What is a Product Roadmap?

Effective product managers lead their teams towards a vision of the future, and to do so they lean on product roadmaps. As the name implies, a product roadmap is a guide that product managers create, and the purpose of such a guide is to identify key steps to take and the order in which to take them.

Crafting a product roadmap is no different from planning a road trip. Think about the last trip you planned. You likely first began by identifying key destinations, key dates, and a theme of what kinds of experiences you wanted to get from your road trip.

From there, you likely dove into research to flesh out the details of each particular stop on the trip. Based on the details, you then had to work through tradeoffs – you likely added, removed, or changed the sequence of destinations based on the constraints that you faced at the time. Continue Reading

What’s the difference between product manager vs. project manager? It certainly doesn’t help that both are named so similarly, and I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been incorrectly labeled as a project manager.

To start, the two disciplines have fundamentally different purposes.

The goal of product management is to maximize return on investment, and that means that product managers are making bold bets. As a product manager, you’ll focus on your product vision, and a successful product will unlock exponential value that didn’t exist within your company before.

On the other hand, the goal of project management is to minimize downside risk. The focus of the project manager is to ensure that initiatives complete on scope, on time, and on budget. Therefore, a successful project is defined by how well-scoped it was, and whether resources were used efficiently or not. The project team is pre-assigned with duties at the very start of the project, and each team member knows exactly what their deliverables are, months in advance. Continue Reading

I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked: “What is a product manager, and how do I become one?”

I’m always fascinated by this question, because the person who’s asking is already interested in product management, even though they have no idea what it is.

That interest makes sense. Product managers are amongst the highest-compensated, most well-respected professions in the world today, even though they’re among the least well-understood.

In business schools around the world, MBA students have set their sights on product management as their dream jobs. Colleges are starting to create new majors and programs focused solely on product management due to high demand.

Part of the challenge with describing what a product manager does is that the role of product manager is inherently poorly-defined. Why is that? Continue Reading