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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

Product management is such a broad field, with opportunities in companies of all shapes and sizes. I recently came across an excellent post about PMing at start-ups vs. PMing at large companies, and I wanted to share my own perspective, based on the points mentioned, on PMing at a large company.

Large Companies

I think it’s very fair to say that larger companies, especially public companies, tend to focus on growing what is already successful. When there are quarterly targets, investor pressure, and lots of eyes from supporters and competitors alike, there’s little room for error and these companies will very naturally minimize risk and continue going after tried and true approaches. Continue Reading

One of the most important aspects of delivering a solid product is making sure a lot of research goes into the effort. Given the limited time and money a project has, it’s essential to understand the aspects that should go into your product for the best possible end user experience. In this post, we’ll be going over quantitative vs. qualitative research, including their differences and when to employ each kind of research.

Quantitative Research

Quantitative research includes A/B testing, fake door testing, and following patterns.

A/B testing tests changes on the page against the current design. For example, half of our customers would see a blue button while the other half would see our current grey button. If the blue button shows a higher click-through rate, we know that the change is an improvement. Continue Reading

At my company I frequently hear the term “MVP” being used by PMs, developers, and designers alike. What exactly does this mean, and why is it so important for agile software development? MVP stands for minimum viable product and is a development technique in which a new product gets just enough core features for it to function.

The goal of the MVP is to quickly get feedback from customers and improve the product without having to invest a lot of time or money that could potentially go to waste. From the customer’s interaction with the MVP, the product can then go through cycles of improvement that result in a full-featured product that customers will love.

The term MVP is by no means boxed-in to just software development and writing code. Take a look at some famous examples of tech entrepreneurs using a minimum viable product to validate and improve upon their early products: Continue Reading