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Launch Management: A Tour of LIKE.TG’s New Solution for Bringing Products to Market
The ugly truth is product launches are a messy business. At times, they can be overwhelming, impossible nightmares. There are launch activities to track, expectations to manage, and stakeholders to hold accountable. Product teams carry this burden alone without the help of proper tooling.
Launch Management is a first-of-its-kind tool for product teams that helps you wrangle the chaos of a product launch. We are incredibly excited to show you how you can guarantee launch readiness, all within a single platform. For more, check out our guided product tour of Launch Management functionality provided below.
Today our Launch Management solution enters General Availability as an exclusive Enterprise Plan feature set. For our LIKE.TG customers, if you have questions about our pricing plans or want to see a demo, you can reach out to your Customer Success Manager, or you can schedule a demo here.
Or, if you’re new to LIKE.TG and want to try everything we offer, including best-in-class roadmapping and tailored launch planning, you can also sign up for our two-week free trial.
But first, let us take a step back and explain how we realized the opportunity for launch management.
So why did we build Launch Management?
Ask any product manager about their launch process, and you will likely hear something like this: “It’s a nightmare. There’s no standard process for go-to-market. It’s confusing for everyone.”
Or maybe something like this: “It’s a nightmare. I’ve never worked for a company that had an airtight GTM process. There’s always a stakeholder who wants to be more in the loop and says there isn’t enough communication.”
Or even this: “Lol, what launch process?”
Disclaimer: These are all actual statements our customers made when we spoke to them about their launch process!
Product managers are some of the most organized people in the world. They must be to rally their entire organization around the product strategy successfully. So it’s telling that such a critical piece of the product strategy—its execution—is described as a trainwreck.
However, it’s not their fault. Launching a new product or feature requires the complex orchestration of multiple moving pieces. It extends beyond the product and engineering teams to include marketing, sales, customer success, legal—the list goes on. It’s one of the few instances where an entire organization collaborates to do a single project simultaneously. Of course, it’s a mess.
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What challenges does Launch Management solve?
Many of our customers spoke candidly about their challenges with inconsistent and disorganized launch processes. Our research discovered three core challenges at the heart of the problem.
1. Lack of visibility across teams
There is no single place to check the status of an upcoming launch and any deliverables it requires. Instead, that information is often scattered across documents and minds, spanning teams and, at times, entire departments. To uncover what needs to be done next is to go on a scavenger hunt. The result is wasting valuable time and fraying nerves.
2. Building manual, time-intensive reports to access launch progress
Many product managers are stuck building manual, time-intensive reports to assess launch progress and identify loose ends. Time spent here is time spent away from work product managers want to be doing: talking with customers and collaborating with their dev teams to build new cool things.
3. Inconsistent and disorganized launch processes
And finally, the ad hoc, figure-it-out-as-we-go nature of these proceedings means no two launches follow the same process. Instead, launches are inconsistent and disorganized. Repeating successful launches isn’t easily done. Failed launches have no easy answer to the question, “why didn’t this work?” And every new launch must start from scratch.
In many cases, stakeholders involved in the launch aren’t clear on expectations and therefore default to peppering the launch leader with the dreaded “so what should I do next?” question. Instead of distributing mutual ownership of the launch among all relevant stakeholders, the lion’s share of the responsibility rests with the product team. If the product team doesn’t make sure it happens, it simply doesn’t.
The problem with status quo solutions
These challenges haven’t had great solutions. Yes, you can build a launch process on a house of cards using spreadsheets, slide decks, and a jumbled array of documents. But that leaves you chasing the work when you’d rather be directing the strategy.
To make matters worse, there are no purpose-built tools for launching a new product.
There are plenty of tools that help you organize a project. They might allow you to plan deliverables, assign owners, and create due dates—all of which are useful in planning a product launch. But it’s rare for tools like these to be managed by the product team, and they never live alongside other important pieces of the product puzzle, like the roadmap.
A launch process that’s severed from the product strategy is a dangerous thing. It encourages messy handoffs while creating unintended silos.
Ideally, your product vision will carry from your roadmap to the launch plan. You want every deliverable created—whether a marketing asset, a sales talk track or a customer support article—to demonstrate a firm understanding of the “why” behind the product. If you create these deliverables in a silo, it’s less likely they will leverage important pieces of product knowledge. They may not empathize with key customer pain points, for instance, or show little understanding of the target audience.
The cost of a bad launch
It’s difficult to overstate the cost of a bad launch. There is, of course, the opportunity cost to the product team when things break down. Instead of doing more important work, they must play the role of project manager and hold things together for their go-to-market team.
Occasionally, a launch cobbled together on the fly like this is a success. Even if the road was a painful one. The cost of product diverting their attention to wrangle the chaos might not be felt until later when it becomes clear other opportunities slipped by the wayside while the product team had their hands full.
But more likely, a bad launch means, well, a bad launch. That means your product isn’t being pushed by your enablement team or sold by the sales team because there was no clear direction or ownership over key deliverables. A bad launch might result in poor customer awareness of the new thing you’ve built or, perhaps worse, a betrayal of customer expectations. A bad launch can also result in a delayed launch, meaning less time on the market, generating revenue for the company.
Overall, a launch that flops is painful for everyone involved. It takes a cut from sales expectations. In addition, it hampers the marketing team’s ability to bring in new leads. It steals a vital tool away from customer success in their fight against churn. This reflects poorly on the product team, who tragically may have built the perfect product. The launch just didn’t do it justice.
Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be this way! Let’s dive into an overview of LIKE.TG’s new Launch Management solution.
A guided tour of Launch Management
To ensure every launch is a winning launch, you now have Launch Management. With our solution, you can:
Create thoughtful launch strategies that your entire team can get behind
Build tailored plans for each launch, assign due dates, and assess progress
While creating shared ownership of your go-to-market process
The Launch Dashboard: Ditch the hassle of weekly launch reports
Welcome to the Launch Management Dashboard. This is your 10,000-foot view of all upcoming launches in a single place. We designed the Dashboard to wrangle together all the important details you need to see at a glance about every launch you have planned.
Use the Dashboard to see all upcoming launches and their respective launch dates. You can also use the Dashboard to track progress on individual launches, which is calculated automatically according to the percentage of completed deliverables in the Launch Checklist (more on that later).
Based on the progress of your launch and its launch date, you can assign each launch a status: low risk, medium risk, high risk, or launched.
While the Launch Dashboard is fantastic for helping you and your team stay organized in your go-to-market planning, it’s also the perfect place to send executive stakeholders whenever they come sniffing around asking for an update. It houses everything the curious senior executive needs to feel “in the know” about your launch strategy.
And as a bonus, it allows you to sidestep having to create manual, time-intensive reports every week.
The Launch Checklist: Manage the launch strategy, not the work
The Launch Checklist is where a product launch comes together. A successful launch includes a tailored array of deliverables. In some cases, the list may be small. It might only include release notes, a new section in a product support article, and a slide for the sales team.
Other launches might require the kitchen sink. In either case, for a new product or feature to land successfully in your customers’ laps, you need other members of your organization to pitch in and help support.
We designed the Launch Checklist for this purpose. Many product people we work with described how the handoff between the release of a new product and its launch often felt like tossing items over a fence, hoping others would be on the other side to receive them and run. You have complete visibility into every task required to see a launch through to success with the Launch Checklist.
The Launch Checklist has a few purpose-built tools to help you do this. Each item added to the Launch Checklist has a place for a brief description, a due date, and an owner. So, you can assign anyone in your account (both editors and viewers) as a deliverable owner. Upon assigning, that person receives an email alerting them to the required task.
The goal is to create co-ownership of the launch. We’ve heard many horror stories of the one-person launch, where someone on the product team ends up holding the launch together through sheer force of will (likely complimented by a disorganized flurry of ad hoc meetings and one-on-one Slack conversations).
These kinds of launches unravel quickly and come at a significant opportunity cost to the product team, who end up playing project manager and dealing with all the questions from confused stakeholders.
Instead, the Launch Checklist can be your central place to plan a launch tailored to the released product or feature and get buy-in early from your cross-functional partners. And if you give your cross-functional team editor permissions, it’s also a great best practice to have them help you determine which deliverables you commit to as a team.
Consider delegating the customer communication plan to a marketing or customer success person. Have your sales engineer come up with any deliverables needed to train your sales team on how to demo a new feature. These are great ways to encourage others to feel a sense of ownership over the launch. You’ll need their expertise to help guide your new product to market.
All this might beg the question: what should go into your Launch Checklist? There are no hard and fast rules. Every launch will be different and depend on the product itself, your customers, and your organization’s makeup. That said, you can find 20 great ideas for your next product launch checklist here to help get you started.
Connect your launch plans to your roadmap
One of the benefits of having your launch plan in the same platform as your roadmap is it helps ensure your product vision influences your go-to-market deliverables. We make this easy with the “Features Included in the Launch” module found to the left of your Launch Checklist.
Your roadmap houses all kinds of helpful information about your product. Many of our customers use their roadmap to document their roadmap strategy (what they’re building and when) and the why behind the features they prioritize. They will add context to the descriptions within their bars and often link to essential assets like objective documents or customer-facing collateral.
This information is gold for anyone planning a marketing campaign or coming up with sales talk tracks to support the launch. Adding features to your launch allows cross-functional partners easy access to what is on deck for the release and the vital context fueling it. It also encourages team members outside of the product team to read your roadmap because the information there is now actionable.
The connection works both ways. From your LIKE.TG roadmap, you can also assign an individual bar or container to a specific launch in Launch Management, allowing you to quickly switch between your strategy and your execution plan with a click.
Try Launch Management today!
Launch Management is available as a part of our Enterprise plan and our two-week free trial. If you’d like to learn more, schedule 45 minutes with us, and we’ll tailor a demo to your unique launch goals and challenges.
We’re looking forward to turning your next product launch into a success!
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Roadmapping Frameworks: How to Set Goals for Growth
Let’s imagine you’re planning a trip across the country. You know where you’re departing from, where you want to get to, and what resources you have available (like the vehicle, budget, traveling gear, etc.), so all that is left to do is to map your way there.
There are a couple of ways you can do this: you can plan your trip according to the time you have available (i.e., you need to get from point A to point B in x amount of days), or you trace your route based on the sights you don’t want to miss. Another option is to be more flexible, choosing the road you want to travel and picking the stops along the way.
Product roadmapping frameworks work in a very similar way. There are a few routes you can take to achieve your product goals. As you choose which one you want to take, you must consider how you will allocate your resources along the way and set milestones to check off as you get through. Let’s map this out.
Recap: What are Product Roadmaps?
A product roadmap is a holistic visual document that outlines your product’s growth path. A stellar roadmap includes the release of new features, key dates, product updates, and the product vision – giving context to the product lifecycle.
Product roadmaps are a good way for organizations to prepare for the future. If there’s a new product to launch, the tasks and timeframes will also be clear to everyone.
Why is roadmapping important for product led-growth?
In the era of product-led growth, the product roadmap is essential. Roadmapping helps you list all your competing priorities and narrow them down to what’s most important and relevant for the team and stakeholders.
Prioritization is another crucial part of product-led growth. According to LIKE.TG’s 2022 State of Product Management Report, it’s the most challenging aspect of product management, with 22 percent of survey respondents ranking it as their biggest hurdle.
Hence, besides electing the roadmapping framework that works best for your organization’s goals, choosing the right prioritization framework to help you determine the most important tasks and milestones along the way is also important.
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An effective product roadmap will:
Support vision and strategy
A product roadmap will outline how your product vision and strategy can become a reality. It should convey the strategic direction for your product and tie it back to the company’s strategy. But it should also be a source of inspiration, motivation, and shared ownership of the product and its successes.
Guide teams toward success
Sometimes we know what success looks like, but while managing all branches of product development, we can forget the actions needed to succeed. A product roadmap will keep you on track.
Strengthen internal alignment
Strong product-led teams have strong and well-oriented synergy between engineers, product leaders, marketers, customer support, and all other stakeholders. A product roadmap will serve as a guide to keep teams aligned and accountable for the same goals and milestones.
Help communicate with external stakeholders and customers
A strong customer and stakeholder relationship is one that acts as a partnership. Achieving that requires a transparent line of communication that can paint a picture of the company’s evolution and future.
With a customer-facing roadmap, you can address common questions from your customers like:
What is the company working on right now?
What new features and updates are coming next?
Why is the company doing what they are doing?
What to avoid when building a product roadmap
A common and unfortunate mistake made by SaaS product teams is to treat the roadmap as a static, archival document developed early in the product development lifecycle.
A successful product roadmap evolves alongside your product. Traditional roadmapping methods like spreadsheets and Gantt charts can be impractical for the team as they focus primarily on task management rather than setting actionable milestones that center on product success. A visual and collaborative roadmap can be more effective in communicating and tracking progress.
Who is Responsible for Roadmapping?
Creating a product roadmap is primarily a responsibility of the Product team, but it is also a group effort as it concerns all internal stakeholders. This combination of collaboration and discrete ownership gets stakeholders onboard while maintaining informational integrity and avoiding a free-for-all atmosphere.
Product management begins with a clear understanding of the product’s and the organization’s strategic objectives. Then, with the desired outcomes in mind, product management creates the key themes for this portion of the product’s lifecycle.
Tip: Chameleon has an excellent guide to Product Management frameworks that can help you strategize your growth path.
In a remote-first world, collaboration can become somewhat of a challenge. However, there are frameworks and tools that can facilitate successful collaboration, like LIKE.TG’s dynamic roadmapping tool that offers key features that enable collaboration:
Custom views: show stakeholders exactly what they need to see
Roadmap level conversations: hold and document conversations within the roadmap
Integrations: connect your roadmap with your tech stack to track progress, status, and completions.
Watch our webinar: Working Better Together: How to Collaborate in a Remote World
3 Examples of Roadmapping Frameworks
Let’s go back to the cross-country road trip analogy at the start of this article. If you’re starting to map your trip out, you typically ask yourself the following questions:
Where am I beginning my journey?
What is my final destination?
What resources do I have?
How long do I have to get there?
What are the routes I should consider?
Who else is involved in my trip, and what are their goals?
As you answer these questions, you’ll better understand your goals and what roadmapping framework makes the most sense, given your resources, constraints, and priorities. We’ve selected three frameworks that work well for product teams.
Timeline roadmaps
If you’re working on a new product release and have it tied with a specific date-based event in the future, the best strategic move is to use a timeline roadmap. This type of roadmap outlines every task and step your team members need to take to achieve the final goal and the timeframe to complete each milestone.
The timeline roadmap is a visual representation of a strictly time-constrained workflow. That said, this type of roadmap would suit a Scrum workflow within sprints.
To make it easy to understand, you can include the upcoming tasks that need to be completed and attach key dates and other relevant information. Share the roadmap across the teams in your organization to ensure everyone is on the same page.
Here is an example of a Release Plan Template
Swimlane roadmaps
On the other hand, if your product or feature release is not explicitly connected to a specific date, you can exclude the dates from your roadmap. Instead, you could make it quarterly-based with an overview of the planned product lifecycle development.
The swimlane roadmap is also a good choice for emphasizing what is planned, what’s in progress right now, and what has already been completed.
Here’s a template to help you build a roadmap aligned with your product development
Flexible roadmaps
Flexible roadmaps are another way of organizing the roadmap for your next product or feature release. It can be a release-based, an outcome-based roadmap, a roadmap based on customer requests, or any other type that suits your needs that aren’t strictly related to a specific timeframe.
Besides that, in our guide to flexible roadmaps, we also talk about the value that lean, feedback-oriented roadmaps can bring to your team – and your customers.
You can use in-app surveys to evaluate customer satisfaction, include them in feature ratings or request voting, and collect feedback to make better-informed decisions. Use the insights you gain to validate your feature ideas and further iterate your roadmap.
Product landscapes vs. roadmaps
While a roadmap answers the questions of “what” and “when” to build, a landscape answers the question “why”. In other words, a product landscape gives a broader picture of the product’s context. It includes the product mission, go-to-market strategy, and the overall position of the product in the market, along with the desired vision of where the product is going.
Tools for Successful Roadmaps
Alright, now that you know what framework works best for you, it’s time to build your roadmap. Here are a couple of tools to help you in the process.
LIKE.TG: Build your roadmaps
LIKE.TG is a roadmap platform that aligns team members in a visual, dynamic, and intuitive interface that concentrates your roadmapping efforts in a single, customizable space.
Chameleon: Gather user feedback
Chameleon is a Digital Adoption Platform that allows you to create code-free and native-looking in-product experiences that boost product activation and adoption. You can run in-app surveys to gather contextual user feedback and use it to inform your strategy.
Choosing the Right Framework
Whether you’re starting your roadmap from scratch or revisiting and updating your existing one, we hope this guide will help you choose the right framework.
Before you get to it, let’s just recap some key points:
Use your product strategy and vision to guide you in the roadmapping process.
Prioritize tasks and milestones that will get you closer to your ultimate goal.
Avoid static roadmaps that do not evolve alongside your product.
Leverage collaboration in the process of building your roadmap.
Use different SaaS tools to optimize your roadmapping process.
See you at the end of the road!
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6 Tips for Building Your First Launch Checklist in LIKE.TG
Launching a product is not for the faint of heart. So many things, both large and small, can go wrong. In 1985 Coca-Cola canceled New Coke because the product team didn’t confirm that Coca-Cola drinkers would accept a change to their favorite soft drink. Samsung had to recall its Note 7 smartphones because they were exploding. And Google Glass suffered from privacy concerns, bugs, low battery life, bans from public spaces, and an inability to live up to the hype all stymied public adoption of the technology.
Thankfully, few product launches fail in such spectacular fashion as those examples.
More often than not, product launches simply fall flat with the market, and often lack true product-market fit. In my experience in working with product teams, one of the most common reasons for lackluster product launches is ineffective communication throughout the launch process. And I’m not talking about a lack of emails, Slack messages, or meetings. We can all agree that there usually is plenty of communication happening at any given time—especially in a remote work environment.
If it’s not a lack of words, what makes communication and organization ineffective during a product launch? More often than not, it’s a lack of listening and intent where cross-functional teams talk at each other rather than collaborating together to achieve an outcome.
