Just listened to a good podcast from Janna Bastow on building product roadmaps. In 24 minutes, here is what you will here:
- Start with what problem are you solving and for whom.
- 2 sources of input for roadmap
- Top down product management: vision + objectives + big steps
- Bottom up approach: conversations with customers, team, competitors – in the trenches.
- Challenge – dealing with tons of data from customer, prioritizing, and communicating
- How to address getting input from the team into the product plan: product tree game
- Innovation Games was the inspiration
- Put people from multiple disciplines in a room and put a huge tree on the white board
- Trunk represents the core – foundation
- Infrastructure is represented by the roots.
- Ideas are the branches.
- Have a bunch of post it notes and put them on the tree
- Separate release plan (2-4 weeks out) from roadmap to give you agility – roadmaps do not have dates.
- 3-6 months out for roadmap is reasonable for an immature product; 2 weeks is sprint for them.
- Roadmap should not be a set of features; distill out the higher level meaning of the features into more meaningful themes.
- Every product should have objectives and metrics – but how do you measure the effectiveness of a product manager? Who knows:)
- Is the HIPPO hijacking the roadmap? Stakeholder management and saying no are critical skills for a product manager.
- Who else is doing interesting work in the product management thought space? Nate Walkingshaw, CXO at Pluralsight https://www.pluralsight.com/blog/career/product-development-directed-discovery
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