What does a good product roadmap look like?

The litmus test for a good product roadmap template to start from is that it’s visual, accessible, and clear. Anyone should be able to scan it and find answers to the following questions:

• What are we doing?
• Why are we doing it?
• How does this tie back to our OKRs?

This is the fundamental idea behind a theme-based product roadmap – and its benefits are enormous and immediate. It will help you be able to:

• Have way fewer meetings – Your priorities (what and why) are clearly documented on the roadmap. You don’t have to explain things differently to different people.
• Foster healthy team debates – Your roadmap can be the reference point team members use to challenge themselves and one another to link their deliverables back to roadmap goals and OKRs.
• Make product decisions everyone understands – You’re no longer the bad guy batting down ideas. You can actually discuss customer feedback and ideas through the lens of your roadmap and priorities everyone can see.

In the words of product discovery coach Teresa Torres:

“We need to let go of the idea that we can enumerate a list of features that represents what we’ll do in the future. This idea is absurd. Rather than sharing feature lists with the rest of the company, we should be communicating how we will make decisions.”

A theme-based roadmap is designed to do just that: communicate problems to be solved and open up the conversation around how to solve them. 

If you want to dig into this more, I recommend checking out our CEO Janna Bastow’s excellent presentation on using your product roadmap as a communication tool.

Start with this theme-based product roadmap template

You’re probably already familiar with feature roadmaps – they usually look like Gantt charts or release plans. These are useful for planning projects, but they don’t communicate the big picture very well.

Our theme-based roadmap of choice, the Now-Next-Later roadmap, replaces that with time horizons, made up of three columns:

1. Now: Stuff that you are currently working on.
2. Next: Stuff that’s coming up soon.
3. Later: Stuff that you’d like to work on in the future, but need to do a bit more research before you move on.

Note that we aren’t showing any timelines. This is not a release planner, it is a bird’s-eye view of your priorities. Those are always subject to change – there’ll always be something that happens in the future that you can’t meaningfully plan for today.

The point is to leave room to adjust to change. If something you’re working on was current but now you want to push it back, you can.

Define Initiatives for your roadmap

Themes are “a promise to solve problems, not build features,” says Jared Spool, founder of User Interface Engineering.

The idea behind Initiatives is that it’s better to tackle the root of the problem with a single, elegant solution than burden yourself with a growing laundry list of features. You should be working at the problem level, asking what you can do to solve specific issues, rather than plotting out what feature to build next, just for the sake of having a feature to build next.

Developing initiatives for your theme-based roadmap enables you to define priorities in terms of problem areas, which are things that everyone can understand. It also enables you to actively incorporate the daily flow of customer feedback into your product planning.

For example, if you’re getting a lot of feedback for Single Sign On, then now’s not the time to drop everything and build 10 new ways to sign into your app. Rather, it’s time to set up a new roadmap card (like the ones you see below) and start pulling all this feedback together to help you explore the best way to start solving this problem (Fun fact: ProdPad’s AI assistant can help do this for you!).

This enables you to communicate with your company that you’re aware of the problem and that you’re thinking about it, but you don’t have to provide anyone with the exact solution at this stage.

Each of the following roadmap cards represents an initiative except the last one.

Why has the last one been crossed out? Because roadmap cards should always be strategic, not tactical. “Rewriting transactional emails” is too specific to be a strategy. It’s a task rather than an initiative.

At this high-level view, those are details you don’t have to worry about yet. Save the granularity for when you get into the details of each card.

Build the case for each Initiative

Once you have your Initiatives down, you can attach more supporting details for anyone who wants to drill further down. These details help us strengthen what we’re putting on our roadmap, which again, could include useful information for those reading it:

• What are we doing?
• Why are we doing it?
• How does this tie back to our OKRs?

Internally, your team will have access to detailed information which will help prepare them and guide them through your workflow. These details include:

• Ideas – Tactical suggestions for improvement. These ideas answer a simple business case: What problem are you trying to solve?
• Customer feedback – We attach feedback directly to ideas in ProdPad, so they can be linked to potential improvements and we can easily track what our clients are asking for.
• User stories – Use case scenarios for ideas: As a user, I want to X in order to Y.

Cards sitting in the Later column don’t have to have all those answers yet, but as a card moves closer to the Now horizon, they should become a lot more detailed.

