“If you’re a growth stage company then you have to be able to make strategy decisions very rapidly. If you don’t have the data then you can’t make secure decisions and alter course.” A key insight shared by Melissa Perri, CEO of Produx Labs and author of Escaping the Build Trap during our “Getting Started with Product Ops” webinar series. It’s no secret that product management often looks different from one organization to the next. There’s a lot of reasons why this is the case. It’s not necessarily bad when product management adapts to each company’s specific needs. Product managers are versatile and possess a broad range of skills, so if any role for company-specific customization suits them, this is it. However, product management must be consistent within the same organization. The responsibilities and expectations for product managers shouldn’t be based on individual personalities and preferences, and it must be steady and dependable regardless of the particular product or line of business. Product operations (more commonly known as product ops) is where product management becomes a scalable resource and function for companies instead of a made-to-order one-off. Below is the discussion Melissa Perri had with John Cutler and Jim Semick on why teams that are scaling need product ops. What is Product Ops, Exactly? As a relatively new discipline, there is plenty of confusion regarding product ops. When we spoke with Melissa, whose company helps organizations stand up their product ops, she identified product ops’ three key components: Business Data Insights: There is a sea of data locked inside various nooks and crannies of corporate systems, but knowing what’s available, getting it regularly, and making sense of it all can be tricky. Product ops collect and analyze internal data to support strategic planning and monitor progress. It includes revenue, costs, usage, churn, etc. Customer Market Insights: Talking to customers and using their feedback to drive product decisions and priorities are essential. But executing that comes with major administrative overhead. Product ops can facilitate and aggregate external research, whether sizing the market opportunity or unlocking user research basics. Processes Practices: The more product teams grow and multiply, the less homogenous they get. But both high-growth and enterprise organizations rely on consistency to remain efficient and effective. Product ops introduces and maintains operational standards. This addresses the potential differences and disparities that can emerge when lots of people are trying to do the same things in different silos. One thing product ops is not, however, is program management. While they may have some surface-level similarities, they definitely shouldn’t be doing the same things. Program management, often housed in a centralized Program Management Office, is all about executing large-scale projects and initiatives that span multiple business units and groups within the organization. It’s an essential role for growing and large companies, but it’s really an outgrowth of project management. Product ops, while also a centralized resource, is responsible for very specific areas of expertise. They’re providing information that serves as an input to strategy decisions, but they’re not involved in execution. When Is the Right Time to Add Product Ops? Product ops don’t exist in smaller organizations for a good reason—they don’t really need it. There are simply not enough people or products requiring their services, and a business analyst can probably do all that’s required. But once a company’s headcount and product offerings start multiplying, Melissa thinks that product ops can start adding value. “At larger enterprise organizations, they don’t always do the basic stuff, like talking to customers, because they’re afraid that unbeknownst to them different teams might also be talking to the same customers. Start to classify your customers in databases so that every product manager is empowered to reach out to them or know who to start or stop reaching out to.” For LIKE.TG co-founder Jim Semick, he sees product roadmaps as one early warning sign that product ops are in order. Melissa believes, “Large companies don’t tend to have a standardized roadmap because they’re stuck in an excel sheet… Roadmaps will bring in transparency into what people are doing.” Download the Anatomy of a Product Launch ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '0edb2611-2761-4434-90b0-f055704d9daa', {}); Companies not only start to worry that roadmapping is too variable, but that stakeholders can’t even find the product roadmaps they need because they’re in a forgotten folder on someone’s hard drive instead of being widely available and frequently updated. Forming the Team Of course, starting with product ops doesn’t require organizations to hire an entire team immediately. Plus, these hires aren’t the same generalists that might make good product managers. Melissa suggests that this first hire should fill the product data analytics role. They’ll be responsible for doing data analysis, modeling, identifying trends, and segmenting customers. Over time the team can grow, with a second hire often best filled by someone who can program business intelligence and analytics tools to aggregate data and make sense of it. It also frees the product team from relying on development resources to get the data they need. Ideally, Melissa advises, there will be a VP of Product Ops reporting to the Chief Product Officer (or a Director of Product Ops reporting to the VP of Product). They’ll be responsible for analytics, standardization of practices and tools, standardized cadence for strategy reviews, roadmap reviews, agile cadences, budgeting, and those sorts of tasks. Other hires to fill out the team can include user researchers, folks doing user outreach to build out the customer database, and additional data analytics people. But making these new teams work requires product management to give up some of the tasks they may previously have been directly responsible for. Delegating isn’t easy, but Melissa said that product ops ultimately make product managers more visible, available, and productive. They can be more present for internal stakeholders since they’re not so busy mucking with data and scheduling customer calls. Product managers must accept this trade-off so they can focus on other things. No product manager ever complains they have too much extra time, and product ops free up time for other duties. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); Proactive, but Advisory Product management shouldn’t fear product ops hijacking their core responsibilities. Product ops is a support function, offering up data, insights, and assistance without grabbing the reigns. For example, many large companies shy away from reaching out to customers for feedback. This shyness is because they’re not sure what each company is up to and their openness to this solicitation. Plus, they’re afraid someone else from their organization might have already reached out. With this function centralized and an accurate database of customers and their feedback channel preferences known, product managers can survey, conduct interviews, and even identify beta testers with confidence and speed. That said, Melissa mentions that product ops shouldn’t just be an on-demand resource; they can be encouraged to proactively identify and communicate relevant information. Since they’re looking at the data all the time, they can spot trends product managers didn’t even know to look out for, while also responding to specific information requests. The secret is empowering product ops to investigate and report what they find while still managing the scope of their activities. Product Ops Is the Key to Scaling Product Management People like dependability and consistency. Executives like it even more so in their employees. When a company scales, there’s little leeway for lone wolves and their individual styles and traits. Companies must make strategic decisions quickly, which means they need data, product roadmaps, and all the other ingredients for those processes to be readily available and easy to consume. By instituting standard policies, defining tools and frameworks, and facilitating data analysis, product ops make it all go smoothly. People start speaking the same language and presenting data using the same benchmarks, templates, and baselines. Teams mine customers for data and insights without ruffling feathers or squandering unnecessary hours identifying and contacting them to gauge their interest. Melissa advocates that product ops streamline everything for optimal strategic performance. It ensures teams are working toward the right goals, and you’re spending product investments properly, Putting off this building-out product ops is all too easy. But any delay can sacrifice potential growth since what worked when the company was smaller isn’t feasible after a while. Download Get Buy-In on Your Product Stack➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'c4f7dcc8-378e-4b20-9c16-637fcb9589a5', {"region":"na1"}); To learn more about building out a product ops team in your organization, check out our webinars on this topic.

No matter how much we love our career, we all have some days when we’d rather stay in bed. So what motivates product managers to get out of bed and show up? I recently moderated a panel of experts to talk about the intersection of happiness and product management. We found that our panelists and our attendees had a variety of reasons they not only show up every day but are excited to do so. Check out what other product management professionals use for their motivation. File away a few of your favorites for the next time you’d rather keep hitting the snooze button. What Motivates Product Managers to Get Out of Bed Every Morning? Variety When you’re working in product management, no two days are the same. With a wide range of tasks on our plate and the dynamic nature of the role, you’re never in danger of getting bored. This unpredictableness is a spark that many product managers thrive on. Suzanne Abate, CEO of The Development Factory, was one of the featured panelists in our happiness webinar. She cited this element of the job as her spark to start the day. “It’s never the same,” Abate said. “Every single day is going to be a different kind of thing because there’s going to be different tasks that you’re facing or different fires you have to put out.” This sentiment was echoed by several webinar attendees. One product manager from a healthcare company, who cited “The opportunity to do something new every day.” A product manager in the content protection industry said, “I get excited to wake up and learn, do something new.” Embracing the pandemonium Not only must product managers tackle a diverse array of tasks during their workday, but there’s also an element of unpredictability. You simply never know what the day will throw at you. For panelist Kevin Steigerwald, Director of Product Design at Jama Software, that’s a feature, not a bug. “Knowing that there is going to be a little bit of chaos today, and there are going to be different problems to solve,” he said. “I have to coordinate with everyone in the organization. I’m not going into work and just talking to one person all day long.” Another webinar attendee eloquently echoed this. “If you’re not drawn to crazy, then you don’t belong in product,” said a product manager for a credit rating firm. Download The Essentialist Product Manager ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'be753440-dc4d-40c5-9808-cad744d00a28', {}); Teamwork Product management is a team sport, even if the other players aren’t technically on your “team” in the org chart. But the tasks on our plate require a ton of interaction and working together with colleagues from across the organization. Together you’ll investigate, discuss, debate, and solve problems. This powers another panelist’s internal alarm clock. “Collaboration is a pretty key thing that I really enjoy. When you come together with everyone from the different disciplines, working with design, working with developers, with support and marketing,” said Candice Yono, Senior Product Manager at Pivotal. “I love seeing the different perspectives and the different take that everyone brings to the table and how that comes to shape some solutions that no single individual would have been able to come up with on their own.” Some of our attendees also found this facet of the job to be their reason for clocking in every day. A product manager for auto dealer software referenced “my core working team” as his motivation. “The people I work with,” said a product development manager for a guitar company. “And the pride we all share in the quality products we make.” Innovation One of the best parts of product management is bringing new solutions to the market. It’s the perfect combination of creativity, business savvy, and execution. For some attendees, this was their catalyst for seizing the day. A product manager for a user research platform craves “exciting challenges to solve,” while a senior product manager for a computer-aided design firm is pumped about “changing the industry.” “The opportunity to create cool, new products,” said a product manager for a real estate software firm while their colleague answered, “Addressing my beta testers issues.” Making a real impact was key for a security firm product manager for a security firm, who cherishes “the opportunity to have real input into effective change.” But an associate product manager working on employee engagement solutions might have summed it up best, exclaiming, “watching my idea come to life!” Delighting customers A customer-centric mindset is essential for developing great, useful solutions, and thinking about their users was another commonly cited incentive. The COO of a healthcare call center solutions provider mentioned: “the end value our products provide our clients.” However, the big motivator for others is addressing their customers’ key challenges. “Solving someone’s problem, making them enjoy their job, and making their day,” said a product owner for a process management firm. The grind Patience is a virtue. Especially in product management, where it can take months or years to bring an idea to life and reach end-users. To keep their eyes on the prize and show up every day with a smile, some product managers lean into the routine. A senior business analyst for a television production and monetization firm referenced “my 7 am daily standup” as their wake-up call. Others just enjoy chipping away at things a little each day. A product owner in the financial services industry mentioned “moving things forward one step,” while an industrial systems product manager said, “I want to complete something.” “I really enjoy what I do… with challenges and all,” said a product manager at a process automation firm. “I have still so much to learn only being a year in this position coming from QA… major change but loving it more every day.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); A Little Hectic, but Pretty Happy No matter what particular part of the job ultimately gets people going, product managers remain a pretty happy cohort. Our 2020 product management survey found the vast majority of product managers are happy with their role. The average satisfaction rating is 3.8 out of 5. To read a little more about the current state of product management, download the 2020 product management report below. There are some important drivers for that happiness—and definitely, a few things we’re not fans of—but most of us wouldn’t want to do anything else. 92% of product managers plan to stay in a similar role, and most of us just want more help and support to do the jobs we have. Download the Free Product Leadership Book hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'b3ac6e76-f5cd-45d6-95a0-813fcd905bd1', {});

We are excited to welcome guest writer Carlos González de Villaumbrosia to the LIKE.TG blog. Carlos González de Villaumbrosia has over 10 years of experience building teams and digital products in the US, Europe, and Latin America. Carlos founded Product School in San Francisco in 2014. Today, the company is the global leader in product management training with 20 campuses worldwide and a live online campus. What is Qualitative Research? Qualitative data is sometimes referred to as ‘soft data’ and is usually described as the exact opposite of quantitative data: the numbers. Quantitative includes the hard facts; things like demographics, statistics, and other kinds of ‘hard data.’ This form of user research fills in the gaps that hard data can’t. It tells you about your customer’s opinions, what they’re thinking, and how they feel about your product. Modern product managers are often encouraged to be as data-driven as possible, and may instinctively want to turn to the numbers, but great products require both types. You need to know what feelings your product evokes in users as much as you need that full Google Analytics report. Let’s take a look at what product managers need qualitative data for and how to do it right! Qualitative Research Methods The best qualitative research method for your product depends on a variety of factors. Before you set out choosing your method, look at how much time you can spend on it and how many resources you can afford to use. Surveys and forms: An easy and scalable way to collect data. Customer interviews: A good way to get in-depth feedback, but takes time and resources. Focus groups: More time effective than one-to-ones, but less effective than surveys. More commonly used for physical products. Ethnographic research: Observations of your customer’s environment (demographics, geography, infrastructures, culture, etc.) Useful for breaking into brand new markets. App store reviews: Sometimes the qualitative data comes to you! Smaller startups may only be able to use one or two efficient and cheap methods, whereas massive companies will be able to do much more. If you’re in the former category, don’t spend all of your resources running endless focus groups, but make sure you invest in a proper discovery phase. Finding that balance is a key product manager responsibility! Read the Customer Interview Tool Box ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '7f735619-2494-4c81-b86b-cf6e764a20c3', {}); 6 Things Product Managers Can Do with Qualitative Research 1. Back it up with quantitative data When you’re conducting qualitative research, should you believe every word your customers say? Well, no not really! Sometimes customers don’t know what they want. They may think that, in theory, they’re willing to pay $12.99 per month for a subscription service. But when the time comes to put in their credit card details, many will hesitate. Abandoned carts are a huge challenge to overcome in eCommerce, as everyone is eager to buy…until the point of purchase. Many companies, such at Netflix, find that giving customers what they were begging for, barely increases retention. That’s why you need to cross reference your quantitative and qualitative data. If you’re seeing a trend in the answers to your surveys, then back them up by checking the hard data. The key here is to know which questions to ask. The answer to “do you like this product?” may not be the same as “would you be willing to pay for this product?” 2. Use it to find your ‘Why’ One of your main duties as a product manager is to focus on the ‘why’ of the product. Or rather, making sure that your ‘why’ both solves a real problem and that you’re building the right product for it. There’s no better way of understanding your customer’s problem than to ask them about it. If you see a problem that needs to be solved, ask your target market questions like: What are the main roadblocks in achieving X? What other solutions do you know of/have tried? What do you envision being the solution for X? Would you be willing to pay for a tool that does X? To learn how to build your own data-driven roadmap, watch LIKE.TG’s webinar: hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); 3. Use it to challenge your assumptions On the flip side, if you’re seeing a trend in your data, you can back it up with what customers are telling you in the surveys. Never assume anything in product! Qualitative data is used to challenge your assumptions no matter where you are in the product life cycle. For example, you might be seeing that a lot of your customers are failing to use one of your features. You might assume that’s because they hate the feature and you need to redesign the whole thing. But when you go into your surveys, your customers tell you that they didn’t even realize it was there! That leaves you with a relatively simple UI redesign to do, rather than a huge feature overhaul. 4. Use it with your product marketing manager Marketing needs to be built into your product from the beginning, which means you need to have a close relationship with your product marketing manager. Together, you create a powerhouse of growth for your company, because you can both benefit from qualitative research. It’ll help inform your communication style with your customers, making marketing significantly easier, and help you build feedback loops into your product. 5. Use it to build your minimum viable product A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a great learning tool, and gets you feedback on what users want. But if you can build it based on user feedback you’ll be one step head! If you start gathering data from your target market when you don’t even have a launched product or a user base yet, you’ll have the advantage. This exercise will also be vital for finding your product-market fit. A story we see repeated time and time again, is that someone has an idea, they build what they want, and then see if people like it. Sometimes they hit it out of the park straight away, but more often they have to pivot in a different direction. By using qualitative data to inform how you build your MVP, you’ll save yourself time and resources, making your time to market that much quicker. 6. Use it for post-launch feedback All the best product leaders know that their job isn’t done after your initial product launch! Once you’ve finished popping champagne bottles, it’s time to find out what people think. The most common form of qualitative research done at this point is a user-feedback survey, much like those you may have conducted with your MVP. This will help you figure out how well you listened to, and understood, your customers the first time around. Did your product fix their problem? Is it easy to use? Is there a reason some downloaded and uninstalled it within a day? If you have an app, you’re also likely to collect reviews. Don’t just go off the immediate reviews after launch. Early adopters tend to be quite techy and may have vastly different opinions to users who onboard further down the line. Your reviews are a great source of qualitative information, which you can keep referring back to throughout your product’s lifecycle. Getting Qualitative Research Right Have a plan. Set out what questions you need the answer to (big and small!) and take stock of your resources. Set a time limit. You’ll always think of other things to ask, but eventually you’ll reach the point where you just need to build. When using qualitative research to build your MVP, or at the start of a new feature, set a time limit for your research phase. Don’t just use your favorite customers. You need to have a good mix. It’s a great ego-stroke to interview people who sing our praises, but you need a balanced mix of opinions. Ask open-ended questions. Yes/No questions usually won’t give you the depth you need. Ask detailed questions that give you plenty of information to work with. Here are 10 great questions you should ask customers. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'd16e75f0-0601-4ef3-909a-e2b4f61f0c9a', {});

