Outputs are the specific changes your team is making to your product or service to improve things for your customers and your business.

Outcomes are what you are hoping for as a result of those outputs. 

A lot of organizations balk at hiring Agile coaches (aka scrum masters) for every team. They find it hard to justify that many people who aren’t coding, designing, or figuring out what’s next. I agree.

Product people are often elected to jump in and do whatever it takes to make their product successful. In addition to product I've pinch hit in UX, agile coaching, engineering management, ops, business development -- you name it

The best boss I ever had trusted me with everything. He taught me everything about product culture by giving me the mission and letting me loose to figure out what was necessary for myself. John Wang went on to become CMO of HTC and Chairman of Noodoe. Thanks, John.

Product culture is spreading. 

• The idea that making people awesome is at the center of success; 

• The idea that we should put all of our effort to build, test, and learn into achieving that outcome sustainably; 

• The idea that we need to entrust small, diverse teams with that effort and hold them accountable;

...these ideas are accelerating.

Some would argue we are living in a post-Agile world. Some say SAFe and LeSS are ruining Agile. Some say it was never that great and we are outgrowing it.

Are you a strict Agile Product person? Are you a kinda-sorta Agile Product person? When do you deviate? Why?

"Roadmaps get a lot of flak. They are often blamed for unrealistic deadlines and death marches. For missing market opportunities, and for building features that are out-of-date before any code is even written," says Janna Bastow, cofounder of Mind the Product. "No Roadmap Survives Contact with Reality," is a common product refrain.

Be the one who brings the light of knowledge of market needs to the organization. As a product person, that's core to your value. Shed that light on inside-out thinking and it will illuminate your roadmap to success.

“A great product manager has the brain of an engineer, the heart of a designer, and the speech of a diplomat,”says Deep Nishar, managing director at SoftBank. I've written about product leadership skills in my book Product Manager vs. Project Manager from O'Reilly.

Steve Jobs is famous for ignoring market research, saying, “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” This perhaps oversimplifies the problem a bit but it resonates with my experience.

It's often a mistake to focus on matching your competition feature-for-feature. All this does is commoditize your market. Instead, focus on creating unique value by developing solutions your competition can't easily duplicate.

Influence is the superpower of good product people. Few people report to your average PM, but they have outsized impact on their organization. They provide direction on what to build to Engineering; they provide direction on target markets and messaging to Marketing; they recommend alliances and acquisitions to Business Development, etc.

Here are some New Year's Resolutions. Some are eerily similar to a talk I gave on product culture. Others not so much. 

Premise 1: Agile was developed as a response to lack of consistent direction from business execs.

Premise 2: A good roadmap keeps your organization inspired and on course toward its destination. 

That doesn't mean the two are incompatible. Yet many companies I have worked with fear mapping out a course, thinking "it's not allowed in Agile."

Personas deal with softer characteristics. They are often defined as representations of users that embody the qualities, feelings and preferences of groups. They are typically depicted with photos or images surrounded by descriptions and supporting attributes.

This week my friends at ProductBoard published an ebook with wisdom on being a superb Product person. I wrote a chapter on Roadmaps (surprise!), entitled "Focus your Roadmaps on Outcomes, Not Outputs." 

A Dear John letter tells a romantic partner that they are dumped. In my roadmaps workshops we practice writing Dear Roadmap letters. We complain about all the things that are not working in our relationships: "It's time to split. We do the same thing every three months...."

I’m curious: If you had to create the Superhero Product person, what attributes would you demand? Shooting lasers out of their eyes? Possibly. Leadership and communication skills? Definitely. How technical would the dream Product hero be? Able to write a brilliant roadmap in a single bound?

The hardest thing about roadmaps is making it clear to people that they will change -- and that change is not failure but a considered response to evolving conditions.

A roadmap conversation with a customer is an opportunity for a product person to verify their understanding of market needs before actually building the product. If you’ve done a really great job in your customer discovery, then the roadmap is merely "confirming the mutual understanding" of these needs.