Is Your Product Launch Cross-Functional Team a Track and Field Team, or a Bobsled Team?
Right now, many product folks are running launches like they’re a track and field team in the Olympics. Every department has a separate job; they’re a sprinter, a long jumper, or pole vaulter. The pole vaulter can’t tell the long jumper how to jump farther, and the sprinter is solely focused on their run, so they can’t even help another runner participating in hurdles. They’re all participating in separate events. And while they’re all contributing to the total medal count (Cue: USA chant!), the athletes aren’t actually working together.
So, while individual medals sound great, it doesn’t quite work out as well when it comes to product launches. And that’s because product launches are a team sport.
What cross-functional teams should strive to be like in product launches is a bobsled team.
In this scenario, everyone is doing their job in sync with one another, and it directly impacts the shared outcome—a successful product launch. And there’s no better feeling than when everyone is doing their best. That’s how you get Cool Runnings!
If you’re ready for your next product launch to run as smooth as a bobsled on an Olympic ice track, the key is two-way communication. I’ll explain what I mean in this post when I say that product launch communication needs to be a two-way street. I’ll also give you a couple of suggestions for making it happen with your team.
Transforming Your Product Launch Communication Into a Two-Way Street
First, let me start by breaking down the difference between what I have deemed one-way and two-way street communication.
One-way communication is like building a baseball field in the middle of a cornfield in Kansas and expecting people to show up (are you tired of sports movie references yet?). Kevin Costner clearly made it work, but the odds of success in the real world are extremely low.
In this case, product folks tell other stakeholders what they are doing, why, and when. When the stakeholders get confused, the solution is to repeat the information. On Zoom meetings, in documents, and on a roadmap.
The one-way communication is often mistaken for alignment, but in reality, all you have done is pushed information and hope the right things happen.
In contrast, two-way street communication is about presenting your launch plans and asking for feedback. It relies on the product person understanding what the stakeholders are (or aren’t) excited about and what they will need to be able to do their jobs well. It’s also about making sure they understand what they need to do to do their jobs well. The most significant benefit of two-way communication is that everyone becomes invested in the outcome because they feel like a key part of the launch process rather than a passive player in the product person’s plan.
To drive home the difference between one-way and two-way street communication, we created this helpful comic:
Two-way communication ties back to the idea that product folks need to focus on building relationships with key stakeholders. And as Simon Sinek shared, “Strong relationships are based on trust and communication. But if there is no communication, there can be no trust.”
Source: LinkedIn
When you focus on two-way communication, you are instilling trust in stakeholders. You show this by welcoming and valuing their input in the launch prep process.
What Two-Way Product Launch Communication Looks Like in Practice
Achieving two-way communication in product launches takes a concerted effort—especially from the product person leading the charge.
1. You’re speaking with product launch stakeholders early and often.
Communicating your product launch strategy is an iterative process requiring you to communicate with stakeholders at every step of the process. A lack of communication destroys any sense of alignment and cross-functional flow.
Your product roadmap needs to communicate the product team’s strategic goals and top priorities as they relate to the business’s strategic goals. At the end of the day, what the product and development teams build is to serve the customer after all. Stakeholders may require you to provide them with status updates, while marketing may need information on how to appeal to your target audience.
Roadmaps are great resources to communicate the status of initiatives and provide milestones that reflect your strategic goals. Two-way communication in product launches breaks down silos and can help mitigate any bottlenecks throughout the launch process.
2. You’re making yourself available for stakeholder questions and proactively providing guidance throughout the launch-prep stage.
As the product professional driving the launch, you are the main point of contact and information for all company stakeholders. The key is to understand what your cross-functional team needs to be successful and use your interactions with them to help them navigate what is often a complicated and long process.
It’s important to not drive yourself crazy trying to assume you understand all of your stakeholders’ needs and concerns. The truth is, you are not a mind reader. But you can use your product experience to hone in on questions to ask your stakeholders, like:
Do you understand the timeline of the product launch?
Is your team prepared for the launch?
What can the product team provide you to craft an effective marketing message?
Do you feel the product addresses our customer’s concerns?
Do you have any insights into how customers may react or any thoughts about the questions customers may ask?
Implementing two-way communication allows you to clearly define to stakeholders the goals and objectives of your launch. You can achieve this by setting up 1:1 meetings with stakeholders from various departments.
3. The conversation doesn’t end when the product is launched.
A successful product launch doesn’t end once the product hits the market. Keeping an eye on how the market is responding to your product can embolden your team or reveal major gaps in the product launch process.
Your team will recognize a successful product launch when end-users engage with your product or service. By providing marketing and sales with enough information, your end-user clearly understands the benefits of your product or service.
After the launch, your team should continue engaging with your customers. Customer feedback can provide your team with product insights to assist your team in their product launch. The product launch process is an iterative process. With each launch comes new findings.
Go for Gold with Your Next Product Launch
Product Launches and Olympic Bobsledding have one thing in common: both are exhilarating.
A lack of listening and intent can derail your product launch. Clear communication allows stakeholders to fill in knowledge gaps or provide extra resources to streamline the launch process. Break down those communication silos with better communication.
Two-way communication and cross-functional alignment provide your team with the support to launch a successful product. A successful launch gives you the privilege to make the impossible, possible.
Fostering Collective Development, Bonding, and Connection at Product Plan Fest 2022
Many of us have been to a corporate event at some point in our careers. Often they focused on lengthy training sessions, had a high-stakes environment of “impressing your boss,” and the cocktail hour mingling that was more painful than relaxing. While the COVID pandemic put these events on hiatus, they sadly still exist. But we knew it didn’t have to be this way. That’s why LIKE.TG purposefully created an experience that flipped this narrative.
LIKE.TG’s all-company event, known as Fest, started many years back when our first remote team was hired and began to experience the common disconnect between in-office and remote work. Far before the COVID pandemic, these experiences were real and something employers needed to solve. Looking back, we feel lucky that we channeled a lot of focus and effort toward creating an equitable work experience for in-office and remote employees well before the world was thrust into it with little to no warning or time to plan.
Fest created a time when employees from near and far came together to grow personally and professionally, all while having fun. The ultimate goal was to increase employee engagement, satisfaction, and stickiness at the company.
We’re creating all-employee events that make sense for the moment
LIKE.TG’s Fest has always been and will continue to be organic to where the company and employee needs are at that time. In years past, Fest included developer-specific hackathons, sushi dinners, problem-solving sessions, murder mystery parties, scavenger hunts, etc. You name it; we probably did it! No matter what the team needed, the company looked for creative ways to provide that in a collective experience. The common denominator is that we built Fest to meet our employee’s needs, not our own – this may be the primary differentiating factor from other corporate events. There is something for everyone, and no detail is overlooked.
Bringing a rapidly growing team together for connection, fun, and appreciation
This year, Fest included three days in beautiful Santa Barbara, California. Team members flew in from near and far (some literally across the globe!) to connect over various activities designed for their unique roles and needs. This year’s Fest was a long time coming and had a unique challenge because the team is the largest it has ever been in the history of ProductPlan. Last quarter alone, we hired over twenty new employees across Product, Engineering, People and Culture, Sales, and Customer Success! With so many new faces on Zoom, we needed to bring the company together in person.
There were fun moments of food trucks, sunrise yoga, late-night fire pit shenanigans, beach volleyball, and trivia on topics such as diversity, culture, and inclusion. We even had a wonderful and insightful keynote presentation from Product Management thought leader, Dan Olsen. However, the magic of our Fest was the enhancement of our company culture. We wove our values of Hustle, Humility, and Heart into every moment of the event. In addition, we built bridges across departments with cross-collaboration sessions. We hosted educational training and added fun competitions, including one around Quarterly Business Reviews. We also made sure to show our team members some personalized appreciation.
At the end of the day, the little moments matter. For example, we asked our team members about their favorite snacks and personalized their welcome bags. In addition, each manager wrote unique appreciation cards to their employees. It may seem small, but when a team member opened their welcome bag and saw their favorite chips or beef jerky, they knew we cared about their individual needs.
These moments break down the anxieties some have with meeting so many new people for the first time off Zoom. All of these touches of appreciation culminated on the last day when we celebrated our company’s success.
We’re already looking forward to next year’s Fest
Although three days feel like a whirlwind, we’re thrilled with its impact on our team. In fact, over 90 percent of LIKE.TGners said that Fest increased their feeling of connection with the company and peers. I am already excited to start planning next year’s event!
If LIKE.TG sounds like the right fit for your next chapter, we’d love to hear from you. Take a look at our open roles at productplan.com/careers.
Why Product Launch Communication is a Two-Way Street
Launching a product is not for the faint of heart. So many things, both large and small, can go wrong. In 1985 Coca-Cola canceled New Coke because the product team didn’t confirm that Coca-Cola drinkers would accept a change to their favorite soft drink. Samsung had to recall its Note 7 smartphones because they were exploding. And Google Glass suffered from privacy concerns, bugs, low battery life, bans from public spaces, and an inability to live up to the hype all stymied public adoption of the technology.
Thankfully, few product launches fail in such spectacular fashion as those examples.
More often than not, product launches simply fall flat with the market, and often lack true product-market fit. In my experience in working with product teams, one of the most common reasons for lackluster product launches is ineffective communication throughout the launch process. And I’m not talking about a lack of emails, Slack messages, or meetings. We can all agree that there usually is plenty of communication happening at any given time—especially in a remote work environment.
If it’s not a lack of words, what makes communication and organization ineffective during a product launch? More often than not, it’s a lack of listening and intent where cross-functional teams talk at each other rather than collaborating together to achieve an outcome.
Is Your Product Launch Cross-Functional Team a Track and Field Team, or a Bobsled Team?
Right now, many product folks are running launches like they’re a track and field team in the Olympics. Every department has a separate job; they’re a sprinter, a long jumper, or pole vaulter. The pole vaulter can’t tell the long jumper how to jump farther, and the sprinter is solely focused on their run, so they can’t even help another runner participating in hurdles. They’re all participating in separate events. And while they’re all contributing to the total medal count (Cue: USA chant!), the athletes aren’t actually working together.
So, while individual medals sound great, it doesn’t quite work out as well when it comes to product launches. And that’s because product launches are a team sport.
What cross-functional teams should strive to be like in product launches is a bobsled team.
In this scenario, everyone is doing their job in sync with one another, and it directly impacts the shared outcome—a successful product launch. And there’s no better feeling than when everyone is doing their best. That’s how you get Cool Runnings!
If you’re ready for your next product launch to run as smooth as a bobsled on an Olympic ice track, the key is two-way communication. I’ll explain what I mean in this post when I say that product launch communication needs to be a two-way street. I’ll also give you a couple of suggestions for making it happen with your team.
Transforming Your Product Launch Communication Into a Two-Way Street
First, let me start by breaking down the difference between what I have deemed one-way and two-way street communication.
One-way communication is like building a baseball field in the middle of a cornfield in Kansas and expecting people to show up (are you tired of sports movie references yet?). Kevin Costner clearly made it work, but the odds of success in the real world are extremely low.
In this case, product folks tell other stakeholders what they are doing, why, and when. When the stakeholders get confused, the solution is to repeat the information. On Zoom meetings, in documents, and on a roadmap.
The one-way communication is often mistaken for alignment, but in reality, all you have done is pushed information and hope the right things happen.
In contrast, two-way street communication is about presenting your launch plans and asking for feedback. It relies on the product person understanding what the stakeholders are (or aren’t) excited about and what they will need to be able to do their jobs well. It’s also about making sure they understand what they need to do to do their jobs well. The most significant benefit of two-way communication is that everyone becomes invested in the outcome because they feel like a key part of the launch process rather than a passive player in the product person’s plan.
To drive home the difference between one-way and two-way street communication, we created this helpful comic:
Two-way communication ties back to the idea that product folks need to focus on building relationships with key stakeholders. And as Simon Sinek shared, “Strong relationships are based on trust and communication. But if there is no communication, there can be no trust.”
Source: LinkedIn
When you focus on two-way communication, you are instilling trust in stakeholders. You show this by welcoming and valuing their input in the launch prep process.
What Two-Way Product Launch Communication Looks Like in Practice
Achieving two-way communication in product launches takes a concerted effort—especially from the product person leading the charge.
1. You’re speaking with product launch stakeholders early and often.
Communicating your product launch strategy is an iterative process requiring you to communicate with stakeholders at every step of the process. A lack of communication destroys any sense of alignment and cross-functional flow.
Your product roadmap needs to communicate the product team’s strategic goals and top priorities as they relate to the business’s strategic goals. At the end of the day, what the product and development teams build is to serve the customer after all. Stakeholders may require you to provide them with status updates, while marketing may need information on how to appeal to your target audience.
Roadmaps are great resources to communicate the status of initiatives and provide milestones that reflect your strategic goals. Two-way communication in product launches breaks down silos and can help mitigate any bottlenecks throughout the launch process.
2. You’re making yourself available for stakeholder questions and proactively providing guidance throughout the launch-prep stage.
As the product professional driving the launch, you are the main point of contact and information for all company stakeholders. The key is to understand what your cross-functional team needs to be successful and use your interactions with them to help them navigate what is often a complicated and long process.
It’s important to not drive yourself crazy trying to assume you understand all of your stakeholders’ needs and concerns. The truth is, you are not a mind reader. But you can use your product experience to hone in on questions to ask your stakeholders, like:
Do you understand the timeline of the product launch?
Is your team prepared for the launch?
What can the product team provide you to craft an effective marketing message?
Do you feel the product addresses our customer’s concerns?
Do you have any insights into how customers may react or any thoughts about the questions customers may ask?
Implementing two-way communication allows you to clearly define to stakeholders the goals and objectives of your launch. You can achieve this by setting up 1:1 meetings with stakeholders from various departments.
3. The conversation doesn’t end when the product is launched.
A successful product launch doesn’t end once the product hits the market. Keeping an eye on how the market is responding to your product can embolden your team or reveal major gaps in the product launch process.
Your team will recognize a successful product launch when end-users engage with your product or service. By providing marketing and sales with enough information, your end-user clearly understands the benefits of your product or service.
After the launch, your team should continue engaging with your customers. Customer feedback can provide your team with product insights to assist your team in their product launch. The product launch process is an iterative process. With each launch comes new findings.
Go for Gold with Your Next Product Launch
Product Launches and Olympic Bobsledding have one thing in common: both are exhilarating.
A lack of listening and intent can derail your product launch. Clear communication allows stakeholders to fill in knowledge gaps or provide extra resources to streamline the launch process. Break down those communication silos with better communication.
Two-way communication and cross-functional alignment provide your team with the support to launch a successful product. A successful launch gives you the privilege to make the impossible, possible.
The Benefits of Adding More Product Roadmap Viewers in LIKE.TG
The Benefits of Adding More Product Roadmap Viewers in LIKE.TG
Product leaders across industries—software, finance, and healthcare—want a centralized location to house product initiatives and updates. However, many waste valuable time updating inflexible spreadsheets or slide decks that fail to capture a product strategy effectively. Instead, product leaders can transcend the confines of these antiquated tools by using a purpose-built roadmap solution to add roadmap viewers.
A Single Source of Truth
As a product professional, your product roadmap is your single source of truth. Your roadmap enables you to present your team’s big-picture goals to internal stakeholders. However, to ensure you don’t silo stakeholders or overwhelm them with unnecessary information, you must provide each department with a customizable view of your roadmap. It’s a balance to share the product strategy in a clear and easy-to-digest format for all audiences.
This article covers the benefits of using a product roadmap to break down the naturally occurring silos amongst teams. When you add more product roadmap viewers, each stakeholder comes with a unique perspective. You also encourage open communication and collaboration, which pushes your product to new heights.
Cultivate Collaboration and Communication
Your roadmap serves as the single source of truth to gain buy-in from these stakeholders. Yet, how do you create transparency during a product launch and present the correct information to the right stakeholder?
You can empower them by granting them access to view your roadmap to achieve these beneficial outcomes. Directly viewing your product roadmap provides transparency and lets stakeholders stay up-to-date on the launch process.
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The Benefits of Adding More Viewers to Your Roadmap
When communicating product initiatives to executive stakeholders, the inclination toward transparency may not be every product leader’s first choice. Most importantly, more viewers lead to more opinions and a push away from the organization’s original product vision. Or so you may think.
If done correctly, adding more viewers to your roadmap can assist you in guiding your team through the launch. Product leaders who incorporate a roadmap into their workflow reap the many benefits of adding more viewers, which include:
Empowerment + alignment
A more credible roadmap
Roadmap accountability
Your roadmap becomes a self-service tool for cross-functional teams
We live in a busy world, where 24 hours is nearly not enough time in the day. Consequently, product teams have relied on asynchronous communication to inform stakeholders of updates to their product roadmap. Admins can add an unlimited number of viewers to their roadmap, allowing these stakeholders to access important product information in their free time. A “self-service” roadmap provides customers with a quick, easy solution to their problems.
Save time with asynchronous communication and fewer meetings
Asynchronous communication is necessary, especially in a remote work environment. But what about asynchronous video communication capabilities within your roadmap? Well, wouldn’t that be a dream?
Guess what? It’s a reality with LIKE.TG’s Vimeo integration. Product leaders can now communicate with their product team and stakeholders via recorded video. You can now walk individuals through your roadmap.
Our integration allows you to provide targeted details to specific stakeholders, which gives them greater context about the product lifecycle.
Increase the ease of communication and collaboration with stakeholders
Asynchronous video communication may not be for everyone. Many product professionals prefer to communicate within the product roadmap. Moreover, with our roadmap-level conversations, product leaders, product teams, and stakeholders can provide detailed comments relating to status updates, roadblocks, requests for information, or the state of initiatives.
Roadmap Level Conversations
Roadmap-level conversations allow you to tag essential stakeholders within the comment section. Product leaders can use this feature to pinpoint particular areas within the roadmap that needs stakeholder attention. On their end, they will receive an email notifying them that their attention is required. But what about standardization?
Shared Legends
Product leaders understand the struggle of ensuring multiple product portfolio views have a standardized legend. Our shared legend feature promotes consistency and ease of communication throughout your product-led organization.