At times, product professionals fail to realize the similarities and differences between thought leadership vs people leadership. A compelling thought leader most likely started as a people leader, such as a manager or a director. In itself, leading is a sought-after position that requires specialized knowledge and experience. Professionals may decide to pursue a leadership position to lead a team and guide them towards primary objectives and milestones. Leaders are the ones that provide all the go-to answers. There are rewards for having the position, both in money and respect. And those in leadership positions have a hard-earned experience that allows them to navigate their colleague towards actionable plans. That said, being a thought leader is close to meaningless if you’re not a people leader, which is one of the primary connections between thought leadership vs people leadership. You can opine all day about the best way, but if it’s not the best way for your people, then it’s a sum-loss game. Even if you are thoughtful with your written pieces and presentations, you miss out. The Start of Thought Leadership Product management is complex. The work is ambiguous. The long hours working on a craft can take a toll if you don’t have the right people behind you. Product leadership requires cross-disciplinary thinking from fields as software development to manufacturing. A vast breadth of insight and the best practices gives a product leader a unique insight. Their point of view combined with their experience brings multiple products from ideation to market. That is how best practices are born, and when leveraged, can make great things happen. Hopefully, that is how most product professionals advance in their careers. They’ve taken those ideas and put them to work. Who in the world is Charlie Munger? Charlie Munger is Warren Buffet’s investment partner and has a reputation as a wise investor. He has an impactful way of looking at the world, which he calls mental models. One of the most useful for those who want to work involves the concept of the “Circle of Competence.” “You have to figure out what your aptitudes are. If you play games where other people have the aptitudes, and you don’t, you’re going to lose. And that’s as close to certain as any prediction that you can make. You have to figure out where you’ve got an edge. And you’ve got to play within your own circle of competence. When the ego goes into the wrong place, operating outside of an individualized circle of competence has disastrous results. Easing the transition of leadership Product leaders need to implement best practices and stay inside the organization’s circle of competence. Though imposter syndrome may affect people differently, product leaders need to feel empowered to utilize their product experience and translate that knowledge into their new role. Whether it’s a new company or a new team, these professionals need to show empathy towards the company culture. Newly hired leaders must respect the company culture and exhibit a level of empathy towards their new team. The leadership transition also affects employees, so an effective leader knows how the change affects their colleagues. Taking Your Thoughts Into New Territory If a tree falls into the woods and no one hears it, does it make a sound? Let’s adapt the famous question into one that fits “people leadership.” “If you have a best practice, and it doesn’t change the culture, is it a best practice at all?” Being good at what you do is a given. You’ve earned that experience in your career. None of that matters if you can’t relate to your current environment. Talking about your ideas is useless if it doesn’t affect the company culture. It’s about managing relationships. People have to respect what you bring to the table. If they don’t see you as credible, your value decreases. If your ideas don’t connect, then you are that tree mentioned earlier. Best practices are fascinating thought exercises, but if they don’t affect change, that is all they are. Digital Transformation Blues Enterprises struggle with transformation. Anyone that has done this work long enough has seen the following play out: The new hire comes on board and promises a digital transformation within eighteen months. They come in with all sorts of bonafide – they’ve worked with all the essential companies. The leader makes a big speech and gets the team fired up. Then nothing happens. Let’s make a couple of bets for this transformation: the teams have a communication issue and find themselves siloed. They have the best practices and experience, but they can’t connect. The behavior does not align with the values of the company. When asked about it, they get process documentation, if anything at all. These examples show how thought leadership can happen without culture shifts. Culture-Shifting Practices Now, here is an example of effectively applying culture-shifting practices. 1.) The leader comes on board and promises a digital transformation within eighteen months. When the leader comes in, they avoid the splash. Instead of trying to grab the spotlight, they spend time listening. They do so to understand the culture they are working with, where their experience can help, and where it won’t. 2.) The leader comes in with all sorts of bonafide – they’ve worked with all the “essential” companies. Instead of leading with company names, the leader leads with experience. They tell stories that pair with the listening tour and give the folks around them a feel of who they are. Along the way, they find minor problems and fix them. 3.) The leader makes a big speech and gets the team fired up. The leader distributes the work. Instead of putting themselves out front immediately, they learn. After finding the actual difference makers, they get their buy-in before going to the group. This way, they know they have support at all levels. Avoid agile-fall Those three changes put culture first. The company gets to be better at making changes because the changes tie to a realistic vision. For example, when shifting from waterfall to agile, go to each team and understand what waterfall did for them. After understanding each team’s waterfall processes, you can develop a business case to sell your agile product management strategy. Listen, apply your experience, and get buy-in. If you are running more reviews of the process than retrospectives, you’ve fallen for the trap. We’ve all been on teams where agile turned into “agile-fall,” and everyone sours on the process. Change is hard, and our thoughts need to evolve. The process is iterative, and when you treat it that way, you’ll get better. Download the Product Planning Process Guide➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'a00f7861-658a-4ef3-829a-60fc115c8a11', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Minding the Gap: Thought Leadership vs. People Leadership Changes are an evolutionary process. They aren’t something that happens only once. Leading doesn’t mean being curious and going to make the conference talk. Remember this: “If you have a best practice, and it doesn’t change the culture, is it a best practice at all?” The concept also applies to ourselves. Making an impact once is good, but we want to expand our circle of competence. There is an opportunity to build that muscle by working within our culture, seeking new problems, and staying curious. When you do that, you shift. You go from one experience to multiple. Remember, leadership is ambiguous, and what you do here won’t always get you to the place you want to go. The more product narratives you have, the more you can exhibit your competence around the organization. Every cycle of change is another opportunity to add to your toolkit. Please focus on the culture, and cultivate it like a plant. From there, you’ll see things develop. That development helps develop yourself as a realized thought leader. An influential thought leader can tell a product narrative in multiple ways while shedding light on the problem from different angles. They can level up to standard best practices by being flexible. We can’t avoid the will to lead. It’s a part of us being leaders. Please don’t deny it, as it may lead you to overdo it. It isn’t harmful to use it to grow opportunistically. It’s essential, however, to stay curious to find ways to develop your craft further. Change is Hard, so Use it to Get Better. Change is hard, and our thoughts need to evolve. It’s an iterative process, and when you start treating it that way, you’ll get better. That said, being a thought leader is close to meaningless if you’re not a people leader. As you do that, you’ll craft the best environment to increase productivity from your team and improve your abilities. Remember, when the team gets better, you get better. Change is hard, and it takes time. Coming in and dropping in ideas isn’t going to do anything. Being able to take those ideas, help them evolve, and make them relevant is the step to leveling up your career. Culture isn’t just something that comes from best practice documents. It is living, growing, breathing. When you treat yourself, the team, and your career that way, you’ll find yourself in a position to take it to the next level. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '2b4f63c6-f7c6-4f60-842d-1f11880da92f', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});

A crisis can bring out the best (and worst) in people. Throughout my career, I’ve seen a spectrum of responses from leaders that have shaped my views on which strategies work and which ones don’t. I had no idea that a crisis would unfold so quickly into the start of my tenure as CEO of ProductPlan. I transitioned to CEO of LIKE.TG in early February, which for those of you keeping track was a month before a global health and economic crisis unfolded. Resilient Leadership During Challenging Times As a leader, I believe in radical candor, and I have always strived to create an environment where my team feels safe to share their feedback and opinions. If you operate from a place of authenticity and transparency, then you can facilitate an environment of trust. Teams that feel safe also tend to trust each other and are, in turn, well-positioned to step up in times of crisis. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '57ff7e42-ccfa-4d9e-b5be-8a0f6ba69363', {}); Demonstrate flexibility Our team has done a tremendous job building a fantastic product and a durable business model. Anytime a company goes through change management, I believe it’s essential to honor and sustain the elements of what makes the company great—while infusing your own philosophy to move the business forward. For LIKE.TG, I recognized we needed to develop a more comprehensive mindset toward growth. We had been gearing up our offensive for several quarters investing in engineering and building out our go-to-market team to better capitalize on opportunities within the business. The results were really starting to show. However, business growth and global economic uncertainty don’t necessarily mix well. As the crisis unfolded, we had to immediately ask hard questions of ourselves and our business to assess what the correct strategy was for us moving forward. During times like these, sometimes you’ve got to play defense. First, we took a magnifying glass to the entirety of our business. We recalibrated our revenue and expense plans based upon different scenarios. We made adjustments to hiring plans and created a more rigorous and gated approach to releasing investments. On the product side, we are building a system of record to help product teams and executives better align and standardize their priorities and ultimately drive better outcomes. We have been ‘pedal to the metal’ on this strategy for the better part of 9 months. We also recognized that we have customers significantly affected by this crisis. We reviewed our product roadmap with an eye toward “what do our customers need now?” This exercise spun up some short-term wins we were able to deliver quickly. Trust in your team In a world where there’s no face to face interaction, one can fall into the trap of feeling less in control of the business. If you and your leadership team have hired right, then, hopefully, you have a deep bench of intrinsically motivated people. These are the people that will step up and do the right thing if you have done your part to convey the mission and the situation at hand. This is the absolute wrong time to turn into a micromanager. To me, the concept of a workday feels a bit antiquated for knowledge workers anyway. Our lives are such that we have them, and that means, at times, things in our life are going to intertwine with our workday. Sometimes a workout in the middle of the day is exactly the best use of your time. Ultimately, if we empower the right people to manage their time, then I’m going to bet on them doing the right thing. The decision to switch to remote work to protect the health and safety of our team happened over the course of an afternoon. About half of the company has already been remote for years, so we already had somewhat of an established blueprint. This certainly helped. For the other half, however, remote work was an entirely new practice. The transition to remote work Interestingly, I’ve noticed that since we have transitioned to 100% remote in response to the crisis, we’ve actually improved our communication. For my part, I wanted to make sure the entire team had a better picture of how the crisis was impacting our customers and our business. This has translated to a cadence of team updates where we openly share our business performance, our views of the potential impact of the crisis and how that impacts decisions we are making. I’ve observed cultures where information is kept tucked away to only be parsed out on a need to know basis to employees. That kind of culture breeds mistrust. Our leadership team also increased the frequency of our communication to stay aligned. Initially, we experimented with meeting every day before determining an every-other-day cadence was sufficient. We have also had to improve our asynchronous communication to help fight off Zoom fatigue. As we can no longer walk down the hall to ask a question or solicit feedback, Slack has become our go-to channel for establishing a shared understanding of doing what matters. We have opened up new Slack channels such as #research to serve as a central repository for relevant information. Going 100% remote has forced us to be more intentional about how, when, and why we’re communicating. Consequently, our alignment about what to do is better. We no longer need a daisy chain to keep people in the loop. Instead, we have the information we need to make qualified decisions. As such, I’ve noticed the timeframe for decision-making is faster than when we were in office. I don’t think these results would be possible without a foundation of trust. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3be75db1-0d50-46dd-b222-ce0aa84f6b08', {}); Embrace vulnerability As the CEO, strategy and culture are two of my key focus areas. During moments of great challenge, we owe it to one another to tune in to the signals and EQ indicators of how the team is doing. There’s so much scary information out there about the pandemic and the economic fallout that can really affect our morale. You can usually tell when someone on your team is having a tough day. People give a lot away. In a world where you aren’t able to comfort face to face – follow up, lean-in, and ask questions. As a team, we are forthright and honest with each other. I will often share with my leadership team when I’m struggling with an important decision. In a way, I’m hoping to elicit more information from them to help make a better decision. It’s a misguided assumption that CEOs have to have the answers. You need to be open and approachable with your team. It’s okay to say, “I don’t have all the answers.” If you want a culture where people feel safe, then embrace your own vulnerabilities. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '35d36a84-b157-43a1-acb7-b972dcb1d1ad', {}); Takeaways Even in the worst of situations, I still believe a company can flourish and achieve awesome things. Trust in one another, be flexible, and, most importantly, stay real.

There is no going back to “normal” for product teams. The idea of simply translating what we did in the office can’t be matched in our distributed world. At a minimum, I believe we need to start thinking remote-first. While we will eventually head back to our offices, we want to prepare ourselves to do it better next time. Even better is to embrace it going forward, perhaps with office/remote hybrids that take advantage of the benefits of both worlds. Like many of you I’m missing the social side of the office, yet cherish the productivity and focus time I’m getting while working from my home. Even before the pandemic there was a shift happening towards distributed product development teams. Especially for software companies that had the luxury of hiring employees wherever they lived. Covid-19 has accelerated this process and, in my opinion, distributed teams will become the new norm. There have always been the remote work success stories such as Invision and Basecamp who have entirely distributed teams – and made it work. Most tech companies dabbled in remote workers, yet it was often the exception to the “normal” onsite work policy. LIKE.TG was somewhere in between. Much of our engineering team was already distributed throughout the US, because we made the decision early on to hire the most talented employees regardless of where they lived. Often these were people we worked with in former roles, so we knew their remote work ethic and knew their approach fit in our growing company and our culture. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '76fe99ed-928a-45e4-ae8d-9429927741a3', {}); Our company values infuse our beliefs about “balance” in our lives, “transparency” in our communications, and other attributes that lend themselves to a distributed work culture. And over the past few years we had fully embraced the tools and communication practices that make distributed work, well, work. We were already good at it. And personally, I was already predisposed to remote work. For years I’ve been living a semi-remote work life, and have advocated its benefits. Twenty years ago when I was a technical book author for Microsoft I would spend my days drinking coffee in bed with my laptop, eventually moving to the coffee shop. Clearly, I love coffee. I was an early remote worker and believed then (and now) that it’s possible to have an ideal combination of work/life/tech balance and be productive while having a hand in building products I was incredibly proud of. Like many of you, we transitioned to fully distributed one day in March. We finished “shifting” to remote work in a matter of minutes. Or so I thought. Over the past two months, I’ve come to realize that we don’t want to simply replicate what we previously had. The New Norm is Different I’ve realized that the idea of us waiting for the eventual day when we can return to the prior way of doing things was actually not the goal. At LIKE.TG we’ve decided to fully embrace remote work—to be even better than before. Sure, many of us will eventually head back into the office (after all, we have space in a fun location near the beach). But in the meantime, let’s shift the way we think about distributed work altogether, and get really good at it. I’ve been reading and listening a lot about the future of work, and while this shift has been happening for a while, with Covid-19, that shift has accelerated even faster. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '57ff7e42-ccfa-4d9e-b5be-8a0f6ba69363', {}); Recently, I listened to a podcast by Sam Harris interviewing Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, about the evolution of distributed work. Matt’s company, Automattic, is entirely distributed—with almost 1,200 employees. In the interview, Mullenweg talks about how we don’t want to replicate what we’re doing today in offices, but rather about how we can take distributed work to the next level. This next-level creates even more productivity and better decisions than before. These ideas have me realizing that there are so many more best practices we can incorporate into our distributed work culture that can help us build a better product. We no longer need to hold meetings in 60-minute chunks. Or perhaps we can create a culture of combined in-person and distributed brainstorming that gives the best of both worlds. In his follow-up article on Distributed Works’ Five Levels of Autonomy, Mullenweg discusses how so many companies (or at least knowledge workers) today are working remotely, yet not fully embracing remote work. They’re still waiting for the day they can head back to the office, and still have the same mindset that decisions need to be made in person for example. If we can hire people anywhere in the world, in any country, we need to be willing to adapt processes for asynchronous decisions by people in different timezones. They no longer should need to adapt to the timezone and schedules for the people back at “headquarters.” (Is there such a thing as “headquarters” any more?) For example, we can use tools like Slack and email more effectively, support home offices for employees, limiting synchronous meetings (and having clear agendas when we do have scheduled meetings). In the different levels of distributed work autonomy, Mullenweg makes a great point that at the highest levels, fully distributed product teams and even companies can work asynchronously and in “nirvana” actually perform better than any in-person organization. Our paradigm is truly shifting at this moment if more companies are aspiring to this level of asynchronous work. Distributed Product Teams The shift to distributed work means we need to trust more. It means that creativity and written communication skills become even more important. At Mullenweg’s company Automattic they sometimes “interview” people exclusively via email for some roles – after all, if the written word is one of the most essential skills, why not shift the interview to that. Annie Dunham, our Director of Product at LIKE.TG believes that as product teams move to remote work, we need to be intentional about the culture. “Rather than defaulting to a command and control structure, think about how you build a foundation as a team,” she says. “On the engineering side, we speak frequently about our ceremonies and standups and what is the best way for us to get value out of them. It’s not process for the sake of process.” In this new way of distributed work, I believe that writing, creative problem solving, and overall communication skills will be more valuable than ever. So will autonomy, time management, and following through on plans. The findings in LIKE.TG’s 2020 Product Management Report show that communication skills are the most important skills for success. I’m waking up to the idea that we can be an even more productive, creative team that is distributed. Teams that have a great combination of life balance and collaboration with their customers and teams. This has the potential of fostering happier employees who are inspired by the work they’re doing and the products they’re building. I’m not saying that a shift to distributed work will happen overnight, or that it’s even ideal for all organizations. I understand that many employees’ lives aren’t set up for remote work — especially in this current time of homeschooling, social distancing, and economic uncertainty. However, many product teams, especially those working on digital products, are in an ideal position to take advantage of these benefits. As the pandemic restrictions ease and as employees feel more comfortable, we’ll experiment with hybrid distributed/in-office configurations, perhaps complementing the remote work with in-person creativity sessions. We’ll certainly be using our office space differently. We’re also frequently sharing best practices and discussing how to do distributed work even better. Distributed product teams will take work and a mindset shift to be successful. But it’s time. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); How will you better the remote work environment? Let me know in the comments or on LinkedIn.

