When working on vision with stakeholders, I like the Cover Story technique taken from the book Gamestorming. Each stakeholder draws the cover of a magazine (e.g., Fast Company, TechCrunch, Mashable) five years in the future, after the roadmap has been implemented. What impact has this product made on the customer base? What changes has it brought about? Make sure they include a headline, an image, a subheadline, a few sidebars, and a quote.

Product people have to grab stakeholders right and left to get their opinions and their support. Product people have to grab stakeholders right and left to get their opinions and their support. As Emily Tyson, COO at Radix Health, says: “Every product manager actually has their own stakeholder advisory group — cross-functional representatives that they work with to get input on: What are priorities for sales? What are priorities from the clinical team? What does security need in the roadmap? The product team is very much responsible for taking all of the different inputs and saying, ‘This is it.’”

A user journey map is a smart way of understanding the customer needs that populate a good roadmap. A journey map simply described the steps your customer takes to fulfill a need. The steps they take on that journey are opportunities to make the customer’s life better. Those opportunities go on your roadmap as themes.

Some product people act like general managers, even owning profit and loss (P&L) for their product. Even if this is not your situation, executives and board members often want to understand business results and return on investment.

A few weeks back we had a lot of interest in our discussion of Roadmaps Themes. I am a strong proponent of using themes, or customer needs, on your roadmap, rather than specific features that may change as you learn more.

Just in time for Halloween, we have a scary Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) story! In this ghost story, different departments are at cross purposes! Evil cackles all around...

Many products serve more than one customer or user type. If your product is in education, you might consider the student, teacher, administrator, and parent. Furthermore, your users might be different from the actual buyer.

You should be seeking regular input from your stakeholders. Their thinking may or may not align with yours, but the act of listening will help with the buy-in you need.

A whistleblower has released tens of thousands of pages of internal Facebook documents, alleging the company was "negligent in eliminating violence, misinformation and other harmful content," favoring increased profits. The whistleblower was...a product manager.

Public companies who publish their roadmaps have lots of legalese in them: "Don't rely too heavily on this document, please!" But even if your roadmap is only shared internally, a disclaimer is useful

Themes are an organizational construct for defining what’s important to your customers. Roadmaps should be about expressing these needs. Most items on your roadmap will derive from a job the customer needs to accomplish or a problem the customer must solve.

I learned the ropes of product management (including both strategy and stakeholder management) from a great boss, John Wang, who went on to become CMO for HTC and to found two companies. Who is your mentor? Who inspires you? How did they help you (intentionally or not)?

I enjoy conferences (speaking, running workshops, hanging out at the bar after). There is a feeling of camaraderie, of shared culture and mission among product people that is hard to duplicate any other way.

How has your conference experience changed during the pandemic? Has virtual worked for you? Who is doing it well? If you could choose a well-run virtual conference or in-person, would you go back?

We're coming up to Labor Day in the USA, a holiday when workers can have a rest and some can have a BBQ. It makes me think about product work in general. Product is such a cross-functional leadership role, it has to be harder over Zoom. Or is it?

"These days, agile is essentially the law of the land if you’re in product management.... But the resulting emphasis on sprints and short-term planning can lead to a lack of a larger product vision. It's also often incompatible with the longer planning cycles of enterprise customers and partners." I enjoyed this article in First Round Review.

I'm doing a survey: What software do you use for tracking Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)? Good old boring spreadsheets? Some sweet tool that I haven't seen? Something mildly annoying in the middle?

Do you remember General Motors' electric car, the EV1? It was built in the 90s, way before Tesla. GM decided that it wasn’t a viable business, recalled the cars, and crushed them — even though its customers were very happy. Now Tesla is reshaping the auto industry and GM is trying to catch up.

“A lot of people think a feature release schedule and roadmap are synonymous, right? You’ve probably heard that a hundred times,” says my friend John Mansour, of Proficientz. But he disagrees. “In my mind, a roadmap is a series of statements that communicate WHAT you’ll help customers accomplish and WHY those goals are important to their success.”

What happens when the customer says they won’t sign the big contract without a commitment to a specific feature this year? Or your CEO feels that extracting blood oaths is the way to ensure everyone is working hard enough?

“At some point, you need to start talking with the sales force about, ‘Hey, we think we’re going to be bringing this new product to market. What’s the best way to go to market? Can our current reps sell it, or should we have specialized reps? How do we get everybody trained up to understand the customer’s problem and the solution we’re bringing to market?”