Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap?

#111

Post by blizkreeg » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 9:25 PM UTC

Managing the roadmap (and delivering value) is the hardest and the key part of product management.

It's hard to give generic advice not knowing more about the context but here's one way that I've found useful and successfully executed. Bucket your roadmap into 3 rough buckets - delight features (no one has specifically asked for but that deliver high value), customer requests (obvious), and your/company's product vision (not something you just concocted but based on real data and validation).

The % of your roadmap and sprint allocated to each bucket depends on your specific business, current situation, and startup/product stage.

Don't let customers hijack your roadmap. Talk to them, listen to their needs, understand the requirements coming from the business team, evaluate the severity and sensitivity, and ultimately prioritize yourself. There are times (sprints/months) where > 60% of my roadmap has been customer-driven and times when only a third of it are customer requests.

Re: Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap?

#112

Post by crazygringo » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 10:28 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #93

aidanlister wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get a piece of paper out and draw a bunch of circles on the left, and a bunch of circles on the right. This is your business team and development team respectively. Now draw lines between all the circles. Those are your lines of communication without a PM. This is a sad diagram, no one knows the whole story. Now repeat the exercise but draw an additional circle in the middle of the page. This time, the lines on the l…

Where are the customer circles in that diagram? Product managers have to get out of the office (maybe virtually) and talk directly to real customers and qualified sales prospects.

A full diagram has a circle at the bottom for customers and a circle at the top for management.

The PM is the hub of communication between all 4.

Although on a day-to-day basis, it's the dev team and business/sales that make up the large majority of interaction.

Check-ins with management are occasional, and conversations with customers are just kind of an ongoing informative thing.

Re: Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap?

#113

Post by jariel » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 11:35 PM UTC

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #17

jariel wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sales team is more important than 'vision' 9 times out of 10. In consumer, where the customer may not really know what they want, and can be convinced, it's more about vision and how that aligns with smart marketing. With B2B the sales teams are it. Customers may also not know exactly what they want, but some discussion there will suss it out. Note Apple was always pretty terrible in B2B, you wonder why?

Apple was always pretty terrible in B2B, you wonder why? I always thought that was a strength, they focussed on areas that companies like Microsoft were completely oblivious to.

It's probably a strength in consumer, but were it not for the extremely fortunate set of circumstances leading to the iPhone, Apple would be a little company selling macs.

Re: Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap?

#114

Post by jariel » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 11:37 PM UTC

aprdm wrote: post #16

jariel wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sales team is more important than 'vision' 9 times out of 10. In consumer, where the customer may not really know what they want, and can be convinced, it's more about vision and how that aligns with smart marketing. With B2B the sales teams are it. Customers may also not know exactly what they want, but some discussion there will suss it out. Note Apple was always pretty terrible in B2B, you wonder why?

I think with no vision is really hard to build a good product and without a good product what exactly are you selling? I think sales is super important yes but it sort of works after having a product. It is just as important for a company since no sales == no money coming in. I guess in the context of this topic I believe that to manage a product roadmap effectively having a strong vision for the product is fundament…

Sun had vision, I don't think Oracle ever did.

I don't really think salesforce's early 'no software' bit counts as vision either. Maybe.

There are huge swaths of mundane companies that make up most of the econony, wherein I would say there's a lack of vision in the way we understand it. What they have is operational tenacity, rigor, professionalism, and a near term vision to 'make money'. For better or worse, that's what we have.

Re: Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap?

#115

Post by jlbnjmn » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 11:42 PM UTC

ian0 wrote: post #55

Been there, made all the mistakes. In small fin-tech startups no less. My advice, assuming you have some sort of product market fit: 1 Clean up shop. Set expectations & bounds. Throw out your backlog. Tell everyone you will release one BIG THING and X minor bug-fixes every month. Your job is to give the engineering team enough space to do their job well (including refactoring, compliance, security etc). And its their…

Excellent comment, thanks for sharing.

You said:

> This has to involve a huge amount of actually talking to customers. If not, its pretty much guaranteed to fail.

Do you have any advice for doing that well?

Re: Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap?