I’ve worked exclusively on digital products for over 14 years, primarily in product and design-centric roles. Thinking back, it’s surprising that it was only about five years ago that I had an important epiphany that would alter the trajectory of our company’s product strategy and my career. As the Director of User Experience, our team was tightly partnered with our product management counterparts to ensure we had baked-in practices and habits that enabled all of our development teams to deliver an exceptional product experience effortlessly. And our success was evident in the feedback. Over 20% of customers took the time to praise the product’s ease of use every month in our Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys. Pat on back. But as someone passionate about user feedback, I started noticing a trend in those same NPS responses that kept some customers from being promoters (i.e., 9s or 10s on the scale). There were hints that the onboarding ramp was steep, for example. Or, while most of the customers raved about our support team, others expressed frustration around how long it took to get a response to their support requests. It hit me by surprise but was so incredibly obvious at the same time: The user’s experience does not start and end within the software itself. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '1f74539e-d4fc-4cb3-97c6-fd86de2bf62e', {}); There are other aspects and touchpoints of their experience outside of our product team’s purview or control. This meant that no matter how awesome our UX practices were within the product development organization, we’d never reach our full potential without being more inclusive of other customer-facing roles. In the above examples, that meant, to make more promoters out of our customers, our experience strategy required building stronger partnerships with our onboarding and support teams. The Product Team’s Role in Customer Experience Strategy So, a simple realization kicked off a new era for both the company and my career, eventually leading to the creation of a new role and slightly different title from Director of User Experience to Director of Customer Experience. But I was still a member of the Product leadership team, and the reason for that is relatively simple – we were a product company and, therefore, a product-lead organization. We were the hub by which the rest of the organizational spokes organized and focused their efforts, so it was natural for the product team to kick off the Customer Experience Conversation. To meet the increasing demands of our customers consistently, we needed to develop stronger partnerships and expand our user experience philosophy and practices cross-functionally. What is Customer Experience (CX), and Why Does it Matter? There are widely varying definitions of customer experience. So, for this conversation, I am defining Customer Experience (CX) as how your customers perceive their interactions with your company across the span of their end-to-end journey. These perceptions are important because they inevitably trigger emotions, and emotions drive decision-making. It’s not intuitive for businesses to consider emotions as part of their equation, but make no mistake that your customers are human beings at the end of the day. Strong emotions such as anger and frustration or pleasant surprise and happiness are the fundamental drivers of whether customers will choose your product, whether they will engage with your product, and whether they’ll stay loyal to your business. To further press the urgency of a robust CX strategy in your business, in 2019, Qualtric’s XM Institute published a study to better understand the impact of Customer Experience on business. Their research further validates the bottom-line impact that emotions can have on a business. A highly rated experience correlates to a significant increase in the customer’s willingness to spend more money with a company, trust and recommend them, and try out new features and offerings from the company. Overall, a compelling customer experience strategy adds significant value to the business over time through its impact on revenue, growth, and customer loyalty. The problem is organizational silos While over 80% of businesses report increased investments in improving Customer Experience, they often struggle to deliver truly exceptional results effectively and sustainably. Why? Because the operational models that serve the company well in so many other aspects are the key blockers of CX success. More specifically, the biggest challenge is in the natural tendency of organizations to create separate departments within the business. The division of functional departments inevitably creates organizational silos, a key roadblock to a successful, long-term customer experience strategy. Divided operational oversight By nature of having organizational silos, the business intentionally separates and distributes ownership of all the ingredients required for its ongoing success. Departmentalization has enormous benefits from a business perspective; most importantly, the ability to apply much-needed focus and investment across various efforts. But it also creates an inherent “bubble” from within each department will operate when it comes to designing processes and experiences against the bigger picture. Lack of a broader perspective introduces an increased risk of uncoordinated customer touchpoints and duplicate efforts in different pockets of the organization. Lack of shared goals Each department has its own set of metrics and goals that they are responsible for delivering. But what happens when there’s a separate set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) from one department to the other? Most businesses recognize the value and necessity of cross-functional efforts but fall short of creating shared goals at the executive level. Competing goals decrease the likelihood that departments will get the investment and resources they need cross-functionally to deliver effectively. So, each department’s goals are not met to their full potential, they’re also more likely to blame the other for not helping them hit the right targets. Fragmented technology investments One potentially significant and unintended outcome of silos, especially for software companies, is an uncoordinated suite of customer-facing technology platforms. Adding digital touchpoints is a culmination of not sharing oversight or goals across business functions. When one department is unable to obtain internal investment to solve a particular problem or need, they’ll leverage their budget to seek it out externally. For example, marketing probably has a separate website, and Customer Support probably has a platform for help documentation and service requests. However, if you’re in the business of a technology-based product customers will not differentiate these disparate experiences from the product itself. That puts all the hard efforts your product teams put into building great user experiences at risk of falling short in the bigger picture. 5 Ways for Product Teams to Drive an Exceptional Customer Experience Strategy As I previously mentioned, I’m a firm believer that the product team in a software organization is perhaps the best positioned to help catapult a successful Customer Experience Strategy for their businesses. For starters, product teams are at a strong advantage because their role is already cross-functional. In coordinating their efforts across the organization, the team has critical access to observe the subtle differences in focus and processes that might put their customer’s experience at risk. Additionally, the product team is naturally poised to drive end-to-end experience improvements since user experience is already (or should be) a top priority of their efforts. This unique perspective and experience-driven oversight put the product team on the front line of driving change in various ways. 1. Become Intimately familiar with the customer journey To be successful, this is more than just familiarity, rather, intentional curiosity. How intimately do you understand your customers’ interactions across each phase of their journey with your business and by the different departments in your company? One surefire way to get on the same page is to conduct a cross-functional Journey Mapping Workshop. Journey mapping forces outside-in (customer-centered) thinking by each department, who instinctively design their processes from an inside out (business-centered) perspective. The activity and resulting visual artifact is a powerful tool to promote internal awareness and alignment and to generate actionable insights on key areas of opportunity for the business to rally cross-functionally behind. 2. Share and advocate the journey Understanding the customer’s journey deepens your understanding of user context, it’s critically important to the long-term success of new features and improvements to the product. Share this context diligently with your teams, and paint the picture of the broader perspective as part of your planning and kickoff of new efforts. Sharing context challenges your team to consider aspects of the experience they otherwise may have overlooked and ask essential questions outside of the immediate product purview. For example, what’s the best point along the journey to generate awareness of this new feature to achieve peak adoption? How can the team partner with their CS counterparts to understand the impact the feature may have on current and future support offerings? It can even expose more complicated nuances where upsell and value-added features are involved, like how to craft an experience that doesn’t complicate or create confusion for customers in the way they are billed for your product services. 3. Broaden cross-functional conversations Product Managers notoriously have busy schedules meeting with other functions across the business; most of these are driven by a need to align other departments to the product strategy, goals, and roadmap. As the leader of these meetings, make time in the agenda to ask stakeholders to also share their initiatives. Ask them what challenges they are facing and how you might help. Get curious—better yet, involved—where appropriate. Of course, this may require some additional time investment on the front-end. The investment is minimal compared to the costs a business can incur in the long term due to the dangerous pitfalls of uncoordinated efforts. 4. Approach cross-functional relationships as partners, not inputs It’s all too easy for the product team to become the sounding board for all the other departments vying for their resources; after all, your team owns and sets the product strategy. The endless stream of things a product team could do is why it’s vital for them to constantly develop their skill in the art of saying no. Although your team is ultimately responsible for the product vision, there’s no reason that it needs to be a black hole and can’t be more strategically collaborative. Consider up-leveling conversations that involve people in other departments in setting product strategy. Exposing other departments to the myriad of difficult decisions you face every day not only empowers them to bring more relevant ideas to the table but also provides more understanding (and less disappointment) behind your “no”. 5. Make CX a vital component of your product strategy Successful execution of a businesses’ customer experience strategy requires investment from each functional department, and product strategy is no exception. Partner across the organization to set shared goals and KPIs around CX, for example NPS, support request volume, time-to-value within the product or for engagement of a particular feature, etc. Aligned goals and metrics ensure space can be made on the product roadmap to address product-related issues that drive CX challenges, such as usability improvements. It also ensures continuity with 3rd party systems so the product can remain the single digital customer touchpoint. Takeaways It’s not your product team’s responsibility to deliver features to your customers, rather to craft an exceptional product experience that drives the loyalty that keeps your customers engaged and makes your product an easy sell for future customers. However, in this day and age, that experience is hardly ever isolated within the product itself but spans in purview across the different organizational silos of your company. Getting genuinely curious – and involved – in the company’s customer experience strategy is the best way to succeed in ultimately delivering a truly exceptional product.

rIn our webinar Product Managers: Treat your Strategy as a Product, Hadrien Raffalli discusses the importance of tracking market activity and tweaking plans accordingly. He has experience building products around the world, including stops in South America, Australia, Asia, and is now in Denver working for Pivotal Tracker, part of VMware. Watch the webinar, below! The Importance of Trendspotting Raffalli believes strategy missteps are inevitable if companies aren’t spotting key patterns quickly enough. “Being able to identify the details of how the market is behaving in different populations and different use cases will give you a better chance to anticipate what is likely to happen later.” Continuous monitoring and adjusting to what’s happening in relevant areas is essential for remaining relevant, viable, and competitive. “Consider: how is your market behaving right now?” Raffalli says. “What have been the cycles of adoption to get you where you are? Or, if you’re looking forward, is there a path that has been chartered for other innovations?” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '5894a003-79ce-4ea3-9804-dae280a96106', {}); Also crucial is the ability to gain mindshare when trends and new technologies are still in nascent stages. Companies aren’t always in the mode of having to find and “wow” early adopters, but it’s a key part of growth. So at some point in every product manager’s job, it’s likely to be a challenge that must be met to be successful. At these points in the product’s lifecycle, Raffalli encourages product teams to consider “if there has been a path that has been charted before for other innovations” that can be replicated or informative for your own journey. “What is the order, what are the customer needs, and what is the value chain for this?” What Does a Good Strategy Look Like? Companies don’t start with a product strategy. Instead, it comes on the heels of defining a mission and purpose. However, missions and purposes are often selected well before new companies, or product teams have researched and gotten to know their customers. Because anyone can settle on a mission or purpose without doing any real work, existing on the plane of “ideals.” They’re not rooted in much more than theory and hunches. Product strategy is where things get real. “Strategy is the art of finding and exploiting leverage in the competitive landscape to achieve your purpose,” Raffalli says. To do so, he recommends the following steps: Have a purpose—Why are you doing this, and what are you competing for? Understanding customer needs and how they’re evolving—Customers aren’t standing still, and neither is their environment or options. Understand your value chain and how it is evolving—Are you solving a problem that still exists? Have new wrinkles emerged that you’re neglecting? Determine what change is likely to happen—You’re not psychic, but make an educated guess about what’s probably on the horizon. Define your actions against those changes—How you respond is just as important as recognizing things have transformed. Measure success and failure and course-correct—Hunches and guesses aren’t enough to make intelligent, data-driven decisions. Be sure you’re tracking what works and what doesn’t, then use that information to inform your next move. Notice a common theme? Things keep changing, so you better adjust to those changes. As the famous military truism goes: No plan survives contact with the enemy. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '527dc6af-8860-436f-9ca6-ae2b71b0cc99', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Stories versus Maps For millennia, information was passed on as stories. From drawing on prehistoric cave walls to the tales of Viking warriors, these narratives provided instructions on how to retrace the steps of those who came before them. Raffalli says the flaw with this method for conveying information was the inability to prepare for what those storytellers hadn’t yet seen. If an invading party hadn’t already visited the target in question, they had no idea what to expect. Then came maps. These cartographical marvels enabled generals to assess the situation in advance and plan accordingly. They could seize the high ground and understand climate and topology without having previously visited the area in question. While this transformation of military strategy occurred centuries ago, Raffalli says businesses still operate based on stories. Both those we’ve heard from others, and those we tell ourselves. “We try and convince ourselves of something being right,” he says. But it’s long past due that business strategy is rooted in hard data rather than subjective tales we’ve heard or spun ourselves. “The product KPI is the ultimate expression of your strategy,” Raffalli says, referring to both users completing significant tasks or business metrics being met. “Your strategy KPI, however, are more like underlying fundamentals. So it’s how the market is moving. So it’s going to be customer needs.” Context-Switching for Strategic Planning Most product teams think strategically in terms of their product. But this often spawns convoluted thinking and strained rationales for those decisions. To be truly strategic, decisions be abstracted and purely based on strategy and the market conditions, regardless of the particular product. It can force some hard conclusions that might otherwise never even be considered. Revelations like “we are targeting the wrong market” or “our value proposition no longer exists.” But if this approach is adopted early enough and remains constant, more minor course corrections can potentially avert such drastic conclusions—or at least give companies time to minimize any negative repercussions. During the webinar, Raffalli used the example of a coding school to illustrate this. When you’re in the business of training coders, you must assess which technology people will care about in the future, along with which solutions/platforms/languages will win market share for the long term. “In real life, it’s really hard to step away from those Product KPIs and think about the underlying more important fundamental assumptions that your plan relies on,” Raffalli says. “So, in this game, we abstract away the product piece and only focus on the strategy piece.” The decision of which framework to invest in has major consequences for these firms, from hiring talent to developing curriculums and materials to enrollment. Betting on the first solution to enter the market could backfire, as it may not be the winner. Other players can swiftly follow, producing superior tech that might be faster, more efficient, or possess exciting new attributes. The first mover might initially be the most popular, but ascertaining which one wins long-term requires a deeper look at the trends than just speed to market. Raffalli implored companies and product teams to follow and ride the trends. Pay attention to search traffic, online discussions, tool usage, and other leading indicators far more informative than trailing ones like revenue. Because picking the wrong horse can be fatal, regardless of how well you execute your product. “If you think about your day to day jobs in product and defining your strategy, independently from how great your product is, probably almost half of the companies that are involved in this game, would probably die at some point and reduce the competitive field by a lot,” Raffalli says. “And that’s just by making decisions of which framework to build against.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '527dc6af-8860-436f-9ca6-ae2b71b0cc99', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Product Strategy Doesn’t Work in a Vacuum All too often, once companies assess an opportunity, draft a strategy, find product-market fit, and define a plan, the sole emphasis is on execution. Hitting dates and making progress toward milestones get all the attention. But regardless of how compelling that initial product roadmap might have been original if the team isn’t paying attention to what’s happening outside its echo chamber, they may be in for a rude awakening. Raffalli emphasizes the critical role product management plays in mitigating risk. Asking questions and validating assumptions allows them to add ongoing volume by ensuring they found the plan on a realistic foundation of truth. To participate in Raffalli’s strategy game and unlock even more wisdom, check out the webinar in its entirety. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"});

When I started my career as an engineer, I didn’t set my sights on becoming a product manager. Flash forward fifteen years later, and I’m the Director of Product Management at HG Insights. Working in startups and big technology companies, I’ve encountered one question more than most: “How do I make the switch from engineering to product management?” That’s a big question, and many roads lead to this outcome. So, what qualities does it take to become a product manager? What differences lie in the company expectations? Moreover, what are the next steps you can take to make the transition? My Journey Transitioning from Engineering to Product Management I worked 9+ years in software development, leading sizeable cross-functional engineering teams across time zones. Then, I started gravitating towards product strategy questions, like, “Why am I building products?, Who am I building for?, What impact am I bringing to the business?, What makes startups fail or succeed in their mission?”, and so on. I thought Business school would be the answer, so I started preparing for it, but an exciting opportunity fell in my lap to transform a struggling product offering. Though I had no idea what I was doing before I knew it, I interviewed external customers, internal stakeholders, and various customer-facing teams to understand the problem better. I worked with the product leadership to plan out a product strategy. Then, I created a product roadmap to move that strategy forward, which ultimately drove a 15% increase in revenue and a 20% increase in retention. I believe in focusing on outcomes to power-up aligning your product strategy with business goals onto a roadmap. It was the most satisfying moment of my career, even more than building multiple product lines. From that success, I was then officially asked to move into the product role by the product leadership, and I have not looked back since then. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '1f74539e-d4fc-4cb3-97c6-fd86de2bf62e', {}); 4 Key Differences in Skills Engineer to Product Manager You don’t need to have an engineering background to be a successful product manager. Anyone can learn agile product development, basics of software design and development lifecycle, etc. Here are the four fundamental elements product managers need that is different than engineering: Strong empathy for your customers (internal and external) Strong understanding of the business (and market) You understand that your goal is to achieve business outcomes through measurable product initiatives. Your role is to identify and validate the problems, not actually to solve them. Participate in every aspect of product design (not talking about just UX/UI here), but this subtle distinction is key to not lose focus on the big picture. In addition to core product management skills, there are other essential intangibles to success like strong communication, cross-team alignment, being the thought leader, and always being curious. I shared more of my thoughts on this in the LIKE.TG video series, Spotlights. Watch them below. What are the Company’s Expectations of a Product Manager? As a product manager, your primary goal is to deliver business outcomes. Depending on the company, experience, team structure, and business dynamics, the expectations could vary. But any product manager not focusing on essential KPIs like active use, revenue, retention, customer satisfaction, etc. needs to take a closer look at the role. A good product manager is expected to drive strong cross-functional alignment and proactive communications to ensure everyone is focusing on the right problems. A wise woman once said: Product management is one of the hardest functions in the business but if done right can transform the entire business. Engineer vs. Product Manager Responsibilities The fundamental difference product managers need to understand is that your role is to identify the right problem (business, technical, or customer) and why it is worth solving or how it drives business outcomes. In contrast, engineering is responsible for delivering the solution to that problem. Your role as a product manager is to ensure your team is working on solving problems that have a measurable impact on the business. You are also responsible for ensuring customer-facing teams like Customer Success, Marketing, and Sales are fully aware and aligned on the product roadmap. Of course, a team is successful only when they collaborate as “one team,” so expect to roll up your sleeves for designing the solution, testing it, providing early feedback, documentation, etc. How to Transition from Engineering to Product Management First and foremost, you need to understand what product management is in your business and what they are responsible for. Every business, every team, and every market is different. To be a product manager, you need to start thinking like a product manager (even before switching over). There are plenty of books, blogs, and online training to sharpen up on the responsibilities. The best recommendation I can give you is to pair up with a product manager to get that hands-on experience. Start to learn how to approach a problem, define a problem, build hypotheses around solutions, collaborate with cross-functional teams to refine it, build metrics for success (or failure), and finally figure out the best and fastest way to get to market. The Transition from Engineering to Product Management Timeline In spite of popular belief, there are no definitive timelines, whether it’s engineering or product management. The first and most important thing is finding a company with an established product management team. Then, collaborate with an experienced product manager on a real project. I am personally a big proponent of the associate product manager track. That’s the best way to get your hands dirty in the game. Long term, you can expect to manage a specific KPI (e.g., improve first user experience, reduce churn, etc.), product offering, entire product portfolio, or product team. You have a little more flexibility in product management because you are learning various aspects of running a successful business. Takeaways Mentoring and people development is a big passion of my life and gives me more satisfaction than anything else. I talk to a lot of aspiring PMs who want to be product managers because they want to be a product manager or have a very different understanding of the role. I don’t blame them because there is so much wisdom that’s out there, which could be confusing sometimes. But if you like solving complex business problems and understand why and for whom, then you might like being a product manager. Look at your career as a marathon and not a sprint. Great products take time. Find the right business and team and learn faster than anyone else. Remember, slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

I’m writing for the first time on the LIKE.TG blog! Long-time reader, first-time writer. I’m currently a remote Lead Software Engineer at LIKE.TG, where I head up a team of four engineers focused on bringing you List View, among other things. Our team is distributed throughout the United States and Central America, making my workday out of San Luis Obispo, CA unique from our in-house colleagues. I’ve been a part of LIKE.TG for over a year now and am excited about how we’ve approached remote team-building. My time here has been unlike anywhere else, which is rooted in the focus on communication, alignment around projects, and the transparency from our leadership team. A Day in the Life of a Lead Engineer at LIKE.TG Working here is pretty special. So, what does a Lead Engineer at LIKE.TG do in a day? Here’s a look into my Thursday. Morning activities 8:00 am: The alarm goes off and I immediately hit snooze. Half of my team members are a time zone ahead, so they’re already up and working off our team’s backlog before the other half arrives. 8:15 am: Snooze again. Luckily, my commute is right around the corner. 8:30 am: Rise and shine. Now, my baby is awake! I get this time in the morning to bond with him while I make a cup of coffee before my wife takes over. 9:00 am: I’m sitting at my desk. Crack my knuckles, and the workday begins. We use Slack at ProductPlan. I add the :coffee: emoji to our Slack’s #development channel. Our entire development team does the same. We find this to be an easy way to indicate when we’re all available, especially with overlapping time zones. Next, I go into my personal Trello and organize my to-do list for the day. 9:15 am: Time for our team stand up. Here’s where I attempt to make a joke in the morning, it’s challenging with the caffeine just barely sinking in. But our team is benevolent, and I get a few chuckles. Our stand-ups are timeboxed to 15 mins. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '6291e080-7d48-43d6-99df-4a101a0c4487', {}); 9:30 am: At this point, we’re all logging into Zoom for our All Team Retro. It’s an opportunity to give shoutouts, explain what went well, and learn what didn’t go well to better pinpoint what we could improve on as an engineering team. At LIKE.TG, I’ve come to appreciate how much we embrace being “judgment-free.” This enables us to spend time reviewing the wins and losses as an entire engineering team. We’re not a huge team, so we still make the time to do this. We always try to derive some action items from this meeting. Then it rolls into Part 2 of the meeting with the same attendees. 10:00 am: The next part of our All Team meeting is All Team Planning. Myself and other team leads demo what was just released. I like to use this time to “eat our own dog food” and showcase new features we built within LIKE.TG. For instance, I use List View to effectively show what we have in store for the coming sprint. I like to use the Sprint style because I can see our sprint start and end dates. I use Legends to differentiate our Sprint Goals vs. our Stretch Goals—this is nice to have and use as a reference to review past sprints. Here’s what it looks like: Yesterday, I used this same view to pitch what we’re planning to product and engineering stakeholders. I synced up with our Director of Product Management (Annie) and SVP of Engineering (Mark) to agree on which projects align with the business goals for the given sprint. Once they share their feedback, I guide my team with Mark and Annie’s input from our earlier conversation. I love to emphasize that my team helps create the pitch, which goes a long way in building motivation. In today’s meeting, I am presenting my team’s upcoming sprint to the other engineering teams. I value this time when all the engineering teams come together and have the ear of our CEO (Brad), Annie, and Mark. We do a great job of having one single source of truth, and that’s ProductPlan. We’re not scattered between a Google Doc here and a Powerpoint there. My team can see this, and my boss can see the plans at any time. Then I sit back and listen to the other engineering teams present their plans. 10:30: Time for headphones and VSCode. Today is a high context switching day, so let’s pick up a low-hanging fruit item. 11:30 am: Time for more coffee. One cool thing that we do to forge relationships with the team are virtual coffee breaks. These are especially important since we don’t have the opportunity to chat over a water cooler in a remote setting. Once a month, we are randomly paired with another co-worker for 15 minutes (but often the conversation rolls into overtime) and given a prompt question if we need it. It’s a great way to learn about other departments and build your network. 12:00 pm: It’s lunchtime! I grab a bite with the baby before he takes his afternoon nap. I play with our dogs and try to get out and get some fresh air. Afternoon activities 1:00 pm: Once I’m back from lunch, I hold a Project Kickoff with the team. In the background, my dog is barking at the mailman like clockwork. With every Project Kickoff, I like to start with “Why?” and “What is the problem we are trying to solve?” I’ll leverage our customer feedback board in Trello to pull customer quotes that reinforce the customers’ voice and put them first when trying to solve the problem. The better I can convey this message to the team; the more successful the project will be. 3:00 pm: LIKE.TG’s most recent Book Club has been going on for a few weeks. We meet once a week to discuss the chapter we read and answer the questions seeded beforehand. It’s a fun way to collaborate with people outside my team and talk about things that aren’t necessarily tied to the product. We’re currently reading Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High. If you haven’t read this book yet, I highly recommend it! Coffee Breaks and Book Club are just some of the great remote team bonding experiences at ProductPlan. I also get a kick out of some running Slack channels like #pets, #parents, and #battlestations. 4:00 pm: Headphones back on! I set my Slack status to “In the zone” to indicate to my teammates that I may not respond to any messages for a bit. Let’s close this pull request from earlier! 6:00 pm: What a day. Before I wrap, I like to post an end-of-day status in Slack. This consists of what I did for the day and any requests for code that needs to be reviewed or tested. The rest of the team does this as well, which helps us easily resume in the morning when we’re spread out across different time zones. Time to start making dinner and enjoy the rest of the night with my family! Takeaways The days where we are not planning out the next sprint benefit from being more focused. We strive to have as much asynchronous communication as possible and minimize meetings so our engineers can get into the zone. At LIKE.TG, every engineer has a say in how we should go about solving a customer problem. I find that being close to determining the solution is highly motivating for everyone involved. We index on team-building opportunities since remote life can be challenging and encourage people to step away to prevent burnout. We’re all here to support one another and help each other out, this is an example of one of those days. If this sounds good, then you’ll be happy to know, we’re hiring!

