Episode 47: Our Best Advice on Strategy and Roadmaps
As the year comes to a close, leaders are looking to the future and figuring out how to build out their roadmaps for 2022. On this week’s Product Thinking Podcast, Melissa Perri shares clips of some of the best insights on roadmap creation and strategic planning at different levels of an organization so that leaders can start off the new year right.
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Here are some of the key points that were talked about:
When building a roadmap, don't assume you can predict the future. Focus on the products that are being built now, so you can have near-term certainty with planning. Executive teams have to do discovery work if they want better estimates. [1:30]
Product management needs to be tied to strategic decisions within the business. They have to be involved in the conversation around revenue growth, product growth and expansion because they need to understand the vision of the business. [6:50]
Companies need Vision Led Product Management. This means being definitive about what the value of your product is, who it's being provided for and where the differentiation is going to lie. It's essentially having all the components of a product vision. [10:52]
Before building a product strategy at a small scale, first figure out if one already exists at your organization. If there is, and it's being executed poorly, figure out what the essential goals are. If there’s no product strategy, do whatever you can to find out and understand the goals of the executives. Once you understand those goals, you can start to build your own product strategy. [13:46]
To set strategy, leaders have to be the ones to make the choices about what to invest in for the growth of the business. They have to think about what skillsets they wish to grow in the company, what technologies they want to implement and what they can do to differentiate themselves from their competitors in 2-3 years time. [20:30]
If your sales team is going outside your company's product definition by a great deal, then you most likely don't truly understand the market your product is for. Product leaders need to communicate product market fit to their sales teams, and understand that they as product leaders don't make all the decisions. There has to be an alignment between strategy and communication in the organization. [27:09]
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