Assemble Initiatives into a product strategy

As you build your theme-based roadmap, you can color code and tag them to allow the viewer to sort through and filter down based on a particular interest. Kind of like you do with Post-it notes!

How about that basic usability, huh? This keeps it visually easy and engaging, and everyone will be happy you didn’t make them sort through herds of cards to find what they came for.

Instead of staring blankly at one big roadmap, your colleagues can focus on the ones that are relevant to them.

Now tie it all together with ‘The Guide to Roadmapping’

Cool, nice roadmap! But what do you do with it? Our CEO, Janna Bastow, gave the most comprehensive talk out there about how you can introduce your new product roadmap template across your business. It’s just 20 minutes – a perfect companion to the flexible roadmapping method you’ve just learned.

We’ve also crafted a free course which takes you through all the steps to move your organization from a timeline roadmapping approach to a Now-Next-Later theme-based roadmap.

And to really get the job done, we’ve even created a ready-made presentation deck that you can download and present to your stakeholders to convince them that moving to a theme-based approach is better for business!

Start building your new theme-based roadmap in ProdPad

Hit the button below to start your free trial today! Discover how to build a product roadmap in a tool that’s designed by product managers, for product managers.

Start your free trial

Enjoyed this article? Check out our product management blog for more key insights.

The post Theme-Based Product Roadmaps: Something Everyone Can Understand appeared first on ProdPad.

But despite the hair pulling, the thinking that product managers should say ‘no’ to ideas goes against the grain. A product manager should have the skill set to listen and prioritize ideas that they think will work to solve customer problems. So instead of saying ‘no’, product managers should be focused on saying ‘yes’ to those things that will help make a positive difference, and learn more about the ideas they’re not sure about. 

Saying No Might Damage Your Product Culture

The product team stretches across an entire organization and is very influential. Product managers saying ‘no’ can ultimately have a pretty negative impact on a product and all those involved. This approach inherently teaches the rest of the company that you’re the source of rejecting ideas and suggestions and will have a detrimental impact on your ability to collaborate, manage stakeholders, and engagement with your co-workers. By rejecting ideas or ways of thinking you isolate yourself and your product work. You can forget about those all-important collaborative processes within your company, your customer-facing teams will shy away from you when sharing insights, and your stakeholders will become further removed from your strategy – perhaps even overruling you on large strategic decisions.

Product Managers Should Learn About the Problems, Instead of Saying ‘No’

So what do you do instead of saying no? Easy, focus on how you can say ‘yes’ to the right things:

• Open up your product process to everyone. Teach everyone what it takes to get an idea from ‘new’ to development. This could involve a product tool like ProdPad which increases visibility over your product development process.
• On that same path, show everyone what validation looks like. How do you know that working on something will bring success, and how do you measure that success?
• Have ongoing roadmap sharing sessions. If your team doesn’t understand what problems you are solving and why, it creates more internal friction. When you say yes to things, show why this is.

Boris Krstovic, Senior Product Manager at home goods marketplace Wayfair, also commented on this post about product managers saying ‘no’. His comment really resonated with me and links to what I’m talking about now: 

“Saying ‘no’ is the default for product managers. But the thing is that in 95% of these cases it shouldn’t sound like a “no”. What they need to hear you say isn’t ‘no’ – it’s more along the lines of ‘hey, let’s learn more about it’, ‘let’s cross that bridge when we get there’, ‘how do we support the claim this moves the needle on our objectives the most’, and bajillion of other things.”

When you get a request or someone submits a new idea (no matter how swamped you are) you don’t need to write it off straight away. What might now seem like a bad idea, might not be such a bad idea further down the line – when there are loads of new customer problems that need to be solved. Take the idea and keep it safe in your product backlog, let it be nurtured, worked on, and give it more airtime when you think it might be ready. 

How Should Product Managers Say ‘No’, if They Have To?

The world will never be perfect, even without a global pandemic, so there are a few times when a product manager might need to say ‘no.’ Boris Krstovic sums it up brilliantly:

“Personally, I very rarely say ‘no’. I usually deflect the conflict if there’s a slight chance of deflecting it – 90% of battles aren’t worth battling anyhow, and will just fade away when they find a new shiny object. Of course, a need to have someone back you up when you say ‘no’ is highly dependent on your organization’s culture, and I’ve seen it vary from a very honest and direct communication style (no backup or anything), all the way to extremely political and GoT-ish [Game of Thrones] level 99 corporate diplomacy games.”