Furthermore, those granted access as “Viewers” can make comments and tag roadmap editors or owners. The function assists them in making an inquiry or asking for more context. Adding viewers supports your product launch and helps you gain stakeholder buy-in.
Free-up time to focus on what matters most
We understand that product leaders wear many hats. They not only advocate for the needs of the customer, but they also serve as a deal-maker with executive stakeholders. Though you don’t directly manage these individuals, you serve as a facilitator of information.
Adding viewers to your roadmap can help you communicate asynchronously and effectively. Not only can you save time, but you can create an environment that supports two-way communication.
Customize Your Viewers’ Experience with Custom Views
The LIKE.TG roadmap platform allows you to create custom view roadmaps that help keep your team in sync. Moreover, product leaders can align their teams with a product strategy that empowers them to make the right product decisions. The platform offers unlimited free viewer accounts that allow stakeholders to ask questions and provide feedback.
Product leaders find our Custom Views feature supports their efforts in effectively communicating changes in the roadmap.
Custom view for development
Your development team focuses on the granular details of your product. Developers’ tasks range from bug fixes to testing and making minor tweaks. Consequently, these tasks occur over a short period of time.
As a product leader, providing a custom view roadmap for developers should show the product’s more significant big-picture objectives. Therefore, roadmap conversations allow developers to give feedback and align behind the big-picture strategic view.
Custom view for customer success
In contrast to development, customer success understands the current and future needs of the customer. Product leaders can provide a custom view for CS that gives them a specific idea of upcoming initiatives and features. CS can use the tagging feature to ask questions or provide feedback to other viewers or editors.
Custom view for marketing
The marketing team wants to know what features are coming down the pipeline, so they can begin to prepare a product narrative for a new release. A custom view for marketing can give them enough insight to craft messaging for the sales team. The deeper insight creates further cross-functional alignment around a shared product strategy.
Custom view for sales
The custom view for your sales team will focus on more high-level detail than your development team. Your sales teams will want to know what upcoming features will impact customers. A sales-focused custom view roadmap gives further context to the prioritization of a feature. Finally, the sales teams can use this information to help develop curated pitches for potential prospects.
Creating Transparency and Customizing Viewership to Serve Your Roadmap
LIKE.TG’s Custom View feature aims to empower “Viewers.” Furthermore, adding viewers and utilizing the Custom View features can save you time by providing only relevant stakeholder information.
The ability to tag these stakeholders within the roadmap ensures that they are immediately aware of roadblocks or updated initiatives. In addition, adding viewers to your roadmap and allowing them to provide comments ensures your stakeholders are always up-to-date.
Two-way communication across departments fosters cross-functional alignment. Therefore, with LIKE.TG’s purpose-built roadmap app, you can help your team develop a roadmap that supports your product strategy, and your organization’s overall product vision.
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10 Tips for New Product Research and Discovery
A blank page, much like the one I’m using to write this article, used to scare me. A new product can feel the same way. There’s nothing to build on and so many more risks. There is a place between nothing and a great product that’s full of uncertainty. Earlier in my career, this was nerve-wracking. Now, after a decade of managing products and advising, I find it exciting.
These days I look forward to starting research and discovery with nothing but a hypothesis. Throughout my experience, I’ve used many frameworks and tools to support the research and discovery process. I may not know exactly what I’ll uncover in the discovery process, but I know how I’ll get there. I look forward to becoming smarter every day and knowledge unfolding at a rapid pace. And I just want to pinch myself because I’ll never learn as rapidly as when I’m starting out not knowing much at all.
With the launch of Launch Management at LIKE.TG, I’d like to walk you through what research and discovery looked like for us and share the lessons we learned along the way. So if you are looking to launch a new product or feature, you are prepared with some tips to reduce that blank page anxiety.
1. Start with your company and product mission and vision.
LIKE.TG is the product management platform that operationalizes product strategy and execution best practices and drives innovation, trust, and accountability. To fully realize this and empower product teams to change the world through their products and the people they serve, LIKE.TG is more than roadmapping.
With our vision in mind, we stepped back and asked, “What can we do for customers in addition to roadmapping to achieve our vision?” Understanding (or defining) your vision is important because the journey ahead is not easy, and you’ll need something to reflect on to help you remember what you are trying to accomplish and why.
To be a product management platform that operationalizes product strategy and execution best practices and drives innovation, trust, and accountability.
2. Understand your customer outside of why they use your product.
Focusing on how and why customers use your product is incredibly valuable for increasing the depth of your product offering but less valuable for increasing the breadth. When you understand your customer outside of why and how they use your product, you can uncover customer jobs and opportunities that your customer may not ask you to solve. It’s possible there isn’t a solution to these problems on the market today.
What you learn is your opportunity to surprise and delight your customers. I approached this through customer interviews, spending time in groups and forums where my customers are, and looking for gaps in the product stack my customers use in their larger workflow outside of just how they use ProductPlan.
This work led me to dig into the product team’s role in launching products. There seemed to be a lot of pain and no solutions for launching a product or feature from the product manager’s perspective. There was so much pain that I found improving launches is one of the first tasks a new product operations team is responsible for.
Bonus Tip: When a customer shows up late to a meeting (happens all the time, right?) and says, “Sorry that I’m late. It’s been a crazy week.”, ask them, “Sorry to hear that, what’s going on?”. You’ll learn what’s causing them stress. And that can give you incredible insight.
3. Refine the problem early, even if you are uncertain.
The challenges with launching a product are immense. It would have been easy for me to take on the whole domain in my research. It also would have been easy to move to analysis paralysis and thoroughly research every opportunity within the domain.
Instead, I chose to refine the problem to a high-level report or dashboard of upcoming launches, so that product managers and stakeholders could get a quick glimpse at upcoming launches and whether they needed attention.
Early research into where this and other opportunities would sit in the market and its impact on customer pain around managing launches informed the decision. Researching outside of customer interviews can be incredibly valuable, but there’s nothing quite like talking to customers to learn quickly whether a problem or opportunity has potential.
4. Be prepared to be wrong.
If you don’t prepare yourself to be wrong, you might miss noticing when something isn’t right! When we get too invested in a solution early, we’re more likely to see all the ways that the solution is the right solution. Bias is really strong and can cloud your judgment when it comes to recognizing errors.
For this reason, I celebrate when I find out I’m wrong through research since it’s a sign that I didn’t let bias cloud my vision. You’ll find out sooner or later, and it’s far less costly to find out sooner. The opportunity around managing launches was appreciated and validated by customers, but why and how was different than I expected.
Instead of being most interested in the higher-level dashboard, the customers we talked to were most interested in managing launches at a lower level. They wanted something that would reduce the time they spent project managing the launch and would be a tool to support co-ownership and accountability for cross-functional colleagues contributing to launching deliverables. This led to us keeping the scope and design of our Launch Management dashboard very lean and instead investing more in the checklist.
5. Embrace the shitty first draft.
As a writer, I’m a big fan of Ann Lammot’s Bird by Bird, where she encourages writers to write a shitty first draft. If your intention is for the first draft to be shitty and not perfect, then you free your mind from the burdens of perfection. It allows you to move faster and be more creative, even if some of the creativity results in more bad ideas! I’ve embraced this in many areas of my life and work life, including Launch Management.
The first visual designs for Launch Management took a lot of time and had a lot of emotion tied to them, especially when we received initial feedback from customers that we didn’t quite understand their problems. When the product designer and I discussed the feedback, we revisited the job of those early designs. We didn’t need those early designs to test usability or guide our engineering team in what to build. Since we were working on a greenfield product, the primary job of those early designs was to take the stories and words customers shared with us and reflect our understanding in the form of a picture.
The picture didn’t need to be pretty. Customers just needed to see themselves in it. With this in mind, I asked the product designer to create an “ugly table” so we could see if this would better show customers the solution to the problems they were facing. Tables are relatively uninteresting aesthetically, but we went with something functional first.
When this got the validation from customers we needed, and they communicated that what they were looking at would be a good solution, we started improving the functionality and aesthetics. That imperfect and frankly ugly table was perfect for the conversations because it was relatively quick to produce, and our customers felt comfortable giving us critical feedback on something that was far from finished.
6. Your customer is the expert, even if they don’t know the answers.
Because Launch Management was the first solution that helps product managers launch products and features, there wasn’t anything on the market we could reference. Also, our customers didn’t have experience using anything to solve this problem either. We asked questions about launches and how to measure the success of launches. As a result, we got a fair amount of “I don’t know” answers from our customers.
While managing a launch created all sorts of challenges, our customers didn’t have expectations that this problem could be solved. So they hadn’t thought deeply about it. Instead of gathering our customers’ direct feedback, we focused on the pain they were facing and understanding the cost of not solving the problem, where our customers were the experts. As these stories started to come together, themes started to emerge, and the solution of Launch Management developed.
7. Look for your customers to take ownership and action.
When your customers assume ownership of what you are showing them and start talking about how they’ll use it with their team, you’ll know you truly understand the problem enough to solve it. When you can move your customers to action, you’ll know you have a good solution.
As we iterated on a solution through designs and prototypes and listened to customers, we got to a point where we could talk about the problems we were solving with Launch Management with product leaders the validation was clear. A customer asked, “When can I use this?” as they peered through the screen. They then asked, “Are you in my Slack?” and excitedly pumped their fist. Their language shifted from asking us how it would work to telling us how they would use Launch Management. They even shared how it would help them with their challenges.
Similarly excited, people who weren’t customers yet wanted to talk to our sales team. This is when the research and discovery team at LIKE.TG looked at each other and said, “It’s real now. It isn’t built yet, but it definitely feels real.”
8. Use your beta wisely.
While customer betas shouldn’t be about finding bugs, getting feedback before everything is polished and perfect is ideal. Beta feedback can help you figure out what to build next through enhancement requests, but I really love beta feedback to understand if I’ve effectively solved the problems I intended to solve.
I used LIKE.TG to create a list of jobs necessary to accomplish the Launch Management vision. I put the jobs in the order I expected us to accomplish them. As our fantastic customer success managers talked to customers and gathered feedback, they added it to the board.
The feedback created this beautiful curve on the board that showed enhancement requests for the jobs we were working on. The feedback was validation (in addition to the customer interviews) that customers recognized the problem we were trying to solve. It was a good signal that we were moving toward product-market fit.
9. Rely on the experts on your team.
Launching a new product is not a one-person endeavor. Even the most skilled among us need colleagues with different expertise to help. Similar to when launching products, when discovering a new product, product managers can take too much on.
By focusing on where each of your team members is an expert, including yourself, you can work together more effectively. In researching Launch Management, I relied on the expertise of product design to create a great customer experience. I looked to product marketing to craft a message and test it with our customers before enabling our customer-facing teams. And I trusted engineering’s expertise to build a right-sized solution that would help us learn quickly and scale.
Since I trusted that my colleagues owned their expertise, I could focus on my own expertise. This was amplified during our launch. We eventually got to the point where we could use Launch Management ourselves. Which meant I wasn’t the one keeping track of all the launch deliverables.
10. Know that what you launch with won’t be done.
Launch Management is far from done. Our first priority was to visualize what was happening in a launch alongside the roadmap strategy. So, the launch manager and launch team could easily see the launch. Rather than having the launch live in the launch manager’s head.
Once we have the launch visualized, we want to help customers standardize their launches. By doing so, they become more predictable and ultimately more successful. Our enterprise customers really value standardization as it helps operationalize best practices and creates predictability in teams across the company. As much as I want all of this to be possible in our general availability launch, I’m launching with less. And instead, I’m focusing on learning from customers to refine the Launch Management strategy.
Research and discovery for a new product is a big challenge. It requires relishing ambiguity on the path from turning that blank page to a product your customers love. Once you’ve got that figured out, then LIKE.TG will help you make launching it easy. Learn more about Launch Management when you schedule a 45-minute demo with us!
Introducing the LIKE.TG Diversity & Inclusion Task Force
Diversity and inclusion is a high-priority topic for many organizations worldwide. And it’s no different at ProductPlan. For years, our team has been working to build a more inclusive and welcoming company for people from all backgrounds.
This vision for an equitable and diverse workplace has evolved and transformed through the years. I’m honored to share what we have accomplished and some of our plans for the future.
But first, allow me to introduce myself. My name is David Hughes. I am a Customer Success Manager and Diversity and Inclusion Manager at ProductPlan. As you can probably tell, I love wearing multiple hats. And diversity and inclusion are very near and dear to my heart. I don’t have the typical background of someone who works in tech. So, I am keenly aware of how important it is to welcome folks from all walks of life.
As the Diversity and Inclusion Manager, I work closely with our People and Culture team and our Diversity and Inclusion Task Force. Together, we ensure a diverse group of people feels comfortable, welcomed, and fully integrated within the company. We seek to achieve lasting equality, equity, and justice by making LIKE.TG an inclusive, safe space where all employees can thrive.
Who is part of the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force?
The DI Task Force is comprised of passionate individuals from all areas of the business who come together to brainstorm ways to promote diversity and inclusion at the company as well as act as liaisons for their respective departments. Everyone who is interested is welcome to join the DI task force. It’s all about getting as many voices and perspectives involved as possible. The group is always learning new strategies and tactics for supporting a diverse workforce.
The journey so far…
Since the creation of the DI Task Force, we have been hard at work building scalable programs to help foster an inclusive culture for all employees across the country.
Giving employees opportunities to get to know each other outside of work
It’s important for employees to feel comfortable bringing their full selves to the workplace. This can be especially challenging in a remote environment. So our DI Task Force began hosting regularly scheduled opportunities for employees to get to connect and collaborate cross-functionally with specific topics, questions, and cultural activities. We call these monthly events, Culture, Connection, Collaboration Break.
During a CCC Break, employees are randomly paired up to discuss a specific topic or prompt. It’s been a great experience so far and has given employees who might not normally cross paths an opportunity to meet.
Encouraging employee-led diversity education
We are lucky to have such an enthusiastic group of employees who come from unique backgrounds and perspectives. It is important for us to encourage and celebrate our differences and learn from one another.
This plays out at LIKE.TG in a couple of ways. First, we have LunchLearn events where an employee can speak about a DI-related topic with their peers. Everyone is welcome to join the LunchLearns and to host them. We have enjoyed a lot of great conversations, and look forward to hearing more from employees as we continue to grow and have new voices join the team.
For our employees who are not inclined to host a live discussion, we also provide a dedicated Slack channel for DI discussions. In that channel, employees can share knowledge, resources, and ask questions. It’s a great way to bring the team together asynchronously.
Establishing partnerships with local non-profit organizations
Volunteering with our local communities is core to the LIKE.TG culture. The Diversity Inclusion Task Force has established two amazing partnerships with two Santa Barbara organizations.
First, is the Equal Learning Fund, a nonprofit organization that provides school supplies to children from low socioeconomic households and communities. In partnership with the ELF, the LIKE.TG team has participated in back-to-school fundraisers where we raised enough funds to supply hundreds of kids with backpacks and school supplies for the new school year.
Another partnership we are very proud of is with the United Boys Girls Club of Santa Barbara County, an organization that provides a safe, welcoming place for kids where they have access to tutoring and education programs, sports, art and music classes, and other opportunities.
We had a blast participating in the Corporate Playdates hosted by the UBGC. We get to meet some of the students, play games, and learn more about how the organization supports the local Santa Barbara community.
The best part is, this is only the beginning!
We are proud of the incredible work the team has accomplished in just a couple of years. However, we are nowhere near done! Looking ahead, we plan to scale our DI programs and initiatives alongside our plans to grow the LIKE.TG team. Stay tuned for more updates from the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force!
If LIKE.TG sounds like a good fit for your next chapter, take a look at our open roles in Sales, Customer Success, Engineering, and Product on our website: https://www.productplan.com/careers/
Roadmapping Isn’t Just for Product Managers Anymore
As your IT department changes, the nature of your department’s role may transition to a strategic partner. You will find several product management techniques useful during this transformation, such as roadmapping. Once considered the domain of product managers, roadmaps are useful in various contexts. You can use a roadmap to effectively communicate and collaborate with your business partners at the beginning and throughout an IT initiative.
Here’s a look at how IT departments can take a page from the Product Management playbook and use roadmaps to effectively collaborate and communicate with their business partners.
Why IT departments use roadmaps
When you become a strategic partner to your business partners, you’ll find creating and using roadmaps very helpful. Here are some specific reasons.
Build clarity and understanding
You’ll no longer have solution requests chucked over your cubicle walls as a strategic partner. Rather, you’ll be able to have a collaborative discussion with your business partners about the problems they are trying to solve and what potential solutions might look like.
You can collaboratively build a roadmap for the initiative with your business partners to gain clarity and shared understanding about that initiative.
This collaborative effort helps you clarify why your business partners want to make a change and the potential themes and epics that could play a role in accomplishing that outcome. These themes provide strategic direction to your initiative without diving into specific details too early.
Communicate goals and intent
You can use a roadmap to communicate information about your initiative to a wider audience. Because the roadmap contains information at a broad strategic level, it’s concise enough that people can get an idea of what you’re planning to accomplish without getting bogged down with specifics.
When creating your roadmap, you’ll involve a small group of key people in the initial discussion. That means there will be several people who may be interested in your IT initiative that weren’t originally involved in those initial discussions. When you share the roadmap with them, they can get an overview of the intended benefits of your initiative, what actions are currently underway, and your plans for future efforts.
For most stakeholders, that level of detail is sufficient. There will be some who would like additional data, which is where a tool like LIKE.TG comes in handy, providing custom views for different stakeholders and displaying the data most meaningful to them.
Track and communicate progress
A good roadmap is a living document that people can rely on to reflect the current state of your work.
You shouldn’t create a roadmap, present it once, and then stash it in a drawer (real or virtual). Nor should you only update it once a quarter when you have to present your current status to your executive committee.
Instead, keep your roadmap up to date regularly, so it accurately reflects what you’re currently working on and what you plan to work on next.
If you set it up properly, you may even use your roadmap as your primary means of reporting status, removing the need to create multiple different status reports for different audiences. Here again, a road mapping tool like LIKE.TG can help you out.
