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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?

#21

Post by zabil »

> just decide your own roadmap and stick with it?

While this may sound like it's easier to manage it usually ends up with a product that does not solve the problem of the customer.

As a product manager solving problems of your user or customer must be the first priority. The only way to do this is getting closer to the customer.

I find teams shielded from customers via business teams use the best part of their product management and engineering skills (microservices included) to manage their business team and not the customers.

There is a constant grooming of the backlog with features and pressure to keep the engineers managed and busy.

Start measurning the value of each feature to your customers. Have short customer feedback cycles for planned features. Your backlog should reflect solutions that make sense to the customer.

The book "Escaping the build trap" talks about this. I highly recommend the book.

Good books on the subject talks against roadmaps and shifting to a value and goal based approach.

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

#22

Post by ddrt »

Use roadmunk or Asana because they have timeline view. Stakeholders love that.

The right way is to collaboratively change your roadmap over time. The wrong way is to restrictively stick to spec from the start.

Roadmaps are not things like Jira tasks, and vice versa.

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

#26

Post by arendtio »

You have to include multiple perspectives. Make a list of the top 5 features...

- you think your customers need

- your customers want (ask them!)

- which offer the highest return on invest

- your product needs when being compared with your competitors

When you have answered those questions, you should have a good feeling about which features you want to implement first. Next, ask the devs how your priorities match up with the development of the application and how much time it would take to build them. Some features might technically depend on each other.

Edit: Btw. changing priorities is okay, as long as nobody has started to work on a feature. As soon as the implementation started you better finish it. Make sure your business team commits to the things you start implementing and get the commitment from the dev team to finish things in time.

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

#27

Post by renewiltord »

Oh, this is literally your job. There are different takes on this, and the detail is hard, but the broad strokes are:

* Follow your vision for the product - i.e. form a feature-set that combines the greatest compatible combination of requested features and your understanding of what the future of the product post those features will look like

* Solve the immediate next problem that will bring you most money fastest. Apply debouncing. i.e. the next blocker to money is feature A in the shape of a customer saying "we're ready to sign if you have A". Rank all amount of money, likelihood of customer actually executing (if you aren't able to sign on to a pilot w/ "we'll have it next week"), and divide by time. Do that. Do not re-evaluate for some duration of time.

* Find what you're selling. Sometimes this can be very different from what you're making. And the customer may be asking for a feature because they think that feature in the thing they're being sold will solve the problem they're having.

Honestly, no one here can help you with this. I suspect not even a course could help you with this. This you're going to learn by attempting to constraint solve here. Just learn from the pain fast and do what's necessary to keep the trust of your team (primary!) and your customer (secondary because there's more of them than the team).

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

#28

Post by bgdnpn »

There always needs to be a balance between external forces changing your priorities and your internal vision and strategy.

This being said, if the roadmap changes mostly based on new customer asks.. then you're not building a product, but doing custom development / professional services work.

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

#29

Post by tarsinge »

zabil wrote: post #21

> just decide your own roadmap and stick with it? While this may sound like it's easier to manage it usually ends up with a product that does not solve the problem of the customer. As a product manager solving problems of your user or customer must be the first priority. The only way to do this is getting closer to the customer. I find teams shielded from customers via business teams use the best part of their produc…

I agree, this is anecdote but a dysfunctional company I have seen had engineering stick on their own roadmap disconnected from customers. The end result was a product that failed to evolve to the market, no features were added for years because the engineering roadmap was always to migrate to a new exciting technologies, or improve fun features to work on but that no customers were using.

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

#30

Post by nurettin »

Hi, I'm also in the industry and in the same situation. The best life changing advice I can give is to introduce a one week delay between finishing features and releasing them. Adjust your software versioning so that you only release what was done a week ago. You have to stick to that one week delay as much as humanly possible. This gives a lot of confidence and room to breathe so you can enjoy work again.
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