rIn our webinar Product Managers: Treat your Strategy as a Product, Hadrien Raffalli discusses the importance of tracking market activity and tweaking plans accordingly. He has experience building products around the world, including stops in South America, Australia, Asia, and is now in Denver working for Pivotal Tracker, part of VMware. Watch the webinar, below! The Importance of Trendspotting Raffalli believes strategy missteps are inevitable if companies aren’t spotting key patterns quickly enough. “Being able to identify the details of how the market is behaving in different populations and different use cases will give you a better chance to anticipate what is likely to happen later.” Continuous monitoring and adjusting to what’s happening in relevant areas is essential for remaining relevant, viable, and competitive. “Consider: how is your market behaving right now?” Raffalli says. “What have been the cycles of adoption to get you where you are? Or, if you’re looking forward, is there a path that has been chartered for other innovations?” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '5894a003-79ce-4ea3-9804-dae280a96106', {}); Also crucial is the ability to gain mindshare when trends and new technologies are still in nascent stages. Companies aren’t always in the mode of having to find and “wow” early adopters, but it’s a key part of growth. So at some point in every product manager’s job, it’s likely to be a challenge that must be met to be successful. At these points in the product’s lifecycle, Raffalli encourages product teams to consider “if there has been a path that has been charted before for other innovations” that can be replicated or informative for your own journey. “What is the order, what are the customer needs, and what is the value chain for this?” What Does a Good Strategy Look Like? Companies don’t start with a product strategy. Instead, it comes on the heels of defining a mission and purpose. However, missions and purposes are often selected well before new companies, or product teams have researched and gotten to know their customers. Because anyone can settle on a mission or purpose without doing any real work, existing on the plane of “ideals.” They’re not rooted in much more than theory and hunches. Product strategy is where things get real. “Strategy is the art of finding and exploiting leverage in the competitive landscape to achieve your purpose,” Raffalli says. To do so, he recommends the following steps: Have a purpose—Why are you doing this, and what are you competing for? Understanding customer needs and how they’re evolving—Customers aren’t standing still, and neither is their environment or options. Understand your value chain and how it is evolving—Are you solving a problem that still exists? Have new wrinkles emerged that you’re neglecting? Determine what change is likely to happen—You’re not psychic, but make an educated guess about what’s probably on the horizon. Define your actions against those changes—How you respond is just as important as recognizing things have transformed. Measure success and failure and course-correct—Hunches and guesses aren’t enough to make intelligent, data-driven decisions. Be sure you’re tracking what works and what doesn’t, then use that information to inform your next move. Notice a common theme? Things keep changing, so you better adjust to those changes. As the famous military truism goes: No plan survives contact with the enemy. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '527dc6af-8860-436f-9ca6-ae2b71b0cc99', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Stories versus Maps For millennia, information was passed on as stories. From drawing on prehistoric cave walls to the tales of Viking warriors, these narratives provided instructions on how to retrace the steps of those who came before them. Raffalli says the flaw with this method for conveying information was the inability to prepare for what those storytellers hadn’t yet seen. If an invading party hadn’t already visited the target in question, they had no idea what to expect. Then came maps. These cartographical marvels enabled generals to assess the situation in advance and plan accordingly. They could seize the high ground and understand climate and topology without having previously visited the area in question. While this transformation of military strategy occurred centuries ago, Raffalli says businesses still operate based on stories. Both those we’ve heard from others, and those we tell ourselves. “We try and convince ourselves of something being right,” he says. But it’s long past due that business strategy is rooted in hard data rather than subjective tales we’ve heard or spun ourselves. “The product KPI is the ultimate expression of your strategy,” Raffalli says, referring to both users completing significant tasks or business metrics being met. “Your strategy KPI, however, are more like underlying fundamentals. So it’s how the market is moving. So it’s going to be customer needs.” Context-Switching for Strategic Planning Most product teams think strategically in terms of their product. But this often spawns convoluted thinking and strained rationales for those decisions. To be truly strategic, decisions be abstracted and purely based on strategy and the market conditions, regardless of the particular product. It can force some hard conclusions that might otherwise never even be considered. Revelations like “we are targeting the wrong market” or “our value proposition no longer exists.” But if this approach is adopted early enough and remains constant, more minor course corrections can potentially avert such drastic conclusions—or at least give companies time to minimize any negative repercussions. During the webinar, Raffalli used the example of a coding school to illustrate this. When you’re in the business of training coders, you must assess which technology people will care about in the future, along with which solutions/platforms/languages will win market share for the long term. “In real life, it’s really hard to step away from those Product KPIs and think about the underlying more important fundamental assumptions that your plan relies on,” Raffalli says. “So, in this game, we abstract away the product piece and only focus on the strategy piece.” The decision of which framework to invest in has major consequences for these firms, from hiring talent to developing curriculums and materials to enrollment. Betting on the first solution to enter the market could backfire, as it may not be the winner. Other players can swiftly follow, producing superior tech that might be faster, more efficient, or possess exciting new attributes. The first mover might initially be the most popular, but ascertaining which one wins long-term requires a deeper look at the trends than just speed to market. Raffalli implored companies and product teams to follow and ride the trends. Pay attention to search traffic, online discussions, tool usage, and other leading indicators far more informative than trailing ones like revenue. Because picking the wrong horse can be fatal, regardless of how well you execute your product. “If you think about your day to day jobs in product and defining your strategy, independently from how great your product is, probably almost half of the companies that are involved in this game, would probably die at some point and reduce the competitive field by a lot,” Raffalli says. “And that’s just by making decisions of which framework to build against.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '527dc6af-8860-436f-9ca6-ae2b71b0cc99', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Product Strategy Doesn’t Work in a Vacuum All too often, once companies assess an opportunity, draft a strategy, find product-market fit, and define a plan, the sole emphasis is on execution. Hitting dates and making progress toward milestones get all the attention. But regardless of how compelling that initial product roadmap might have been original if the team isn’t paying attention to what’s happening outside its echo chamber, they may be in for a rude awakening. Raffalli emphasizes the critical role product management plays in mitigating risk. Asking questions and validating assumptions allows them to add ongoing volume by ensuring they found the plan on a realistic foundation of truth. To participate in Raffalli’s strategy game and unlock even more wisdom, check out the webinar in its entirety. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"});

Communication is a vital skill for product managers. We spend lots of time thinking about the best way to deliver our product roadmaps, give presentations, run effective meetings, and create stakeholder alignment. But in reality, the communication tool we use far more often is email. Even if internal communication has shifted to collaboration platforms such as Slack or Microsoft Teams, email is still the universal communication method for interacting with customers. And there may be no more valuable type of email than a customer interview email that solicits customer feedback. Product managers can’t effectively do their jobs without understanding customer needs and gauging their satisfaction with the current offering. And while in a perfect world we’d get to sit down and chat with every user about their experience, that’s not a particularly scalable model. But by reaching out to customers via email during specific moments in the customer journey, product managers can tap into what users feel while the experience is still fresh in their minds. These emails are important because customer feedback is the lifeblood of any customer-centric organization, revealing exciting opportunities and painful realizations. But if the emails you’re sending don’t spark a response, you’ll never know what you’re missing. Download My Customer Interview Tool Box ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '7f735619-2494-4c81-b86b-cf6e764a20c3', {}); 4 Key Ingredients of an Effective Customer Feedback Request Email Your customers didn’t ask you to ask for their feedback, so you must make it worth their while. By including each of the following in your email template, you’ll increase your response rate and the quality of what you hear back. 1. Lead with intention Being clear and concise is the key here. Tell them why you’re reaching out—you just tried a feature, haven’t used the product in a while, etc. That way, they don’t think it is just a blanket spam email sent to every user. 2. Tell them what you want An open-ended request for feedback might seem the least intrusive and limiting, but that can seem daunting to a user not in the habit of offering input and might swamp you with all kinds of irrelevant comments. Be specific without being too leading in your request (think “we want to hear about your experience” and not “tell us what we should do better”). 3. Ask for availability while respecting their time If your email asks the customer to participate in a call, web conference, or follow-up meeting, be upfront with exactly how much time you’re asking for. Less is more, in this case, so design your feedback session to be efficient, limiting the focus so you can squeeze it into as narrow a window as possible. Telling them you only need, for example, 15 minutes of their time, should increase response rates and be less of a burden on both of your schedules. Watch our webinar on scaling customer-centricity to see how to strike the balance: 4. Be genuine Remember, you are asking them for a favor, and they owe you nothing! Use natural language and don’t come across as too pushy or demanding. The more human and organic it feels, the more likely they’ll want to respond. 4 Customer Feedback Request Email Templates Here are some basic templates for four different types of requests to help you along your journey in crafting useful emails. Use these as starting points, customizing them based on your product’s nature, what you know about the customer and the specific context of “the ask.” These templates are specifically requesting a phone call or meeting. They could just as easily prompt the user to complete a survey or provide feedback directly via an emailed response. Remember, anything you can do to make this seem like a person-to-person interaction and not an automated, system-generated message will improve the odds of a positive response. 1. The Feature Feedback Request “Hello [the customer’s first name], I see you tried [X feature] recently. I’m very interested to hear about your experience on [feature-specific topic]. Do you have some time in the next week or so for a short, 30-minute conversation? Thank you, and I look forward to hearing from you, [Your name] [Your title at/@ your company]” 2. The Discovery Session “Hello [the customer’s first name], Thank you for recently purchasing [Y enterprise product]. We’re curious to understand more about your decision process to buy it, and how your experience has been so far— specifically how you’re finding [topic B]. Do you have some time in the next week or so for an informal 15-minute conversation? Thank you, and I look forward to hearing from you, [Your name] [Your title at/@ your company]” 3. The Feature Validation Session “Hello [the customer’s first name], I see you run [ABC, are using a particular product feature, or are a particular user]. Based on that experience, I would be very interested in getting your feedback on a potential new feature we’re considering. Do you have some time in the next week for a conversation? It would be great to spend 45 minutes to an hour exploring this with you. Thank you, and I look forward to hearing from you, [Your name] [Your title at/@ your company]” 4. The Support Experience Review “Hello [the customer’s first name], I saw you recently contacted customer support regarding an issue you were having with [topic Z]. I would be very interested in hearing your feedback on your customer support experience, and making sure your issue was entirely resolved. Do you have some time in the next week or for a conversation? It should be a quick 15-minute conversation if you’re open to it. Thank you, and I look forward to hearing from you, [Your name] [Your title at/@ your company]” Prepare for the Response By relying on templates, automated workflows, and routine, product managers can create a continuous feedback loop by prompting customers for their input. As the goal is for customers to respond and set up a time to talk, be sure your calendar is relatively open before firing these emails off. You don’t want to spoil your first interaction with them by delaying the actual phone call until their experience is no longer fresh. So don’t be too overly aggressive in sending out more requests than you can reasonably handle. What product managers hear back from these feedback sessions may be startling insights, painful realizations, or helpful, constructive criticism, thanks to asking great questions before sitting back and listening. But without asking, there’s no way to know what’s truly on the mind of real users. The more perspectives we receive, the more informed and grounded our decisions will be. To avoid overreacting to any lone nugget of feedback, product teams need a defined system for capturing, organizing, validating, and summarizing what they hear. You should contextualize and socialize these results to key stakeholders. They can learn from what’s really happening in the marketplace, adjusting their plans and strategy accordingly. Customer Interview Email Takeaways On a final note, don’t forget to close the loop with customers who give their time and provide feedback. Follow up when their requests are being acted on or are now available, as well as when you decide they won’t be in the cards. It’s the least you can do to acknowledge their participation in the process. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'd16e75f0-0601-4ef3-909a-e2b4f61f0c9a', {});

Much has been written over the last few years on the idea of the featureless roadmap, which challenges product teams to present their plans grounded more in strategic vision – or by themes – rather than a laundry list of specific features. LIKE.TG alone has several articles on the subject that demonstrate the many virtues of this outcome-focused approach. It’s becoming more and more widely adopted by Product Management organizations across the globe. One of the critical considerations in developing your theme framework is to ask what drives the need for this theme? There is a genuine risk that a well-meaning product manager might simply group and categorize the existing feature list as a means for determining the theme. However, the real goal of the themed roadmap is to let the desired outcomes define the features. So how do you zero in on the most meaningful outcomes from which to center your roadmap themes around? How to Decide on Roadmap Themes that Produce Meaningful Outcomes I’ve seen several different approaches, including themes that align with high-level business goals (acquisition, growth, customer satisfaction, etc.) or more granular focus areas like the example in Jim Semick’s article of increasing satisfaction within a user persona group. There are pros and cons to each of these approaches. For example, the business goals approach is static over time, so the themes themselves stay consistent and maintain a pulse on the longer view. But the themes in and of themselves are a bit uninspiring and don’t do much to communicate customer value. In the more granular approach, the focus is more laser-sharp and centered on a specific customer outcome. However, this approach runs the risk of myopia and losing sight of new emergent opportunities that might outweigh the theme’s value. A compelling theme should be centered on the exchange of value between the business and the customer, and the above examples are hyper-focused on one or the other. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '5894a003-79ce-4ea3-9804-dae280a96106', {}); One way to achieve this balance is to organize your roadmap themes by each phase of the customer journey. This customer journey approach provides a widely universal framework for both business and customer outcomes and promotes a constant, bird-eye perspective on the end-to-end customer experience. The Customer Journey Framework The customer journey chronicles every customer interaction and touchpoint with your business—from becoming aware that you exist to making a purchase decision, using, and then eventually renewing with your product or service. The journey is depicted in different phases, which are relatively universal (but might be customized by a business that has done the work to map their customers’ journey). Those phases include Become Aware, Evaluate and Buy, Set Up, Happily Use, Get Support, Add Services, and Renew. The Benefits of Defining Product Themes by Customer Journey Phases Breaking down the customer’s end-to-end journey is a highly effective framework that enables an outside-in perspective and customer empathy as a means to drive value that is reciprocal to both customer and the business: Journey maps, then, are highly applicable to the goal of defining product roadmap themes since successful customer outcomes are at the heart of each phase. Besides the apparent value exchange, the customer journey is a universal perspective that transcends organizational silos. Each phase of the journey has pretty clear stakeholders, for example, generating awareness is usually assigned to the marketing team, and the customer success department usually owns the support experience. Focusing your themes on phases of the customer journey enables stronger partnerships between the product team and other functional groups because their goals become less disparate from the product strategy. It changes the conversation from other departments vying for a slot on the product roadmap to one that is much more strategic. Both groups can become collaboratively responsible for goal setting within the shared theme. Another benefit of the journey-based roadmap themes is that it inherently promotes customer empathy. Everyone in the company who looks at your product roadmap can evaluate it, not from just a customer perspective, but a timeline-based customer perspective. The customer journey enables individuals and teams to consider the context of their work within the customer’s end-to-end experience. Leading with this genuine care, curiosity, and perspective of the customer can have profound cultural effects on a business. Customer-centered cultures foster a bottom-up drive for innovation based on the desire to solve customer problems creatively. Problems are fluid, and markets are changing rapidly, so the work of a product manager to effectively prioritize work is a constant challenge effectively. Choosing the right theme altitude is critical to keeping eyes and ears open for emerging opportunities outside of the current focus areas. I like using customer journey phases as themes because, while customer needs may fluctuate, their journey stages are static. Maintaining consistency and continuity in themes provides a clearly defined lens from which to scan the customers, trends, and competition. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); Customer Journey Roadmap Themes in Practice Let’s look at some tangible examples of how each theme may be planned and presented from the perspective of a fictitious e-commerce platform company. Phase 1: Become aware Prospects know our product exists, and it has a positive reputation. Generating awareness includes all of the things your marketing department is doing to reach new prospective customers. In this example, the product and marketing teams establish a mission to grow the reputation of the business by addressing issues raised by contributors to software review sites and focusing on a specific feature and usability gaps common among the less-favorable reviews. CUSTOMER KPI: Reach BUSINESS KPI: Reach as a % of Total Addressable Market (TAM) STAKEHOLDER PARTNER: Marketing Phase 2: Evaluate buy Make it easy for prospects to choose and purchase our product. Reducing friction between a prospect and their willingness to buy is a key concern for sales and product management teams. Having a theme dedicated to this experience drives constant focus in this crucial area, like in this example, where the goal is to reduce sales objections by adding the top payment options prospects are demanding. CUSTOMER KPI: Time to deal close BUSINESS KPI: Maps to sales booking goals STAKEHOLDER PARTNER: Sales Phase 3: Set-up New customers can take immediate advantage of our product. Product onboarding encompasses all the activities a customer or user engages in to configure, learn, and start using a product. In this example, the teams at our e-commerce platform are working on ways to do just that by introducing two new, self-guided onboarding flows within the product. CUSTOMER KPI: Time to the first use of the critical feature BUSINESS KPI: Time to goal monthly recurring revenue (MRR) STAKEHOLDER PARTNER: Customer Success and/or Onboarding Teams Phase 4: Happily use Customers get so much value from using the product, and they love it! Naturally, the phase focused on product use is how much of mainstream product management is currently categorizing their work. Given the above examples, one can begin to ascertain the benefits of instead capturing work in terms of the different outcomes defined by the customer journey. Keeping the outcome of this theme narrowly focused on adding value makes it an excellent space for prioritizing feature requests of current customers, usability improvements, addressing technical debt, and, as in this example, improving product engagement of a specific feature set. CUSTOMER KPI: Transactional Net Promoter Score (tNPS), System Usability Score (SUS) BUSINESS KPI: Critical engagement metrics STAKEHOLDER PARTNER: Product Development (Product, UX, Engineering) Phase 5: Get support Customers rarely need help, but when problems arise, they are quickly solved. The support phase is focused on making support resources easily accessible, improving resolution speed, building out various support channels, and reducing the need for support in the first place. The product team can have a significant impact on this outcome by doing this, like implementing an in-product support experience or, as in the example below, dedicating focus to address the top product case drivers. CUSTOMER KPI: Transactional Net Promoter Score (tNPS), Time to case resolution BUSINESS KPI: Tracking against operational cost efficiencies STAKEHOLDER PARTNER: Customer Support Phase 6: Add services Customers are compelled to upgrade and subscribe to value-add services. The heart of the add services phase is in upgrades, upselling, and the purchase of additional products and services, all tied to a business’s growth initiatives. This theme can capture things like improving the discoverability of value-add services, adding features to be repackaged as a new subscription tier, or, as in this example, building out new features or services that customers would be willing to pay extra for. CUSTOMER KPI: Reach/Conversion BUSINESS KPI: Average Revenue per Unit (ARPU) STAKEHOLDER PARTNER: Customer Success and/or Sales Phase 7: Renew Customers remain loyal advocates of our product and business. The renew phase looks at every opportunity to keep customers happy coming back to your product or service. Almost all SaaS businesses are looking at churn, and addressing those reasons is perhaps the most apparent epic under this theme. But, similar to some of the other themes, there may be opportunities to reduce effort by integrating account management experiences within the product, such as this example that would introduce a renewal flow and add the ability for SaaS customers to pay their invoice online (instead of sending a check). CUSTOMER KPI: Net Promoter Score, Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores BUSINESS KPI: Churn STAKEHOLDER PARTNER: Customer Success Considerations for Journey-Focused Roadmap Themes A highlighted benefit of having high-level themes that align with phases of the customer journey is that the themes are universally applicable across every department of the business. Sharing goals across business functions create a substantial competitive advantage for consistently delivering high-value, end-to-end experiences. There are, however, some aspects of this approach to be mindful of, which include: Avoid creating silos by phase. People and tactics may be focused on a specific phase. However, Product and Design need to maintain their awareness of their work’s context within the end-to-end journey. Phases require prioritization. While I advocate for having the same consistent themes, I don’t believe that work needs always to be happening equally within each. Certain phases will have a greater need than others. It’s up to the product team to appropriately allocate focus where the greatest needs are. Phases often have embedded journeys of their own. This is especially true for the Add Services phase, where there is a complete cycle of awareness to renew to consider. Keeping customer outcomes at the heart of your roadmap, effectively mapping them to business outcomes, and sharing those outcomes across your organization is an excellent recipe for driving innovation and building reciprocal value between your customers and your business. The phases of the customer journey already have this value exchange baked-in. They can be a highly effective lens through which to view and prioritize the opportunities on your product roadmap. Read the Strategic Roadmap Planning Guide hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'e23dbd3d-c389-4aba-b537-43c357b5672a', {});