Boris Krstovic follows three simple steps which mean he only has to directly say ‘no’ a couple of times a quarter:

• Make sure you fully understand the other party and their goals. Perhaps your fight isn’t with the one you need to say “no” to, but with their bosses.
• Always consult with your manager before directly saying no, and inform the team, too. This does not mean escalate, it should be a discussion. 
• Immediately de-escalate. Keep communication unaggressive and try to sympathize with their need, and potentially offer something that would soothe it.

Try To Refrain From Saying ‘No’

Product managers see the bigger picture. It’s our job to communicate what and why things get prioritized, and how the problems we choose to solve benefit both our customers and our business decisions. Simply saying ‘no’ to things adds friction to team communication. If you’re looking to improve company transparency and make sure everyone is aligned on solving the same problems then try out our product management tool, ProdPad. Explore our free Sandbox to get a feel for how it will help you become a positive, customer-focused product manager. 

The post Should Product Managers Say No? appeared first on ProdPad.

Here’s what my advice was:

Question: What are some resources for pivoting from an execution/features/roadmap PM to a vision/strategy/metrics PM?

First of all, congratulations on making a huge change. Going from a feature-focused product manager to an outcome-focused product manager can be a really difficult transformation, so good job! Below I’ve outlined the key points to making the move over to an outcome-focused approach and linked out to some handy resources. 

Outcome-Focused Product Management Starts With a Product Vision

First things first, start with mapping out your product vision. You can do this on a canvas of some sort, there are plenty of those going around. Some to consider are lean UX canvas or business canvas. This template is a good place to get started too.

Once you have your vision outlined, you can start outlining your objectives. For example, if part of your vision is to be the number one downloaded app in the Apple Store x weeks running, perhaps one of your objectives might be “Increase User Growth”. The important thing here is to remember objectives are to be quantitative and measurable. Here is a nice piece on writing objectives and key results to align your team.

Prioritizing Problems Not Features

The next part of outcome-focused product management can be achieved bottom up or top down, depending on how you wish to prioritize. This means you could start looking at potential problems to solve and then map ideas and feedback, or you could look at feedback first and define which best fit your objectives. It doesn’t really matter to be honest, as long as whatever work you choose to do actually maps back to those objectives. Remember, objectives are there to keep you aligned. This means that instead of working on random stuff, you’re working on stuff that aligns to what you’re trying to impact.

My next piece of advice would be, make sure that whatever projects you choose to work on are written down as potential problems to solve, not as features. That is, instead of writing that you’ll work on a “Slack integration,” instead write: “How can we best support users that work on Slack in order to integrate and collaborate with our app more closely?” This gives you the space to actually understand how you might solve the problem better. We’ve got a really good example of what good OKRs and initiatives look like in our Sandbox. 

Learning From Each Outcome To Get Better Results

When it comes to writing down outcomes and looking back at your work, remember there is no such thing as failure. I mean, yes, you might fail – but that’s ok. The whole point behind outcome-focused product management is to allow yourself to fail, and to use this failure (or likewise, potential success) as an opportunity to learn.

• If you failed, how can you prevent yourself from failing again?
• Where did you go wrong?
• If you succeeded, how can you replicate that success again?

This is what outcomes are about. They’re about preventing the risk of business failure and potential debt before it happens, while keeping your team aligned and working towards the same set of goals.

Become an Outcome-Focused Product Manager With ProdPad

A massive well done to product managers who are able to make the change this effective, and quite frankly, more robust way of thinking about products. We’ve built and developed ProdPad to help outcome-focused product managers be more successful at work. Our lean roadmapping tool, customer feedback and idea portals, as well as our Objectives and Key Results functionality is what every forward-thinking product manager needs this year. 

Book yourself in for a personal demo with one of our product experts for more information. 

The post Outcome-Focused Product Management vs Feature-Focused Product Management appeared first on ProdPad.

Product Management Problems Solved

From our Slack Community to our publicly available customer feedback portal, we’ve listened to your feedback and solved the following problems for you in 2020.

1) Measuring Outcomes by Tracking Objectives & Key Results

While we previously offered the ability to link initiatives to objectives, this year we stepped up our OKR tracking game. 

