How far out should your roadmap go? Generally, the pace of change and development is directly related to your product’s stage of life and the maturity of its market.

As the product person, you are ultimately responsible for the success of your product. This usually means you inform, direct, and coordinate among functions as diverse as engineering, sales, and even finance. Sometimes, you may have to get into the weeds, even doing some of the work yourself. (I once spent 2 years doing partnerships because my product needed it.)

Recency Bias: You get off the phone with a customer, and you believe their problems are the most pressing, even if earlier customer calls were the real mess. How to prevent this?

Tesla, Netflix, Dollar Shave Club — these organizations don't just succeed. Each has redefined the rules of their industry and achieved results once considered impossible. But they didn't succeed, really, on technical innovation. The key ingredient was (and remains) culture.

I've seen more General Manager positions at product-led companies recently. A GM is like a meta-Product person, and has the responsibility of a product leader, plus more… Do you have them in your organization? Does it make sense?

I’m often asked how best to manage dependencies between teams. My answer is… don’t!
The best way to reduce the drag introduced by dependencies among teams is to eliminate the dependencies. This requires making the teams able to operate independently, to be autonomous.

Many companies are turning to feedback tools like UserVoice to get a sense of customer needs. Anyone can propose and vote for a feature or other change for your roadmap. These tools work best when you follow up to understand the needs behind the feature requests.

Where is your product in its lifecycle? Is it in early startup mode? Rapid growth? Cash cow? Most big companies get big by having a portfolio of products to “stack" lifecycles on top of each other. Sometimes you have to produce a roadmap of several products at the same time, a “portfolio roadmap".

The one thing that kills most OKR implementations? Not using them often enough. Unlike old-fashioned approaches to goal setting, progress on OKRs is meant to be measured frequently, maybe even weekly. (Facebook tracks metrics daily.)

We've talked a lot about prioritization for companies and teams. But how do you prioritize yourself? Product people often are pulled in a million directions. Now, with so many of us working at home, that balance is even more strained.

Next week is the American holiday of Thanksgiving. We won’t be having lots of friends and relatives over for a meal this year, alas. But there are somethings to be thankful for, even in times of hardship.

I’d like to take a moment below and thank a bunch of you for your help and inspiration this year. I will be extremely thankful for good vaccines, when they come out. What are you thankful for?

In the tech world, people know about product managers. But how do you describe it to someone outside the industry? To your barber? To your kids?

Sometimes your strategy turns out to be all wrong. At that point, the business may decide to pivot. It doesn’t make sense to wait for regularly scheduled roadmap or OKRs reviews to update strategy. When it’s time for a pivot, revisit everything in your roadmap from the product vision down, and be explicit about what is changing, what is not changing, and why these changes are necessary and good.

At my OKRs Product Team Workshop last week, we began by writing OKRs Scary Stories. Here is one, perfectly timed for Halloween.

Ever wonder where the word "roadmap" actually came from? In the 1890s, bicycles were a key form of transportation within cities, and some of the first roadmaps were created to show how to bike from one part of New York City to another. With the rise of the automobile, travel between cities becomes more common, and organizations like the American Automobile Association provided printed roadmap directions for travelers. In the 1980s, Motorola began using the term roadmap to align technology and product development. Ta-da!

So you are a senior Product person who gets recruiter calls all the time. You enjoy the Product space but you want a change. Where do you go to use your skills in a new way? The hip tech General Manager? CEO at a startup? A cushy 9-5 gig? Professional chef? Writing Nano-letters in your den?

A user journey map is a great way to unpack the customer needs that make up a compelling product roadmap.

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are ideal for product teams, but only if done right. It’s easy to get caught in endless to-do items and forget about the real objectives - making customers and your business successful. I’ll be giving a workshop on doing OKRs right, handling what goes wrong, adjusting course, and managing expectations.