Ocean’s 11. “The A-Team.” All those Fast Furious movies… US popular culture is littered with examples of assembling all-star teams to overcome the odds and combine their unique skill sets to save the day or pull off a heist. Although your organization may not employ car thieves, cat burglars, or demolition experts, your teams are still a collection of diverse individuals that bring a range of experiences and talents to the table. How will you bring out the best in what everyone has to offer while adapting to unexpected changes in your company, teams in this COVID-19 world? After years working in and coaching numerous software development teams, O’Reilly recently released the second edition of my book on how to get better at adapting to changes in teams, called Dynamic Reteaming. The book focuses on how organizations grow, shrink and change as a natural occurrence. Since your organization is going to change anyway, you might as well lean in, and get better at thriving in times of change as opposed to floundering in it or trying to fight it. So how do you transform your changing team into a symbiotic superteam? And how do product managers fit into the equation? Start with doing a calibration with your product team. What is a Team Calibration? Your “team” is your fellow travelers on this particular phase of your professional journey. They are the team (both ad hoc and formalized in nature) you must work with to bring your product vision to market. Depending on the task or project at hand, its size may vary, as may the unique personalities comprising the team. But what you all share is a need for clarity, alignment, and collaboration to accomplish your collective goals. Team Calibrations are a proactive way to manage the changes in your team to drive your work, and relationships forward. Product Managers Play a Critical Role in Team Calibration There’s no designated facilitator for team calibrations in many organizations, however, product managers are in a prime position to take on this role. Product managers are used to creating alignment and communicating with cross-functional groups, so they should already possess some of the soft skills required to pull this off. But product management is also uniquely suited for this because they are far more familiar with the product and project mission, as well as the “why” that’s driving the whole thing. Product managers know what’s valuable, what to expect, and what’s irrelevant far better than anyone else. Product managers can reframe every task and project within the lens of how this solves a customer’s problem. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '57ff7e42-ccfa-4d9e-b5be-8a0f6ba69363', {}); It’s also in product management’s best interests to have their team operating effectively. After all, you and the team are all working together to turn the product vision into reality. Team calibrations ensure that when a talented team bands together it goes off without a hitch. It’s best to perform an initial calibration when the team is formed or when the composition of the team has changed significantly. When team members come and go, you can re-align with a team calibration. 4 Suggested Team Calibration Activities A team calibration doesn’t have to follow a set playbook; several activities can enhance team performance and interactions. I like to meet with teams to understand what their key needs are, and then devise a workshop that might include some of the following activities. 1. Align on the mission and initial work to be done with a charter While it might be evident to you, the product manager, what a given project is aiming to accomplish and what must be in place to do so, it isn’t always clear to everyone else. Creating a charter for the project ensures that all team members understand expectations and how things fit into the big picture. It isn’t far off from the overall product vision and plan that is already encapsulated in your visual product roadmaps. But it boils things down to just what’s relevant for this particular team. A charter sets down on paper the project’s scope, its mission, and measurable goals. Everyone can look to this for inspiration, motivation, and clarification during the lifetime of the project. 2. Getting to know your teammates There’s a good chance that not everyone on the team will have the same level of familiarity with each other. But the more you know about someone and understand their personality, the more empathetic they can become, and you’ll usually develop more respect for their abilities and knowledge. Invest some time in having everyone share their backgrounds, relevant experiences, and areas of expertise. It can also extend beyond the purely professional realm, as people sharing some anecdotes and interest areas can humanize everyone and break any remaining ice. Some teams will even create posters or shared slides about each member. This activity highlights what people have done, can do, and want to do, along with other details about themselves. You’ll discover commonalities among the team members that might ordinarily remain hidden. It’s all about uncovering each team member’s strengths so you can fully leverage them. Everyone’s great at something, you just need to figure out each person’s superpowers. 3. Users Guide to Me Beyond simply knowing what a person is good at or cares about, it’s also incredibly helpful to understand how people prefer to work and communicate. I’ve found a beneficial tactic for this is to have everyone write up their “users guide to me.” There are many online accounts of how to do this and how it’s helped individuals create a work environment that works better for them. But it all comes down to clearly stating how you work, how you want others to interact with you, and how you best communicate and process information. We’ve all heard about how some people are “visual learners,” and others prefer “overcommunication.” These may be predilections versus mandatory accommodations, but when other people “get” you, it makes a massive difference in satisfaction and output. 4. Agreeing on Workflow and Tools Team members should also select a workflow and tools that meet the specific needs and preferences of the team. It could just be a reinforcement of the standard processes and tools already used in the company, or it could be a variant specifically tailored to this particular team and the work they’re completing. Some folks may prefer digital tools to power their workflows, such as JIRA or Pivotal Tracker. Others may prefer sticky notes on a whiteboard as an ad hoc Kanban board (although probably less common in the COVID-19 era). There’s no right answer, it’s just what works for your team and company. But one essential point the entire team must reach a consensus on is the definition of done. So why bother with a team calibration? Here’s why. 7 Reasons to Calibrate Your Team If you’re not sure whether a team calibration is necessary, consider the following. 1. You Don’t Know Everyone on the Team Whether it’s a new hire or two trying to mesh with an existing cohort of colleagues or it’s a completely new team, any addition to the bunch represents an opportunity to calibrate. It will make new team members feel welcome and start things off by positioning the whole team for success. 2. You haven’t already talked to everyone Once your company graduates from a couple of buddies bootstrapping in a garage or a coworking space, chances are there are coworkers that haven’t really had much dialogue with each other. They may not have had the opportunity, or they might just spend their time in different circles. Regardless of the reasons why there might be a disconnect, this lack of prior conversation is an excellent impetus for some team calibration. No one should feel like they can’t talk freely with any other members of the team. 3. You don’t typically see your team day-to-day In a big enough (or distributed) corporate setting, physical location can be another barrier to optimal team performance. If you don’t already know where everyone is spending the bulk of their working days, there’s a good chance you don’t know a lot of other things about them. Use this opportunity to share everyone’s work environment and how that impacts their preferences for communication, meetings, overlapping work hours, etc. 4. You don’t know what everyone is working on Agile product development only works when everyone’s work is aligned with larger projects, timelines, and goals. If everyone doesn’t know what’s on each team member’s plate, there’s a high probability of a disconnect, which could impact product quality, hitting deadlines, and morale. A team calibration event can mitigate this by giving everyone a glimpse at what others are working on. It’s an opportunity to shift or rebalance responsibilities if there’s a definite issue, but it also builds respect among team members when they realize how much everyone has to do. 5. Everyone’s communicating through their managers Teams intend to flatten hierarchies in the name of innovation. It requires peer-to-peer collaboration among members of the team and not just sending missives up and down the food chain. Relying on managers to mediate interactions, communications, and minor disputes between team members defeats the purpose of assembling a cross-functional team in the first place. If people don’t feel comfortable speaking directly to their counterparts, it’s time for a reset. 6. The team doesn’t share the same vision Teams thrive and flourish when they’re all working in sync toward shared goals. But if the objectives aren’t mutual or are misunderstood, then individuals could be completing work that’s redundant, inefficient, or straight-up in conflict with the output of others. Product managers are already well versed in crafting, honing, and inspiring the rest of the company with a clear mission and vision of the product, so aligning their team should be a top priority. 7. Unclear roles Teams make sense when everyone understands their job and accompanying responsibilities. If things were planned and well-staffed, it’s making the most of their individual attributes while delivering maximum value for the company. But if someone isn’t sure what they should be doing or if the others aren’t aware of how each person’s work fits into the larger plan, it’s time to create clarity. It ideally occurs when the project starts, but it’s worthwhile to occasionally revisit this topic and remind everyone else how it all comes together. Additionally, as initiatives progress and evolve, the roles of team members (and even team membership itself) may also change. The whole gang should understand the ramifications those changes have on each person in the team. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '35d36a84-b157-43a1-acb7-b972dcb1d1ad', {}); Adapt or Fail Calibrating your team isn’t a luxury; it’s your secret weapon to creating a dynamic, high-performing team. Be proactive! To learn specific tactics about Dynamic Reteaming and step-by-step instructions for conducting team calibrations, check out Dynamic Reteaming, Second Edition. Get 20% off through September 15, 2020, at this landing page. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"});

When I started my career as an engineer, I didn’t set my sights on becoming a product manager. Flash forward fifteen years later, and I’m the Director of Product Management at HG Insights. Working in startups and big technology companies, I’ve encountered one question more than most: “How do I make the switch from engineering to product management?” That’s a big question, and many roads lead to this outcome. So, what qualities does it take to become a product manager? What differences lie in the company expectations? Moreover, what are the next steps you can take to make the transition? My Journey Transitioning from Engineering to Product Management I worked 9+ years in software development, leading sizeable cross-functional engineering teams across time zones. Then, I started gravitating towards product strategy questions, like, “Why am I building products?, Who am I building for?, What impact am I bringing to the business?, What makes startups fail or succeed in their mission?”, and so on. I thought Business school would be the answer, so I started preparing for it, but an exciting opportunity fell in my lap to transform a struggling product offering. Though I had no idea what I was doing before I knew it, I interviewed external customers, internal stakeholders, and various customer-facing teams to understand the problem better. I worked with the product leadership to plan out a product strategy. Then, I created a product roadmap to move that strategy forward, which ultimately drove a 15% increase in revenue and a 20% increase in retention. I believe in focusing on outcomes to power-up aligning your product strategy with business goals onto a roadmap. It was the most satisfying moment of my career, even more than building multiple product lines. From that success, I was then officially asked to move into the product role by the product leadership, and I have not looked back since then. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '1f74539e-d4fc-4cb3-97c6-fd86de2bf62e', {}); 4 Key Differences in Skills Engineer to Product Manager You don’t need to have an engineering background to be a successful product manager. Anyone can learn agile product development, basics of software design and development lifecycle, etc. Here are the four fundamental elements product managers need that is different than engineering: Strong empathy for your customers (internal and external) Strong understanding of the business (and market) You understand that your goal is to achieve business outcomes through measurable product initiatives. Your role is to identify and validate the problems, not actually to solve them. Participate in every aspect of product design (not talking about just UX/UI here), but this subtle distinction is key to not lose focus on the big picture. In addition to core product management skills, there are other essential intangibles to success like strong communication, cross-team alignment, being the thought leader, and always being curious. I shared more of my thoughts on this in the LIKE.TG video series, Spotlights. Watch them below. What are the Company’s Expectations of a Product Manager? As a product manager, your primary goal is to deliver business outcomes. Depending on the company, experience, team structure, and business dynamics, the expectations could vary. But any product manager not focusing on essential KPIs like active use, revenue, retention, customer satisfaction, etc. needs to take a closer look at the role. A good product manager is expected to drive strong cross-functional alignment and proactive communications to ensure everyone is focusing on the right problems. A wise woman once said: Product management is one of the hardest functions in the business but if done right can transform the entire business. Engineer vs. Product Manager Responsibilities The fundamental difference product managers need to understand is that your role is to identify the right problem (business, technical, or customer) and why it is worth solving or how it drives business outcomes. In contrast, engineering is responsible for delivering the solution to that problem. Your role as a product manager is to ensure your team is working on solving problems that have a measurable impact on the business. You are also responsible for ensuring customer-facing teams like Customer Success, Marketing, and Sales are fully aware and aligned on the product roadmap. Of course, a team is successful only when they collaborate as “one team,” so expect to roll up your sleeves for designing the solution, testing it, providing early feedback, documentation, etc. How to Transition from Engineering to Product Management First and foremost, you need to understand what product management is in your business and what they are responsible for. Every business, every team, and every market is different. To be a product manager, you need to start thinking like a product manager (even before switching over). There are plenty of books, blogs, and online training to sharpen up on the responsibilities. The best recommendation I can give you is to pair up with a product manager to get that hands-on experience. Start to learn how to approach a problem, define a problem, build hypotheses around solutions, collaborate with cross-functional teams to refine it, build metrics for success (or failure), and finally figure out the best and fastest way to get to market. The Transition from Engineering to Product Management Timeline In spite of popular belief, there are no definitive timelines, whether it’s engineering or product management. The first and most important thing is finding a company with an established product management team. Then, collaborate with an experienced product manager on a real project. I am personally a big proponent of the associate product manager track. That’s the best way to get your hands dirty in the game. Long term, you can expect to manage a specific KPI (e.g., improve first user experience, reduce churn, etc.), product offering, entire product portfolio, or product team. You have a little more flexibility in product management because you are learning various aspects of running a successful business. Takeaways Mentoring and people development is a big passion of my life and gives me more satisfaction than anything else. I talk to a lot of aspiring PMs who want to be product managers because they want to be a product manager or have a very different understanding of the role. I don’t blame them because there is so much wisdom that’s out there, which could be confusing sometimes. But if you like solving complex business problems and understand why and for whom, then you might like being a product manager. Look at your career as a marathon and not a sprint. Great products take time. Find the right business and team and learn faster than anyone else. Remember, slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

