Product Tank Taipei Sharing Notes
Key Elements of Mind the Product Conference:
# Talks — CEO, PM sharing
# Break time — Q&A
# Sponsors — Data Analytic Vendors
# Product People — PM networking
Key Abilities for a PM
1. Being resourceful
2. Make judgement calls
3. Process optimizing: Use the smallest amount of work to learn the most important thing
4. Having the ability to prioritize: Simply applying a two by two metrics (Risk vs Perceived Value), prioritize testing your hypo where it falls in the area of high risk and high perceived value
5. Make alignments between teammates: PM should have the ability to share the same understanding on core issues among teams.
6. Releasing decision making opportunities to team: this refers to based on the same understanding, PM should allow teammates to make partial decisions under their ownership so that PM has more time to define strategic problem or find additional resources
Different Leadership styles of PM
PM should have excellent leadership skills with radical transparency (Scrum, Demo, Access to data, Access to customers)
Definition of Roadmap
Acting as the key product of a PM, a roadmap is a prototype that bridges the start and finish of a product development. It needs multiple project, or release plan for detailed explanations, but it isn’t only a release plan, nor a gantt chart or a backlog.
Roadmap shows how you will realize your product vision via five dimensions: Product vision, Business Objectives, Timeframes, themes, disclaimer.
Differences between Roadmap and Release Plan
# Roadmap:
1. Overall, board view
2. Long timeframes
3. No specific daets
4. Across all teams
5. Confirm strategic intent, objectives, & directions
# Release/Project Plan:
1. Detailed, realistic view
2. Narrow timeboxes
3. Specific dates
4. Within product-dev
5. Ensure resource allocation & execution
Essential parts of roadmap — Timeframes, Themes
Timeframes is a bird’s eye view of your priorities. They don’t show specific dates but tells you the high level plan via three columns: Now, Next, Later.
Themes are headline of initiatives, are key actions for creating or improving customer success and business success, it can be concrete or abstract.
There is no specific criteria of themes, but themes always show the “how to” between two aspects.
When themes are objectives/initiatives, it bridge between visions/objectives and problems/needs. When themes are initiatives/features, it bridge between problems/needs and solutions/features. When themes are initiatives, it could also bridge between outputs and outcomes…etc
Let’s take SpaceX as an example:
Roadmapping Process
As stated, a roadmap is a storytelling tool and negotiation tool when getting alignment. Therefore, to successfully get aligned among different stakeholders, we should investigate their views in the very beginning.
PM should take to them 1 by 1 while gathering thoughts on the draft version of roadmap, the earlier the alignment is made, the better the outcome is.
