Wouldn’t it be great if you could take the last couple of weeks of December just to wind down your product development for the year, reflect on the progress you and your team have made, and identify the areas where you can improve things in the year to come? Wouldn’t it also be great if you could then clear your mind, and prepare to start the new year with a clean slate and the chance to prioritize all of your new strategic ideas?
Yes, those things would be great — much like a large inheritance or a new type of chocolate that speeds your metabolism. And unfortunately, for most product managers, they’re just about as likely.
The sad reality is, product managers rarely if ever have the luxury of slowing things down, quieting the noise from internal stakeholders and customers, and enjoying uninterrupted time to step back and think about their product’s big strategic picture. Not even during the transition to a new year. What’s more likely is that you’ll begin your January with a backlog that’s even more bloated than it was in December, a long list of often-conflicting requests and demands from various stakeholders, and a calendar already jam-packed with both necessary and totally unnecessary meetings.
Yep: Happy New Year!
But maybe this is the perfect time to change things. Maybe you can resolve in the new year to assert more control over your backlog, your roadmap, your product’s priorities and your schedule. Maybe this is the year to make some product-management-specific New Year’s Resolutions to create a more successful product for your company — and a less stressful life for yourself — in the new year.
So without further ado, here are our 5 New Year’s resolutions for product managers.
1. Take 10 Pounds Off of Your Backlog
If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “Hey, these features make my backlog look huge!” we have a suggestion for you. Make this the year you finally cut down on some of that bloat and get your backlog lean and looking great.
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“New Year’s Resolution for product managers: Take 10 pounds off your backlog.”
It won’t be easy, of course. If you’re like most product managers, you’ve probably found that your backlog is a dumping ground where everyone in your company feels free to toss every task, idea and thought they have about your product.
That means you’ll need to dig into your backlog, weed out the things that don’t belong there, and then group the remaining items into categories and order them according to priority level. You’ll also probably have to do some investigating of those items on the list that you don’t even understand. There will likely be a lot of these — because people in various departments across your company might well be adding things to your backlog written in slightly different languages than yours.
But stick with it. You know what they say about trimming down product backlogs: The last 10 pounds are the hardest.
Then, when you’ve gotten your backlog lean and fit, you’ll want to draft some new rules about what can and cannot be added, and then share those rules with everyone in your company.
You’ll also need to be very clear about how you word your new backlog rules — because, again, many of your colleagues in different departments speak and understand their own dialects, and they’re all slightly different from Product Management-Speak.
If you’re looking for some step-by-step guidance on getting your backlog into shape, you’re in luck. We at ProductPlan have a helpful post on maintaining a healthy backlog.
Oh, and speaking of your colleagues speaking in their own dialects, may we suggest our PM New Year’s Resolution #2?
2. Learn a New Language — Like Developer-Speak, or Marketing-Speak, or Executive-Speak
Yes, it would make things so much easier if there were a Google Translate box where you could simply enter a statement you’d just heard from a colleague, adjust the settings to “Sales-Speak → Product Management-Speak,” and then hit the Translate button.
Then you’d know, for example, that “We really need to prioritize this feature above everything else, because potential customers are demanding it,” often translates roughly to this: “There’s this one prospect that mentioned this feature, and I’m hoping I can use it to convince them to bring me in to give a presentation.”
As a product manager, you serve as a liaison between disparate professionals, across multiple departments, in a coordinated effort to bring a successful product to market. But you always need to be mindful of the fact that each of these team members — your sales rep, a marketing manager, the head of your development team, your chief financial officer — speak and understand things filtered through their own prisms.
That means you need to understand what each member of your team means when talking about the strategically important details of your product. Does “soon” mean the same thing to you and your product team as it does to a developer? Should “we need to prioritize this story” carry the same weight coming from the head of your sales department as it does when it comes from an investor in your company who isn’t involved with the day-to-day?
Also equally important: You need to make sure all of these members of your team are clearly understanding what you’re trying to communicate to them. That means you need to help everyone involved in your product’s development understand Product Management-Speak.
And as luck would have it, we at ProductPlan have a helpful post on communicating the product roadmap as well, offering suggestions for developing your listening, speaking and evangelizing skills.
3. Increase Your Agility and Become a Better Sprinter
This one might be the toughest resolution on this list to fulfill. Everyone talks about moving more of their development processes to an agile framework — but often a company’s cultural bias toward more documentation or stricter management controls make agile development difficult to implement.
But if you’re developing products for a fast-changing, highly competitive industry — and we’re guessing you are — prioritizing an effort to go agile is probably a worthwhile goal for the new year.
Your product and company might truly benefit from becoming an agile shop. Doing so, for example, will allow you to develop and push out products more quickly. That, in turn, will help you generate real-world data and feedback far earlier in your development cycle than with a traditional, don’t-release-anything-until-everything-has-been-developed-and-tested waterfall approach. And this will help you and your team use valuable market insights to iterate more frequently and to continually improve upon your product.
For this resolution we at ProductPlan have two blog posts to help you — a post introducing an interesting idea for organizing your agile development teams into “squads,” and a brief blog post discussing the benefits of an agile product roadmap.
4. Declutter Your Calendar (and Kill Those Meetings That Might Otherwise Bore You to Death)
If you decide to set the previous resolution for yourself, and move more of your processes to an agile framework, you’ll probably find that a lot of the pre-scheduled meetings you have on your calendar can go.
Agile stresses an emphasis on frequently reevaluating your processes, keeping what’s working and getting rid of what isn’t. With that in mind, there’s really no strategically significant reason to keep those long weekly or monthly meetings on the books.
But even if you don’t choose to adopt an agile method for the rest of your product development, we highly recommend you still apply this framework to your meeting schedule. Use the new year as a great excuse to take an objective look at all of your standing status calls, progress updates, product review meetings, “catch-up” sessions — and all of the other regular get-togethers you’ve got on the agenda.
In each case ask yourself, “Is this standing meeting strategically necessary or beneficial to every attendee, including me? And is there a better, less-time-consuming way to communicate this information to the invitees other than insisting on a regular meeting?”
Keep at this, ruthlessly reviewing every ongoing item on your calendar and cancelling everything not essential to helping your team collaborate or moving your product forward. Don’t stop until you arrived at a meeting schedule that includes getting together with the right teams, at the right cadence and at the right times.
And when you’ve arrived at a leaner, decluttered calendar populated with only strategically valuable meetings, we have a couple of blogs to help you make those meetings as valuable and efficient as possible. One offers some seriously great tips for product strategy meetings, and the other has great meeting tips as well but is a little more fun.
5. Make More Effective Roadmaps
Now you’re talking!
In fact, if there’s only one strategic improvement you make to your process in the new year, why not resolve to create the most persuasive and compelling product roadmap you can?
This is, after all, the document that should capture your product’s high-level plan, as well the answers to how that plan ties back to your company’s larger strategic goals. And it should help you communicate this high-level vision to every group across your company — and ideally help you persuade them to support your product’s vision and plan.
Of course, if you’re maintaining your roadmap in Excel, well, you’re not using the most effective tool for the job. The roadmap you want will be visual, easy to update, easy to share, and will allow you to show the right level of detail based on the people you’re presenting the roadmap to — a revenue focus for your meeting with executives, and a timeline-and-resource focus for your development planning session.
And if you’d like to make this year you finally get your roadmap out of Excel or PowerPoint, and into a beautiful, intuitive native roadmap application, we can help you Get started on that right now.
Here’s to a great New Year for you and your products!
