Episode 45: Dear Melissa - Answering Questions About Public Roadmaps, Project Management, Product Practice & More
In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about topics across the board- she covers the responsibilities of a Director and VP of Product Management, how to get in your product reps outside of work, her thoughts on sharing your roadmaps with your customer, and product managers vs project managers.
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Q: Do Directors of Product Management pull out of the day-to-day and just manage the departments? [1:34]
A: When you get away from working in the day-to-day of a team and you become a manager, you're gonna have to manage people, you're gonna have to develop them, you're gonna have to make sure they're on the right path and they're all set up for success. That's definitely a part of what the VPs and director of Product Design do. There's still part of that trifecta team that we have of the tech leader, the product manager and the designer, but you’re just doing it now on the level of a director or the level of a VP. [2:09]
Q: How might a non-technical PM find or develop products outside of work? [4:39]
A: If you don't have a ton of time outside of work, it’s going to be challenging, but if you can figure out how to do this early on, it can really help you make the leap into getting that product management role or practicing your skills. There are lots of low-code options for things out there now; you can build websites or MVPs and test a lot of things without having to be a developer or having to code yourself. I would rely on a lot of those tools and look for low-code or no code solutions. [5:01]
Q: Should we make our roadmap public? What are the complications that may arise if we do? [7:21]
A: I always advocate for bringing in your customers and your users to get more feedback, but I'm not sure if you want to make your roadmap public to achieve what you're trying to achieve. It sounds like you're trying to show them that they don't know everything about their customers; making a roadmap public is one way to do that but you have to make sure there's a feedback mechanism. I would start thinking about hypotheses to test; going out there and doing good user research, and then bringing those findings back. Play video clips of your users talking about how they really don't need that idea, show the users the road map in the actual interviews, and ask if anything’s missing. [7:52]
Q: How do the roles of project and product managers differ? Where do you see the practical and pragmatic product management's response to value delivery when there are time and money constraints? [9:51]
A: No, I don't think project managers do the shallow tasks; you need great project managers in companies and you need people with good project management skills. That is a part of product management. If there is a really big project that needs to get done, we will usually have a project manager working alongside the product manager, especially when it crosses into multiple teams. [10:39]
I don't think I've ever worked on a project that wasn't time and money constrained; everybody wants their things yesterday and they want it for as cheaply as possible. I don't realistically think there's a lot of product managers out there working without those constraints. The way that I would think about it is that it’s not about promising dates super far in advance for things that are super specific. It's more about saying ‘hey, we're going to make these changes to these products; we need to get them out as quickly as possible.’ [11:49]
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