#116

Post by closeparen » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 12:09 AM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #70

Welcome to being PM -- this is the job. And this is exactly what the agile/sprint process is extremely helpful for. Every two weeks, check in with the business team to bring them up to date with development and get them to prioritize/rank the features they want. Then hold a big meeting with your team and use planning poker to estimate how long the top-ranked items will take. Inevitably it'll add up to 2 or 3 months o…

The PMs at my employer don't have a magic business oracle to tell them what to build. Instead the business has some vague goals, and maybe areas it wants to emphasize at the moment. A PM's job is to come up with ideas for products that will serve the goals in accordance with the priorities. They work with designers to mock up what the products might look like, analysts to forecast what the impact might be, legal and policy to understand the risk profile and constraints, user research to understand the customer needs and preferences, support and operations to map out the associated ground game. This culminates in a Product Requirements Document.

They get very rough estimates from engineers, then sit down with the other PMs and business leaders and fight it out for engineering weeks. If the PRD is funded, they'll sit in sprint planning and demos, etc. to oversee the fulfillment of their vision. (The product's tech lead is responsible for architecture and implementation, the PM for its observable behavior and fielding). They'll participate in the design of test cases, rollout plans, experimentation, marketing materials, press demos, etc. They'll be on video calls at all hours of the night working with regional stakeholders around the world to clear the way to rollout in those markets.

Then at the next six-month planning cycle, rinse and repeat.

It is very much their own wishlist of features, although to get engineering weeks they theoretically need an evidence-based argument for why those features are the best use of time.

Maybe we're talking about the difference between PM at a product company and PM in internal IT?

Re: Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap?

#117

Post by knbknb » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 8:14 AM UTC

Just yesterday 2020-04-11 Shreyas Doshi (@shreyas) posted a long thread of 30 tweets about "Good" vs "Great" product managers. Some pearls of wisdom are in there:

https://threader.app/thread/1249039638829793280

(He also admits he doesn't knwo any Great PM who has all of the 30 traits and does all those actions, all of the time.)

Re: Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap?

#118

Post by mattm » Mon, Apr 13, 2020, 7:48 AM UTC

iratewizard wrote: post #100

alangibson wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good 1000 foot view of the job, but never in my 22 years building software have I seen this work smoothly. Most business stakeholders will never be able to describe what they want in a way such that you can implement it. You will just have to live with the fact that you will often rework things you implemented because what you think you heard is not what they said. 2 weeks is an eternity is a fast moving bu…

One of the things I do as director is make pixel perfect mockups which can be clicked through. In a day's time, I can have two months of project work presentable. Work doesn't start until what we are building is locked in, and when it's locked in it doesn't budge without a change order. An added benefit of the mock ups would be that these types of change orders have become rare since I took over.

Isn't this basically the waterfall methodology?

Re: Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap?

#119

Post by meerita » Mon, Apr 13, 2020, 10:21 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #70

Welcome to being PM -- this is the job. And this is exactly what the agile/sprint process is extremely helpful for. Every two weeks, check in with the business team to bring them up to date with development and get them to prioritize/rank the features they want. Then hold a big meeting with your team and use planning poker to estimate how long the top-ranked items will take. Inevitably it'll add up to 2 or 3 months o…

What does that has to be with the initial question: how to properly manage a product roadmap? A roadmap is not a meeting or a prioritization process, it is a document that states what is going to be done during a long period of time.

I don't agree with the "no room part". It seems you don't work as PM but more like a mayordomo like job.

Re: Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap?

#120

Post by meerita » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 9:19 AM UTC

brightball wrote: post #63

dberg wrote: post #61

After seeing so many Product Managers get this awfully wrong sometimes it also helps to understand what your job _isnt_ * Focus on outcomes over outputs. Your job is not to build a spreadsheet or JIRA backlog of features and then hand them to engineers to build like a coding factory. You do not have a crystal ball. You are not Steve Jobs. * Involve the Business, Support and Eng parts of the org when defining _what_ t…

Getting people to understand how useless roadmaps are is the hard part.

I am devoting my life to make that happen. People don't understand roadmaps are just false promises you make. Product evolution is dictated by other variables more critical than a single slide with some features proposals.