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How to use roadmaps and backlogs together
If you’ve been using backlogs for any length of time, you’re probably familiar with the problem of an overflowing backlog.
This is where the backlog becomes a dumping ground for everything you could do as part of your initiative. While there’s a certain amount of comfort in having a list of to-do’s, you soon find that it’s almost impossible to discern the forest from the trees. There are too many items to manage, and it’s difficult to discern ties between highly detailed items and the broader parts of the initiative.
Fortunately, our friend, the roadmap can provide a big lift here.
The primary cause of the overflowing backlog is when you identify a bunch of low-level backlog items too early. To avoid this issue, use your roadmap as a broad overview of your initiative showing the themes and epics you’re considering.
Avoid the temptation
Avoid the temptation to dive into detail on those epics and create items in your backlog until you’re just about to work on that epic. That means your backlog does not contain any backlog items for an epic unless it shows up in the current period on your roadmap. (Or in the “Now” column of a Now – Next – Later roadmap).
When you take this approach, your roadmap provides the overall view at a strategic level, and the backlog provides a more tactical view of the current time horizon. You avoid breaking epics into user stories too early, preventing wasted effort if you decide you don’t need to do a particular epic. You also have far fewer user stories to manage on your backlog.
Because roadmaps and backlogs contain information at different levels of detail and have different audiences, you’ll be tempted to use different tools for each.
Using separate tools works as long as the two tools integrate seamlessly. Fortunately, LIKE.TG integrates with Jira and Azure DevOps so that you can keep your roadmap in sync with your backlog and vice versa.
Examples of using roadmaps
There are many ways that you can use a roadmap for your IT work. Here are three examples that show how you can use different roadmaps to collaborate and communicate with your business partners.
Roadmap for IT portfolio
A nonprofit association wanted a full picture of its various IT initiatives for planning and communication purposes.
The IT Staff created an Enterprise IT Roadmap to show the initiatives that they:
were currently working on (in a Now column)
were planning to work on next (in a Next column)
may consider in the future (in a Later column).
The initiatives were further divided into swim lanes that represented which of the nonprofit’s key objectives the initiatives addressed. Examples of those objectives include:
Build an inclusive global community
Deliver value to members
Build brand awareness for the association
These are the key decision filters that the association uses to decide whether to undertake the initiatives. When they considered a fairly significant action, they would run it through those decision filters (i.e. “Will this help us deliver value to members?) if it didn’t pass through any of the decision filters, they didn’t do it.
The association used this roadmap as an aid for their regular planning discussions. For example, when one initiative was nearing completion, they’d look at the roadmap and see which initiative in the next column made sense to start next. They could also move items off the roadmap or switch items between the later and next columns if they found their needs or priorities changed.
Roadmap for a custom development project
A team was tasked with replacing a 20-year-old pricing tool built on outdated client-server technology. The original scope included rebuilding the tool on modern technology and adding functionality to support some new business processes.
As the team investigated how staff used the current tool, they found several inefficient processes and unused features. They also realized that the target date for cutover to the new system was very aggressive. It wasn’t likely that they’d be able to rebuild everything and add the new functionality by the initial target date.
IT project roadmap
The team created an IT Project Roadmap to plan out the order in which they would build functionality in the new tool and communicate their plan to executives in their organization. They built the roadmap with a monthly timeline and displayed the epics they planned to work on. They also put key milestones on the roadmap so that when they moved the delivery of epics with each other, they could see whether they had a viable solution for the cutover date.
The team built an initial version of the new tool by the cutover date that addressed all the users’ immediate needs. They then delivered additional functionality over the course of the next few months so that the users had the functionality they needed when they needed it in their annual cycle.
The roadmap helped the team keep stakeholders up to date on their plans and convey what functionality to expect when. It also helped with the frequent discussions the team had about changing their order of delivery when they ran into challenges or uncovered new information.
Roadmap for a platform build-out
A team started work to merge product data from several transactional systems and provide that data to a partner to list those products for sale. As the team progressed with their work, they realized they were building a data platform that several other initiatives could use for different purposes.
The team started having conversations with the other initiatives and began identifying the common patterns from all the requests.
The team put together an IT Infrastructure Roadmap for the data platform to reflect their plans for building out interfaces into the platform. These interfaces included additional data sources and ways for other systems to get data from the platform.
The team designed the roadmap with a quarterly time frame to convey which interfaces they planned to work on and when. They chose this timeframe based on the uncertainty of working with several departments in this large retail organization.
IT teams can use this roadmap as a high-level view of their work. They also tied the roadmap to their backlog tool so they could track how individual backlog items satisfied work toward the broader interfaces shown on the roadmap.
Roadmaps are a powerful IT Tool
As you look for new ways to work with your business partners, take a moment to consider how you can use a roadmap to help you out.
You don’t have to be a Product Manager to use a roadmap, but you can certainly use Product Management tools to use a roadmap more effectively.
When you’re ready to build a roadmap for your next IT initiative, give LIKE.TG and one of its IT specific roadmap templates a try.
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What are the benefits of having your launch plan in the same tool as your roadmap?
As a product marketer, I’ve run a good number of launches throughout my career. Product launches. Feature launches. Some were quite big, requiring a tidal wave of activity that spanned departments. Others were small, perhaps only involving an entry in the biweekly release notes.
Regardless of size and scope, launches always turn out better when you involve the product team. It should be a given, considering that what you’re launching is a direct result of the research, prioritization, and planning the product team did months prior. So much of the knowledge you need to launch a product—whether you’re a salesperson, a customer success rep, or a product marketer—is in the minds of the product team.
But time and time again, we hear from product teams that they don’t have great visibility into what happens during a launch. Many, in fact, describe a siloed approach to launching products. Product teams may be responsible for the planning and development of the product.
But the launch of it? That’s someone else’s job.
This was one of the significant challenges we set out to solve when we built our new go-to-market tool within LIKE.TG, Launch Management. We wanted to create a single space to plan your launch, where the product strategy could flow from roadmap to execution. We also wanted to give product people complete visibility into all the activities required to launch a new product or feature.
So that begs the question. What are the benefits of having your launch plan in the same tool as your roadmap? Read on to find out.
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For those managing the launch, visibility creates the opportunity for better strategy and launch quality.
Try searching for product launch software, and you’ll likely come across several project management tools with launch templates. These tools are effective for managing the launch of a new product. However, the product team often doesn’t own or operate them.
This creates a scenario where the product team works in one tool, and the go-to-market team responsible for the launch works in another.
When this happens, it’s difficult for the product team to maintain visibility into the development of product messaging, creating marketing materials, implementing customer support initiatives, and so forth.
You can partially solve this by juggling licenses and getting your product team to work out of both. But in an era of work defined by tool proliferation and the increasing cost of the Enterprise tech stack, that can be expensive to maintain and cumbersome to use.
Your launch plan should be in the same tool as your roadmap. It gives the product team a clear view into critical launch activities, allowing them to ensure each demonstrates an understanding of what the product is designed to achieve and for who. It also helps product understand the timing of key communication events to inform their expectations for product awareness and adoption.
And finally, it helps product feel assured that every deliverable has an owner. Every piece of the launch has been accounted for, is planned, and is ready to be executed.
For those supporting the launch, it encourages roadmap readership.
Having your launch plan in the same platform your product team spends their time ensures a cohesive strategy, from plan to launch. But it also plays a critical role in establishing shared ownership of the launch and the entire product strategy.
For the marketing folks planning campaigns, the salespeople writing emails, and the customer success reps working with customers, the roadmap needs to be available. If your roadmap has been built well, it contains the context your go-to-market teams need to execute.
“Who is this product for? Why did we build it? What goals will it help our business achieve?”
Answers to questions these questions are found in the roadmap. And they can guide the development of your launch plan.
As a product marketer, I’ll be the first to admit I don’t always read our product roadmap. But I know I can find the information I need for my launch plan in the roadmap.
This accessibility encourages viewership of the roadmap in a context that makes the information contained within the roadmap actionable. For instance, if you’re writing product taglines, you can use the roadmap to view supporting documentation.
Overall, a product launch should never take place in a vacuum. It should be a natural extension of the product strategy and serve as the execution of the product roadmap. Each launch is your opportunity to measure outcomes. And to determine whether you achieve the goals associated with the overall product strategy and vision.
With that being the case, it makes sense that the launch plan should live alongside the roadmap. Schedule a demo with our team to learn more about Launch Management.
Top 5 Best Product Management Websites of 2022
So many websites and so little time. And while that truism could be applied equally to recipes, sports analysis, or politics, we’re focusing here on product management websites. It turns out a lot of product folks like to share their tips and wisdom on the Internet.
Here at LIKE.TG, we can’t get enough of product-related content, so we’re always on the lookout for who’s doling out easily-digestible-yet-professionally-fulfilling insights. That’s why we can save you the Googling and share our top five product management websites from 2022, along with why they topped our year-end list.
5. Product Talk
There’s no one more immersed in applying discovery and customer insights to prioritization and planning than Product Talk’s Teresa Torres. She literally wrote the book on it!
But this author didn’t stop there and continues pumping out quality content, all focused on gathering great customer and market intelligence along with best practices to put it best to use. Real-world stories from the trenches at companies like trivago and CarMax share a stage with meaty posts on how to stop salespeople from blocking your access to customers and using opportunity decision trees to visualize discovery work for easier consumption.
There’s even content on how to land your first product job, what to do when your buyers aren’t your users, and implementing continuous discovery at startups. And if you prefer to watch versus read, there are excellent videos on topics including collaborative decision-making and showing your work to attain stakeholder buy-in. With years of quality content in the archive, you won’t run out any time soon.
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4. Silicon Valley Product Group
The Silicon Valley Product Group isn’t just a bunch of product peeps that happen to have a 415 area code. The SVPG remains at the forefront of thought leadership in product development.
Founded by Marty Cagan, who cut his product leadership teeth at places like eBay, Netscape, and Hewlett-Packard, the SVPG has been sharing best practices and practical insights into product development for more than two decades. That means there’s a massive back-catalog of meaty posts on agile, waterfall, and the age-old dilemma of where product management should live, and the hits keep on coming 20+ years later.
Recent entries include articles on coaching vs. mentoring, product/market fit, and what product managers need to take off their plates so they can focus on interacting directly with customers and engineers. But a quick search on nearly any topic should uncover a gem or two from their list of published posts.
3. Department of Product
This company’s bread and butter is training product managers, but their blog doles out a ton of useful content for anyone interested in the field. For PMs lacking technical backgrounds or who are decades past their days writing code, explainers on buzzy topics, including Web3, GitHub, and natural language processing are unintimidating primers on subjects you need to be conversant in to hold your own with developers.
Posts on process—such as writing release notes and managing UX debt—show they’re not afraid to spend time on the less-sexy parts of the job, while content regarding SaaS pricing and measuring product-market fit helps product managers optimize their go-to-market tactics. There’s also plenty of career advice, including pointers on how to build useful skills, including reading API documentation, SQL, and even how to draw on a whiteboard with confidence.
And, if your eyes are tired after all that close reading, pop in your earbuds and check out one of their podcasts, where they interview product leaders from companies including Wayfair, Venmo, and Uber.
2. Sachin Rekhi
Notejoy founder and CEO Sachin Rekhi’s website provides a flavorful variety of hundreds of essays and videos spanning a cornucopia of product-related topics.
Videos on career-propelling topics such as mastering influencing without authority and getting actionable product feedback stand alongside posts on midlife career exploration, finding product culture fit, implementing OKRs, and the importance of leaders reviewing which metrics you’re using
Sachin also frequently re-reads some once-hot business books and gives a fresh take on them with a bit of 20/20 hindsight, including Peter Thiel’s Zero to One and Hamilton Heller’s 7 Powers, as well as more recent reads such as the behind-the-scenes look into Amazon’s working backward approach to product development and where you begin with the press release and Andrew Chen’s The Cold Start Problem.
1. Bring the Donuts
Ken Norton’s Bring the Donuts is sadly not the latest subscription box or instant delivery service for baked goodies, but it is our top website of 2022. What—other than its unforgettable moniker—makes it stand out from the crowd?
Ken’s a former Google product leader and his posts are so thorough they even have footnotes. He challenges product managers to think beyond the immediate and consider nontraditional topics such as thirty-year product plans and why companies should offer dual career tracks for product management. But he also digs into some fundamentals, including creating strong product cultures and figuring out the ideal PM-to-engineer ratio.
There are also “deep dives” into how products get built at leading companies such as Stripe, Slack, and Airbnb, giving product leaders behind-the-scenes peeks into how those firms roll out innovative new offerings.
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LIKE.TG Cares: Q&A with the Equal Learning Fund
Heart, humility, and hustle. These core values aren’t just central to how LIKE.TG operates as a business. They also play a significant role in our Diversity and Inclusion efforts. Through our DI Task Force, LIKE.TG has partnered with several wonderful non-profit organizations helping the local Santa Barbara community.
We’d like to take a moment to highlight one of our non-profit partners, the Equal Learning Fund. And who better to talk about the ELF than its Founder, CEO, and Board President, Hannah Huelin-Meek?
Keep reading to learn more about Hannah and the Equal Learning Fund!
1. Can you tell us a little about your background and experience?
I’ve spent my entire career in the nonprofit world. So, before launching Equal Learning Fund, I worked for the Red Cross for almost 15 years in disaster relief and blood donations, but I’d always had a passion for helping with children’s causes, which led me to start Equal Learning Fund. Throughout my career, I’ve specialized in providing strategic vision and real-world solutions focused on building teams.
Bringing this expertise to my own nonprofit has been a gratifying endeavor.
2. What is the Equal Learning Fund, and what is its mission?
Equal Learning Fund is a 501c3 nonprofit organization created to help bridge the socioeconomic gaps for underserved youth. We believe that every child should have an equal opportunity for education regardless of socioeconomic status. We provide educational funds, school supplies, and program support to those most in need so that every child can have a chance at a great future.\
3. How does the Equal Learning Fund identify communities to support?
Equal Learning Fund prides itself on researching school district data, talking with educators, and working directly with our shelter partners and school programs to identify real-time needs. We have also been cautious only to take on the right number of community partners we can service and make meaningful impacts with based on our available funding.
4. Having spent over 15 years in the non-profit sector, what led to the decision to create the Equal Learning Fund?
Before creating Equal Learning Fund in 2020, I had been pondering the idea for a couple of years. As mentioned, I’ve always had a special place in my heart for children’s causes, and even from a young age, I would donate and volunteer – the calling was definitely there!
Having grown up in the UK and attended college here in the US, I have had the opportunity to learn about different education systems and learning opportunities with a very objective lens. So, I knew there were gaps when it came to learning; this certainly was not a new issue, but when the pandemic hit, it brought these socioeconomic gaps to the forefront of so many households across the nation. Additionally, I knew families that could purchase laptops for virtual learning, get extra tutors, and help their kids continue to succeed, and then some families shared with me that their kids weren’t learning at all; there was no better time to launch than that moment.
5. What accomplishments are you most proud of with the Equal Learning Fund?
There are a couple; our backpack drives each year have been amazing, and providing kids with what they need to feel confident returning to school is great. I was able to meet with some of the families that received these, and it was heartwarming to hear their stories and see the direct impact of our work. The other accomplishment I feel really good about is being able to provide tutors in core academic subjects to some of the students we support. We get progress reports weekly, and it’s incredible to see the improvement week over week!
6. Where do you envision the Equal Learning Fund accomplishing in the next 10 years?
That’s a great question and one I love! Currently, our primary focus is on the California market, with some special projects sprinkled in. Our goal is to scale our model over the coming years so that we can do more nationally and eventually have more of a presence overseas.
7. What do you look for in a corporate partner?
Let me start by saying that we LOVE all our current partners and have a lot of respect for your team at LIKE.TG; I often find myself sharing your company as an example because of the fantastic teamwork and partnership provided. We look for partners who are aligned in what they want to achieve from a giving standpoint; we also look at the company itself and the work they do to see if there might be further overlap and opportunities to collaborate. Ultimately though, we are looking for individuals who have a passion for making an impact and care about the communities that they are in – LIKE.TG is an excellent example of this!
8. What can companies like LIKE.TG do to support organizations like yours?
There are a few ways companies can help:
Fundraisers – These give employees a chance to give back, help their communities, and get involved with a cause!
One-time donations – Great for targeting a specific impact.
Volunteering – We love our volunteers and strive to match individuals with projects they will enjoy! We offer virtual and in-person opportunities.
Spread the word – Help raise awareness.
9. How can folks participate and volunteer without a corporate affiliation?
Individuals can donate their time by volunteering or become an advocate for the cause by reaching out at Get Involved – Equal Learning Fund in Santa Barbara, CA.
10. Can you share any insights about the successes the Equal Learning Fund has seen over the years?
We are proud to have served over 2k students with school supplies, technology, and storytelling sessions! Also, we have provided over 600 backpacks, and over 700 reading books and tutored 15 students in core academic subjects. We have made significant impacts and want to do more! Check out the links below to our current fundraisers.
Is there anything else you would like to share or promote?
LIKE.TG’s Giving Tuesday Technology Fundraiser: LIKE.TG’s Giving Tuesday Fundraiser! – Campaign (equallearningfund.org)
Holiday Fundraiser – Join us for gift giving for children in shelters: Holiday Giving! – Campaign (equallearningfund.org)
We’d like to thank Hannah and the Equal Learning Fund for being such an incredible partner to the LIKE.TG Diversity Inclusion Task Force. We look forward to continuing our efforts to support our local communities.
If LIKE.TG sounds like the right fit for your next chapter, we’d love to hear from you. Take a look at our open roles at https://www.productplan.com/careers/.
Battling Roadmap Inconsistency
If you’ve been in a product for a while, you’ve almost certainly run into the problem of inconsistent documentation. This problem rears its ugly head in lots of places:
Requirements spread across product briefs, PRDs, Jira or other workflow management tool tickets, and wireframes
Web-based and in-app user guides
Sales collateral, especially in B2B situations in which sales execs like to put their spin on the pitch
Product roadmaps
Inconsistent documentation is, of course, only one example of a lack of standardization within a product team.This post will focus on the last example, product roadmaps. Furthermore, the post will offer some suggestions on how you can get this issue under control.
