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What's the point though of this long list of ideas or wishes? Are you worried you'll forget what's important and start working on something that doesn't matter

by j4yav 3y ago

What's the point though of this long list of ideas or wishes? Are you worried you'll forget what's important and start working on something that doesn't matter if you don't have it?

ako 3y ago
To do objective, measurable, data driven roadmap prioritization. You want to be able to show how often certain features or capabilities were requested, in what context, and what the impact would be, both on the customer and on sales targets. To do this you need complete observability of all customer interactions, i.e., meeting/call notes, presales notes, forum posts, zendesk support tickets, services interactions, etc. Productboard goes quite far in enabling you to bring all these channels together so you can build a data driven roadmap. Jira Product Discovery on the other hand is quite thin on this, more focussed on handover to the development teams, showing roadmaps, and tracking progress. Hopefully they'll add actual product discovery in the future. One additional benefit of a tool: you get insights into discussions other PMs have with customers. It's good to be aware of requirements customers have on your product area that they may have communicated to other PMs working on other parts of the product.
- j4yav 3y ago
  Sure but I mean does that result in different outcomes compared to identifying and focusing on the next most important few things which will move the needle at any given time, which tend to be quite obvious? GitLab for example built a billion dollar company by for the most part incrementally focusing on the next most important step, without deep data-driven backlog analysis or trying to capture all interactions and contexts related to potential product feature discussions. https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#iteration https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#iteration
  - ako 3y ago
    Probably depends on your stakeholders. In a small company with owners (having domain knowledge and experience) driving the roadmap there's probably no need to provide data for what should be the next important thing. In a large corporation however where a PM needs to convince higher level (MBA type) stakeholders about product prioritization, having data goes a long way to convince stakeholders.
    - j4yav 3y ago
      Yeah, that's fair. I think GitLab avoided that by not having MBA-types approving the roadmap.

by j4yav 3y ago

What's the point though of this long list of ideas or wishes? Are you worried you'll forget what's important and start working on something that doesn't matter if you don't have it?

ako 3y ago

To do objective, measurable, data driven roadmap prioritization. You want to be able to show how often certain features or capabilities were requested, in what context, and what the impact would be, both on the customer and on sales targets. To do this you need complete observability of all customer interactions, i.e., meeting/call notes, presales notes, forum posts, zendesk support tickets, services interactions, etc. Productboard goes quite far in enabling you to bring all these channels together so you can build a data driven roadmap. Jira Product Discovery on the other hand is quite thin on this, more focussed on handover to the development teams, showing roadmaps, and tracking progress. Hopefully they'll add actual product discovery in the future. One additional benefit of a tool: you get insights into discussions other PMs have with customers. It's good to be aware of requirements customers have on your product area that they may have communicated to other PMs working on other parts of the product.

j4yav 3y ago
Sure but I mean does that result in different outcomes compared to identifying and focusing on the next most important few things which will move the needle at any given time, which tend to be quite obvious? GitLab for example built a billion dollar company by for the most part incrementally focusing on the next most important step, without deep data-driven backlog analysis or trying to capture all interactions and contexts related to potential product feature discussions. https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#iteration https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#iteration
- ako 3y ago
  Probably depends on your stakeholders. In a small company with owners (having domain knowledge and experience) driving the roadmap there's probably no need to provide data for what should be the next important thing. In a large corporation however where a PM needs to convince higher level (MBA type) stakeholders about product prioritization, having data goes a long way to convince stakeholders.
  - j4yav 3y ago
    Yeah, that's fair. I think GitLab avoided that by not having MBA-types approving the roadmap.