The year 2020 shifted the world in fundamental ways. It changed the way we work, learn, play, travel, and socialize. It catapulted some industries into dominance (video conferencing, food delivery) while decimating others (hospitality, tourism). In fact, 2020 brought us so many shocks and surprises that it made identifying top trends in product management more challenging than ever. This year conditioned us to the reality that industry, a nation, and even the world can change overnight. How can we predict the future with any confidence? Will our governing systems change in light of new threats to world health? Will a vaccine eradicate COVID-19? How long before we can attend a public event without wearing a mask? Who knows? As a product leader, entrepreneur, and product management author, I have paid close attention to the product community throughout 2020. My team at LIKE.TG has worked with hundreds of product professionals this year. We’ve gained an understanding of how the pandemic has affected their goals, concerns, and plans. We even recently released our 2021 State of Product Management report where we learned what the #1 thing product managers hope changes in their role in 2021 (hint: it’s not a higher salary). Here are a few top trends in product management I’ve seen and that I’m predicting will continue through 2021 and beyond. 5 Tops Trends in Product Management for 2021 1. Distributed product teams will be the new normal. I anticipate that the world’s health experts will bring the pandemic at least somewhat under control in 2021. But one temporary consequence of the 2020 lockdowns—remote work—will become a permanent part of the culture for millions of organizations. After talking with hundreds of product teams throughout the year, I sense that many companies will adopt a hybrid model of remote and office work. There are strong business reasons for this: It allows organizations to find the best product talent anywhere. With an office-bound culture, a business limits itself to the best staff it can find within a reasonable commuting distance from its building. Without the artificial limitation of hiring people only in the company’s geographic location, the business opens its pool of viable candidates to the best talent available anywhere in the world. This gives an organization the ability to build a world-class product team. It makes an organization a more appealing place to work. Many product professionals worked from home for an extended period in 2020 for the first time in their careers. A lot of those professionals realized both that they can remain highly productive and creative working remotely—and that they love it. Businesses caught on to this as well. By allowing more flexibility in both when and where their employees work, an organization can attract and keep better people on their teams. It can lower an organization’s fixed costs. Another common theme my team and I heard during the 2020 lockdowns were our customers re-examining their office real estate. Many found that if they implemented the hybrid model of remote and onsite work, they could downsize their office space and lower their real estate costs. With more employees interested in working at least part-time from home and businesses are discovering they can reduce their overhead with a smaller office footprint. The remote-work trend will become the new normal. 点击播放声音 @keyframes VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } @keyframes VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } .volume__small-wave { animation: VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite; opacity: 0; } .volume__large-wave { animation: VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite .3s; opacity: 0; } 1:02:52●●●●●●●●●●●●Meet the PanelToday's AgendaAre you currently working from home?Our Remote AwakeningsAre you temporarily working from home, or do you always work from home?Remote Work Best PracticesRemote Key TakeawaysWhat tools do you use to create sources of truth?Managing AlignmentHow effective is your team's communication?Staying Connected and Having FunLive QA #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_57_wrapper .w-css-reset{font-size:14px;} #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_57_wrapper 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.w-css-reset-button-important{border-radius:0!important;color:#fff!important;} Complete the form to access the full webinarFirst Name*Last Name*Job Title*Email*LIKE.TG is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy, and we’ll only use your personal information to administer your account and to provide the products and services you requested from us. 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For more information on how to unsubscribe, our privacy practices, and how we are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy, please review our Privacy Policy.#wistia_grid_57_wrapper{-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;box-sizing:content-box;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;height:100%;position:relative;text-align:left;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_57_wrapper *{-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;box-sizing:content-box;} #wistia_grid_57_above{position:relative;} #wistia_grid_57_main{display:block;height:100%;position:relative;} #wistia_grid_57_behind{height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;top:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_57_center{height:100%;overflow:hidden;position:relative;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_57_front{display:none;height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;top:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_57_top_inside{position:absolute;left:0;top:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_57_top{width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0;left:0;} #wistia_grid_57_bottom_inside{position:absolute;left:0;bottom:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_57_bottom{width:100%;position:absolute;top:0;left:0;} #wistia_grid_57_left_inside{height:100%;position:absolute;left:0;top:0;} #wistia_grid_57_left{height:100%;position:absolute;right:0;top:0;} #wistia_grid_57_right_inside{height:100%;right:0;position:absolute;top:0;} #wistia_grid_57_right{height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;top:0;} #wistia_grid_57_below{position:relative;} 2. Product leaders will become more effective. Based on my interactions with product leaders throughout the COVID-19 lockdowns, I believe 2020 triggered in the product profession a phenomenon known in the physical sciences as stress-recovery-adaptation. Developed by a medical doctor and researcher, Hans Selye (pronounced “say”), this theory argues that when we’re exposed to a stressor, we go through three stages. There’s the fight against the stressor, a recovery period after that fight, and a general adaptation that makes us more resilient against similar future stress. (This is the process we go through during and after physical exercise that makes our bodies stronger.) The pandemic forced everyone to adapt quickly to many new threats against their organizations. These stressors included the lockdowns, the sudden and forced transition to remote work, financial pressure on their businesses, and sudden changes to their customers’ priorities and demands. From what we at LIKE.TG witnessed during this time, many product leaders handled these external stressors with intelligence, patience, and compassion. They accepted—even embraced—the uncertainty. Product leaders trusted in their teams and strategically went about building new processes that would work under these rapidly changing circumstances. I believe product leaders have already begun to adapt successfully to the new realities of a post-pandemic world. In the future, I foresee product leaders running their teams more effectively and successfully as a result. They’ve undergone an enormous stressor. They’re recovering from that struggle. And they will emerge stronger from it. If you’d like to delve more deeply into crisis leadership strategies, I recommend this article from LIKE.TG’s Chief Executive Brad Wills: A CEO’s Tips for Resilient Leadership During Challenging Times. 3. The essentialist product management movement will grow stronger. When your house is on fire, you don’t run to the closet looking for your box of multi-colored paper clips. Your mind homes in on what matters—people, pets, photos, etc.—and ignores everything else. This year left people feeling overwhelmed with level-one priorities. Many had to adapt to new working arrangements. Many others lost their jobs or businesses entirely. Parents had to manage children learning from home for the first time. And everyone had to figure out how to adjust their lifestyles to protect themselves from a worldwide viral pandemic. In these chaotic times, many people began cutting away the things that didn’t matter so they could focus on the ones that did. This is essentialism, and it’s a useful approach for living a more productive, balanced, and fulfilling life. Product managers, in particular, are vulnerable to overwhelm. They’re constantly putting out fires in their organization. They have so many responsibilities, so many teams, and projects to coordinate that they can fall victim to worrying about everything equally—even those multi-colored paper clips. What I’ve seen repeatedly throughout 2020 is product professionals realizing the need to narrow their focus. The crazy events of the year forced them to de-prioritize all but the projects that could truly move the strategic needle for their products and their businesses. Many product managers and leaders have adapted by: Focusing on their product’s highest purpose Creating space and time for thinking Saying no when necessary Doing less, but better. As a longtime technology product manager, I’ve experienced firsthand how effective the essentialist approach can be. That’s why I expect this trend to gain more traction through 2021. Download The Essentialist Product Manager ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'be753440-dc4d-40c5-9808-cad744d00a28', {}); 4. Diversity awareness and action will increase. Successful product teams don’t exist in a vacuum. They are a part of their larger society. Smart product leaders were paying close attention in 2020 to the changing cultural and political climate. If they hadn’t already made a material effort to create a corporate culture fostering diversity, collaboration, and integrity, these organizations must have realized that this was the year such policies became must-haves. The civil unrest in dozens of cities around the country, primarily emerging out of protests against systemic racism, made diversity and inclusion top-of-mind for many product teams. This was true even for organizations that had already prioritized building diverse teams in the years leading up to 2020. But based on what the LIKE.TG team has seen firsthand in working with product teams in all industries around the world, I anticipate these noble goals becoming even higher on product organizations’ priority lists for 2021. You can see what product professionals had to say about diversity at their organizations in our 2021 report. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '35d36a84-b157-43a1-acb7-b972dcb1d1ad', {"region":"na1"}); 5. Product teams will re-examine and update their strategies. A product strategy that would have been effective in the 2018 world might fall short in 2021. For reasons, the product team could not foresee when they developed their strategy. For example, a B2B software product sold only through a long-term subscription might have been wildly successful in the booming-economy days of 2018 and 2019. But by 2020, the product team overseeing that business app might need a new pricing model to accommodate its customers’ post-pandemic fears of committing to long-term expenses. An ingenious COVID pivot: One small but brilliant example of a product team that adjusted its strategy in light of COVID was a company that manufactures hollow, plastic eggs that parents can fill with toys or candy for Easter egg hunts. The lockdowns went into effect in mid-March 2020 for most of the world, just weeks before Easter Sunday. Of course, egg hunts all over the world were canceled. But the product team hit on a great idea. They recolored their eggs from traditional Easter tones (light blue, yellow, pink, light green) to a black and orange that showed up under a blacklight. Then they marketed their new product as eggs that would be perfect for a “Halloween hunt.” Throughout 2020, many product teams found themselves playing defense. They had to react to major disruptions to their businesses, their markets, and their employees’ personal lives. As I’ve noted throughout this post, I think many product teams have done an admirable job of adjusting to a chaotic situation. But as we head into 2021, I’m confident these teams will become increasingly proactive. They’ll be taking an objective look at their pre-COVID strategies. Examining them against new realities and updating their plans to ensure they can continue to deliver outstanding products that solve real market problems in a post-pandemic world. If you’d like ideas for creating a winning product strategy, even in the challenging period we’re living through now, I recommend the book written by our Vice President of Product, Annie Dunham: hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '1f74539e-d4fc-4cb3-97c6-fd86de2bf62e', {});

Is it Time to Declare Roadmap Bankruptcy? Whether your product finds a market or falls flat, your team needs to understand why this outcome occurred. That way, you’ll know if your strategic plan is working and your roadmap is on the right track, or if it’s time to declare roadmap bankruptcy. In my years as a product manager and product leader, I’ve seen many product teams draw the wrong conclusions from both failures and successes. Even a product that’s earning money and pulling in new customers can be enjoying that success for reasons that have little or nothing to do with what the product team is prioritizing at the time. In fact, those can be the costliest misjudgments. They could lead the team to misallocate resources away from work that could build on its successes and focus on things that don’t move the needle at all. In this post, I’d like to share with you what I’ve learned about when you might need to make major adjustments specifically to your product roadmap—whether your product is falling short of expectations or exceeding them. Then I’ll suggest a few steps you can take to build your roadmap in such a way that you won’t have to declare it bankrupt in the first place. If you’re curious, I’ve also written my thoughts onwhen it’s time to declare backlog bankruptcy. 3 Signs that Declaring Roadmap Bankruptcy is a Fit 1. Fundamental realities have changed since you last updated it. For this example, we’ll use LIKE.TG ourselves as a case study. Throughout the 2020 COVID crisis, we closely monitored customers’ usage data around the world using ourproduct roadmap platform. Based on those data trends, we found that product teams are shifting their behaviors and priorities according to new realities brought on by the pandemic. Our product team has updated our own strategic plans and priorities on our roadmap with this new information. No, LIKE.TG didn’t need to declare roadmap bankruptcy. We needed only to move certain initiatives higher on our priority list and shift others to our backlog. But if we were not paying close attention to how our customers were using our product, we might eventually have found that our existing plans—now based on a changing paradigm—no longer supported our business objectives. Another example: If fundamental realities change for a product’s key persona or industry, those changes could render the existing roadmap no longer viable. At that point, the product team might need to find a way to pivot its product or focus on a new solution. My take: The pandemic and the lockdowns led to such serious disruptions across so many industries that any company’s pre-COVID product roadmap will benefit from a fresh look in light of the new realities. Declaring such a roadmap ready for an overhaul might not be nearly as harmful to your business as insisting on continuing with a product strategy that fails to account for the major shift we all just experienced. 2. Your work on the product is not contributing to your KPIs. Whenever you build a new product or update an existing one, your team might set any number of key performance indicators (KPIs), or success metrics, for it. For example, you might be hoping the product will: Grow your market share relative to a key competitor Win over a new type of user or buyer persona Help your company earn customers in a new market Increase monthly recurring revenue (MRR) from an existing market Increase free-trial signups You might be releasing new product features and enhancements regularly. You might be aggressively advertising to your target markets. But if all of those efforts are not translating to a boost in the specific success metrics you’ve established, you might be misallocating your resources. While product metrics are not an exact science when all signs point to a downward trend, it may be time to declare roadmap bankruptcy. At a minimum, it might be time to review your strategic priorities in light of this. If most or all of your initiatives fail to achieve the objectives you’ve set for them, it might be time to declare roadmap bankruptcy. Note: As you might have noticed, this type of warning signal can be present even for a product that succeeds in the market.Maybe you’ve released a new version of your product, and it receives a lot of free-trial signups. But if the roadmap initiatives your team completed for this release had nothing to do with that KPI, there is a disconnect between your roadmap and the market’s priorities. For example, if your team prioritized bug fixes and eliminatingtechnical debt in the product. In this situation, you can’t simply declare success because you saw a spike in trials. You’ll need to review all of your company’s efforts to figure out what led to the spike in signups. This includes efforts across all teams—marketing, advertising, sales, or social media activity. You’ll also want to review your roadmap to determine if your team is working on the wrong things. Download Product Success Metrics ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '18f5a8aa-393b-4397-9fd4-f7758c1edf55', {}); 3. Your product team is falling for the “post hoc” fallacy. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc is a Latin phrase meaning: After the thing, therefore because of the thing. It’s a logical fallacy that confuses sequence with causation. To use a silly example: I took a different route home this evening, and it rained overnight. Therefore, when I deviate from my normal drive home, it rains. You can find examples of the post hoc fallacy everywhere, and falling for its subtler versions is easier than you might think. Let’s say your company releases a new version of your product. Let’s also assume your team packed this update with cool new features. Six months later, the overall revenue from the product is up. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc? Not necessarily. What if… The spike in revenue had nothing to do with the new release? Your sales team hit on an effective new strategy for presenting the product to customers in demos? Your marketing team created a brilliant piece of social media content that went viral? A persona in an industry you weren’t even targeting somehow discovered your product? Word got out in that industry, and the orders flooded in. Word got out in that industry, and the orders flooded in. If you’re not monitoring these details carefully, you might make this pervasive post hoc error: We did a lot of work on the product and released it to the market. Product revenue increased. Therefore, our work on the product led to an increase in revenue. By the way, the post hoc fallacy works for the opposite outcome as well. Your team might just as easily attribute a product failure to a poor sales presentation or a badly designed eCommerce experience. But those things had nothing to do with why your solution failed to find a product-market fit. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'ad657ba8-be75-4be1-a163-e71ff5498018', {}); 3 Steps to Developing a Bankruptcy-Resistant Product Roadmap As I pointed out above, sometimes a roadmap becomes bankrupt, not due to anything the product team does but simply because external realities demand a new approach. For many companies today, the fallout from COVID might have caused such a shift. I bring this up again to note that no matter how carefully you build your product roadmap, you might need to declare it bankrupt in the future because of the ground shifts beneath you. In other words, you can’t create a roadmap that is truly bankruptcy-proof. But the following steps should help you develop a roadmap that’s at least bankruptcy-resistant. 1. First, make sure you’re actually solving a real market problem. You should never begin developing a product roadmap until you’ve determined—based on evidence—that the product idea addresses a market problem worth solving. Here’s the easiest way to find yourself in roadmap bankruptcy. Start with a product idea your team is excited about but that you haven’t also vetted with a ready, eager market. Now, even if you have vetted your idea, your team can still fall short in executing the details. But if you don’t first make sure you’re building a product that solves a real problem for real people—one they’re willing to pay to solve—your roadmap won’t stand much of a chance of success. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '9754e937-d766-41b6-acef-85c0aefaaa24', {}); hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '8d90fe78-17c8-4e9d-b664-8a5e4e8a2afb', {}); 2. Set specific success metrics for each initiative. Okay, let’s assume you’ve compiled data supporting the case that your product idea is worth pursuing. Your next step will be to start building the roadmap itself. For each theme, epic, and other strategic initiatives you add to the roadmap, you’ll want to make a note of the key reasons it belongs there. As well as the success metrics you’ll be monitoring to determine if it’s serving its purpose. This is one of many reasons to use native roadmap software instead of spreadsheets or slideshows to build and maintain your roadmap. You’ll find it much easier to attach a strategic note to each item on the roadmap with a click than by having to create your own color-coded legends and tags. In this screenshot of LIKE.TG’s roadmap app, you can see how easy it is to add a strategic goal to each container or bar you drop into your roadmap. You can also review each initiative’s goals and share them with your team, with a single click as well. Remember, specificity is the key to gaining the only business insight that matters. Is this project we’ve prioritized on our roadmap moving the needle the way we hoped? If so, then it’s worth the continued effort and resources. If not, it might be time to scrap this initiative, or at least shelve it for later, and shift those resources to another project with a better chance of meeting your goals. 3. Check on your data regularly.Assigning success metrics to each item on your product roadmap is the best practice. But those metrics can guide your team as to the effectiveness of your roadmap only to the extent that you look at them—and often. Remember, the ground can shift under your plans for any reason, at any time. As you release a new version of your product, for example, you should have a specific set of KPIs for anything you’ve added. This includes new functionality, product enhancements, an additional pricing option, etc. Then, you’ll want to check in at some point after the launch, review all relevant data, and check those data against the KPIs you’ve set. Is the new functionality leading to the added trial downloads as you’d hoped? Great! Are the enhancements helping to slow your churn rate? Also great! But if you’re not analyzing your data with this level of granularity, you can’t expect to know which initiatives warrant continued resources and which don’t. You also won’t know if, for whatever reason, it’s time to declare your roadmap bankrupt. 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In modern software development, product designers tend to be embedded on a cross-functional squad or scrum team. That team’s collective work is often represented, at a high level, as features on the product roadmap. The work of a product designer, however, is distinct from their developer counterparts. Also, the role of product design in designing great user experiences is both tactical and strategic. The Role Roadmaps Play in Managing Product Design As an organization scales, product design leaders and other executives need some way to track their team’s efforts. They need to ensure all teams are working in service of the same goal and user outcome. The roadmap can be a powerful tool in coordinating these efforts, including the product design team members. Avoid the Temptation for a UX Roadmap I sometimes hear of design leaders who use a roadmap to track the work of their designers. More often, their bosses ask for a UX roadmap to have visibility into the design team’s workstream and bandwidth. These use cases give me pause, as the UX Roadmap is an artifact of waterfall software development. As modern software development has adopted a more agile and lean approach, the design has become more integrated and in-step with the development team. In this practice, having a separate UX and Product Roadmap doesn’t make sense. Even if your team is still practicing handing up-front design to developers, that work is still ultimately guided by the product roadmap. In most cases, it seems the goal of a UX Roadmap is more for management to stay on top of what each designer is working on across several teams. For this, I would argue that a roadmap (which is more strategic by definition) isn’t the right solution. It would be more beneficial to somehow view and track tasks at a global level. I usually recommend tracking design tasks alongside development tasks in the same system. Capture Product Design With Your Existing Product Roadmap The work of product design is always in service of the product strategy. So, including design work on the existing product roadmap is a great way to provide visibility into their work. Understanding how design supports product initiatives also enables collaboration. Cross-functional leaders can better align and respond to schedules that inevitably slip. It’s generally recommended to have different roadmaps for different audiences. Representing design work, then, should be at the appropriate fidelity for the right audience. I recommend showing tactical design work on shorter-term roadmap views and more strategic work on longer duration views. Tracking tactical design Tactical design tasks include activities such as UX research, design sprints, prototyping, and usability testing. These activities are granular, which might be more information than executive leaderships care to see. They are, however, critically important to the team and the short-term view. For this reason, I recommend including these tasks on weekly or bi-weekly view roadmaps. Seeing those design tasks can be beneficial for audiences that need to plan and sequence their work. For example, on any given sprint, most teams are balancing current work with planning for work to pick up in the future. So, your current sprint might have a line on the team’s product roadmap for prototyping when, in the following sprint, the development work may begin. Similarly, at the beginning of the next sprint, there may be a line representing that team’s usability testing to validate what is being built. Tracking strategic design Much of the product design team’s work is more strategic than tactical. Some activities that might fall into this category include strategic user research or design audits. Design teams may also build playbooks and libraries that support the greater organization. This work is in contrast to design work that focuses on a particular team and/or initiative. For this reason, a design leader may want to advocate for their own lane to include these efforts on higher-level roadmaps. And high-level roadmaps tend to cover a longer duration (months or quarters). Visibility into strategic design work can be especially valuable for executives. For example, strategic user research usually looks out ahead to generate new product ideas or opportunities. More research follows the discovery of those ideas to validate their feasibility and business viability. These efforts serve the product and also inform the cross-functional roll-out efforts. In addition to informing what to build, user research also helps coordinate sales, service, and marketing efforts. Tracking design system work The outlier to the tactical vs. strategic design categorization is work done on the organization’s design system. The primary purpose of a design system is to enable design decisions at scale and across teams. It provides a system for designers and developers alike to pull their components and patterns from. Because it is an internal product, the design system requires the focus of a product development team to build. In this case, represent a design system that works the same way you would other product-related initiatives. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'bcf47ad4-3832-42c0-9ae8-1fd954c6be9c', {}); Use Product Design Roadmaps Only for Team Development By now, it’s clear that my strong belief is that product design work does not belong on a roadmap separate from the product team’s. However, in general, roadmaps can be a useful tool for all kinds of purposes for various roles in an organization. A marketing team might use a roadmap to plan their editorial calendar. Or a sales team might roadmap their strategy towards winning deals in a certain segment. In the same way, a product design leader may use a roadmap to communicate the strategy for growing their team and practice over time. For example, most design leaders make calculated investments to improve design maturity in their organization. A roadmap is an effective tool for illustrating and communicating that plan and how the organization might support those efforts. To learn more about tools experts use in product design teams, watch our recent webinar: 点击播放声音 @keyframes VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } @keyframes VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } .volume__small-wave { animation: VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite; opacity: 0; } .volume__large-wave { animation: VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite .3s; opacity: 0; } 55:49●●●●●●●AgendaBackgroundTeam StructureDesign ProcessArtifactsProduct ComparisonLive QA #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_75_wrapper .w-css-reset{font-size:14px;} #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_75_wrapper 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For more information on how to unsubscribe, our privacy practices, and how we are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy, please review our Privacy Policy.#wistia_grid_75_wrapper{-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;box-sizing:content-box;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;height:100%;position:relative;text-align:left;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_75_wrapper *{-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;box-sizing:content-box;} #wistia_grid_75_above{position:relative;} #wistia_grid_75_main{display:block;height:100%;position:relative;} #wistia_grid_75_behind{height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;top:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_75_center{height:100%;overflow:hidden;position:relative;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_75_front{display:none;height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;top:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_75_top_inside{position:absolute;left:0;top:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_75_top{width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0;left:0;} #wistia_grid_75_bottom_inside{position:absolute;left:0;bottom:0;width:100%;} #wistia_grid_75_bottom{width:100%;position:absolute;top:0;left:0;} #wistia_grid_75_left_inside{height:100%;position:absolute;left:0;top:0;} #wistia_grid_75_left{height:100%;position:absolute;right:0;top:0;} #wistia_grid_75_right_inside{height:100%;right:0;position:absolute;top:0;} #wistia_grid_75_right{height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;top:0;} #wistia_grid_75_below{position:relative;} Another example where a product design roadmap might be useful is in team support and planning. A design manager might see an opportunity for filling skill gaps on a team, for example. A roadmap could help her map out a plan to educate existing team members and/or hire to fill those gaps. Additionally, a cross-functional roadmap could be useful for coordinating headcount planning across teams. Keep Design Work Visible Finding the right level of detail for a product roadmap can be tricky and is dependent on the audience. Product managers may not understand the value of including the design on their product roadmap. Collaborating with product managers on the roadmap is a great way for design leaders to communicate their team’s work. Product design work is uniquely different from development. Including design on the product roadmap provides visibility into how they support the company’s short and long-term efforts. Download Building Your First Product Roadmap ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'a81908bd-d7dd-4be2-9d7e-cb09f3f90137', {});

