Product Collective - 🚗 Roadmap for a new product

Roadmaps for New Products

It’s always annoying when people ask you to predict the future. It’s especially annoying when the product you’re developing is brand new. While your predictions about the future are never going to be right for your new product, a product roadmap can help you communicate your intentions so that you can at least appropriately manage expectations.

How to build a product roadmap for a startup in 2022? The folks from Clockwise Software explain how to create a startup product roadmap. Get ready to find out about the preparation process, focus on the right things, define what you need most, and create a workable document for your needs. They describe the role of a product roadmap in project discovery, detail some of the dos and don’ts when creating a product roadmap, and explain how a wisely built roadmap can save you effort, time, and money
(via @ClockwiseSW)

Building a product roadmap for a new startup. Shanif Dhanani has learned one of the most important ways to keep moving forward is to love the problem you’re solving, but be flexible on the solution. There are a million different decisions to make, strategies to take, and products to build. Knowing what you’re trying to accomplish, and keeping that front and center at all times, helps you prioritize ruthlessly and keep working on the things that you think will have the biggest impact. Shanif describes how creating a product roadmap helped him prioritize and keep focus in his new startup..
(via @shanif)

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Should your roadmap include helping people not use your product?

When we’re tasked with building out our company’s roadmaps – we’re often thinking about what products and features we can build to solve problems for our customers (or at least, we should be!). But we’re also trying to move key metrics that are important for our company’s objectives as well. For many websites and apps – engagement is one of those key metrics. But in what many may think would be a surprising move, TikTok actually introduced a feature that would intentionally help its users decrease engagement. 

Recently, TikTok announced it would be rolling out options for consumers to end the endless scrolling that we’re all very used to when using social apps like TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, and others. These options allow users to set custom time limits for how much uninterrupted time they want to spend using the app. After that, the user will receive a notification reminding them to take a break. In a way, it’s not all that different from our Apple Watches reminding us to get up and moving throughout the day. 

But why? Why would TikTok introduce features that would theoretically encourage its users to stop using its app?

It could be that companies like TikTok are feeling the recent societal pressures to be more mindful of its users’ well-being in this digital age where everybody is constantly on their devices. We’ve even talked through product addiction in a recent season of Rocketship.FM. In the episode, we were hopeful that companies like TikTok can do more to help users on this front – and it seems like perhaps they’re moving in the right direction on that front.

Most of the products we’re managing may not be in the same boat as TikTok where we have that much control over our users’ habits. But even still – maybe moves like this are a reminder that we should at least be aware of the impact our products have on users – whether they’re intended or not. 

Would you like to join us (for free!) at INDUSTRY Virtual, the premier online Product Management conference, on October 18th? Andrew Chen (Author of The Cold Start Problem and Partner at Andreesen Horowitz), Justin Bauer (SVP, Product at Amplitude), Michelle Parsons (Chief Product Officer at Hinge), and many others will be speaking.

There will also be plenty of time for learning and networking with 1000s of other product people from around the world.

There's a completely free ticket available to you, but these are limited to the first 500 registrants - so make sure you register today (it will take less than 2 minutes).

INDUSTRY: The Product Conference is back with a bang! The in-person edition returns on September 19-21 in Cleveland, Ohio, reviving the top independent product conference anywhere. Build your network and find inspiration as you'll learn from some of the best -- like David Cancel (CEO at Drift), Sarah Butterfass (CPO at FanDuel), and even Mark Duplass (award-winning filmmaker and co-star of Apple TV's The Morning Show).

Story mapping for new products.  Balach, founder of epekworks, has found story mapping the most impactful exercise to align the entire team and have a point of reference that can inform not just engineering and product management, but also marketing, operations, user research, design, and business stakeholders; specially when starting out a new product or a clear initiative within a running product. In this article, he explains how to use story mapping to visualize your product roadmap.
(via @EpekWorks)

The right roadmap for the right purpose — Five different roadmap types. In Product management we use different kinds of roadmaps, most prominent is the so-called product roadmap where we set priorities on what we would like to develop or better which outcomes to achieve in a certain time period. This is mainly shaped by the product manager together with the product team but there are different actors and stakeholders in a company that manage different things in order to make a product a success. Sebastian Straube examines five different types of roadmaps, including product roadmaps which are most applicable for new products.. 
(via @BastiStr)

A New Era for PLG: Introducing the Age of Connected Work. The folks at OpenView Ventures defined what they see as the next wave of Product-Led Growth. It brings together trends you might have followed like API-first/connected products, low code/no code, PLG and usage-based pricing. These trends can be a key input into the roadmap for your new product.
(via @OpenViewVenture)

Bridging the Gap Between Your Product and Customers

You have an awesome idea to build for your product, but how are you communicating that to your customers? And do your users even like that idea? Join us to learn why you should engage with your users, and how you can do it *strategically*. In this session, Lisa and Peer will specifically be discussing the following topics:

• Building a product your users actually want by validating your ideas
• Gaining valuable insights from engaged customers
• Closing the feedback loop
• How you can do all that in the most effective way

Plus, you'll have a chance to ask questions of your own!

Radical Candor

Since you learned to talk you’ve likely been told some version of, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Then you become the boss and the very thing you’ve been taught not to do since you were 18 months old is suddenly your job. But in order to succeed, you have to Challenge Directly. Challenging people is often the best way to show you care. It does not mean that whatever you think is the truth; it means you share your (humble) opinions directly.

In this discussion, we'll dig into this conundrum — and you'll be able to ask questions of your own as well.

1. A newsletter each and every Friday centered around an important product topic, like roadmapping, strategy, and analytics.
2. Access to a thriving Slack group with thousands of others to share advice, tips and get feedback on your work.
3. Plus, invitations to exclusive video chats, special member privileges at the conferences we hold in the United States and Europe, and more!