Why does roadmap inconsistency matter?
What are the problems that arise from having inconsistent roadmaps, starting with the most consequential?
Your story lacks coherence
The worst result of roadmap inconsistency is that the story doesn’t make sense. The details at the drill-down level don’t support the big-picture vision. This inconsistency is the most insidious sign of a poor product strategy. It has the consequence of individual teams failing to align. In either case, the outcome is the same – a failure (or at least an obstacle to overcome) to achieve your goals.
Your audiences get the wrong message
If you only have one roadmap for the entire company that you show to everyone who needs to see it, inconsistency is not an issue for you. The effectiveness of communication might be, but that’s a different topic. Or you may work at a very small company. Smaller companies may not need to target views of their roadmap for different groups – internal/external, executives/product team/sales team, etc.
If you have reached that point, however, a set of roadmaps describe a different picture of the future. When it comes to expectation management, those different understandings make a big difference. One group may celebrate the evolution of the product, while the other experiences confusion.
For example, you could find yourself in a situation where the customer support team is thrilled about a fix. The fix addresses a big source of support tickets. However, the sales team is incensed that the valuable feature they have been promising customers is still in development. Or worse, depending on how large, decentralized, and empowered your product team is, you could have teams working on problems that have been deprioritized based on a change in corporate strategy.
The roadmap user experience makes the reader “work for it”
If your product team is of sufficient size to include multiple product managers, all with responsibility for a different aspect of the product, then you likely have multiple individuals creating and contributing to views of your roadmap at different levels. With each person applying their spin on how to visualize the plan for their area of responsibility, even if each team’s plan is aligned with the overall vision, you can end up with a document that is difficult to decipher. Inconsistency of formatting and what drill-down details to include can create an increased cognitive load on the reader or viewer that requires unwanted work to understand. At worst, these issues can make what is otherwise a well-aligned team and story come across as disconnected and disjointed.
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Types of inconsistency and how to fix them
Roadmap inconsistency falls into three categories:
Structure
Content
Style
You need to address all three to avoid the issues we reviewed above.
Structural inconsistency
Structural consistency requires the product team to choose a standardized roadmap the collective can use. Will you adopt a feature-based roadmap or an outcome-driven roadmap? If you select an outcome-driven, feature-less roadmap approach, will you build your story around themes or a north star?
The second aspect of structural consistency to consider is the time horizon. Whereas traditional roadmaps orient around a calendar-based timeline, typically divided into quarters or even years in some cases, more and more teams are adopting a Now, Next, and Later approach. This type of structure, used primarily with outcome-driven roadmaps, acknowledges the uncertainty around strategic outcome achievement. Calendar-oriented timelines have more common with feature-based roadmaps, which usually aim to communicate specifics about when a new feature will be delivered.
Another element of structural consistency that can be overlooked is decisions about what to include in different roadmap views. For example, sometimes it’s appropriate to include an item on the view that the sales team shows to customers, and sometimes it’s not. Having a way to manage information disclosure can go a long way toward avoiding uncomfortable conversations when a customer gets excited about an early-stage idea on the roadmap that was ultimately deprioritized.
Templates and tags
LIKE.TG helps product leaders manage structural roadmap consistency through templates and tags. There are a variety of template types that teams can use as-is or customize as needed. Or if none of the pre-existing templates are quite right, product leaders can create templates from scratch. In either case, product managers can save preferred templates for team members to use as they build the roadmap for their specific area of responsibility.
LIKE.TG also allows forcustom tags and a way to manage tags to avoid redundancy and error. Once in place, tags can filter roadmap items to create the right view for your audience and situation.
Inconsistent content
When you have a team of product managers contributing individual areas to a larger roadmap owned by a Portfolio Product Manager, you run the risk that each person will make decisions about what information is important to include and what isn’t. The old saying, “The devil is in the details,” applies here. A consistent set of details for every item on the roadmap goes a long way toward instilling confidence in the decisions.
For example, at the most basic level, information like what you are building, why you are building it, and who you are building it for are a good start at establishing a common set of details for each item. In many cases, companies will want to go further to include information like the responsible product owner, the allocated budget, and the values assigned to each item that contributed to its prioritization.
LIKE.TG has two features that are particularly helpful in maintaining consistent content in your roadmap. Custom fields give you a way to specify exactly what content you want product managers to include, assuring that when a stakeholder drills down, they get the same set of supporting details for each item. The Prioritization Board provides a customizable set of scoring criteria that allow your team to make objective decisions about the importance and anticipated value of each item on the roadmap. This objective prioritization helps you avoid the dreaded HiPPO approach to product strategy and communicate the “why” behind an item’s placement in the plan.
Stylistic inconsistency
Sometimes designs are objectively bad or at least worse than others when comparing the outcomes achieved by alternatives. The practice of A/B testing allows product teams to make design decisions out of subjective opinions about whether the orange or blue call-to-action button is better by looking at the conversion data achieved by each.
Often, however, decisions about design alternatives are purely subjective. Should we use a serif or sans-serif font for labels? Will the items on the roadmap related to this theme be green or purple? Should we use a light orange or dark orange to denote initiatives that are at risk? Or should we use yellow? Product managers, left to their own devices, will make different decisions when creating their roadmap. Even if the rest of the content and structure of the roadmap is completely consistent, a stylistic hodge-podge is the first thing stakeholders will see, and the rest of the content will immediately be suspect.
Shared legends and templates
With Shared Legends and templates, LIKE.TG users can easily maintain a consistent look and feel for their roadmaps. Shared Legends allows admins to create and lock down roadmap legends. Individual users will have to use predetermined colors and labels. Just as templates allow product leaders to implement structural consistency, they also support stylistic consistency. Templates provide a way for product leaders to provide an officially-styled display format that product managers can not change.
With LIKE.TG’s roadmap software, product teams have a rich set of tools available to battle roadmap inconsistency. By ensuring that roadmaps are consistent structurally, in content, and stylistically, product leaders can better communicate the information, stakeholders need with a product roadmap.
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2022 Product Management Trends
Lists of business trends tend to fall into two types – those that look into the future and those that survey the past. Predictions about future trends are tricky because of the uncertainty of them coming to pass. Lists of trends that survey the past should be easier by definition, right? After all, what’s happened has happened. Let’s look at some of the biggest trends we identified in 2022.
Trends (still) impacting the newly converted
Organizations that have more recently recognized the importance of product management to the success of their business are those that are transitioning from being “sales-led” or “customer-led” to “product-led.”
Agile vs. agile
“Are you Agile, or are you agile?” Adopting Agile methodologies like Scrum, Kanban, eXtreme Programming, or some combination of the above has been a trend, or some might say a craze, affecting digital product management for many years. The process has been going on long enough to spawn backlashes proclaiming its demise. As others have said, the idea that Agile methodologies are a thing of the past is a gross exaggeration. Still, the problem that this discussion raises is a real one with which many organizations continue to struggle.
At issue is the difference between Agile (capital “A”) methodologies and an agile (small “a”) mindset. Yet many organizations continue to jump head-first into the adoption of Agile practices. And they do this without an understanding of why these practices work. Organizations that fail at Agile practice adoption often haven’t taken the time to embrace the agile mindset.
Unfortunately, this trend is likely to be with us for a while. Fortunately, many companies do eventually get through botched implementations and false starts. Failure is a great teacher.
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Data-driven decision-making
Another persistent trend is the continued growth of an appreciation for grounding decisions in data – both quantitative and qualitative. This trend has supported the emergence of the Data Product Manager as a role on the product team dedicated to the process of collecting, organizing, storing, and sharing data within an organization. At the time of writing this post, there were 525 postings on LinkedIn for positions in the U.S. with this focus. When broadening the scope to include data scientists and data analysts, who often work closely with product managers to answer questions with data, the open positions swell to almost 7,000.
Outcome-driven vs. feature-based roadmaps
If you are unfamiliar with the difference between these two types of roadmaps and why it matters, let’s quickly unpack that. They showed a list of features on a release timeline: this quarter, we will ship features a, b, and c. The next quarter will feature d, e, and f. There are several problems with this type of roadmap:
Feature-based roadmaps are often inaccurate because forecasting the completion date for a new feature is imprecise.
They don’t typically reflect the reasons why any feature ships.
Little attention is paid to whether the shipment of a specific feature led to a profitable outcome. The act of shipping a feature is celebrated rather than the achievement of a measurable result.
On the other hand, outcome-driven roadmaps are very different. They focus on the results that the team is looking for. Either way, they recognize that the product changes are more hypotheses than guarantees. Moreover, they embrace the uncertainty of the timeline. Finally, they accept the agile (small “a”) reality that priorities change.
In full disclosure, placing this trend on the list of those affecting organizations early in their product management journey reflects a bit of a bias to which some may object. The bias is based on the judgment that those still using feature-based roadmaps fall low on the product management maturity scale. Although some companies have been on their product management journey for many years and still use feature-based roadmaps, their reluctance to accept the limitations of this approach and embrace an outcome-driven approach is holding them back.
Trends for product management leaders
While the list of trends above is relevant to those who are further along their product management journey, they are no longer top of mind. Whichever side of the ongoing debates these organizations fall on, the companies in this group have picked a position and are now looking at a different set of concerns.
Optimizing data pipelines
Product Ops: hero or villain?
The extent and limits of product management authority
A warehouse-first approach to data
The next step after recognizing and embracing the importance of using data throughout the organization is to figure out how to deal with the pitfalls many companies fall into when they first embrace data-driven decision-making. As many product managers learn, it’s not enough to have the data; you have to be able to put it to use. The inability to perform analyses that require combining account data with usage data is a frustrating roadblock. Learning about an incompatibility between systems initially chosen as point solutions is a common facepalm moment as product leaders mature in their organizational data requirements.
One solution to this problem that is growing in popularity is to take a “warehouse-first” approach to data collection. In other words, the data warehouse is the source of truth and the central node in the data pipeline strategy. Account, app usage, clickstream, and marketing data are all stored in a data warehouse where it is cleansed and transformed as necessary before being pushed out to other tools like marketing automation.
The advantages of a warehouse-first approach to data are compelling, especially considering the ability to avoid vendor lock-in resulting from key data being imprisoned in a proprietary database. The challenges, however, are also significant. Key pieces of the puzzle are lacking, so you may need to adopt a hybrid approach until the tool you need supports the ability to ingest data from an external source. In other cases, the tools exist, but issues can arise for those handling healthcare or other sensitive data that cannot leave the U.S. due to regulatory restrictions. If you find yourself looking into the tools available, be sure to verify whether the vendor can guarantee HIPAA or other relevant compliance before going too deep on an evaluation.
Product Ops: hero or villain?
In February 2022, product management author, blogger, consultant, and pundit Marty Cagan lit up product management discussion groups and Slack channels with his post, “Product Ops Overview.” In this controversial post, Cagan identified six distinct definitions of the Product Ops role that he describes as “most damaging, to most valuable.”
Reincarnated PMO Model
Two-in-a-Box PM Model
Delegated Product Leader Model
Product Operations Rebranded Model
Product Marketing Manager Rebranded Model
Force Multiplier Model
The post generated controversy because his opinions hit close to home for many people. The Product Ops role has been proliferating on product-related job boards for several years, and it has solved a lot of problems for a lot of organizations. Cagan would likely argue that those problems arose from more fundamental problems in product management practices. Regardless, the debate over the role of Product Ops within a product management organization is not over.
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The extent and limits of product management authority
A popular product management book on product leaders bookshelves is Influence Without Authority by Allan R. Cohen and David L. Bradford. This book describes how to use an understanding of what motivates others to achieve mutually beneficial agreements when the ability to control the actions of others through managerial edict doesn’t exist.
The idea that a good product manager is the CEO of the product was first articulated more than 20 years ago by Ben Horowitz in his memo, “Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager.” Horowitz has since added a disclaimer to the top of the document, possibly because of the backlash over some people taking his original concept, that a “good product manager takes full responsibility and measures themselves in terms of the success of the product,” to an unintended extreme. Some product managers have used this statement to assume authority where none exists.
Empowered product teams, another of Cagan’s contributions, are essentially the antithesis of feature teams. The latter is given a list of features and enhancements to implement that are defined and prioritized by stakeholders outside the product team. The former is given problems to solve and trusted to discover, design, build, and implement solutions that solve those problems.
None of these concepts are new to 2022, but the discussion is alive and well. At the heart of the debate are challenging decisions about how an organization will be run. As product management teams mature from infancy through growing pains associated with company expansion and possibly bumpy roads, these decisions are inevitably revisited.
Trends on everyone’s mind
Regardless of where you are on the product management maturity scale, there’s a good chance you spent some part of 2022 considering one of these topics:
The impact of artificial intelligence
Objectives key results
The great talent shortage
The impact of artificial intelligence
On the mind of virtually every digital product manager with enough capacity to think ahead a few steps is the question of how artificial intelligence plays into their product strategy. For some, of course, this question is not one for “someday” but for “right now.” The financial product manager who is not at least thinking about how they can leverage AI today is probably already falling behind in the market.
AI impacts all stages of the product lifecycle, from design to development and testing to marketing to customer service and support. If you’re not considering how AI will affect how to design, build, market, or operate your product, you can bet your competitors or future disrupters are.
Objectives key results (OKRs)
Is there anyone who hasn’t at least dabbled with OKRs yet? This organizational management methodology has been around for decades but has exploded in recent years into one of those “everyone’s doing it” trends. Seemingly every unicorn in Silicon Valley and beyond, not to mention the largest and most successful companies in the world (Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Adobe, Intel, Amazon, Dell, GE), have embraced OKRs to align their people around the corporate strategy. A well-executed OKR implementation promises not just to get everyone in the company paddling in the same direction but also to increase morale and retention by helping every member of the team to understand how their day-to-day work supports the big, strategic goals.
The great talent shortage
Finally, a growing appreciation for the importance of solid product management has combined with an expansion in the overall jobs market to add product manager to the list of roles that are difficult to fill, along with product designer, software developer, and many others. The candidate shortage has contributed to a rise in wages which has made the ease of changing positions in search of higher pay more common, so positions are difficult not just to fill but to keep filled.
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Best of LIKE.TG 2022
The past year was a lot, but dull wasn’t one of them. With so many social media posts, blogs, videos, ebooks, and podcasts, it’s hard to keep up. Look at how many browser tabs you have open right now for things you still want to read! To help you get over your FOMO on any amazing content from your friends at LIKE.TG, we’ve pulled together the most-viewed articles, blogs, and glossary entries this past year. So, without further ado, here are the top ten pieces from LIKE.TG for 2022!
10. 10 Great Questions Product Managers Should Ask Customers
Kicking off our top ten is a top-ten list of its own! It’s a tenet of Product Management 101 that PMs need to get out of the building and talk to real-live customers… even if it’s just over Zoom.
But while fresh insights from actual users are always invaluable, you’ve only got so much time to pick their brains. To make the most of it, these ten questions maximize your opportunity to collect primary research by asking open-ended questions that coax real nuggets of insight from these interview sessions.
Best of all, it means you’ll do more listening and less talking, which is always a good thing.
9. Misfits, Geniuses, and Ringleaders: Why Product Management May Be Perfect for You
This guest post from LogMeIn Principal Product Manager Carey Caulfield helps readers understand if their entrepreneurial mindset and career aspirations are a good fit for product management.
Weaving in a few anecdotes and experiences from her career, Caulfield forces readers to take a clear look inside themselves to determine if they have what it takes and whether it’s a job they actually want.
This primer on why product management may be perfect for you is a great read for those considering leaping to another career or for senior product leaders to share with colleagues outside the product team yearning to join.
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8. 4 Key Responsibilities of Outstanding Product Managers
Whether you’re writing a job description for a future hire, preparing for your first day at a new position, or simply investigating whether product management sounds like a good gig, you need a solid understanding of what the job entails. But beyond the obvious bullet points, such as “maintaining a product roadmap” and “understanding customer and market needs,” our VP of Product Annie Dunham says she’s looking for PMs to go above and beyond in certain areas.
Annie’s top four integrate some of the key soft skills product managers need to build trust and operate transparently while still holding the line against any departures from the core product strategy. See what it takes to stand out in her organization.
7. The Product Manager Career Path
With no direct pipeline from trade schools or a specific college major, all sorts of people end up in product management at different phases of their careers. But whether you’re a freshly-minted MBA, a converted project manager/customer service rep/engineer, a product management “lifer,” or still on the outside looking in, there’s always an on-ramp to the PM life and new tiers to reach within the discipline.
Our guide to product management careers runs the gamut from entry-level roles to the C-suite, explaining the responsibilities of each position and some tips on how to level up within the field.
6. Product Manager vs. Product Owner
Although the “vs.” in this article’s title might think these roles are adversarial, PMs and POs can and should work together. But like any ensemble, they need to know their part and stay in harmony with the rest of the band.
At the highest level, it’s about one concentrating on strategic matters while the other focuses on tactical execution, but this article delves further into which skills each role demands and their inevitable overlap. It also touches on cases where the same individual may fill both roles in smaller organizations.
5. 11 Revealing Product Manager Job Interview Questions
All the job switching and newly created product positions this past year meant a lot of product management leaders were busy trying to determine which candidates were a great fit for their teams. But getting a strong sense of an applicant’s skills, mindset, work ethic, and style is tricky when you can only have a short amount of time with them.
To help interviewers maximize their opportunity to find diamonds in the rough and kick the pretenders to the curb, we’ve got 11 tried-and-true questions that will reveal a little more about the candidates’ inner selves than their resumes put on display. From putting them on the spot to pitch you a product to having them define product management to ensure both parties are aligned on what this specific job entails, these go-to questions will give interviewers a fuller picture of the person sitting across the table…or on the other end of the video call.
4. 4 Product Management Certifications that are Worth Your Time
In this crazy job market, everyone knows you need to stand out in the crowd and show potential employers you know your stuff. So it’s no surprise many current, and aspiring product management professionals were looking to burnish their credentials.
