A very common challenge faced by Product Managers of all experience levels is understanding and implementing some form of repeatable process around prioritization. Some people take a very light approach, making decisions based on their own experience, data, and beliefs about the direction of the product. Others take a much more rigorous approach, applying scorecards […]
How to Get Organizational Alignment with your Product Roadmap
This is the third in an ongoing series of blog posts originally published on the UserVoice Product Management blog. One of the constant tensions that product managers around the world deal with on a regular basis is creating product roadmaps that align with the expectations and needs of all of their stakeholders – particularly the management or […]
Agile Roadmapping is NOT a Contradiction!
Many companies struggle with the challenges of reconciling the need for strategic planning and the desire to execute in an “agile” or Agile fashion. Generally speaking, this is because they’re stuck with the perspective that a “roadmap” must be a set of promises regarding what’s to be delivered, and not merely a strategy that will and must change over […]
Creating an Effective But Agile Product “Roadmap”
As companies transition from traditional, more waterfall-oriented approaches to their products, they often struggle with understanding how agile practices fundamentally change the ways in which they need to plan and develop their product roadmaps, both for internal use as well as for discussion with key customers and market prospects. The old-school method of assigning specific […]
Death By Gantt Chart
We’ve all been there — we’re talking about our upcoming projects, discussing possible timelines and resource allocations, working to align our tactical work with the company and product strategy, when it hits you like a brick thrown through your living room window in the middle of the latest Game of Thrones episode: So, where’s the […]
The Roadmap Conundrum
Roadmaps are a pretty popular topic whenever Product Managers congregate — whether that’s online or at events like ProductCamp. It’s also one of the things that new Product Managers or Product Managers moving into a new role in an organization often struggle with. It doesn’t help matters that different companies, different execs, and even different […]
You’re not Agile Unless You’re “agile”…
Probably the single most common question that I run into nowadays is which process is the “best” one to be Agile, with a capital “A”. And people are often surprised when I tell them there’s no right or wrong answer here, but that they’re focusing on the wrong thing if they’re trying to be Agile […]