The first change came with the separation of portfolio and product objectives, meaning teams can add more definition to their objectives, particularly for those product managers with larger portfolios. 

We also introduced key result tracking, giving teams more powerful visibility over how their initiatives are having an impact on their outcomes. With the ability to link initiatives to both objectives and key results, you can keep track of status changes as well as final success outcomes. Absolute game-changer.

2) Getting Teams Involved via Slack

Great ideas can crop up anywhere, and it’s likely your Slack workspace has been busier than ever. So you never miss out on a conversation, our beloved Slack bot is all grown up and repackaged as a new Slack App, providing extensive functionality and interactions all from your Slack workspace. 

In addition to submitting ideas and feedback directly from Slack, teams can also now respond and keep track of threads that sync to ProdPad automatically. With dedicated channel notifications and backlog search, our Slack App is a great solution for solving this classic product management problem.

For information and details on all functionality, please refer to our Slack set up guide.

3) Advanced Security Features for Larger Organizations

ProdPad is Enterprise-ready and prepared to help organizations with complex security and compliance regulations. 

Our SAML configuration is ready to provide access to ProdPad through your favorite identity provider, and we’ve expanded safety measures to allow you to manage inactivity timers and logging in to multiple accounts.

We also increased security through the introduction of data classification labels. 

These allow admins to highlight levels of sensitive information within their accounts, and ensure everyone in the team is made aware of the sensitivity of the information that is being worked on.

This is your IT team’s dream come true.

4) Publishing Roadmaps Anytime, Anywhere, for Anyone

With collaboration and transparency in mind, we recently revamped our roadmap publishing feature to give you greater management control. We understand that a common product management problem is the need to share and create roadmaps for multiple target audiences, as well as ensuring that your roadmaps are always secure wherever you share them.

• The ability to create and track an unlimited number of roadmaps with different views. From your executive board to your development team, create multiple roadmaps based on your master version. All updates are pushed automatically, so you never have to worry about them being out of date.
• Extended administration over created shares, including the ability to expire URLs and embed codes as needed. 
• Added password protection to roadmaps, providing more safety over roadmaps you share.

5) Improved Stakeholder Management for your Atlassian Products

Our support for Atlassian products was also expanded in 2020 with a brand new Confluence plugin.

Available in the Atlassian Marketplace, our plugin allows you to embed roadmaps, feedback forms and portals directly into any Confluence page. Combined with our Trello and JIRA integrations, you can now introduce ProdPad as a complement to your product development workflows, and make sure you’re keeping your stakeholders up to date with every step of the process. 

And what’s more? It’s available for both Server and Cloud versions.

6) Improving Your Day to Day Activities

This year we focused on making ProdPad easier to use for everyone. We introduced new and improved navigation, as well as the ability to favorite products and product lines. Product managers who oversee large portfolios can now cut through the noise of the products they’re not working on and focus on those that are part of their remit.

Our improvements didn’t stop there, of course. We also improved our search capabilities in the app. Finding those important ideas in your backlog can be majorly time-consuming. But now you can search through actual idea content – including files, designs and your archive. This is perfect if you can’t quite remember the name of an idea but know the gist of what’s in there.

7) Integrating ProdPad With Other Tools 

We understand the importance in having an app that is flexible and can easily be integrated with your existing tools. While there are plenty of integrations you can use, we still want *you* to have the ease to plug ProdPad into anything. 

As such, we’ve moved our API documentation over to Swagger.

Swagger allows the easy specification of the API methods using a standard. By adding your ProdPad API key to Swagger, you can actually test the calls directly from the platform, making it easy to get started and integrate with our API.

• Find all our API documentation in a single place
• Test API methods live
• You can create SDKs in various languages
• API is specified using OAS making for easier adoption

8) Supporting your Product Journey

This year we committed ourselves to ensuring you have all the necessary resources and information to make the right decision for your and your team. Introducing a new tool, after all, is never an easy feat. Whether you’re still getting to know us, just about to purchase or are already on ProdPad, we’re ready to support you on your journey to better product management. 

Sandbox

If you want to see what a good setup looks like, or what product management problems ProdPad might solve for you, our brand new Sandbox is the place to be. We’ve set up a free account for you to play with. How cool is that? Play in our Sandbox right now.

ProdPad Glossary

We understand it can be difficult moving to a new tool, particularly if you aren’t familiar with some of the lingo. Luckily, we’ve set up a glossary of terms ready for you to hit the ground running. Check out our Glossary to learn more about ProdPad’s product lingo.