This list of 4 Product Management Certifications saves you the trouble of sifting through the many options on the market. We outline what we like about each program to help you narrow things down and accelerate your path to certified product management expertise.
3. Acceptance Criteria
After a meandering diversion through career-related content, our top three pieces return to the nitty-gritty details of product management work by defining a few key terms product managers were exceptionally curious about this year.
As Mick Jagger once told us, you can’t always get what you want, but… you get what you need. Acceptance criteria help stakeholders separate “want” from “need” by stating the minimum necessary to move forward.
Alignment around this “definition of done” is essential in the fast-paced world of Agile development since engineers are given more leeway in the specifics of each implementation. Clearly, articulated acceptance criteria list precisely what must be present before product development even thinks about testing and shipping a new release while informing the test plan for quality assurance.
2. MoSCoW Prioritization Model
This rollercoaster of capitalization nabbed second place… hopefully not just because people wanted to know what that wild acronym stands for! More likely, readers remain intrigued by the particular pros and cons of this technique for deciding what to build next.
The MoSCoW Prioritization Model is a fitting follow-up to acceptance criteria as it slots potential functionality into four definitive tiers:
Must-have
Should-have
Can-have
Won’t-have
When the team is aligned around which bucket each feature or capability falls into, there’s no mystery surrounding what to work on first, what might sneak in, and what belongs on the back burner for now.
1. RICE Scoring Model
Topping the charts this year was another prioritization method, the RICE scoring model. This acronym stands for Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort, and the model scores each potential initiative against each of these elements.
Using this method helps teams compare the relative ROI of each project under consideration based on how many people will realize meaningful value from it, along with how certain the team feels about that and how much work it will take. This really shifts the internal debate to consider each idea holistically to make realistic cost-benefit calculations to drive their roadmap, staffing, and more.
Still hungry for more?
Suppose those 10 pieces haven’t sated your craving for top-notch product management content. In that case, we encourage you to explore our Learning Center, where you’ll find tons of blogs, articles, glossary definitions, and eBooks to help you master your craft and keep releasing amazing products that satisfy and delight your target audience.
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How We’re Turning Feedback into Strategic Product Decisions
There is no shortage of product ideas. They come from everywhere. Customer feedback, feature requests, and new ideas born from your interpretation of your product strategy—can all be the starting point for your company’s next great opportunity.
The challenge has never been finding more things to consider. Of course, there’s always plenty to consider.
The real challenge is to cut through the noise and identify what’s actually worth pursuing.
Earlier this year, we set out to solve this challenge. Specifically, we want to help product teams make better decisions. Yes, that starts with a way to capture and organize ideas. But it must also include a way to connect these ideas to the broader opportunities they represent.
Most of all, we want to help you avoid the feature factory, a dreary place where product teams are encouraged to ship more features faster without validating ideas or assessing impact after launch. In the feature factory scenario, what gets built next is often decided by who yells their idea the loudest. It’s a frustrating, demoralizing, and ultimately unsuccessful way to create a product.
How are product teams managing their ideas today?
Over the years, we’ve talked to our customers about this challenge. And it is a problem without a great solution. The solutions that do exist today tend to fall into two camps.
1. Repurposed existing solutions
The first camp consists of ad hoc solutions created using your digital workspace’s existing tools. You know them well.
It’s the cluttered spreadsheet of ideas that was created years ago by someone who no longer works at your company. There are multiple versions of it living… somewhere. Which one is most current is anyone’s guess.
Or it’s a Google form shared amongst internal stakeholders and customers. Anyone can submit an idea for something they want you to build at any time. It is great if you like your ideas repository like you like your volcanoes—explosive, violent, and wholly unmanageable if caught in the vicinity of its spew.
2. “Purpose-built” solutions
The second camp consists of “purpose-built” solutions. Many product management platforms attempt to help teams collect and manage their ideas. Some provide a customer-facing inbox for feature requests. Others have created integrations with popular tools that allow product teams to capture ideas where stakeholders live and work.
With enough time and maintenance, any of these solutions can be a viable way to collect and organize product ideas. But if not careful, these solutions can also encourage a feature-factory approach to product management. An idea alone does not solve a problem. The most challenging job isn’t necessarily collecting feedback. It is defining the opportunities or problems the feedback aims to solve.
And, of course, not all ideas are created equal.
Ideas should be used to validate (or invalidate) broader opportunities.
The problem with ideas is that they typically land on a product manager’s desk as a feature request. When this happens, it skips an essential part of the product manager’s process.
The product manager’s job is to hear the pain a customer experiences or the goals they hope to achieve. Then the product manager researches to understand how they can build a solution that won’t only work for that one customer but entire segments of their customer base. The solution must also align with and help achieve the business’s goals, be it retaining more customers, increasing the speed of adoption, or tackling a new market.
For an idea management solution to work for product teams, it must separate the idea from the opportunity. On their own, ideas often exist in the solution space. They might suggest a feature to build, for instance. But when captured in mass, ideas will point to common problems worth solving. Trends will emerge. These are your opportunities. From there, it’s on you – the product manager – to develop a solution that helps your organization attain the desired outcome.
It can also work in reverse. For example, take the goals and objectives your business prioritizes during its annual or quarterly planning sessions. Then, you can translate the goals and objectives into opportunities for the product team. From here, it’s a process of sourcing ideas that can support and validate the opportunities your business pursues or, in some cases, invalidates them.
It’s all about helping product people make better decisions, using the ideas they’ve sourced as invaluable insights to prioritize.
Ideas should inform your roadmap—they shouldn’t replace it
Many product people we speak with talk about the agony of a bottomless pit of ideas. An overflowing inbox. A dumpster of post-it notes. It might be tempting to toss all those ideas into your backlog, eventually creating a roadmap out of the best ones.
Doing idea management this way is a sure path to the feature factory model. Unfortunately, it creates a reactive roadmap rather than a proactive one. And it can result in your product organization—and your business—careening in the wrong direction.
Over the next couple of months, we’re excited to show you what we’re building to help you avoid the agony of an endless supply of ideas. For now, know that our goals are as follows:
We want to help minimize the time spent collecting, consolidating, and understanding customer feedback
We want to help you improve how you make product decisions
We want to help you minimize the likelihood of misalignment with your company vision or time spent working on the wrong things
Digital transformation is all the rage right now. Idea management is one of the last remnants of that non-digital era. Unfortunately, many companies still consider it a crowd-sourced way to build your roadmap. This is not the right way to do it. Sure, you’ll get some good ideas (and some bad ones), but if you’re not aligning them to your product strategy, you’ll just be flying blind and wasting time.
Stay tuned for more about ideas management from LIKE.TG!
Exploring the Future of Product Management: Trends, Opportunities, and Best Practices
I have been fortunate to have joined the LIKE.TG team as the SVP of Product Management in the latter half of 2022. As I experienced the whirlwind of onboarding and meeting my wonderful colleagues, I also spent much time thinking about the future of product management and the space at large.
We have seen the rise of product operations, the Great Resignation, a renewed focus on digital transformation, and challenging economic uncertainty.
However, throughout this period of monumental change, the product community continued to advance the field with shared knowledge and support, which allowed us to become more connected, even while many of us were still remote.
Part of our mission at LIKE.TG is to support the product community with insightful, data-packed content that provides actionable insights and serves as a valuable resource for product leaders and teams alike. So, I am honored to share some highlights from The 2023 State of Product Management Report.
How the state of product management report works
Our eighth annual report explores significant trends and data-packed findings on the state of our industry. We surveyed over 1,500 product professionals last October. Our largest cohorts of respondents were “product managers,” “product owners,” and “directors of product.”
A majority of respondents, 34 percent, had between 2-5 years of experience, with 33 percent reporting that they worked at an organization of 101-1,000 employees. Furthermore, most respondents reported working in “information technology and services,” while “computer software” came in at a close second.
This year’s report focuses on how product teams support the entire product lifecycle from ideation to launch. These findings fill me with excitement about the future of product management and the multitude of possibilities to push our field forward.
Keep reading to learn key takeaways from the report and how it will impact product management organizations in the year ahead.
Cross-functional alignment is one of product management’s most significant challenges for 2023
Across various industries, product leaders often need help aligning their product strategy with organizational goals. Usually, this is the result of communication breakdowns amongst various stakeholders.
According to our 2023 State of Product Management Report, 37 percent of those surveyed reported that “getting cross-functional alignment on product direction” was their biggest challenge.
Struggling to get stakeholders on the same page is nothing new, but it becomes more challenging as companies look to scale. Ineffective communication can have devastating effects, including lackluster product launches and breaking trust among product teams and executive stakeholders. One way to look at this is as an opportunity to establish better communication strategies with all departments—executive leadership, customer success, marketing, and sales. Influential product leaders engage stakeholders and ensure conversations remain productive and informative.
Best practice: use a product roadmap as a single source of truth for communicating with stakeholders
A product roadmap is ideal for capturing important initiatives that product managers can share with stakeholders throughout the product lifecycle. The right roadmapping software can provide product teams with the ability to communicate roadmap changes to stakeholders, allowing them to understand changes to the roadmap at different points in time.
A quick look back at the challenges product organizations faced has changed since 2022
As we look ahead to the new year, we must reflect on how product management trends have changed. According to our 2022 State of Product Management Report, 22 percent of respondents reported that “planning and prioritizing initiatives” was their most significant challenge. This challenge is likely the result of organizations readjusting after weathering the worst of the pandemic. We also found that 37 percent of respondents reported that they would allocate a significant portion of their budget to hiring product managers.
Tightening budgets requires product organizations to scale more efficiently
When looking at budgets for 2023 and comparing them to our 2022 report, hiring remains the primary bucket for budget allocation at 22 percent. Despite recent layoffs and the Great Resignation, the product management field continues its upward trajectory regarding new hires.
In fact, according to Linkedin, 43 percent of organizations surveyed reported the need to hire more product managers.
Though hiring was top-of-mind for our respondents, budget allocation to “change management initiatives” came in at a close second at 20 percent. Product leaders know that to execute change management effectively, they must first gain alignment amongst their team and stakeholders.
Best practice: The seven R’s of change management
Successful change management requires significant planning, strategy, and communication with all key stakeholders. To start, product leaders must focus on understanding the seven R’s of change management:
The REASON for the change
The RISKS of changing
The RESOURCES required to implement the change
Who RAISED the change request
What RETURN is necessary for the transition to be considered a success
The parties RESPONSIBLE for each aspect of the change
The RELATIONSHIP between this particular change and other recent, concurrent, or future changes
Product teams are focusing on using product metrics to measure success in addition to business metrics
Each product team is uniquely positioned to identify how to measure product success. According to our report, 33 percent of respondents concluded that their team’s primary success metric was product metrics.
Last year, our report ascertained that product managers who used “product metrics” as their primary success metric said that product experience had the most significant impact on customer acquisition.
Additionally, 32 percent of respondents reported that “business metrics” defined how they measured success.
Best practice: product metrics inform the success of the product vision
When done correctly, product and business metrics can work together to help product teams understand where they are at accomplishing the product vision. In essence, the product vision serves as a north star that helps the ever-evolving product strategy and tactics remain focused. Everything the product team accomplishes aligns with the product strategy and using the product and business-oriented metrics can inform teams of their impact.
Despite the challenges ahead, the future looks bright for product management
When product teams align their product strategy with organizational goals, the value they provide their customer grows exponentially. Moreover, when product teams own the product lifecycle, product market success tends to follow, which challenges the efficacy of the top-down approach.
I look forward to you reading our 2023 State of Product Management Report. My colleagues and I hope you and your product team benefit from the many insights found within the report.
Feel free to share with your colleagues and friends!
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The Challenge of the Feature Factory
Does your product team celebrate launching that feature they’ve spent the last three months working on and then never give it another thought until it breaks? Is the senior leadership at your organization constantly ordering you to work on the top 10 priorities that change every other day? Are you too busy to reflect on how your product team can work better together? Then you probably have to begin to face the challenges of being in a feature factory.
What is a feature factory?
John Cutler coined the term feature factory upon hearing a software development friend complain that he was “just sitting in the factory, cranking out features, and sending them down the line.”
The term has gained traction ever since. And even with all the bad-mouthing that feature factories have received since John originally coined the term, they still exist.
LIKE.TG’s 2023 State of Product Management Report found that 54% of roadmaps are designed around outputs. Only 43% communicate outcomes.
Who knows what the other 3% focus on…
What happens when a product team is a feature factory
So are feature factories all that bad? After all, you’re producing a lot of features. Isn’t that a good thing? Not always, no. Your unrelenting focus on pushing features out to market results in multitasking, over-utilization, and the hard-core environment that only Elon Musk would love.
Ways to know your team is a feature factory:
You produce a lot of features, but you don’t always know how they relate to each other and if they produce a viable solution.
Your product becomes too complicated to use. You constantly add features and never remove any.
Your product becomes too difficult to maintain. When you furiously add features without considering how they work with existing features, you end up with a maintenance nightmare.
You introduce many features, but you never take the time to reflect on how to improve them. Instead of iterating, you move on to the next big thing.
You’re more likely to introduce features solely for the sake of closing a big deal, which leads to several of the issues described above.
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How does a product team become a feature factory?
Ok, so if feature factories are so bad, why do so many product teams go down that path? Our 2023 State of Product Management Report gave some clear indicators. Per the report: “Reviewing customer feature requests” is the number one source of actionable product ideas (35%).
That’s not too surprising because feature requests (usually expressed as a solution) can seem like an easy way to decide what to work on.
But when you don’t dig deeper into those requests and identify the underlying problem, you risk hoping on the feature conveyor belt – introducing features with no overarching understanding of why except for “our customers asked for it.”
Role of senior leadership
Senior leadership is also a common source of product ideas, according to the report. That source of ideas comes with a big downside – a lack of product manager confidence.
The report explained product managers are “five times more likely to rate their confidence [in their ability to identify problems worth solving] at one out of six when ideas come from senior leadership compared to respondents getting their ideas from other sources”
Suppose senior leadership tells you what to build. In that case, you’re probably not going to be very confident in your ability to identify problems to solve, and you’re more likely to focus on outputs.
Another reason teams focus on outputs and risk becoming feature factories because it’s hard to measure outcomes.
When asked if the return on product development investments meets their senior leadership’s expectations, nearly a third of PM’s responding to the survey said, “I don’t know.” Based on the low adoption of tools for post-release evaluation and reporting, you could interpret that as a sign that they aren’t measuring return on investment.
So if you don’t have a good way to measure return on investment, the path of least resistance is to measure progress by how much stuff you’ve delivered. As proof of that, 70% of roadmaps most influenced by senior executives focus on communicating outputs over outcomes.
A final cause of feature factories is a poor execution of your product strategy or lack of a clear product strategy.
Ideally, your product strategy provides the tie between your business’ goal and objectives and your plans for your product. Suppose you don’t have that guiding north star. In that case, you’re more likely to find yourself whipsawed from one emergency feature release to the next to satisfy the loudest customer or the latest HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion).
Feature factory, here we come.
How to avoid the trap
It doesn’t have to be that way. There are some simple ways that your product team can avoid the soulless monotony of cranking out features.
To start, change how you communicate what you’re building and why. Talk more about the value you’re delivering and less about the specifics of the features you’re working on.
Next, treat customer requests as feedback – Talk directly to your customers, and learn how to read into their requests to find the underlying problem. After all, customer requests are feedback, not requirements.
Finally, give product teams a mission – a problem to solve – and let them figure out how to solve it. When the outcome comes from leadership, it should be clear they care about it, so your team will look to how well they’re solving the identified problem as your gauge of success.
Want more insights like this?
Check out our 2023 State of Product Management Report to get in-depth information about where product teams are now and where they’re headed.
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Why Product Teams Keep Roadmaps and Processes Consistent
Large organizations are all about operating at scale and leveraging the efficiencies this brings. But for enterprise product teams, the most common area where that opportunity and reality clash is roadmapping. While common processes and templates should be the lifeblood of any effective enterprise operation, 50% of large product teams (those with 50+ members) cite keeping roadmaps and processes consistent as their top growing pain.
Why is this such a problem? Why is the problem so important? And is there some solution to make this all easier? Let’s answer all these questions to help you identify ways to solve them.
What’s wrong with a little inconsistency?
Product managers and leaders don’t get into this line of work to conform. Inspiration, insight, and new ideas rarely spawn from filling out lengthy forms or attending endless status meetings.
Creativity and revelations instead arise from customer research, experiments, and data analysis. We try to break new ground instead of retreading well-worn paths. We continue to unveil new and better ways to satisfy and delight customers. And there’s ample room in the product lifecycle for these bespoke learning and discovery activities.
But when ideas and feedback begin flowing, they must get collected, characterized, prioritized, and scheduled. And here’s where leveraging standard tools, terminology, and processes begin kicking in when working in an enterprise setting.
Large organizations can’t function effectively if everyone takes a DIY approach to documenting and sharing this data. If Team A keeps their ideas on sticky notes while Team B throws them in a Google Sheet and Team C logs each one as a Jira entry, there’s no simple way to collaborate and share across the organization. Confusion and duplicative work will follow without common and shared knowledgebases and repositories.
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The importance of consistency in enterprises
Crossfunctional work is relatively easy to do on the fly in a smaller organization. A common frame of reference exists and familiarity with the specific products, target market, buyer personas, etc. But that breaks down quickly as the organization grows, making ad hoc work more difficult to manage.
First, you and your team’s reputation may not proceed you. You might lack credibility and trust with some folks, and they may not buy into your unique way of doing things, especially when it looks different from what they’re used to. But when an organization adopts consistent processes, documentation, and terminology, it’s far easier to plug-and-play different contributors and teams into various projects and roles.
Teams may face a learning curve around the process and the project’s specifics. This common starting point facilitates far more flexible and fluid staffing arrangements. They can now reassign or reshuffle resources to meet organizational priorities and deadlines.
Strategic alignment
While this shared scaffolding makes it easy to optimize staffing, it also simplifies things for executive leadership and other stakeholders, getting them strategically aligned instead of critiquing the roadmap’s format or presentation.