It’s all the rage, and is often the reason we get out of the bed each day – we want to delight our customers in everything we do. I’d bet that at least 75% of those reading this post would say that “Customer Delight” is somewhere in the top 3 stated goals of their company for the year. So, each day, well-intended product teams across the globe rally behind delight as an outcome in their work, eagerly awaiting their customers’ reaction as a barometer for success. Getting Real about Customer Delight: The Strategy of Emotional Outcomes In my experience, however, these teams frequently lack a shared definition of what “delight” looks like in the context of their current initiative. Missing this up-front alignment inevitably creates dissonance between individual team members and their subjective interpretation of the customer feedback. The result is a team often in disagreement around when the work is “good enough” to move on to the next thing. The truth is, however, it’s likely that delight isn’t the goal. Delight as an outcome for every single feature or customer touchpoint is not only unnecessary and can be prohibitively expensive, and it’s also pretty close to impossible. Unfortunately, the phrase “customer delight” has lost its potency, as evidence that its definition seems to vary depending on the work context. But, before we indoctrinate the phrase into the swirling no man’s land of synergistic business buzzwords, I propose we reclaim it to portray the deeply emotional response for which it was initially intended. Rather than seeking to delight your customers at every corner, save it as a strategic outcome for the moments that truly matter. The Diluted Definition of Customer Delight Over 20 years ago, a business trend emerged suggesting that delighting customers was measurably more profitable than simply satisfying them. Foundationally, the idea breaks down these two important definitions: “Customer satisfaction is the process of achieving goals and consistently delivering the value you promised. Customer delight, on the other hand, is the “wow” factor. It proves to the customer that you intimately understand their needs and can proactively anticipate ways to improve their situation.” By definition, then, simply satisfying customers can have the same potential to deliver high value as delighting them does. But, for some reason, we don’t set goals around that outcome. Meeting expectations isn’t as alluring as exceeding them, and years of favoring words that foster inspiration and motivation among employees have eroded their meaning. And, trust me, words matter. Especially when it comes to setting clear goals that you want the intrinsically subjective humans in your business to align around. Add in the fact that we’re talking about emotions, which are difficult to measure, and you have a surefire recipe for misinterpretation and misalignment. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '57ff7e42-ccfa-4d9e-b5be-8a0f6ba69363', {}); Delighted by Relief For example, I once worked with a team that was finally picking up essential iterations of a feature MVP after over a year of customers begging for the full functionality. Being a team highly motivated by customer delight, they released small iterations and monitored the beta group’s feedback closely as their measuring stick for understanding when they’d met the need. Within two weeks of the estimated 4-6 week project, praise started rolling in from the beta customers. Customers inundated the team with gratitude and excitement, and since evoking delight was their metric of success, there was talk that they had solved the customer pain and could move on ahead of schedule and budget. Here’s the thing, though: The customer pain around not having the additional functionality was so significant that many had to abandon using the original MVP (a lack of engagement that triggered the business reason for prioritizing the work). When they saw the improvements, they were genuinely delighted. But in this instance, their delight wasn’t at all due to exceeding their expectations; instead, it was their reaction to the feeling of relief. Providing this relief was the emotional equivalent of giving a small bottle of water to someone stranded on a deserted island. The smallest sip of water will surely delight them with temporary relief, but that alone won’t save their life. So, in theory, we can delight our customers by merely starving them first. That’s not our goal and not suitable for business, but it demonstrates the ambiguity of setting goals for emotional outcomes without clarifying their meaning. After much discussion and deliberation, the team ultimately made the right call to keep working with customers on the iterations, and still finished ahead of schedule. Upon the full release, customers’ response didn’t delight as defined by “wowing” customers and exceeding their expectations. But simply satisfying their need made customers happy and saved several accounts that had threatened to churn. It was a massive win for both customers and the business. Return on Innovation as a Deliberate Strategy for Emotional Outcomes At the core of being misaligned on an emotional outcome such as delight is that emotions are personally subjective. Thankfully, there are some ways to help teams get aligned on these goals at the onset of a project and help them track progress against them over their work. In his 2015 LinkedIn article, Geoffrey Moore introduced three categories for innovation efforts: To differentiate, neutralize, or optimize. It has since become a simple and effective lens for businesses to look through to make conscious decisions about where and how to invest focus. These innovation classifications are also a great way to align product development teams on the intended outcome of a new feature or improvement and how to determine when the work is good enough to move on. 1. Delight to Differentiate First, to differentiate a product (or feature or service) means that customers get more value from it, then they could go anywhere else in the market. For product development teams, efforts intended to differentiate should far exceed any other solutions and require a high level of care and feeding to achieve that outcome. But differentiation isn’t just about checking more boxes than your competitor, instead of creating a response from customers that send them flocking to sign up and even pay extra for your solution. Differentiation is highly focused on the emotion, and in this case, we are truly talking about delight. This is the same psychology behind why people will buy a brand of food that’s twice as expensive as its competitor with the same ingredients or choose a bottle of wine based on the label’s design. It makes them feel good. 2. Neutralize to Meet Expectations Often product development teams are tasked with building a solution to neutralize a competitive one. Almost all feature development motivated by sales objections fit into this category, and it’s important work! Wowing customers is not the goal of neutralization efforts. In fact, more often than not, customers (or prospects) are already wowed with the product but find themselves in a predicament where they might need to use a different solution because yours is lacking. In the case of the story I shared earlier, the work that team was doing fit clearly in this category in retrospect. The goal was to keep the product usable and at least up to par with competitive solutions, so aspiring to delight customers here wasn’t all that practical and would have been unnecessarily expensive (in terms of time invested). Neutralization efforts are best poised to satisfy your customers simply: Deliver the value they asked for and expect. 3. Optimize to Improve Satisfaction Finally, Moore describes efforts that optimize as more internally focused – delivering the same value to customers more efficiently to save on costs. But providing the same value more efficiently is also a crucial customer-facing goal that product development teams can and should continuously prioritize. Looking at optimization from a value exchange perspective, many of these efforts are win-win for the company and the customer. From a customer’s emotional outcome perspective, I find this kind of work addresses functionality that was once exciting but has lost its luster, usability or performance over time. In these cases, the customers are less than satisfied, and the goal is to return them to equilibrium. Measuring Emotion I know what you’re thinking, “that can’t be done!” But, while it’s true that emotion is a complex and personal experience, there are some ways that product teams can gauge, normalize, and track their work against the intended emotional outcome. The most obvious metric is the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which asks customers how likely they are to recommend the product or service to a friend. Foundationally, NPS gets to the excitement a customer feels about your business and their drive to refer others to it. And, that’s right, excitement is an emotion. NPS is an excellent company-wide indicator of how customers feel about their business, but it does little to help teams hyper-focused on a specific solution. These teams can introduce a Transactional Net Promoter Score (tNPS) survey as part of the experience they are building that asks customers how likely they are to recommend the company based on this interaction. Another useful metric is the Customer Effort Score (CES). Originating from the realm of customer service and focused on how easy or difficult it is for customers to resolve issues, the intent is also highly applicable to product development in terms of user experience. Making tasks effortless to complete in your product leaves customers feeling confident and in control. Some studies show that reducing and simplifying customer effort can have a stronger correlation to retention and loyalty than delight. Asking customers how easy or difficult it was to use the solution you built is a highly valuable approach to validating your work. Finally, measuring perceived value via the Product/Market fit question gets at the core of emotions by asking customers how they would feel if they had to stop using the product, from very disappointed to not at all disappointed. Like the examples above, teams can ask this question specifically about a feature or improvement to understand how well it meets their needs as part of their build, measure, and learn feedback loop. I’ve seen teams successfully adopt these models to set goals that align with the emotional outcome they want to achieve and implement one-question surveys to track against that. The goal you will set will depend on the purpose of the work. For neutralization efforts, for example, a high tNPS goal would certainly be overkill, but ensuring that at least 40% of customers would be very disappointed to stop using the feature might be a more reasonable gauge. Customer Delight Still Matters! To those businesses setting delight as a high-level goal for the year, I say that is still an important strategy! But, instead of encouraging employees to seek delight in all of their work, be more explicit about the touchpoints and interactions where it truly matters. As a gut check, ask yourself if customers would be excited about the goal’s bullet points. Or, better yet, ask them.

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

When you’re new to a product management role, you enter the situation with minimal credibility, name recognition, or trust beyond your hiring manager. When your entire job is to define a direction for the product and convince everyone else it’s the right one, that clean slate isn’t helpful. For this role, it’s essential to grow your sphere of influence. You need to win people over and give your ideas and suggestions a fair shake. Do this by convincing colleagues that your strategic decisions are based on sound data, adequate deliberations, and keen insight. This is why you need to establish allies and supporters early on and before you try to shake things up. 6 Steps to Building Your Sphere of Influence in Your First 90 Days A constant theme for new product managers is managing their sphere of influence. If you are new to the role or new to an organization, your starting months are critical. During a recent webinar hosted by The Product Stack entitled “Your First 90 Days as a New Product Manager,” Roxanne Mustafa, Design Lead at VMware, and Pivotal Tracker provides advice to new product managers. 1. Play the “newcomer card.” You only get to be new once. Don’t miss your chance to let your newness pay dividends. For a few months, you get to ask whatever questions you want. Explore assumptions and delve into the product and organization’s history with honest curiosity. Ask fundamental questions that you won’t be able to later. Probe in a non-confrontational way. Challenge ideas before the legacy of previous PMs clouds you. Learn the history, but don’t resign yourself to relive it. This will help you understand how and why things ended up where they are. Remember, you’re on a fact-finding mission. Your mission is to understand the tribal knowledge and what things were already tried and failed. To understand how failure was defined in the first place. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '8bd83652-2868-48a8-9b9c-ebb8e0b9c945', {}); 2. Utilize one-on-ones. Mustafa says the most important thing you must do is figure out who you must talk to and what conversations you should be having. The best way to do this is to start scheduling intimate meetings withstakeholders across the organization. Starting with the product owners. Stay in listening mode as much as possible, using the various insights you gather to slowly build up your opinions. Be sure to see whose names keep getting dropped. This way you get a sense of where the power centers are and who are the key influencers, then add meetings with those individuals to your calendar. Make sure you get on any relevant email lists, Slack channels, or standing meeting invites. Ask how each stakeholder and team defines “value” and “success.” This may not be consistent across the organization. Knowing which benchmarks and preferences each team has are useful. Particularly in understanding product managers’ views. Keep your one-on-ones on the shorter side to be respectful of their time. Thirty minutes should be plenty for those initial getting-to-know-you sessions. Follow up after the initial round when needed. 3. Demos, demos, and more demos. Any product manager should be familiar with their product and value propositions to give aproduct demo at the drop of a hat. As someone new to the product, demos can play an instrumental role in understanding the product. Seeing what different stakeholders think about it, and emphasize is important. So is showing existing colleagues that you’ve digested what the product has to offer and how to position it. To do this, schedule sessions with multiple people or teams individually. You’ll want to see sales, engineering, and the existing product team demo the product in isolation. This way their commentary and presentation aren’t influenced by whoever else is in the room (or on the Zoom). Each demo will vary in what they show off (versus gloss over) and what language they use. Seeing how sales sell the product versus what engineering believes is essential can be eye-opening. This gives insight into what each group prioritizes. You can document the gaps. Once you’ve witnessed everyone else’s take, it’s your turn. Your demo will not only illustrate that you’re now quite familiar with how the product works and the key talking points. It can also synthesize the different messages you picked up from your colleagues to give a more holistic view of things. 4. Ride shotgun with sales and support. Salespeople and support staff are the folks having the most interactions with actual customers and users. Sitting in on their calls can be very illuminating. Not only will you get a heavy dose of the voice of the customer and reinforce your commitment to customer-centricity, but you’ll also get a sense of your new coworkers. Don’t try to jump in and take over, although you can occasionally interject with a question or clarification. The real opportunity for interaction is when the call is over, and you can debrief with your colleague. These interactions can help build a report with them and show them you’re an inquisitive, thoughtful product manager. Not just some new person with a pile of opinions and assumptions. You’ll also be able to spot low-hanging fruit for some quick wins when the time comes to start prioritizing items. Be sure to ask whether anything that stood out on the call was an outlier or something they encounter. This will help you categorize what you hear as anecdotal or pervasive. 5. Search the archives. Can’t get enough forthcoming team members to talk? Support tickets and the support team can be another great resource. Reviewing these gives you insight into the current state of your customers. From there, you can review the product backlog. Note which stories were accepted in the past, the key milestones used, and how releases were packaged. You can peel back the onion even further by reviewing the conversation logs. This helps your understanding of how decisions were reached. In addition to what variables got a lot of attention, and who were the key players. Retrospectives will give you a sense of morale and feelings. If there were minutes or action items from previous retrospectives, these could be mined for details. If you’re able to attend (or even facilitate) a retrospective of a recent release, you can witness it all in real-time without any prejudices or skin in the game. Just be sure to stay in “listening mode.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); 6. Take a holistic approach. When you’re first learning the ropes, it’s natural to stick close to the other product team members. Or devote much of your time to building your relationship with engineering, but Mustafa warns against this. It’s important to expand in order to create your sphere of influence. Instead, she recommends taking a 360-degree view of the organization. Getting input and making connections with every department will help you get a fuller, less-biased picture. This will help you to forge connections with the organization’s broader swath and develop your sphere of influence. You never know when that will pay off, and it will certainly help you build cross-company support down the line. Make sure you also know what you’re accountable for. If the executive team expects a weekly dashboard or monthly update at an all-hands, find out and get ahead of it. Takeaways It can be hard to avoid speaking your mind and fixing obvious flaws as soon as you notice something awry. Reserving your opinions until later in tenure is the right move. You don’t want to suggest new ideas or try to impose any new methodologies until you have a solid baseline of understanding and discretely vet your ideas among a smaller, friendlier audience. If you come out shooting, many of your good ideas will be ignored or forgotten. At least until you’ve built up a stable of allies and established a favorable reputation throughout the organization. While your first 90 days isn’t your only opportunity to build your sphere of influence, it’s a great opportunity can set you up for an easier path to ship great products moving forward. Read the Career Guide for Product Managers hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '51f4627c-aefd-4981-92a8-41fe12455dbe', {});