How ProdPad Fits

Every organization is unique – you have your own structure, ways of working and existing frameworks. Find out how ProdPad fits with your processes and methodology of choice (with many more coming soon). Find out how ProdPad fits.

Training and Sales Support

You know you need a product tool, but how can you convince everyone else investing in one is the way forward? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered with our new Considering ProdPad resource.

If you’re already purchased ProdPad and need help with training, support and additional services, we’ve also got resources for you. Never fear, ProdPad is here.

Help, Improved

We’ve made big changes to our support system, now offering improved self-service and a more unified and robust setup. Improvements include:

• Contextual documentation as you navigate through ProdPad
• Documentation search from the support widget
• Email and chat support via the support widget, setting proper expectations for available support hours
• A brand new Help Center

Product Management Problems We’re Solving in 2021

While we can’t give you exact release dates or specifics on features (see what we did there?), we’re looking ahead at the new year and exploring the possibilities of solving more problems for our customers. We’ve mentioned a few highlights below, but do check out our public product roadmap to get the full picture for 2021. 

• How to help new users acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviors in order to become effective ProdPad users.
• How can we make it easier for the wider team to contribute to and reduce the barrier to entry for them to enable and support wider team contribution and engagement.
• Can we utilize the power of automation and intelligence to help reduce the burden on our users?
• How can we improve and expand our integrations to support cross team collaboration and make ProdPad the hub for all product knowledge.
• Enhancing existing features and infrastructure so ProdPad can continue to help large teams with lots of data solve the right customer problems.

If you’d like to know more, jump over to our portal and give us some feedback. Or if you now want a slice of the ProdPad action for your own product management teams and want to see how it can solve your product management problems, sign up for a free trial. 

The post Eight Product Management Problems ProdPad Solved in 2020 appeared first on ProdPad.

Upon reading the question above I can see that there’s quite a lot to address. This is a pain faced not just by startups, it also rears its head for larger organizations, too. The Agile methodology is perfect for creating transparency and keeping product teams aligned, but (as always) I’d like to break this question down into bits to get to the core issue.

Agile vs Agility

The first bit that caught my attention was the opening statement:“We need agile since we tend to wrongly estimate the time needed…”

Using the Agile methodology is not the same thing as being agile. 

When it comes to estimations and timelines, the Agile methodology won’t help you work any faster, or allow you to estimate better timelines. If anything, timelines are against the very core of what Agile stands for. Agile is about this continuous loop of learning and iteration, and setting due dates goes against that flow. 

I’d recommend looking at an Agile framework that allows for better estimations for work. This isn’t about time, but rather understanding the capacity your team has to work on things in a given sprint. The types of frameworks you could adopt are Scrum, Kanban, or the hybrid Scrumban. 

Setting Direction and Creating Transparency for Your Product Teams

Agile methodology is great for moving things along, and coupled with a framework that will allow you to understand the capacity of work and setting a structure will certainly help you. However, this is all focused on the output (delivery) process.

If what you want is to make sure that your team knows what they’re working on without getting sidetracked on random features, as well as create overall transparency for your team, you need to also set an outcome (strategy) process. In other words, you’re helping your team understand what the current focus is.

This will include:

• What you are doing
• Why you are doing those things
• What objectives you’re looking to impact and achieve by working on those items
• How you will measure success 
• What are the benefits of working on those items
• Who benefits from you working on those items

These are all things a product manager takes care of, and a project tool won’t help you out with that. This is why product tools exist. Our product management tool, ProdPad, will help you manage strategy (outcomes) while a project tool helps you manage execution (output).

Once you’ve established your strategy process, then you can focus on the execution process. These are the two sides of product development – first you understand what and why you are working on things, then you execute on those things.

Using tools that support Agile methodology 

The reason Excel isn’t a solution is because spreadsheets aren’t really meant to manage this type of work. I’d recommend looking at two separate tools: a product management tool like ProdPad integrated with an execution tool, such as Trello or JIRA. This will enable you to establish the process separately and join them together as needed. As a product person you’re then able to focus on the problem space, while your team has a space to focus on the execution space.

A product manager who is looking to successfully incorporate this methodology into their product and software development teams should book a personal demo with one of our product experts. They’ll show how ProdPad supports the Agile frameworks to provide more transparency… and much fewer spreadsheets.

