Learn industry best practices for planning, building and communicating product roadmaps.
The Product Stack is a coalition of product manager allies focused on helping you plan, execute, and measure your way to customer-centric products. We teamed up for a webinar on how to communicate with your team at every stage of the product development cycle.
Check out this episode of Suzanne Abate's 100 PM podcast, entitled "Founders are Product Managers, Too." In the episode, Jim Semick explains why customer development is critical, the benefits of bootstrapping your business, and why now is a great time to be a product manager.
Is your roadmap just a list of features that's left you too focused on details at the expense of strategy? In this Pragmatic Marketing webinar, Jim Semick explains how to nail your product roadmap and by implementing top-down strategic planning, evangelizing your product goals, and more.
Learn how to connect your long term strategic plan with your agile backlog. Too many product managers focus on their backlog and miss the big picture. In this webinar, we discuss three ways to prioritize your strategic roadmap, the relation between the roadmap and backlog, and different techniques to best order your backlog.
In this interview with Chad McAllister, ProductPlan Founder Jim Semick discusses the purpose of product roadmaps and best practices for constructing them. Learn how product roadmaps can help teams collaborate better and why it's beneficial to use a purpose-built roadmap tool.
Check out our interview series, Product Lessons Learned, in which we talk to product managers across various industries about their experiences on the job. We hope these interviews will shed light on trends and challenges in the profession, and be helpful to new and experienced product managers alike.
How can product managers get to the heart of customer problems? As Jim Semick explains at ProductCamp LA, it comes down to asking the right questions and listening empathetically. In this presentation, Jim offers tips for effectively interviewing customers and shares some example questions that product managers can use. Watch the recording.
Browse our library of roadmap templates. We have examples that showcase different time horizons, organizational structures, and levels of granularity. ProductPlan roadmaps are flexible and allow you customize everything to fit your particular use case. We hope these examples will spark some ideas to get you started.
Building consensus among various stakeholders can be one of the most challenging aspects of a product manager’s job. Part of the solution is to get upfront agreement around your organization’s strategic goals and to be transparent about your prioritization process. It’s important to make sure all parties in your organization are on the same page.
Many roadmaps are mired in spreadsheets and text-packed presentations. Product managers often find themselves using presentation tools, spreadsheets and project management software, because they believe those are the best tools for the job. Many are longing for tools specifically designed for roadmaps.
Our 2015 Roadmap Survey found that communication is both a top roadmap objective and challenge. We asked a panel of experienced product managers how they communicate their roadmaps. Successful product managers get consensus on their high-level strategy early and then translate vision into actionable steps.
As a product manager, it’s important to always seek new sources of feedback and keep a living roadmap. But you certainly can’t listen to every request or you’ll end up with a clunky product that lacks overarching direction. So who should you talk to, when, and about what? In this post we walk you through communicating with stakeholders at every stage of the product lifecycle.
Marketing roadmaps can cover initiatives that are large or small, simple or complex. Some examples include: creating a social media strategy, planning a company’s event participation, executing on an content-marketing editorial calendar, tracking a strategic marketing plan, launching a new product, and managing a company’s digital media mix.
We often associate roadmaps — strategic plans outlining the steps required to accomplish a business objective — with the development of products. But the key value propositions of building a product roadmap can be integral to the success of any business initiative, such as upgrading your company’s technology backbone.
What is the best product roadmap style? Before you can answer intelligently, you need more information. Although there are endless permutations of product roadmap styles, we see the following three used most commonly: Timeline-Based Roadmaps, Roadmaps without Dates, and Kanban Roadmaps. Following is a brief discussion of each.
You’ve planned your product strategy, and now you’re ready to present your proposed roadmap to the team. As product managers, one of your key jobs is to be an evangelist for the product. A high-level visual presentation is a powerful way to help get buy-in on your strategy. Here are some tips for creating an easy-to-digest, visual roadmap.
When building a roadmap, it’s important to think in terms of strategic goals and to keep your initiatives high-level. Carefully consider your audience and tailor the roadmap’s level of detail to fit their needs. In this presentation, ProductPlan’s co-founder, Jim Semick, shares some common signs of roadmap dysfunction and how to address them.
In this video, we’ll show you how to get started building your first roadmap in ProductPlan. Simply drag and drop elements onto the roadmap to represent your upcoming initiatives. Group Bars together in Containers to represent themes. Easily resize, reorder or recolor as your plans change.