There are many roles where your career path is clear. But, product management is a different story. People have transitioned to successful careers as product managers (PM) from every background. I know this experience firsthand and I’m thrilled to say, LIKE.TG itself recently made a similar hire: from customer success to product manager. That new PM is me. The Journey from Customer Success to Product Manager If you’re in customer success and want to make a jump into product management, I’ll share some of the practical lessons I learned and tips on how you can make a similar move in your career. Why LIKE.TG Was the Ideal Place to Make the Transition from Customer Success to Product Management Let me make one caveat up front. Your best chance of finding a direct path from customer success to product management is within a company that is customer-centric. I don’t mean an organization that includes the phrase “customer-centric” on its website, although that can’t hurt. I’m talking about a company that lives this philosophy. A company that treats solving customers’ goals as a top priority. Why is this so important? A company that evaluates its customers’ success as a key metric for its own success will be more likely to understand the value a customer success manager can bring to the product team. Fortunately for me, LIKE.TG is such a company. (I’d even go so far as to call this team customer-obsessed if you promise to keep that between you and me.) A relentless focus on the customer has always been a core element of LIKE.TG’s culture. Nobody here gets points for a feature or an upgrade because it looks cool. Every update we make to our roadmap software product first has to provide a satisfactory answer to the question: How will this improve the lives of our customers? It’s this relentless focus on the customer that allowed my colleagues to see the potential in bringing a CSM over to the product side. As the company’s first Customer Success Manager, I’ve spoken with at least as many LIKE.TG customers as any other member of the team. LIKE.TG is customer-focused and understood that this gave me a real insight into our customers’ needs and priorities. With that in mind, let me share the best lessons I learned from making this move. 5 Lessons for Transitioning from Customer Success to Product Manager 1. Understand that product management is customer success A great first step is understanding that these roles are not as different as many people think. Yes, your job description and your day-to-day activities will change. But think about the purpose of both roles. Aren’t customer success managers and product managers after the same thing? Aren’t they both trying to help customers succeed with the help of the company’s products? When you understand the similarities of both roles, you’ll feel much more comfortable taking the steps to make this career move. You’ll also be less likely to fall victim to imposter syndrome and give up. Most important of all, you’ll have the confidence to explain to your employer why your CSM experience could make you a valuable addition to the product team. 2. Try to make the move within the same company A big part of my value to the product management department at LIKE.TG was the fact that I had gained so much first-hand experience supporting users of LIKE.TG’s product. Had I applied for a product manager role here as a CSM from another company, I wouldn’t have developed as much relevant expertise or value. When you want to go from CSM to product manager, try to make the move within the same company. Bonus tip: Another advantage I had working for LIKE.TG was that this company has a long history of hiring from within. I’d also recommend you start by looking for a CSM role in a company known for hiring internally. These are the employers most likely to give you a chance to prove yourself in a new role. 3. You need to really care about your customers As a customer success manager, my favorite part of the job was positively impacting a customer’s day. Usually by helping them solve a tough problem. I realized that a product job would allow me to have an even greater impact on our customers. That’s one of the things that appealed to me most about this role. If you find a similar sense of satisfaction and accomplishment in helping customers, then product management might be for you as well. In fact, this is one way in which CSMs can make the best PMs. It’s important to remember that as a product manager, your focus should always be on serving your customers. The products you develop are a means to that end. Customer success professionals understand this as well as anybody. If you’re motivated to move into product management because you’d like to stop working directly with customers, then you’re going to find your new role disappointing. Outstanding product management isn’t just about heads-down brainstorming with a tiny team and tinkering with prototypes. It’s also about speaking with as many customers and prospects as you can, so you can build products that make their lives better. 4. Voice your interest in product management When I started at LIKE.TG, our CS team consisted of… me. The company was so small, in fact, that I got the chance to help out in many departments—marketing, sales, and product. As the company grew and the teams all expanded, I knew there would eventually be an opportunity in product. I voiced my interest early. Recognizing that I was a serious candidate, our Director of Product, Annie Dunham, began giving me product management tasks while I was still in customer success. By the time an opening arose on the product team, I was in a great position for it. It might seem obvious, but don’t overlook the value of letting your product colleagues know that you’d be interested in contributing to their team. You’ll need to be patient. Eventually, you’ll find an opening. 5. Start honing your product management skills now You’re already using many of the skills every day that you’ll need to be a great product manager. But we can always improve our skills. Given that these skills are going to come in handy in your product management career, I’d highly recommend honing them right now: Become a great listener Pay close attention to what your customers are actually saying, not what you assume they’re saying because you’ve heard similar things before. Hear every customer out fully. Ask open-ended follow-up questions, draw out as much detail as you can. Learn how to say no Practice this by being a great listener. Give the other person a chance to fully express their request or idea or complaint, and then answer. Sometimes saying no can even mean saying “Yes, but not right now because of XYZ.” A lot of times, giving a customer or a colleague a chance to be heard is enough to satisfy them. Get organized Develop routines for your daily activities—work or personal. Whether you’re a CSM or a product manager, you’ll find the firehose of information never seems to slow down. You’ll want strategies and tactics to stay on top of the inflow of new data, rather than allow it to drown you. The sooner you start building these habits—making lists, breaking complex projects into actionable tasks, etc.—the more prepared and successful you’ll be when you start your first job as a product manager! I highly recommend the Ultimate Guide to Product Management Resources for more help. LIKE.TG has some other great interviews with other PMs who took non-traditional routes into the field, including: Engineer to product manager Corporate finance to product manager IT operations to product manager Consulting to product manager If you have any thoughts on how to transition, leave them in the comments below. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"});

Once you’re blessed with the opportunity to expand your product management team with a new hire, you have options to consider. You can hire a senior product manager who will bring their years of real-world experience and savviness to the table, or you can bring on new talent you can mold and mentor yourself. Of course, there’s a little more to this decision. When hiring a senior product manager, their compensation is greater. They are more difficult to find, recruit, and win over. Also, they may have firmly-entrenched ideas about how things should work. Meanwhile, a junior product manager will be a more affordable investment. You might even be able to get two for the same price as one senior PM. But they’ll likely require handholding and closer supervision. They won’t start off with much credibility and could turn out to be the wrong fit for the job. In our 2020 Product Management Report, we found that 23.5% of respondents planned to hire a junior product manager this year. Compared with 48.2% expecting to add a “regular” product manager. Directors of Product and Chief Product Officers were less likely to be hired (at 9.8% and 4.8%, respectively). In our 2021 State of Product Management report, hiring was one of the primary focuses of product leader’s budgets. So why should product team leaders favor experience versus potential? 3 Reasons to Hire a Senior Product Manager 1. You get what you pay for. When you hire a senior product manager, the cost is greater, and there’s no getting around that truth. Someone with years of experience knows their worth and commands a higher salary. A senior product manager can hit the ground running. They won’t be new at being a product manager. They’ll still need to make the rounds getting to know key stakeholders, sit in on some customer interactions, and bone up on the product and its market. They’ve already learned the basics of the job and gone through all the invaluable steps required to take on this role at a new company before. Besides possessing a fundamental grasp of what the role entails, a senior addition to the team brings their specific experiences and expertise. They can begin making keen observations and suggestions predicated on what they’ve dealt with elsewhere. Most importantly, product leaders should start handing off real responsibilities to a new senior hire quickly and with confidence. Their learned experience will shorten the time between their first day on the job and their first days of actually adding value. Getting things off your plate is one of the main perks of expanding your team, so the sooner you can confidently make that happen, the better. 2. Great time investment. Mentoring, coaching, and showing newbies the ropes can be incredibly rewarding. For some managers, it’s their favorite part of the job. But it’s also incredibly time-consuming. Instead of delegating and focusing on something else, you’ve got to keep a close eye on junior staff as they get their sea legs. It’s important to avoid any costly missteps or indirect damage to your own reputation. While building up a bullpen of talent may be a strategic goal for your organization, it’s not expected to come at the expense of delivering fantastic user experiences and increasing revenue and profitability. If you’re spending too much time grooming and nurturing, that means your product’s evolution and growth could suffer. 3. Strong performers elevate teams. Some product leaders worry that bringing on a talented, experienced product professional could come back to haunt them, primarily by outshining their own performance. Bringing on strong performers and positioning them for success is part of being a leader. The benefits these senior staff members bring should raise the profile of the entire product team. There is evidence that the best leaders hire people who are smarter or better than them. Why wouldn’t you want the best players possible on your team? Exceptions To The Rule Are there fresh-faced product professionals that can run circles around established PMs despite their lack of experience? Sure! It’s possible you could luck into an overachieving product savant. One that outperforms their salary and brings incredible value to the organization. But there’s no way to know that before they’re on board until they are in the thick of things. Even then, they’ll need some basic training and additional coaching as they come up to speed. Betting on a promising undiscovered talent can pay massive dividends if they pan out. However, when you only have a small number of hires to make during your tenure, do you want to risk it? This isn’t to say that you should never hire an associate product manager with minimal experience. It’s a longshot; you’ll see the same returns as you would from someone with a proven track record. Addressing Specific Needs Additional headcount is usually intended to serve a specific purpose as few companies add personnel for the heck of it. That’s why it’s important to remember you’re not building an abstractly ideal organization. Instead, you’re actively filling a role that’s desperately needed. The specifics of that need should be the primary driver for the job description and whom you select to bring aboard. Before you stock up on junior product managers to build your mini-empire and celebrate your new staffing budget, take a step back, and consider what will actually be helpful for you and the product organization: Business Analyst Need help with reporting and sorting through reams of data to make informed product decisions? A business analyst could fit the bill, or you could build out a separate analytics team. Product Owner Does the development team need so much attention that there’s no time to think about strategy? Maybe aproduct owner would be the right fit. They would free staff members to focus on their roles while the product manager deals with the day-to-day issues during implementation. Group Product Manager Are there too many products with their own separate schedules, priorities, and customers to supervise? A group product manager can take some of that load and provide the mentoring and attention to detail required. This would help create a consistent approach to product management processes and a single point-person for senior leadership. Senior Product Manager Launching a new product and want to give it the attention it deserves and requires? Hire a senior product manager. Put them on the project and remain confident they won’t have to learn on the job for this important new initiative. Product Onboarding Manager Are you struggling with your product’s successful adoption (s) and need to shrink the time to value? A productonboarding manager can take on a holistic approach to improving this critical stage in thecustomer journey. They do this by improving the KPIs the executive team is counting on. Product Operations Manager Maybe the day-to-day processes and operations are becoming overwhelming in their own right. Do you want someone to own those and take the reigns for those issues? Bringing on aproduct operations manager can manage the tools and processes required to make the product team hum. Invest Wisely in Strategic Staffing You will only have so many opportunities to add headcount to your team, so be sure you’re making the most of each chance you get. Closing gaps in your organization’s collective skill set and bringing on trusted lieutenants will allow you to hit the accelerator and bring better products to the market with fewer missteps and minimal delays. Ask for what you really need, hire the best, and position your team to successfully seize the available opportunities while those windows are still there. In today’s competitive marketplace, you can’t often afford to incubate potential future superstars when you need a solid player today. Watch our webinar, Hiring and Growing a Successful Product Team, to see what product leaders look for when hiring new team members:

Customer feedback is the lifeblood of customer-centricity. It’s impossible to create and improve products without understanding customers’ experience, especially when customers have unengaged and do not provide feedback. Customers don’t buy or use your products, so they have an opportunity to tell you what they think of them. They’re using it because it helps them get their job done, makes their life easier, or brings them a little joy. While some customers may be quite vocal, sometimes customers aren’t engaged. Often customers are unwilling to jump on a call or participate in a user forum. But you can’t limit your feedback collection to the customers who are proactively offering it up. You want to avoid a heavily biased view due to the combination of effusive superfan and complaining detractors dominating the conversation. Instead, to gauge your user base’s temperature, you need to hear from a wide variety of users. That will take a little extra effort. However, a more representative sample will legitimize the feedback you receive. It will paint a truer picture of the user experience. 3 Ways to Gather Feedback from Unengaged Customers During our “Supercharge Your Product Roadmap with Customer Feedback” webinar, Brian Tran, Director of Product Management at UserTesting, urged product managers to figure out why customers/users are less forthcoming with feedback. He also outlines his suggestions on how to get input from unengaged customers. 1. Lean into the pain points when gathering feedback from unengaged customers. Brian Tran suggests leveraging tools that allow you to follow up with users immediately. Especially those who just had a bad experience and might be unengaged. “You can grab them at the point when they’re at their highest level of frustration,” Tran said. “And that’s actually the most valuable time when you want to talk to them and get their feedback.” It’s not always pleasant, but the feedback from these unengaged customers is what you and your team need to hear. When users hit a wall and can’t complete a task, they are at high risk of abandoning your product or decreasing their usage. The wall they hit will provide reduced value in their eyes, which can also impact your ability to monetize the product down the line further. Offering up a channel for quick, instant feedback at these moments can offer many benefits for product teams. First, you’ll get a sense of which friction points are coming into play most often. These points give you ammunition to prioritize addressing those areas in upcoming product releases. Second, you’ll get more information about what the specific issue is. Is it a technical problem? Poor communication or messaging? Faulty business logic or process? Third, you (and your customer support team) will have the opportunity to potentially “rescue” some of these users. You do this by coming to their aid and expressing empathy during their moments of frustration. Instead of finding out the hard way when they quit, and you’re stuck dealing with churn feedback instead. Be sure to keep these pain-point feedback collection exercises as brief and, well, painless as possible for the user. They’re already unhappy. A 12 question form isn’t likely to generate a high response rate, so try sticking to a brief, focused email template. First, ask one or two questions to categorize their issue. Then offer an opportunity for them to provide further details and vent if they’d like. You can always follow up later with a call, email, or survey to dive deeper into their concerns. Read the Customer Interview Tool Box ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '7f735619-2494-4c81-b86b-cf6e764a20c3', {}); 2. Create an incentive. Whenever you’re thinking about soliciting unengaged customer feedback, put yourself in their shoes. They already bought your product or downloaded it, or saw your ads. What’s in it for them to spend their precious time making your job easier? Tran says the trick here is providing a good reason for unengaged customers to spend some of their time giving feedback. Most value rewards. Whether it’s cash, a gift card, an exclusive experience, or even a discount on your product if these folks are getting this “for free.” They’re more likely to give you the time than if you asked them nicely. However, it would help if you made it clear that even though you’re compensating them for their efforts, you still want them to be brutally honest with you regarding their product experience. To avoid any “quid pro quo” scenarios, Tran emphasizes that how you frame things can make a massive difference in the accuracy and transparency of the responses you’ll receive. Be very upfront that you want to hear honest feedback, regardless of how unpleasant it might be. Remind them that your goal is to improve the product, not solicit compliments. If they tell you what’s problematic for them, there’s a better chance that they’ll have a superior experience themselves in the future. So, it’s in their best interests as well to take part and be truthful. 3. Find alternative strategies for collecting feedback from unengaged customers feedback. When a customer isn’t open to participating in a feedback session despite the lure of a reward, it’s time to get creative. You can offer alternative feedback methods, such as surveys since they’re asynchronous. Another tactic is inviting customers to participate in a customer advisory board. Participating in an advisory board will give them a sense of ownership and a stake in the process, far beyond a one-off call or meeting. You can always leverage existing relationships the customer may already have with other folks at your company. Try to find which salespeople or account managers they’ve established a good rapport with and piggyback on those interactions. This rapport could get you an “in” with a customer that has otherwise frozen you out. Alternatively, you could have the colleague they’re close to asking your questions on your behalf. Put It All to Work After all that effort to extract tidbits from unengaged customers, you certainly don’t want to let the feedback all go to waste. Ensure you’ve already set up a practical framework for capturing, organizing, and evaluating customer feedback and putting it to good use during this process. Additionally, it’s always a huge plus to follow up with customers that offered up their opinions and experience and let them know when something they asked for or complained about has been addressed in the product. You can even recruit them to be a beta user if they’re so inclined. Make them more open to future feedback sessions and maybe even get them to provide it proactively. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'd16e75f0-0601-4ef3-909a-e2b4f61f0c9a', {});

I met Jim Semick the first day I started ProductPlan. We took a walk outside the office to talk about the values that drive the company directly from the mind of one of the founders. Outside of the LIKE.TG team, Jim Semick’s energy and passion for learning have cemented him as one of the product community’s leading voices. This year alone, he sparked conversations in the product community from blogs like this one on imposter syndrome to this one on declaring backlog bankruptcy. Most recently, with his recent book on being an essentialist product manager. The book itself is a must-read that you can download for free below. Download The Essentialist Product Manager ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'be753440-dc4d-40c5-9808-cad744d00a28', {}); Getting to Know Jim Semick Jim Semick and I chatted over Zoom to discuss his interests and what the product community can expect from him. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Semick: I’d say my entrepreneurial journey is unique, spanning from product manager to founder. I’m okay with uncertainty. It’s who I am. I am okay with not knowing what the future holds. I haven’t always been that way, but that’s who I am today. I can take reasonable risks, which makes it possible to launch new products or a startup. I like to have fun too — Why bother if it’s not fun? Throughout my career, it’s been imperative for me to pursue my curiosities and challenge myself. I want to learn—whether it’s entrepreneurship, life, or even studying Roman antiquities. With each piece I collect, I’m curious to know everything about it. Where did it come from? What are the stories that came with it? What do you enjoy sharing with the product community? I believe that great products don’t happen by accident—it’s exceptional leadership and customer engagement that genuinely makes a difference. As such, I’m passionate about sharing my experience with future product leaders to build successful products that solve real customer problems. There are quite a few topics I’ve explored over the years. It started with my top passions of market validation and product-market fit. When I’m talking with customers, I’m driven to understand what problem we’re solving and figuring out all the levers that startups can experiment with to make a successful product. I’ve conducted hundreds of validation interviews with customers and prospects for different software products I’ve helped launch—I love sharing some of the techniques I’ve learned about conducting great customer interviews. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'ad657ba8-be75-4be1-a163-e71ff5498018', {}); Validation of products, customers, and markets is a skill that not many product managers and entrepreneurs know much about. It’s frustrating to see new startups and products fail. I know that failure is sometimes necessary but often avoidable. The risks that teams take without doing the validation breaks my heart. You could pinpoint the start of the failure to not understanding the customer’s problem or misinterpreting the customer’s need. That frustration a few years ago inspired me to start writing and speaking on the topic at conferences and lecturing in various programs at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The Feature-Less Roadmap: Using Themes and North Stars to Ground Your Product Roadmap If I can help in some way to improve a company’s success in some way—I want to. Lately, I’ve been writing and speaking a lot about essentialist product management, entrepreneurship, and building winning software products. In the last few years, I’ve also written books on SaaS pricing, product roadmaps, and product leadership. They’re available to read here: hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'fe899f95-5814-4253-9ac2-4cb78e40ef2a', {}); hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3aa6cb5b-cf9b-4527-a6f0-4492930dea99', {}); hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'c6a78b23-a2f3-46e3-bc23-4578f7506068', {}); I enjoy guest authoring for various publications and talking on numerous podcasts. In addition to speaking, I also mentor and invest in my community in Santa Barbara, California. I love to travel, paddleboard, and read as much as I can. Tell us a bit more about your career. Semick: For almost 20 years, I have taken new disruptive software products from concept to market launch. I’ve perfected a recipe for building and launching great products that have a greater chance of succeeding in the market. My current company, LIKE.TG, creates software used by thousands of product teams at the world’s leading companies to power their product roadmaps. I started LIKE.TG as part of my entrepreneurial journey. With my co-founder Greg Goodman, we started the company with the end in mind and reverse-engineered the company to align with our objectives and values. I talk about this in the book Product-Market Fit. I’ve previously helped validate and launch some of the earliest SaaS products, including GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, and AppFolio. What can a reader expect from Jim Semick? Semick: Writing and sharing my message has flowed seamlessly from my passions. I write a lot about topics that mirror the stage and lifecycle that LIKE.TG is in. I would talk about start-ups, lean-market validation launching, product discovery, and uncovering problems in the early days. That was my mindset. Then my talks evolved to be about product roadmaps. They then transformed into conversations on how we communicate. I’m always learning new product management things (product ops, product growth, decisions through metrics). You can definitely expect to hear more about how product managers can use the philosophy of essentialism to focus on what matters and get more meaning from their work. I’ve spoken about essentialism for various product management groups and am conducting workshops. I owe it to the community to keep providing new ways to look at how we’ve been doing things. Takeaways Jim is open to speaking engagements and connecting with product leaders on LinkedIn. Sometimes, it’s easier to put a face to the name. Hear more about Jim in his Product Leader Spotlight: Jim Semick, below. You can also read more about Jim’s speaking topics and writing at JimSemick.com.