The post Using the Agile Methodology to Create Transparency for Product Teams appeared first on ProdPad.

Wonderful online talks and breakout sessions were certainly not opaqued by the pandemic. As always, the Mind the Product team were able to provide an absolutely immersive experience for all things product.

Our Mind the Product Roundup, November 2020

‘Tech and the New Normal.’ By Ben Evans 

Covid has hyper-accelerated our use of technology. 

The internet has changed from ‘how can I find what I want’ to ‘tell me where what I want is.’ Advertisers have pivoted from traditional paper advertising to online marketing. 

Online dating, food deliveries, and even doctor appointments have moved to an online system.

As a result, a lot of habits are now being broken.

This is a period of massive destruction and pain, but also a period of reconfiguration and incredible change.

As product managers we should be asking ourselves – how can we best support this change, and how can we make sure that everyone has access to this change? There are lots of problems to be solved here. Thank you for an excellent talk, Ben.

‘Is Inclusive Design Enough?’ By Julian Thompson’s (breakout session) 

Julian talked us through what inclusive design means and why it’s important to talk about it. 

Design is about outcomes and shaping the future. It’s important to think about whether or not our designs are excluding certain audiences.

More importantly, it’s worth understanding how exclusion happens: 

• Our biases are shaped by our experiences, what we value and what we see. 
• Relationship deficit. Without the networks needed to make connections to a diverse group of people and communities. It takes time and energy to build relationships.
• Know that you don’t know everything.

This was an excellent talk to get us all thinking about inclusion, exclusion, and an ethical approach to problem solving.

‘Roadmap Prioritization.’ (Breakout session)

There was no way I was going to skip this one. It simply has to go in this Mind the Product roundup.

I was lucky enough to join the roadmap prioritization breakout session and talk with some amazing product people like Thor Mitchell (Miro) and CTodd Lombardo (Author of Roadmaps: Relaunched and Product Research Rules). 

Everything from stakeholder management to timeline roadmaps to OKRs were on the table. It’s so great to see people wanting to include OKRs and outcome-based roadmaps and ditch that timeline.

‘Scaling Product Teams: In Defense of Process.’ By Spectra (Adaora) Asala

Spectra has a background in ops as well as product – but loves the chaos behind product! 

Having grown several teams, Spectra is breaking down good process and bad process practices. 

Some key takeaways:

• Onboarding and training: By providing templates for discovery, prioritization, and delivery, processes translate ambiguous challenges into accessible playbooks. It’s easy to suffer from framework overload.
  
• Frame problems vs solutions (yeah we hear that).
  
  • Process frameworks are a great way to ground people and a wonderful entry point for anyone learning product.
    
• Facilitating inclusion: From combating bias in interviews to consistent standards and criteria for career advancement. It’s hard to deliver against the values we have. It’s important to translate that into actions that our teams can follow. 

• Operationalizing ethics: How about, rather than just talking about ethics, we make sure we have a way to action on those ethics.
• Alignment: A huge part of the product manager role is to make sure everyone is on the same page. Look who’s making a guest appearance here… it’s ProdPad. We’re glad we’ve helped you, Spectra.

‘Lessons from a Product Champion.’ By Mary Poppendieck

Here is an absolutely biased comment to open this one up: this was my favorite talk of all.

Mary has a background in early product development with the 3M team. Her talk titled “No champion? No product” – dug down into what a product champion was back in the day. Often, it was the person that did everything necessary to get that product to market, working with various members in leadership positions, such as: tech (feasible), marketing (viable), design (usable). 

Most importantly, Mary highlighted that in order to work as a team, you shouldn’t have conflicting goals. You had one goal that everyone worked together to achieve (hello again, OKRs).

My favorite part of her whole talk was her statement on making decisions. “Hold off,” says Mary. Why make a decision if you don’t have enough data to support making it? It’s better to wait than to build something nobody will use. 

Absolute mic drop moment.

You’re a gem, Mary.

Day Two of Our Mind the Product Roundup

‘All These Worlds Are Yours.’ By Cennydd Bowles

Cennydd challenged us from the getgo to think about our use of technology. While tech has made our lives infinitely better, it has also reared its ugly head with unforeseen consequences. From Uber to Twitter – the promises of tech helping make our lives better, to a certain degree is true but it has also breached our privacy. From accidentally racist chatbots to political radicalization, the public has viewed for many years these scandals as “minor” or just did not understand. 

