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Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap?

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

#121
post #40
post #6

There's no way to answer this in a comment...you can take a full course on tech product management and still not have all the answers. But I'll at least offer some advice: Just be very good at measuring and presenting data from all the channels in your company. Your customers, your prospective customers, your customer engineers, your sales people, your support team, your engineering managers, directly from developers…

This is a great comment. Love it. On my end, I’ve recently started working on documenting (still very, very early) on the “measuring” part at https://datadriventeam.org . It is backed by an open source GitHub repo and I hope people would contribute once I’ve gotten the initial version out.

I just checked out Data Driven Team and Herald. What do you think of this comment[0]:

> Good PMs know the importance of talking to customers frequently. Good PMs listen intently to customers to develop their product hypothesis. Great PMs also listen to what isn’t said and anticipate where the industry overall is headed when developing their product hypothesis.

How do you think about balancing data (customer) driven approach and product vision? This is an age-old question. I sided with the former and am learning that there's also wisdom in the latter. This might be a better way to put it: there's time and place for each approach, in a product's life cycle.

[0] https://twitter.com/shreyas/status/1249039646094311424

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

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you pick the right OKRs?

The first step is: encourage everyone in your team to read "Measure What Matters" https://www.whatmatters.com Then decide what matters to the company and all those involved and write it all down in a shared document.

Agreed. The first step is always to establish what matters most to your company and your team. From there you'll have a clearer picture of what your ideal destination is and then you can draft OKRs accordingly. Here's a simple online guide on How to write great OKRs: https://www.perdoo.com/how-to-write-great-okrs/.

Another good place to start is the Ultimate guide to OKR: https://www.perdoo.com/the-ultimate-okr-guide/.

Hope that helps!

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

#123
post #121
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great comment. Love it. On my end, I’ve recently started working on documenting (still very, very early) on the “measuring” part at https://datadriventeam.org . It is backed by an open source GitHub repo and I hope people would contribute once I’ve gotten the initial version out.

I just checked out Data Driven Team and Herald. What do you think of this comment[0]: > Good PMs know the importance of talking to customers frequently. Good PMs listen intently to customers to develop their product hypothesis. Great PMs also listen to what isn’t said and anticipate where the industry overall is headed when developing their product hypothesis. How do you think about balancing data (customer) driven a…

Yup, totally agree. I will update the guide with this quote/source and expand on this line of thinking on my next edits. As you can see it's very early days for the guide. Thanks Ray!

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

#124
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If we're doing T&M, it's pretty agile. If it's fixed bid - which is often - we are bidding on a release's worth of work and working them through. If we were to go full agile on fixed bid projects we would lose our shirts with a lot of indecisive clients. We also don't charge project overages on our fixed bid and guarantee our work.
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