Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are goals shared at the team level, setting up teams for collaboration from the very beginning. See my article here. OKRs bring focus and results to an entire organization, measurably. That means they can help rally people to the roadmaps as well.

People who excel at both product and project management are often compared to unicorns because they are so rare. The responsibilities are different enough that people tend to neglect one set for the other and, unfortunately, it is usually the important but less-urgent research, strategy, and prioritization activities of product management that suffer.

"Your product roadmap is the prototype for your strategy. It’s your key to vision alignment. It’s your ever-adaptable communication aid, the one thing your team can coalesce around and use as a North Star guiding light."

When sitting down with stakeholders to discuss your roadmap, treat the meetings like customer interviews. They should be informal, one-on-one. Ask them about themselves. What are their goals? What is keeping them up at night? (And how are the kids?)

In my first VP Product role, my company had a charismatic founder with a strong vision of where he wanted the organization to go. But the vision was high level and long term, like the top of a pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid were the stakeholders' actions and tactics, a list of dozens of requests.

When planning your product strategy, getting opinions from your stakeholders is key. However, those opinions should not be the final arbiter. You should make the final decisions.

When planning your product strategy, naturally you have to get input from your stakeholders. Do not do this in one big group. A meeting of everyone on the executive team will be full of jockeying and politics. Have your stakeholder meetings one-on-one for honesty.

A new release is a golden opportunity to learn. Sometimes called a discovery period, it's when you get new data showing success or failure for customers and for the organization. Has the new capability changed customer behavior measurably? Are they more engaged? More likely to buy, upgrade, or renew?

In the old way of running companies, goals were set by management over long periods of time. In contrast for the knowledge economy, Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are set by teams and looked at frequently... some weekly.

OKRs are meant to create alignment on goals. The best approach is to create one set of shared OKRs for an entire team. Shared OKRs promote collaboration, problem-solving, and focus. This may mean that individuals have no OKRs of their own — and that’s ok! The team rises or falls together.

When creating Objectives and Key Results, consider two types:
Committed are OKRs that you must meet. These are things like contractual obligations or new SLAs you need to improve to hit.
Aspirational are more like a stretch goal, something where you want to reach as far as you can and 70% of that number is still good. They may be recalibrated along the way.

A few weeks ago, I ran a contest on Product Vision MadLibs. The idea was to create your vision statement using this MadLibs template:

We help [type of customer] [achieve a benefit] by [what we do best].

The winner (drum roll, please)…

A fun way to develop your product vision is to hold a MadLibs game. Stakeholders individually fill in the following sentence:

We help [type of customer] [achieve a benefit] by [what we do best]

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.