Imagine you’re a senior executive seeing roadmaps for dozens of products, customer rollouts, and IT initiatives. Then imagine that every team that comes before you uses a completely different format and template for their roadmap. You now must first attempt deciphering what the legend, color coding, and timelines of each roadmap mean. It would be best to accomplish this before contemplating each one’s actual contents.
After clearing that hurdle, you must now consider each roadmap in relation to the other. You’re comparing apples to oranges, trying to picture how they align and support the company’s overall mission. All that variation is distracting, confusing, and likely to result in oversights and confusion, which can plague implementation and damper enthusiasm for funding and staffing all of these seemingly unrelated initiatives.
It also makes it harder for senior leadership to paint a cohesive picture to the board, investors, key customers, and strategic partners. With no easy way to roll things up into a master view of the entire portfolio, they’re at a disadvantage when they do their jobs building support and positioning the overall business for success.
Finding consistency with a purpose-built tool
The primary dilemma plaguing most enterprise organizations in this particular realm is a reliance on a wide variety of tools for roadmapping, but not necessarily multiple roadmapping tools. Instead, it’s a symptom of people getting creative and trying to build out roadmaps using the apps available, especially slide decks and spreadsheets, which are truly ill-suited for this purpose.
Introducing a tool specifically for roadmapping across the organization alleviates much confusion and minimizes variation across the enterprise. First, it gets everyone to work in the same digital environment, making it easier to collaborate and plug and play with resources from any department or division.
Everyone will instantly have the capability of interpreting any roadmap and understanding its full context. This goes for product roadmaps and IT initiatives, and product launches.
Add a few best practices, ground rules, and templates, and enterprises can supercharge their synergies. With common color coding, legends, terminology, and timelines, different roadmaps now at least look similar. Teams can view them holistically for a broader view of what’s on tap for different teams and products.
This facilitates portfolio-level rollups and broader strategic alignment. Stakeholders know what to expect and understand what they’re looking at. Swimlanes break out how much work gets expended against different themes and goals, simplifying rebalancing efforts when needed. And resource planners can also make adjustments within individual roadmaps and across multiple ones quickly to optimize implementation and execution.
Standardized roadmaps
Standardized roadmaps also create more accountability and transparency. Using a common platform eliminated comparisons between different teams and their presentation styles, creating more focus on updates and progress.
And for roadmaps shared externally with customers, prospects, or partners, a consistent platform and presentation format makes the enterprise look more organized and professional than each business unit or product team using a different template or medium for sharing their plans.
Last but not least, roadmap standardization will save your organization time. No more endless formatting and re-formatting to make things look perfect for a high-level review or trying to pull random bits of data from disparate systems. Keeping in mind that the goal of building a roadmap is expediting building a great product, you want to spend less time futzing about the plan and more time building stuff and interacting with customers.
It’s never too late—or too early—to start
A standardized, consistent approach to roadmaps and processes is an investment in the future of you, your team, your products, and your entire company. While standing up a new process requires its share of critical thinking, executive planning, socialization, and education, it will pay dividends in the future.
Beginning as quickly as possible to define the ideal roadmap structure and format and then introducing a roadmapping tool that streamlines the process and captures the commonalities makes the most sense. The fewer legacy roadmap presentations and processes lingering, the better, and it can ingrain some best practices into the company’s DNA.
But not all product leaders have the luxury of a clean slate when operating within an enterprise setting. Plenty of bad habits might need breaking, and you probably must sentence some old traditions to the dustbin. Yet this exercise shouldn’t be in vain.
The sooner an enterprise can standardize how they plan for the future, the more time leadership will spend thinking strategically. They may even try to make sense of the materials presented. And with more bandwidth to spend on planning rather than formatting, product teams should give those leaders better roadmaps.
No matter where your organization sits in its journey toward consistent roadmapping processes, now is the time to get everyone on the same page and platform. The longer you wait only increases the degree of difficulty in this transition. Begin realizing the true economies of scale that standardizing on a common roadmapping tool can bring, and get started today with a free trial of LIKE.TG.
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Access a Better Way to Collaborate in LIKE.TG
Have your big-picture roadmap discussions in the roadmap itself
Users of LIKE.TG’s roadmap app can always add comments to any bar or container in a roadmap. Users can click on an item in the roadmap and type a note or question into the comments field. The app even lets users add @mentions to their comments, to make sure the right stakeholders see them.
But what if you want to add comments or questions about the roadmap? How can you start those higher-level conversations about product strategy or other roadmap-level issues? What if your comment or concern doesn’t fit neatly into any of the roadmap’s bars or containers?
We discovered that many LIKE.TG users were creating these comment threads outside of our app—often in email and Slack channels.
Feature: Roadmap-Level Conversations
LIKE.TG has a feature that allows your team to have roadmap-level discussions within your roadmap itself.
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How does the new feature work
Look for the bell icon in the upper-right corner of the LIKE.TG app? Clicking on it brings up our roadmap-level Comments menu. It lets you filter between Open Comments and Resolved Commentsto view All Comments for the roadmap.
Now, when someone on your team wants to ask about timelines or budgets or competitive info—not for a particular theme or epic, but for the roadmap itself—they can start that conversation right here.
Note: You can even have these high-level conversations for an entire portfolio of products if you’re using LIKE.TG’s Portfolio View to consolidate multiple roadmaps.
With our Roadmap-Level Conversation feature, your team can now:
Hold and document strategic discussions at the roadmap level (rather than the bar or container level).
Review roadmaps asynchronously with your stakeholders.
Discuss and resolve issues between individual roadmap bars and containers.
Update your team on the status of roadmap initiatives, identify blockers, request additions, and document changes—all within your roadmap interface.
You can also resolve comments at the roadmap level. This way, all stakeholders quickly ensure they’re participating in the latest conversation about the current roadmap.
Make it easy for stakeholders to see what’s changed since they last viewed the roadmap
Our app does a great job of tracking all changes to your roadmaps. But your stakeholders have limited time. They want to see those changes quickly without reading through a long list of details.
Here’s how we took that customer feedback to make our app even better.
What our customers wanted
Sonia works for a multibillion-dollar tech solution company, and her team uses LIKE.TG for their product roadmaps. We’ve heard variations on her request from many customers. Here’s how she summarized the issue:
“I want to see a view of what was planned and what actually happened. It’s not a question of what was completed or not, it’s a matter of understanding how our plans changed.”
We knew we could do better. So, we created the Visualize Roadmap Changes option.”
Feature: Visualize Roadmap Changes
How it works
With this feature, you can simply click a button and visually display the differences between roadmap versions or the differences between the roadmap at any two points in time. As you can see from the screen above, clicking into the History section still allows you to display roadmap changes as a list. Those updates display on the right-hand side.
But now you can also toggle to a visual depiction of this information. As you can see in the main panel above, the app can now also display the changes to the bars and containers. For example:
Items moved show both original and new placement, connected with lines and arrows, and are color-coded with red borders.
Green borders depict items added to the roadmap.
Strikethroughs show items removed after the previous version.
With the app’s Visualize Changes feature, your team can:
Make roadmap changes easy to grasp for stakeholders.
Quickly and easily compare a roadmap between any two points in time.
Eliminate the need to manually recreate visual changes for executive and other stakeholder roadmap updates.
Visually monitor your performance and progress over time. (For example, to determine if your team is moving an items’ deadline more often than you’d like.)
Takeaway
These new features address two very different use cases in our app, but they have a common theme: improved roadmap collaboration. At LIKE.TG, we are always looking for ways that our roadmap app can help your team communicate and collaborate more efficiently—so you can build great products. Try our Visualize Roadmap Changes and Roadmap-Level Conversations features, and let us know if they hit the mark with your team.
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Product Success and the User Experience: Three Reasons Why UX Must be a Priority
As a product manager, one of the toughest challenges I and my fellow PMs face is prioritizing the right features amongst an ever-increasing influx of data from customer feedback, product analytics, and the never-ending list of stakeholder requests.
The pressure doesn’t let up even after you decide on your product strategy and communicate your vision on your roadmaps. The internal pressure to deliver faster and more frequently often leaves product teams feeling like they have to slim down the scope of a feature, change the architecture, or make design decisions, all in the name of expediency.
Thankfully, the product development lifecycle doesn’t always have to exist in a pressure cooker. Therefore, executing an ambitious product roadmap with proper planning is not only possible but also an exciting experience.
A successful product never sacrifices the user experience.
And the one area that you should never skimp on in your development recipe is user experience (UX). Creating a positive user experience is essential for innovative companies to retain customers, grow their user base, and differentiate from their competitors.
At LIKE.TG, UX is always top of mind when defining a new feature, and we continue to prioritize it as we refine existing features and functionality over time. It’s something we pride ourselves on, and I am thrilled to be part of an organization that believes in the power of the user experience.
LIKE.TG’s journey to enhance the user experience of Launch Management.
Last December, our product and development teams were juggling development cadence and vacation schedules. So, we took a step back and considered prioritizing UX refinements that we could achieve with limited resources. We started by brainstorming the enhancements that we could ship, Kanban style.
The development team, product designer, and I looked closely at LIKE.TG’s Launch Management solution. TheLaunch Management solution is a relatively new feature—we first released it last fall. It is a new tool for product teams that helps them manage a cross-functional go-to-market process. Inconsistent ad hoc launch processes are transformed into visible, flexible, and easily repeatable plans that live alongside the product roadmap.
Despite the newness of Launch Management, we knew it was the perfect place for us to focus on UX enhancements. Our goal with updating the Launch Dashboard was to help customers see the information most relevant to them at the top via launches in descending order by date. We also tackled keyboard navigation improvements to our Add a Task flow in Launch Checklists and did an overall sweep of our UI, including minor tweaks to colors, hover states, alignment, copy, and more.
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Some of these enhancements may not sound too flashy on their own. Still, when viewed as part of the overall user experience, they impact how customers feel when using our product, impacting retention, engagement, and growth.
I share this brief behind-the-scenes snapshot of our development process to showcase how essential the user experience is for every stage of the product development cycle.
Still not convinced UX should be a priority? Keep reading to learn three reasons that will change your mind.
1. User retention: When customers are happy, they stick around.
Have you ever walked into a room and couldn’t figure out where the light switch is? Maybe you finally figured it out but continue getting frustrated every time you enter that room.
That’s a poor UX experience, and this stuff happens in software constantly. It’s what leads to user frustration and can ultimately impact churn. A product with a simple, intuitive, and easy-to-use interface is more likely to elicit joy in users.
You may not move houses because of a light switch, but you’d likely think about switching products if it was frustrating to use daily. By providing a seamless user experience, businesses can reduce user frustration and increase joy, leading to higher levels of customer retention.
2. Increase engagement: When it’s easy to use, your customers will use it more.
UX also plays a significant role in enhancing engagement. Every product team uses some metrics to track engagement, whether active use, stickiness, feature usage, or something else. By launch, we’ve usually put a lot of research, validation, and effort into a new capability, so we expect it to do well, right?
Sometimes it doesn’t, and there are many reasons why that could be, such as we just got the customer’s actual problem wrong. But sometimes, it could just need some UX love to reduce complexity. A product or feature that is easy to use and provides a straightforward solution for a customer’s needs will encourage users to spend more time using it.
3. Enable product-led growth: An approachable, easy-to-use user experience will attract more customers.
It’s almost impossible to be in the product world without hearing about product-led growth. The bottom line is that consumers expect to test a product. They want to buy it themselves and roll it out with little to no friction.
Reducing that friction across the product interface is something UX can help with, whether that’s an easy onboarding flow, upgrade paths, or just an overall simple-to-use experience.
Ultimately, UX design is a critical aspect of your product. A well-designed UX can help you minimize churn and increase engagement and product-led growth opportunities. It can help reduce frustration, increase user joy, and eliminate friction.
Try Launch Management today!
Launch Management is available as a part of our Enterprise plan and our two-week free trial. If you’d like to learn more, schedule 45 minutes with us, and we’ll tailor a demo to your unique launch goals and challenges.
We’re looking forward to turning your next product launch into a success!
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Why Product Strategy is More Often Reactive than Proactive
Have you ever started working on a new product and felt overwhelmed with everything you could do? If so, chances are you were working without the benefit of a concrete product strategy.
A sound product strategy helps with feeling overwhelmed because it
Helps your product team see how your product contributes to your company’s goals.
Helps you get the right items on your roadmap and keep the wrong items off it.
Guides your product decisions.
Given that product strategy provides product teams with so much guidance, why does it seem like your product strategy is more reactive, and is that ok?
Product strategy in theory
Product strategy answers key questions about who your product serves, how it benefits them, and how the product contributes to your organization.
In theory, your product strategy focuses on planning for the future and should anticipate threats, challenges, and opportunities in your market. You’re also trying to avoid issues before they occur.
Your product strategy should be a proactive one where you’re trying to get improved results and meet business objectives.
Product strategy in practice
According to The 2023 State of Product Management Report, the most significant influence on product strategy (46%) is business goals and objectives. Those product managers are proactive and focus on the future to plot their product strategy.
It also means that more than half of product managers say their product strategy is based on something else. Consequently, the next two most significant drivers of product strategy are requests from executive leadership or sales (26%) and customer feedback (26%).
That means over half of the product managers are reacting to internal and external feedback instead of planning for the long term. Their product strategy is reactive.
It’s possible that company size seems to play a role in whether a product strategy is proactive or reactive.
Smaller companies appear to have more reactive product strategies. 36% of companies with under 20 employees say that customer feedback drives their product strategy. That could be because of the outsized influence that even one customer can have on a small business.
As organizations grow, their business goals and objectives have more of an influence on strategies. Enterprise companies (those with over 10,000 employees) were the most likely to say that business goals drive their product strategy.
So does that mean that enterprise companies have “better” product strategies than smaller companies? Not necessarily.
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Product strategy is both reactive and proactive
It turns out that your product strategy can be both reactive and proactive. Both types of strategies require research into your market, your customers, and your competitors. The difference comes in what you do with that information.
Proactive product strategy
A proactive product strategy anticipates future market changes and customer needs before they happen.
A proactive strategy requires assessing the information you get from your analysis of the market, your customers, and your competitors to identify new opportunities. You then gauge those opportunities against your business objectives to see which ones are the best fit for your business strategy.
Proactive product strategies typically lead to products that provide new solutions to an existing problem or solve a problem for which there previously wasn’t a suitable solution.
A familiar example of a proactive product strategy is Apple’s iTunes Store. When Apple introduced iTunes in 2003, it “fundamentally challenged how customers accessed music,” said Andrew B, a Senior Product Manager for deep tech and sustainability. “With an exceptional user experience, and the iPod creating a further demand for the marketplace, they created a new ecosystem with incredible moats.”
Marcin Stoll, Chief Product Officer at Tidio, notes, “to be proactive in Product, do your research well in advance, anticipate the market’s needs as much as possible, develop a detailed product roadmap, and monitor the competition. Investing in UX and UI research and Research Development is something you cannot overlook if you want to be proactive in your strategy. Rather than putting out fires here and there, make sure they don’t occur.”
Alok Agrawal, VP of Products at Mailmodo identifies three actions you can take to build a proactive product strategy:
“One, have a long-term goal for the business to help guide the direction where the company is heading. Two, Create yearly or half-yearly milestones for the product team based on customer research and alignment with the business stakeholder. Three, Create a detailed product roadmap to drive weekly / biweekly priorities for the product team. ”
Reactive product strategy
A reactive product strategy features adaptations to your product based on market and competitor analysis and customer feedback.
You let the feedback you receive from external sources and suggestions you receive from internal sources guide your product development efforts.
Reactive strategies are beneficial when new situations arise in your market, when one of your competitors introduces a new product, or to improve your product based on customer feedback. These strategies allow your company to adjust quickly to new situations, learn from your mistakes and take advantage of new trends.
Consider the iTunes example from above. After Apple released iTunes, several other established companies created competing music sites (Google Play Music and Amazon Music). Moreover, new entries entered the market, like Spotify, and took advantage of the new trend.
For another example, consider the impact of the 2020 pandemic on remote meeting software. As people needed tools to meet remotely, companies like Microsoft and Google adjusted their product focus.
As more people returned to work, the companies that had built tools specifically for remote meetings, such as Zoom, have had to introduce capabilities beyond remote meetings to counter the falling demand and burnout on video meetings.
Matthew Ramirez, Founder of Rephrasely, points out that product strategy “should be highly influenced by market conditions and customer feedback. Changes in the market or customer feedback can make a strategy that was successful yesterday obsolete today.”
Marcin Stoll notes that market shifts, changes in customer demand, and unexpected competitor moves “make it harder for product teams to be proactive and make product predictions. Being reactive is not a bad thing: you listen to your customers’ feedback and adapt accordingly.”
Why you should mix proactive and reactive product strategies
When you work on a completely new product, you may follow a proactive product strategy. You may even create an entirely new market or a novel new solution. You may also follow a reactive strategy and introduce a new product to improve upon products introduced by your competitors.
Either way, once you receive feedback, your product strategy inherently becomes more reactive. Alok Agrawal explains two reasons for this shift:
“1. You are validating hypotheses and doing quick iterations with customers to determine which customers to target and what problems to solve. Speed is critical at this point, and you need to change your product strategy in response to customer and market needs. 2. There are a lot of moving pieces on the GTM front, especially in terms of product pricing and business model, figuring out the right sales channel, etc., which directly impacts your product strategy.”
Regardless of the type of strategy you employ, you need a steady stream of research and feedback. Andrew B suggests forming habits to ensure you get regular information flows, such as setting “recurring meetings in your calendar with customers” and using recurring competitor analysis to “reflect competitor insights within their product strategy.”
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Standouts vs. Status Quo: 10 Traits of an Elite Product Leader
Product teams are as diverse as the products they help bring into existence. While backgrounds and experience can vary broadly, all product managers come to work with a similar core foundational skillset that organizations rely on to build successful products.
Product leaders (e.g., CPOs, VPs of product, head of product, etc.) have the weighty challenge of bringing these diverse PMs together to form a cohesive team with a unified vision and aligned goals.
Of course, not all product leaders are created equal. Some stand out from the rest as exemplary in the role.
