AMA: BILL Vice President of Product Management, Tara Wellington on Product Roadmap & Prioritization

When executives are highly involved in your roadmap, your first job is to understand WHY. Are they providing a lot of input because they don’t trust the team and their direction? Are they trying to provoke a change in direction or strategy? Is there an actual problem they need to solve? Do they just like it? Each of these situations should be handled a bit differently.  If your exec is wanting to influence the roadmap due to lack of trust, you need to go back to the basics. Gather your data, art ...Read More

This can be a blessing or a curse depending on how you look at it. From a negative lens, it can feel like you have thousands of decisions to make, and no direction and guidelines to help you make these decisions. On the positive side, you have full control of your roadmap and team’s resources. The world is your oyster!  To help keep you on the positive side of the spectrum, I would start by trying to get your C-team to answer one question, “What does success look like?” If you can get your C-tea ...Read More

The main stakeholders that have input into my roadmaps are (1) Customers, (2) Sales, (3) Customer Service, (4) Leadership / Executive Team, (5) Other teams dependent on my team. In addition to these stakeholders, my roadmap is also influenced by product data and customer behavior in the product, market research and trends, competitive research, and our company and product strategy.  In a perfect world, the product manager controls their team’s roadmap. They build the roadmap based on “streams of ...Read More

When you are in a situation where the team needs time to build a point of view on the roadmap, there are a few tactics you can use to help build trust within the organization and set clear expectations. .  Start by sharing the process - where are you currently in the process, what has been done and what is yet to be done. If there is a strategy, but no roadmap yet, share the strategy and get people confident in the direction you are going. If you only have the next 3 months, start by sharing a q ...Read More

Communicating roadmap changes can be notoriously tricky. There is often a lot of nuance and decision making that goes on behind the scenes that gets lost in translation. It sounds like your primary audience is leadership in this situation, so I will focus my answer on communicating changes to leadership.  In order to reduce the overhead of communicating with leadership and still remain effective, I would do three things, (1) Ensure your business rhythms include a consistent and regular pattern f ...Read More

This answer definitely depends on the company, culture, leadership, product - so you can take my answer with a grain of salt. Generally, I like to use the “first 90 days” approach from the book aptly named “The First 90 Days” by Michael D. Watkins.  The first 30 days is all about listening. Do as much listening and learning as you can. Don’t try to affect change during this time. Focus on learning the culture, the people, the products, the customers - and most importantly focus on building relat ...Read More