How did we let technology get so far from its original intentions? While our hunger for technology grows, it’s the product manager’s role to keep ethics at the forefront. Work with your teams, talk to researchers, and take the time to add responsible product ethics to your product process.

Ethics might seem fuzzy, but there’s a wide body of work already available. Don’t just do the performative “ethics washing”. Do the research. 

User centricity has blinded our wider responsibilities – “Our loyalties must be with the world, not just our OKRs.” 

‘How to Create a Product Strategy.’ By Amy Zima

Amy Zima took us through the steps of creating a solid product strategy. 

Step 0: Have a solid vision.

Why we love this: There is no strategy without vision. *CLAPS ALL AROUND*

Step 1: Understand the problem you are trying to solve.

• What problem are we solving? (data and insights)
• What needs to be true to make this vision happen?
• Who are we really building for?
• How do we differentiate? Why us?
• What does success look like? What could go wrong?

Step 2: Identify your choices and look at the pros and cons.

That’s it, you’re done. Well no, you’re not done, but you can now start creating your outcome-based roadmap, run validation, discovery, and build amazing products.

‘The Anatomy of a Pivot.’ By Asha Haji

Pivoting can be one of those moments that makes or breaks a company. Asha ran us through how some of the most well known companies came about from a pivot moment. 

Did you know Slack started out as a gaming company? Originally building a game called Glitch, and with millions (although I think I heard billions) in funding, the game never actually took off. The founders then had a decision to make – take the loss or pivot to something new, and lo and behold, we now have Slack.

The bigger the company, the more dramatic the shift. Discuss how to pivot, when to pivot, and most importantly – include your product managers.

Using the pivot pyramid is also a good way to gauge who and what will affect the pivot. Regardless of your choices, understand that customers will always be affected.

‘Product Leadership is Hard.’ By Marty Cagan

The difference between great product companies and everyone else is a gap that has not been shrinking whatsoever over the last few years. What’s the key differentiator? Good leadership.

An empowered product team is one where they exist to serve customers in ways the customers love but meet the needs of the business. In contrast, a feature team is there to serve the business. Can you really hold a feature team accountable if they’re given the solution without any other context? Of course not. The responsibility is yours, says Marty.

If you want to empower your product teams, you must provide them with context!

Where to start? With the product vision, of course. Step 0, remember?

A product vision first and foremost puts the customer front and center (not your company.) It’s all about understanding how the customer’s life will be better by using your product.

Good product visions are emotional. They also show which industries you will leverage, and how your teams will keep aligned against a common North Star.

Understand objectives, focus on key results to move the needle forward. Less features, more outcomes.

Keep Those Product Management Conference Vibes Going

Well that’s a wrap for our Mind the Product roundup. ProdPad’s virtual booth is always up and running. Head over there now and check out some of our great resources, including our sandbox where you can try out ProdPad to see if it’s the right tool for you. 

If you want to chat to our product experts about product management best practices and learn a little more about ProdPad then feel free to book in for a personal demo.

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“How do you manage feedback? Is everyone else tired of spreadsheets?”

When I worked in support, it was so hard to give my product manager the right information and usually it all came down to trying to understand a spreadsheet dump. So let’s kick this off by saying yes – there absolutely is a better way, but I’d like to take a step back first and break this down into different buckets of information.

Do Not Call Customer Feedback Feature Requests

This is your opportunity to change the conversation. What you’re receiving is feedback on how you might improve your product and what your customers are struggling with. A “request” implies you will have to work on every item that comes in, whereas feedback gives you more flexibility as to how you handle things. Whether it’s positive or negative, it’s then up to your product team to manage this customer feedback and handle things appropriately.

Gathering vs Tracking

I like to separate the concept of gathering vs tracking. Gathering is something you should do with as many tools as possible – don’t limit yourself. Whether it’s through social, email, conversations, or your different customer-facing teams – open up as many channels as possible. This makes it easier for people to actually want to engage with you. There certainly isn’t a lack of tools that will help you do this.

Tracking is a separate step of the process, and in my opinion the most important part, as it will determine how things impact your product backlog and eventually how items get prioritized. For this, we built and use ProdPad. Why? Because customer feedback is what helps validate your product backlog, so having it in a separate tool makes absolutely no sense. You need to understand the qualitative and quantitative aspects of it.