What separates the average product leader from the superstars who energize their teams and provide the right leadership, support, and space to enable teams to create and steer products to successful outcomes? In this post, we’ll explore some of the key skills and qualities that elite product leaders share, and we’ll also identify what separates the standouts from the status quo.
What elite product leaders have in common
Truly great product leaders share ten key attributes we’ll examine more closely here.
1. Driven to lead
Elite product leaders are natural-born leaders. They are driven to lead. Not only do they know what needs to be done, they know how to get it done. They make prioritization look easy. But they also trust their team and nurture their people to lead. Leadership in and of itself is a core value.
Bill George, the former CEO of Medtronic and senior fellow at Harvard Business School, knows a thing or two about cultivating an environment of leadership. (George wrote several books that explore leadership: True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership and Discover Your True North.) “The role of leaders,” he contends, “is not to get other people to follow them but to empower others to lead.”
2. See alignment as a cornerstone
An elite product leader stays firmly aligned to vision, strategy, and an organization’s goals. The alignment of all three is considered sacred and unshakeable. But more important: this alignment is shared. And it becomes the glue that unites the product team.
“It’s no longer good enough to build products customers love. Elite product organizations must work across multiple dimensions, building products customers love, that achieve the company’s objectives at the lowest cost and best use of resources. Elite product leaders are the multi-dimensional connector across teams, functions, and all levels of the company hierarchy.”
(Connie Kwan, How to Run an Elite Product Organization)
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3. Powerful storytellers
A product leader holds a strategic and visible spot for the product team within the company and has a great deal of power in setting the tone companywide. An elite product leader understands the power of effective storytelling and why getting the story right and telling it well are so important for product teams. They use stories to simplify, engage emotions, and be memorable. And when these three boxes are checked, that story becomes shareable–an ideal outcome for a product team.
In Building a Storybrand, Donald Miller suggests that the job of product is “not simply getting products to market, but also communicating why customers need those products in their lives.” Without a strong story that persuades and sticks in people’s minds, even the best products can be drowned out in a crowded marketplace.
4. Seek meaningful engagement
Elite product leaders know how to motivate members of their team by meaningfully engaging them. They also encourage, support, and mentor their team members. They understand their people and know what makes them tick. And they see team members as individuals who bring unique skillsets and experiences to the group.
Elite product leaders understand that building a great product begins with building a great product team that scales alongside product vision and goals.
5. Offer ongoing connection
Product leaders are often responsible for hiring. Building the right team culture begins here but doesn’t end here. It’s an ongoing, intentional effort to cultivate the right culture. That intention might take setting a weekly goal for customer interactions or a daily time to check in on product usage. (Note: Elite leaders use their products.)
Building a truly great team must be as intentional as building a truly great product. Elite product leaders know that “great product teams don’t build themselves or come together by chance or accident. Instead, it takes a dedicated leader to envision, shape, and nurture the team and its members so it can grow and scale with the products they manage.”
6. Intentionally build community
There are many ways to generate an intentional product community. The easiest way is to relevant read books and articles and listen to podcasts. Join groups that create an external product bridge. Connect internally within the product group by launching a book club or setting up a casual monthly or biweekly meetup to talk shop. Merge internal and external communities by attending conferences together.
7. Data-driven (but not data-obsessed)
Data is essential for a product team to make informed decisions. But sometimes, there’s so much data coming at the team; it’s challenging to know what to focus on or how to manage it so that it can be useful.
Elite product leaders can skillfully balance the flow of data, get the right systems to manage it, and identify what’s most important.
8. Extraordinary communicators
It really can’t be overstated just how essential strong communication skills are to the entire product team, but especially product leaders. Elite leaders can strike a strategic balance in knowing what to say, when, how to say it and to whom. Getting it right (or wrong) can make or break a product.
9. Amplify efficiency
Increasing efficiency across product teams and organizations is the hallmark of product operations. To elite product leaders, this means long-term sustainability and effectiveness. This efficiency stems from “implementing standardization around metrics, infrastructure, business processes, best practices, budgeting, and reporting.” Further, it means enabling product teams with the tools and processes they need to do their jobs successfully.
10. Customer-driven (borderline customer-obsessed)
Being customer-driven is a hallmark of a successful product organization. That being said, an elite product leader might be seen as more customer-obsessed. They take customer feedback and the customer experience very seriously. And they use this feedback to inform strategic product decisions about which goals to pursue.
How do elite leaders view mistakes?
Elite product leaders are not superhuman. They certainly make mistakes along the way. But they don’t bury those mistakes or distance themselves as quickly as possible from their mistakes. They circle back and poke at them, dissect them, and hold them up to the light to learn from them. Mistakes become teachers. Mistakes provide valuable insights. Leaders know this, embrace this, and put this value into action.
“Failure is not the opposite of success. It’s a stepping stone to success.”
Final Thoughts
Effective product teams that build great products are a direct result of an elite product leader.
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Are you Solving Customer Problems or Just Building Features?
When your product can do more than it could do before, that sounds like a good thing. Added functionality, new capabilities, a more robust feature set…these are the talking points product marketers salivate over and executives search for on product roadmaps. But are you solving for actual customer problems?
In the never-ending race to ship out product updates to keep up with—or ideally, stay ahead of—the competition, it’s easy to get caught up in the flurry of activity and become a feature factory. The danger, however, lies in mistaking new functionality for actually adding meaningful value to the customer experience.
All those new features might look good on a product comparison matrix and give salespeople a new angle when pitching reluctant prospects, but none of it matters if those features aren’t solving real customer problems.
Where are product teams getting their feature ideas?
According to our 2023 State of Product Management Report, customer feature requests are still the top source of actionable product ideas, but that’s only the case for 35% of respondents. Feedback from sales and support is the source 26% of the time, and the competition inspires new features for 16% of respondents. Most concerningly, 19% of respondents reported that their top source of ideas comes from senior management, who are often disconnected from both customers and the product development process.
To reframe things, only about one out of three feature ideas actually come directly from customers… you know, the people who are paying money to use your products. And while a quarter comes from sales and support, these too can come with their own caveats since there’s always some amount of interpretation and bias involved.
When product investments don’t meet expectations, the blame gets spread around. But a lack of a clear company strategy (23%), poor prioritization (19%), misallocation of resources (17%), and underdeveloped roadmaps (17%) encompass the vast majority of misfires. These all point to internal deficiencies in planning rather than problematic execution. In short, organizations are making the wrong bets rather than messing up on the go-to-market or implementation fronts.
Why do product teams become feature factories?
No one intends to waste valuable resources on projects that don’t yield meaningful results. No software developer wakes up in the morning excited to write a bunch of code that will be re-written a few sprints later. Product managers don’t want to ship features no one will use. And no management team prefers an extra bullet point in a sales deck over another satisfied customer.
But despite good intentions, feature factories arise more often than anyone cares to admit. There’s no single cause for these misguided projects frittering away precious development and testing resources, but there are some common causes for many of these missteps.
A scattershot strategy
In the quest to meet the needs of as many different people and customers as possible, product teams can become too ambitious and reactive in their strategic planning. Saying no to a key customer or stakeholder is challenging, so the product team finds itself pursuing multiple paths simultaneously.
Implementation teams get divided up to solve lots of different types of problems, often in the same sprints. This can incrementally add new capabilities to the product and potentially quell a few customer complaints, but without a a unified vision, it can also lead to a lot of partial fixes that don’t attack and solve major pain points in a holistic manner.
Instead of the product team putting more energy into validating and solving major problems, customers get a steady stream of tweaks and minor improvements across the board. This generates a sense of progress and improvement in the form of minor enhancements that may feel like you’re on the right path, but never quite puts those issues to bed from a customer perspective. It’s a bit like treading water. You might stay afloat, but you’re burning a lot of energy without getting closer to the shore.
Noisy customers
When it comes to your product roadmap, the customer is most definitely NOT always right, especially when they ask for specific features. This doesn’t mean customer ideas and requests should be ignored… quite the opposite! But it does mean product teams should ultimately be responsible for defining features.
When a customer has a feature idea, it’s not really because they want that particular feature. In the majority of cases, they have a problem or pain point they want to address, and their suggested solution is their way of asking for help. But most of your customers probably aren’t product managers. They just want the problem to go away and this is their best guess on how to solve it.
If you build exactly what the customer asks for, it doesn’t guarantee they’ll get what they actually want. For products to truly address the root cause, product managers must understand the jobs their customers are trying to get done and identify the roadblocks preventing them from achieving it.
While it’s certainly possible that the feature request is spot-on, chances are it doesn’t fully address the underlying issue or will only address a very narrow set of use cases that don’t necessarily fit in with your product vision.
By really digging into the problem space with customers and putting in the right validation efforts, the product team can get a clearer picture of the right solution opportunity. Then they can work with the implementation team to shape a more holistic solution that improves things for a broader swath of current and potential clients.
Shiny object syndrome
When an executive with enough influence gets excited about something, their enthusiasm can sometimes create a runaway train. They could be inspired by new technology, a new business model gaining traction, or a competitor’s differentiating capabilities. Whatever it is, these power brokers get it in their heads that THIS is the game-changing addition the product needs. This comes regardless of any existing customer problems to be solved.
They bypass ROI calculations, due diligence, prioritization exercises, and customer validation. They lobby hard for their new obsession to jump the queue and get added to the product. Fearing blowback or simply trying to play nice with this executive, product managers just go with the flow and disrupt their own roadmap and strategic plans to make it happen.
When it hits the market and doesn’t move any needles, there’s less scrutiny and criticism because who wants to tell the boss that their bad idea was a flop? And without some brave souls willing to take a stand, it’s likely to keep happening as long as that power dynamic continues.
How can product teams focus on value versus volume?
To ensure product development resources get expended on actual customer problems, product managers must dig deep into their toolbox. Relying on some of these fundamental principles will introduce more discipline into the process and give the product team solid footing to stand their ground and make some potentially unpopular decisions.
Learn to say no
Nearly everything on a product roadmap is there because someone thought it was a great idea or asked for it. Unfortunately, there are way more great ideas and requests than there is time to address them. We can’t do everything, so we must be choosy.
This puts product managers in the awkward position of having to say “no” to stakeholders and customers. It’s awkward because plenty of us are people pleasers. Plus it seems odd to say we’re trying to satisfy customers while regularly telling them “we’re not going to give you what you are asking for.”
Product managers don’t do themselves any favors when they agree to do everything asked of them. It’s not possible to deliver on those promises and it’s an irresponsible use of resources to say “yes” to everything.
Product management would be a pretty easy job if all we had to do was take requests and hand them over to developers. Deciphering which requests will drive key results is the secret sauce. Luckily, saying no is a little easier when there’s an objective prioritization process guiding those decisions.
Use prioritization frameworks
Every decision to build a new feature is a judgment call. But making the decision on any one feature in a vacuum presents problems. There’s no context nor much consideration given to what DOESN’T get built instead.
Using prioritization frameworks eliminates these isolated judgment calls. They force everyone involved to both justify the need for a given feature and stare at the trade-offs head-on. Consider selecting a framework that incorporates scoring and ROI. These are particularly helpful for avoiding prioritizing features that don’t move the needle in meaningful ways for customers or the business.
The opportunity scoring framework puts customers in the driver’s seat, which should lead to prioritizing features that customers actually care about. The jobs-to-be-done framework is another tool that refocuses prioritization around what customers are trying to do rather than what the product team thinks they need.
There are many prioritization frameworks to choose from, so teams should try out a few to find their best fit. You don’t have to pick the perfect framework. The most important thing is to use ANY of them (if not multiple frameworks). These are tools that can help force more objective conversations. Plus, they help you directly acknowledge the tough trade-off decisions that need to be made.
Validate with multiple customers
It’s natural to want to make customers happy. We are in the “delight” business after all. But the problem facing a particular customer may or may not represent a true systemic need. It might be unique to that customer due to external factors or just not be a top priority for others.
The only way to fully comprehend the scope of the issue is to engage more customers. Discover whether this is a real problem for them as well. If it’s a common complaint causing customers a significant level of pain, then it likely warrants prioritization. Otherwise, there are likely better things to work on.
Some enterprise clients may still get their personal wish list items fulfilled. But the organization should go into things with their eyes wide open regarding the eventual ROI and impact of dedicating resources to a relatively bespoke situation.
Define KPIs and success metrics upfront
Don’t build something, release it, and then figure out how to gauge its success. Rather, product teams must begin by defining measurable indicators of the outcome they’re aiming for.
If the team can’t come up with any solid way of assessing the ROI or impact of a new feature, then it’s time to revisit the rationale altogether. No net-new features should make it onto the product roadmap without a measurable benefit for the business/customer base.
Adopt a theme-based approach to roadmapping
The antithesis of scattershot feature releases is leveraging themes to dictate product development. Themes create an overarching thrust for an entire development cycle.
This enables the product team to prioritize multiple features to be worked on at once with the ultimate goal of building out significant functionality to comprehensively solve a specific problem area. Instead of making parts of the product slightly better, it takes one problem and tackles it head-on.
This singular focus yields benefits for the entire business. Product teams can do their homework and fully understand a problem, providing valuable customer insights to the organization. Implementation teams can dedicate more resources and problem-solving energy toward identifying comprehensive solutions. Sales and marketing have a meaty set of capabilities to sink their teeth into for go-to-market and customer communication purposes. And senior leadership can get out of the weeds and focus on big-picture priorities.
Keeping customer problems at the forefront
Resisting the pressure to continually push new features instead of focusing on customer problems might give you a case of imposter syndrome. But rest assured you’re doing the right thing. Customers aren’t counting how many new bells and whistles your product adds. They just want it to do what they need it to do.
So use the strategies above to keep your product on track and your team focused on what really matters. To bolster yourself, here’s more on why you should put your customers first.
LIKE.TG Customers Tell Us How They Really Feel About Our Product Management Platform
Over the past ten years, you’ve heard from us a lot. Therefore, we think it’s time to turn the spotlight on who matters: our customers. Thanks to the review site G2, our users share their honest thoughts about our product management platform.
We love hearing directly from our customers. And what they have to say is helpful to anyone looking to learn more about how an end-to-end product management platform works. We’re excited to highlight some of the feedback they had to share below.
If you want to provide feedback or check out the full reviews, visit our G2 page today!
Fostering better collaboration
It’s all too common to feel siloed, especially when working at an enterprise company or in a highly cross-functional role. Getting feedback and keeping people updated with outdated tools and increasingly remote teams is tough. Luckily, our customers have overcome these pesky silos thanks to the LIKE.TG platform.
A verified user in the computer software space notes, “Before LIKE.TG, we would have to update multiple sources constantly. It was hard to maintain and keep up to date while including only relevant information for specific groups. Now we can leverage tags in LIKE.TG to create specific views that are always up to date. Overall it has already led to time savings and is improving how we communicate internally.”
Commenting on LIKE.TG’s roadmap features, Tiffany W., a Product and Business Analysis Director, writes, “While we still maintain a couple of different styles of roadmaps (for different audiences), they are all in one place and they are all linked – making it easy to keep all of them up to date. Additionally, we have incorporated additional users to assist with collaboration on the relevant roadmaps, thus enhancing visibility and awareness and introducing better collaboration!”
Collaboration at every level is absolutely essential for success. Our customers have benefitted from how our platform serves as a single source of truth for all stakeholders.
Effective communication of the product strategy
Establishing and maintaining a focused product strategy is difficult. Internal and external stakeholders naturally have conflicting priorities. So how do you alleviate concerns and keep people engaged and bought into the strategy? Our users found the answers to these questions with LIKE.TG’s help.
A verified user at an enterprise-level Consumer Goods company comments, “LIKE.TG enables our team to share all of the activities that are going on in different areas so we can gain one clear view with the overall aim of using it to determine our medium to long term strategy. It is now forming a central part of our yearly planning process as it contains up-to-date information and can be manipulated as required to suit many different needs.”
Phillip P., a Software Engineer from a mid-market company, gets even more specific: “I use more than 20 roadmap templates a day easily. With LIKE.TG it is relatively easy to plan, visualize and communicate a product strategy in a matter of minutes using the integrations with Jira, Slack, Trello to streamline each process.”
On getting buy-in, Dylan, a Product Marketing Manager at a small business, said: “I utilize LIKE.TG to propose, visualize, show options, and track [the] progress of a full portfolio of products. This portfolio is made up of a number of products with overlapping requirements and dependencies. Being able to provide clear communication about this complex work is critical to getting buy-in and agreement amongst a large group of internal and external stakeholders.”
We live in an era where many companies are doing more with less. The successful ones have the product strategy at the center of everything they do. Subsequently, they continue to deliver innovative products their customers love. And LIKE.TG is there to support them by organizing all the vital information in one place!
Keeping the focus on the outcome rather than the output
It can be tempting to fall into the trap of focusing on outputs during a product development lifecycle. Roadmaps and product strategies risk becoming a never-ending backlog if the emphasis on outcomes is absent. As a result, a product management team transforms into just another feature factory. With LIKE.TG, product organizations don’t have to worry about this common planning pitfall.
A verified user at a mid-market insurance company stated that LIKE.TG helps him “[Keep the focus on] outcomes: [by having the] ability to see all company product epics, initiatives, and features in one place, and categorize by customer journey/teams. [LIKE.TG] saves time in creating packs with the information and allows stakeholders to self-serve the latest updates.”
Louisa, the Head of Global Marketing at an enterprise company, comments on how staying objective-focused with LIKE.TG helped her team’s ROI: “We obtained better results in increasing our ROI, thanks to the fact that we had the support of LIKE.TG to be our daily guide and to manage all our business plans and objectives.”
Productivity cannot be solely measured by items checked on a to-do list. With LIKE.TG, our customers can ensure the work they are doing aligns with the larger business goals. As a result, everything they launch delivers outcomes that support success and growth.
We’re just getting started
The feedback our customers share with us is invaluable to the work we’re doing on our end-to-end product management solution. We look forward to hearing more from our customers in the future! We cannot thank our customers enough for their continued support.
Not a LIKE.TG customer yet? See how our product management platform can help you turn your product into a competitive advantage. Schedule a demo with our team of product experts to learn how to standardize your product operations, build strategic roadmaps, prioritize high-quality ideas, and launch new products.
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