| After seeing so many Product Managers get this awfully wrong sometimes it also helps to understand what your job _isnt_ * Focus on outcomes over outputs. Your job is not to build a spreadsheet or JIRA backlog of features and then hand them to engineers to build like a coding factory. You do not have a crystal ball. You are not Steve Jobs. * Involve the Business, Support and Eng parts of the org when defining _what_ to build. They all bring fantastic perspectives and really helps focus on the MVP and creates shared buy-in. Remember you are trying to solve a business problem not just crank out features aimlessly as a team. * When mapping out _what_ to build, it always helps to use the collective team (in previous bullet) to outline Effort vs Impact. Forces really good discussion to keep things hyper focused and efficient. * Instead of focusing on features focus on the strategy and the vision, let the team figure out how to get it there. As a PM you need to understand the market, the competitive landscape, how people are pricing their products, what customers are saying, industry trends, etc. * Roadmaps in general are somewhat useless bc you don't have enough information and they create a lot of emotional commitments. Things change (hello Covid-19) and you don't know what you don't know. Instead outline your vision and strategy at a high level and make sure they are aligned to your overall business outcomes. This prevents people from saying "You said we would get feature X in Q2!!!". Instead you focus on metrics (Decreased Churn, Increase engagement by 3x, returning users more than X times in Y days, Revenue, etc). * Be religious about data. Define your business outcomes, have good tools to track the progress of those outcomes, have a way to test/validate quickly and pivot as soon as it doesn't work. Keep fine tuning the machine |