Product Management Auckland hosted this take on internal stakeholders, their competing goals, and what they really look for in a product roadmap. Slides included.
How do we communicate product management’s view of prioritization and strategy to ROI-focused executives? Here’s my side of several recent conversations.
We may be over-investing in a few outlier prospects and neglecting our core customers. How do we frame this and get support to fire one or two?
The software bits we release are not the whole product, but a part of the product. We need to make sure we ship a whole product, which includes a compelling story of interest to customers. Strategy, segmentation and customer joy matter.
Team-level priorities and backlogs need to be anchored to broader technical and business goals. Here’s how one product leader is getting her various pieces lined up.
The second video (of five) in Tolpagorni‘s product leadership series: Magnus Billgren and Rich Mironov talk about strategic product management challenges in agile organizations: the need for roadmaps, strong market input, and the increased (but very valuable!) additional work load for product managers. Recorded in March 2012 during Produktledardagen.
It’s been a very tough quarter for economic forecasters, quota-carrying sales teams and CEOs. The sudden downturn even caught GE’s legendary planners by surprise. If you’re an executive at a technology company, you may already have started an FY09 planning process to re-examine staffing, product investments and revenue. These already bake in your core business assumptions, though, so you should “stress test” your assumptions using scenario planning. We’ve worked with a range of executive teams on scenario planning: using market-driven product roadmaps to identify business risks and core assumptions, and then highlight the interrelationships among strategic choices. Once you can see how products and delivery dates relate to market realities, you’ll be able to answer the “what if” and “how…
As CEOs of our products, we product managers have a lot to do. Traditionally, this has included “build-versus-buy” decisions. The debate often hinged on whether technical tasks were “core” or just “context”. Over the last decade, this has shifted from “build-versus-buy” to “buy-versus-buy” as we balance more kinds of internal and external resources. Here are some thoughts on sizing various “buying” opportunities to keep products shipping and revenue flowing. The smallest opportunity might be called “the expert quick hitter”, then up to “niche technology provider” and finally a large “please build this for me.” All three are invitations to think about what your team can do for itself, and your own urgency to get revenue products to market. Small: “The…
2005 was a great year for open source developers and solutions, with a dramatic boost in credibility, tools and respect. As part of this, there are an increasing number of companies commercializing open source: adding value through installers, packaging, coordinated releases, technical support, management utilities and formal product planning. This has the feeling, though, of domesticating the wild spirit of open source and turning it into another IPO-driven, VC-backed, competitively focused economic model. I’m reminded of Joni Mitchell’s verse from “Big Yellow Taxi”: “They took all the trees And put them in a tree museum And they charge the people A dollar and a half just to see ‘em”