Responding

Saying thank you is the first step. But for every piece that comes in, we make sure the person handling understands how to respond – that is, always asking why. Why do they feel they need this feature they’re asking for? How might it help them do their job? This is significant in two ways: one, it trains our team member in understanding what the product needs and how the product works and two, it lets the customer know we’re not just taking the piece of feedback and dropping it off to be lost, but that we actually want to (and need to) understand what they’re struggling with.

Post-implementation Comms

This is a biggie as it closes the feedback loop. Just answering and saying “thanks” isn’t where it ends, you then need to get back to the customer and close the feedback loop once the idea is implemented. This will give you the opportunity to bring back lost leads, but also create an atmosphere of trust. Just getting back to someone and thanking them for making a difference in your product makes them feel like it matters. Again, we use ProdPad for this. All feedback links back to a contact who we can then reach out to when the item is released. We generally include a quick thank you note as well as either a video or a how-to doc as to how the feature works. Boom, you’re a superhero.

Managing your customer feedback in a system (not a spreadsheet) that allows you to understand who the feedback came from, why, and how it’s impacting your product backlog, is not only making things easier for yourself but for your team. Your customer-facing teams will have an easier time speaking to your customers, you’ll have a better way of understanding and prioritizing feedback, and you’ll be on your way to building great products.

How do you manage customer feedback? Drop us a comment below and let us know. Or book yourself in for a demo with one of our product experts to learn how ProdPad can help you overcome this problem. 

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“My exec team wants the entire team to vote on features and prioritize the most popular ones – I think this is a terrible idea. Help.”

First off, they absolutely nailed it in thinking this is the wrong approach. Building a product isn’t about running an internal democracy and working on the most popular items your team thinks you should be working on. At the end of the day, you aren’t building things for yourselves, you’re building things for a market.

With that said, before you just say “no,” it’s important to take a step back and understand where this is coming from. Usually situations like these stem from your team wanting more visibility over what is happening. It is a symptom of the major problem your team is having: lack of transparency.

So the real question is:

How can you make the product management process more transparent for your team?

This is what product tools like ProdPad were designed for. ProdPad acts as a single space where your entire team can access all the information about what it takes to get an idea from inception to implementation. By providing visibility to that process, alongside your product roadmap, your team will have a clear understanding of how you prioritize and make decisions. 

Your team can also ask questions and jump into discussions, help you validate ideas with customer feedback, and keep an eye on how things are moving forward and impacting your objectives.

Once you have this increased level of visibility for everyone, it’s likely there will be less focus on the voting aspect of things.

How do you keep your internal product management processes transparent for your entire team? Comment below and let us know.

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Sharing your roadmap can only lead to better communication, both internally and externally. Above all, it keeps your team aligned and working towards the same goals and outcomes, so instead of working against each other you’re actually working with each other. 

Now there is no wrong or right way when it comes to sharing the product roadmap – the important thing really is that you’re doing it.

At ProdPad we use ProdPad (duh!) and everyone has access to view the product roadmap. The great thing is every user has the ability to set their own views, so whether one is looking to get a really high-level view or a breakdown of the ideas involved, the flexibility is there for each user to set that visibility for themselves.

Sharing your product roadmap with customers

Additionally, we also share our roadmap externally with our customers. This is important for two reasons:

1. It helps our customers understand what we’re working on and why
2. It helps our team have conversations with our customers about what we’re working on and why

But wait… there’s more

It’s not enough to just make your roadmap visible internally, the next step is to actually talk about it. Our Senior Product Manager, Kirsty, has roadmap catch ups with our customer-facing team every couple of months so they are up to date with how things are moving forward. This isn’t a release or sprint catch up, it’s a strategic chat more than anything, and helps our customer-facing teams plan their own roadmaps around similar strategic initiatives. 

Now remember, your product roadmap is about communicating what you’re working on, why, for whom – and above all, how these problems you’re looking to solve are actually going to make an impact for both customers and business. With that in mind, we also have quarterly reviews of how our objectives and key results are doing, so that everyone can be kept up to date about what the impact of the work we are doing is. This is the chance for everyone to focus on those outcomes, and as a team understand our own success.

How do you share your product roadmap? Leave us a comment below and let us know

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