Product Roadmap
A product roadmap is a strategic communication tool. Its purpose is to show your team and other stakeholders what your product vision is and how it breaks down into product strategy and the product development initiatives needed to achieve that strategy. A product roadmap is not a gantt chart, and it’s not a device for showing off every last detailed feature in your development plan – instead a product roadmap should focus on high level themes aligned around customer outcomes.
LATEST POSTS
The Hidden Costs of Constantly Shipping new Things
I worked for 8 years at a successful startup called Base CRM. It was acquired by Zendesk 2 years ago. During this time I saw the company take different approaches to many problems startups have, but one remained unchanged: unparalleled, obsessive focus on shipping new functionality. Lately, I’ve been thinking a bit more about a […]
What Makes a Good Product Roadmap?
Roadmap creation is one of the primary jobs of a product manager, and probably the one that causes them the most difficulty. There are many books, blogs, conference talks, and training programmes on what makes a good roadmap, and people make careers out of being roadmapping experts. It’s impossible to distill all this valuable information […]
Creating Consistency Within the Chaos of Roadmapping by Rohini Pandhi
The process of building products can be challenging and needs to be iterated on as much as the product itself. In this ProductTank San Francisco talk, Rohini Pandhi, Product Manager at Square, shares her thoughts on roadmapping and its role in the product process. Watch the video for her talk in full. Or read on for an […]
Free Your Product Roadmap and Ditch the Timeline
I recently raised something on Twitter that I’ve said in the past on conference stages, webinars, podcasts, Mind the Product and elsewhere – the timeline roadmap simply has to go. The topic led to a long thread of questions which I’ve decided to answer here. My Tweet was inspired when checking out Ecosia, a new […]
A Product Manager's Guide to Saying No
As a product manager you have to say no to stakeholders, a lot. Find out how to master the art of saying no with empathy, so you can maintain positive relationships and stop all those zombie ideas from haunting you. On a field trip, you speak to John, a user. John is super-engaged with your product […]
How to Avoid Market Feedback Traps
If you were to ask me whether you, as a product manager, should you always listen to market feedback? My answer would be yes, definitely. Sometimes. Here’s why. Henry Ford is famously quoted as eschewing market feedback by saying that if he’d listened to his customers, they’d have asked for faster horses. Interestingly, I learned […]
Good Product Management is the key to Organisational Happiness
A few years ago I read Tony Hsieh’s book on Zappos, a company that has been lauded for its amazing culture. In the book he shares his view on the four pillars for happiness: progress, purpose, control, and connection. Although various people have made lists of this type, this particular list has resonated the most […]
Why Feature FOMO Stalls Product Innovation
Messenger apps started as the simplest way to start a conversation online. Open the app. Select a person to chat with. Go. Today, those apps have seemingly endless ways for users to engage: video chat, send gifs, send emojis, send money, use a filter, buy and sell goods, play games, talk to bots, and more. […]
4 Product-Driven Steps to an ArtificiaI Intelligence Roadmap
What’s so transformative about artificial intelligence (AI), anyway? Artificial intelligence (AI) is regularly breaking new ground, from DeepMind’s AlphaGo Zero teaching itself to play Go and beating human champions to text-generating algorithms so powerful that their creators at OpenAI decided not to release them publicly for fear of malicious use. While these accomplishments are rightfully generating enormous buzz and […]
Product Management is Simple, but Very, Very Hard
I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead. Mark Twain At its core Product Management is about making choices between countless possibilities to deliver value to the end user while meeting organisational goals and constraints. Simple huh? But not straightforward, nor easy to achieve. Indeed, this is […]