AMA: Appcues VP of Products, C. Todd Lombardo on Product Development Process

I'll start with an upfront caveat - there is no one product development process. How you go about development will depend on what you want to develop: An entirely new pro...

Depends on the problem! Who has the best knowledge to help assess? This could be a product manager, an analyst, a designer, or an engineer!It is likely a team of people, ...

Hm. There appears to be an undercurrent of "us vs them" in your question, maybe this is intentional, but look at your inner beliefs on that to see if there's a negative b...

Two week iterations are very common and can work effectively if you've broken the work down in such a way that you're delivering customer value within each sprint. The qu...

I've worked with some teams that have dedicated QA people and others with none. If QA falls solely on 1 person, this can also become a challenge where engineering is not ...

I don't know of any company that doesn't have this constraint in some manner!Ultimately you have to ask a very very critical question: What's important?Here's a video of ...

I generally go by this guide7 to 10 engineers for every 1 designer1 product manager for every 7 to 10 "makers" (designers + engineers)It's never a hard and fast rule as e...

Communicate, communicate and communicate more!We have a quarterly product strategy meeting where the PMs share their plans and the execs ask questions ahead of the work b...

We have something we call a "common roadmap discovery doc" that has a set of questions around the problem that the PM, the designer and a tech lead (engineer) all work on...

Ask them to repeat it back to you in their own words. "Explain it to me like I'm 10 years old!"Ask them where they have the most confidence and the least confidence about...

As soon as we start talking about the idea. PMs need to have a hypothesis about what a good outcome looks lie in the beginning. For example we were talking about some cha...

Name and shame them! (kidding)Look, these things may happen and sometimes they can be amazing, sometimes they're a waste. Ask youself why this happens? Do they see a need...