPACT can guide your product management endeavors, download the free IMPACT ebook today.
Watch Annie talk through IMPACT: Processes in the webinar below.
