As everyone says, it's a careful balance. However, I want to emphasize how much slicing features down to the absolute minimum can help. What you absolutely don't want is many half finished, unreleased big features. However, using tactics like continuous deployment and feature flags, you can slice features into small bits, always be deploying, and launch to customers as soon as the feature is minimally viable. Then, you have the choice to continue improving it, or pivot to a different feature depending on how people like it, new sales opportunities, etc. Plus, having even minimal versions of features out in people's hands opens people's minds about what they want. You want to move that churn upstream from development to product at the very least, but possibly even further up to stakeholders or clients.
Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap?
51–60 of 124 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap?
#52Hi, 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.
That's interesting but seems odd. Could you elaborate on why this approach works better for your team?
Re: Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap?
#53Hi, 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.
Can you expand on this? What do you do during that week?
This runs really counter to my instincts. The first thing I wanted to do at my current job was move from weekly deployments that were lagged by a week of QA to nightly deployments behind feature flags, so product managers could launch quicker, allowing faster feedback loops.
Re: Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap?
#54Re: Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap?
#55Been 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 job to make sure that one, well specced, well sized BIG THING releases on time.
2 Business team, with your help, has 12 attempts a year to try to release features that will significantly up the growth/revenue of your company. Make yourself available to them to learn more about the customer and business needs and spec out your BIG THING each month. This has to involve a huge amount of actually talking to customers. If not, its pretty much guaranteed to fail.
Seems basic but theres a lot packed into the rational, like:
- Non-tech folk don't know what a big thing is, so you have room to play and overdeliver (important for your engineering team moreso than you).
- Reduced feature throughput generally means you only focus on those features that tilt the needle. Cant underestimate how important this is! Esp if your a fintech startup. Our products are notorious - 5% of features account for 99% of usage.
- Reduced feature throughput also allows you to spend longer speccing / talking to customers & business teams reducing the risk of mid-development scope creep or problems on release.
Re: Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap?
#56Hi, 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.
To clarify, let's say you are asked for a feature. The normal workflow is to determine when it will finish and crunch for the deadline. Once the deadline arrives, you are going to finish and release at the same time and hope that you have done enough testing during development. At this point get ready for embarrassment because you will inevitably make a few mistakes and cut some corners.
What I am suggesting is, you take a bunch of requests, but manage two roadmaps. One is the feature roadmap with reasonable dates, the other one is the release roadmap which lags one week for each feature. So once you release that awesome backtesting feature, you've been testing it internally since a week and finding bugs as you go. Do not release when done with a feature.
Re: Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap?
#57I'm still diving through all the answers (this is GREAT, btw). 2 of my previous PM organizations were hamstrung by exec teams that would decide, in a vacuum, what projects & features would get green-lit.
This interference-from-above characteristic can work if a PM is new to the job, but ultimately results in a PM having all the exposure (ie, organizational risk) and zero influence. That's a hopeless scenario & all too common because the vast majority of orgs have no idea what a PM truly is.
So I want to know if the OP has the freedom to defend his convictions. It's not about tools. It's about responsibility.
Re: Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap?
#58Re: Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap?
#59Any good courses anyone can recommend on tech product management? Seems like very relevant here.
Strategyzer.com has great resources and courses, and all of their books have been valuable to me. Starting with value proposition canvas and business model generation would be my suggestion.
Re: Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap?
#60No single customer owns your roadmap, your roadmap is yours. Unless you're actually billing hours to customers for features, the features you add are yours. Sell what you have now, do not sell based on a future promise. You need to balance the value of a single customer against the opportunity cost of not building a feature that all customers want. The way I've found to do this: Qualify every feature request. Get in…
> Sell what you have now, do not sell based on a future promise.
You've never met a salesperson, have you?