AMA: BILL Sr. Staff Product Manager - Platform Intelligence (Data & AI), Aindra Misra on Product Roadmap & Prioritization

This is a difficult question and generally depends on the guidance which comes from upper management and business. If the company is focussed heavily on growth, and your product is a part of the growth initiative then your roadmap chunk would be heavier on the prospects Vs the exiting customers. Whereas in other cases where the company is focussed on user retention and getting more value/customer then it might be heavy on the existing customers. Here are the two factors which primarily influence ...Read More

Your roadmap should have just enough details on the top level that will explain the below three things: WHAT? Summary of the problem, high level potential solution and the link to resources (documents, diagrams etc) Why? Value prop and mapping with the business goals and priorities When? Delivery time It's great to break down the delivery time into smaller chunks and have clear milestones for the phases. The rest of the details and granularity should be out of the roadmap and into execution proc ...Read More

Here are the steps I take for end to end feature prioritization - Talk to various stakeholders (sync and async) and collect a list of features from them with the following details - Impact, expected ETA of the request, mapping with business goals Talk to the engineering team and get a list of the foundational/tech debt features which they want to implement to improve efficiency of the team and create a modern tech stack Align the business with the capacity split between business features and fou ...Read More

This is a common case scenario. Here are the few things I would take into account when providing a reset of expectations: For the items too far out in the roadmap should be provided with an asterix and tentative disclaimer Ensure that as soon as you know that there is a possibility of a pivot, start communication informally with the primary stakeholders to avoid surprises and backlash Once there is clarity on the pivot, come up with a plan to explain the following things in the communication - W ...Read More

You should try to split your stakeholders into two categories: Primary Stakeholders - The ones which will be directly benefit or impacted by your work. These should not just be your customers who will use the product, but also the teams who will help get this work to the finish line, upper management who need to report this work to higher above. Primary stakeholders can be of various functions - PMs, eng partners, user researchers, design, PMM, leadership Secondary Stakeholders - These are the o ...Read More

This depends on the type of product. Here are the examples of the scenarios - Customer facing product - PMM (Product Marketing Managers) is highly involved as soon there is clarity on the product requirements and discovery phase is mid way. They start drafting press releases and/or company wide or eTeam readouts/approval docs and start collecting feedback from the PMs Platform product/internal/technical - They are less involved depending on the downstream consumption of the technical product. If ...Read More

It should be an iterative process and start off with creating a product mindset before enforcing roadmapping process to your company/team. Here are the steps, I would recommend: Create awareness about Product roadmapping and benefits - Hold awareness sessions and mandatory trainings for the PM team and build a product mindset Create a lightweight and flexible roadmapping process to begin with as a phase 1. Enable PMs to drive the roadmap and share it widely. Guide them on how to do it Start shar ...Read More