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

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 bias towards engineers. What control are you unwilling to give up? And why? First ask: What do you control and what do the engineers control? I think about it in terms of what questions do the players solve. Product managers answer the why and the what: Why should we build this, and why now? What do we need to build? Engineers an ...Read More

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 product? A feature? An improvement on a feature?If I simplify - you need to: Form a hypothesis on a problem that needs to be solved Gather data and evidence that backup that hypothesis Determine what data you would look at to know if you solved the problem and got the outcome you sought User outcomes — How do you make the user or c ...Read More

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 question I have is: What does "on time" mean? If you're off by a day a week or even a month, that rarely matters. If yo'ure off by months (plural!) then you have not planned well. And yes, you need to plan. Nothing in Agile says don't plan. You also should have done your research. I'm a big fan of Jared Spool's approach - get the ...Read More

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 being done, so there's time for the PMs to go back with the engineers and designers to refine based on any course corrections. We keep a set of artifacts available - a product roadmap and a product staraegy doc that have the details of what we're working on. We document a lot of our conversations in Notion and these are availabl ...Read More

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 together. The doc has questions about the problem to solve, the evidence we have around why it's important, the technical challenges involved, and what design constraints should be considered before choosing a particular solution. The surrounding activities differ from team to team. Sometimes they hold virtual workshops (think ...Read More

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 checking along the way becuase the attitude is "Oh, QA will catch it" and this can create inefficiencies in your process. There's a saying, "if everyone is responsible, no one is." This sometimes happens regarding QA. Ultimately, I hold the product manager accountable for quality of the resulting product. If something isn't work ...Read More