For many professionals who lead company initiatives, a roadmap serves as their primary mechanism to plan and track their progress. Given how central roadmaps are to a company’s most important programs, it follows that choosing the right roadmap tools plays a major role in the success of a company.
Discover solutions to the top challenges of creating efficient product roadmaps from Jim Semick, co-founder of ProductPlan. Jim discusses how to create a simple roadmap that can be easily changed and widely communicated across your organization. Find out why it’s important to create strategic goals and align those goals with a compelling product roadmap.
More product teams are taking advantage of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) concept – deploying products early to customers in order to learn and iterate. But how do you know if your MVP provides enough value? We’ve found that it’s essential to provide features or value propositions that directly relate to the customer’s biggest pain point.
Have you ever built a frequently requested feature only to find out that customers never actually use it? Oftentimes, feature requests warrant further digging to really understand the job the customer is trying to accomplish, and get the right initiatives onto your product roadmap.
Prioritization is a hot topic for product teams. Most likely, your challenge won’t be a lack of ideas or feedback. It will be just the opposite — having too much feedback. It’s challenging to sort through all of it and to decide what supports your product’s goals and what doesn’t. With so many opportunities competing for scarce resources, how do you decide?
Roadmap planning doesn’t need to be stressful. Incorporating metrics with vision to plan your roadmap and then evaluate its success can increase stakeholder buy-in and provide deep product insights. In this recorded webinar, Jim Semick of ProductPlan and Eric Boduch of Pendo cover how to define product goals and measure success.
As your company’s central hub for your products, you probably receive feature requests, product ideas and other feedback on a regular basis, from a wide range of constituents. Customers, prospects, executives, sales reps — it can seem as though everyone ideas for your product. Learn how to distill the firehose of feature ideas into a strategic product roadmap.
As a product manager you’re busy dealing with day-to-day demands: prioritizing the backlog, updating various stakeholders, and putting out fires. But if strategic thinking is last on your list, you may resort to reactively prioritizing your roadmap by focusing only on requests from your loudest stakeholders. Beware of this “bottom-up” approach.
Most product people are familiar with the sticky problem of feature bloat. You may also recognize the issue by its other uncomfortable names: feature fatigue, feature creep, or feature overload. So how to avoid falling into the tempting trap? With the laser-focused ammo of a four-tiered process: be informed, mindful, selective, and cutthroat with your feature decisions.
Can product managers develop successful roadmaps using agile development principles? And more importantly, should they? Yes, and yes. Product roadmaps can benefit significantly from one of the unique advantages of agile development — the ability to correct course frequently based on real-world input, user analytics and other key metrics.
Ask 10 product managers to describe their jobs, and you’re likely to hear 10 different answers. But whatever their specific responsibilities, all product managers share a core function, which we can use as a working definition of their job: Product managers drive the development of products, and they are ultimately responsible for the success of those products.
Successful product managers are transparent about their prioritization process and able to say “no” while explaining why in terms that stakeholders can understand. They also balance the needs of customers and stakeholders and bring evidenced-based decision making to their communication. Learn more about how you can embody these key characteristics.
As product managers we all know to talk with our customers more – but it’s never quite enough. You can improve the quality of the insights by asking the right questions. In fact, a few well-phrased questions can yield fantastic customer insights. Read several tips and awesome questions that product managers can ask customers.
Product management and project management are often used interchangeably, but they are very different disciplines that require different skills and tools. Product managers collect ideas, prioritize initiatives and make big decisions about what gets built. Project managers oversee the execution of plans that have already been developed and approved.
At ProductPlan, we’ve had the opportunity to interact with hundreds of product managers and learn what makes them tick. From these conversations, we’ve compiled a comprehensive list of product management resources including groups, blogs, podcasts, articles and books. Our library contains tips and best practices for product managers with all levels of experience.
A roadmap is not simply a list of features arranged in a somewhat prioritized order, nor is it the product backlog. A roadmap communicates the “why” behind what you’re building. It’s a plan for your strategy. A roadmap is a high-level visual summary that maps out the vision and direction of your product, often over time.
Download our free book and learn best practices for planning, building and communicating your product roadmaps. Plus get sample roadmaps and prioritization frameworks you can use at your company. We’ve distilled our learnings from working with some of the world’s most forward-thinking product teams, and are in turn sharing our knowledge with you.