To gain alignment on your roadmap, meet your stakeholders early and often. This ensures that stakeholder feedback is delivered early enough for co-creation of the problems, priorities, and possible solutions on that roadmap.

Your outputs are your what - features or other improvements. Your outcomes are your why - the impact you want to have. We think we know what will drive outcomes, but we're wrong often enough that Steve Blank and Eric Reis popularized the whole Lean Startup movement.

Even if you are an introvert, you don’t have to become a cheerleader or channel your inner stand-up comedian to connect with stakeholders. You can start small and have deeper conversations over time.

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are meant to help inform decisions within the quarter. Progress should be measured at least twice per month to determine if what you are doing needs to be adjusted to meet the goal.

In case you haven't noticed, the US has been more polarized recently. This upcoming election will be another fight. Are we really this divergent? Or is it media/social media?

OKRs are not your backlog. They don’t include everything you plan to do, only the most important things you want to focus on right now. Teams cannot concentrate on more than a handful of things at once. I have seen teams with dozens of OKRs. Invariably, they fail all of them for lack of focus.

Say you have a belligerent stakeholder. (How could that be?!) Some tips we’ve amassed over the years…

Which department in your organization really leads? It may not be clear on your org chart. What is the dominant culture of your organization?

A friend of mine left the product profession (yes, true). The reason: he had lots of good ideas from customer interviews and market research. But other voices yelled louder. Ideas supported by data were always at the bottom of the priority list.

In a startup, the founder is often the driver of product/marketing/sales/vision/kitchen sink. As they scale, they may hire a product person. Being the first product hire in an organization is tough, because of all the context locked the founder's head.

Successful product people work hard on market fit. Some roadmaps focus on filling the perceived gaps in fit, but of course you can’t know filling those gaps will get you to that goal. It’s all hypothesis until fit happens.

Lots of firms say they are Agile to sound like Amazon or Google, but don’t have the mindset. They still do a lot of planning up front and release once or twice a year. In contrast, some teams are nimble, with small, frequent releases.

Some Product people must report profit and loss in their roadmaps. Is that you?

There are lots of ways to hone in on a product vision. One way is a Value Proposition: how a product creates differentiated value for a specific customer segment by addressing their needs, desires, or problems.

As savvy Product people, we are eager to talk to customers, but it’s hard. Working with Sales or Support to identify good candidates, sending emails, following up to schedule time, writing a script, collecting and analyzing the data. It’s a lot of work. How can you fit all of that into your week? A few suggestions from teams that are making it happen:

“Leadership cannot really be taught. It can only be learned.” In other words, it requires practice. The quote is from Harold Geneen, president of ITT Corp. I definitely support that view in product.

The egos of stakeholders are a lot of fun, especially when they meet in one messy room. When you are trying to get buy-in for the next phase of a roadmap, tread lightly.

It’s easy to lose sight of your big picture vision, getting bogged down by minutiae. Yet prioritizing your day-to-day outputs in lieu of that big picture vision will make things more difficult in the long run – and eventually, for your customers.

I believe leadership is the most indispensable part of product management because, by nature, that’s what a product manager does: they lead.

Ever heard someone say, “I’m a jack of all trades but master of none?” Usually, it’s not a compliment. But the full saying actually goes: “A jack of all trades is a master of none but oftentimes better than a master of one.”