AMA: Momentive Vice President Of Product Management, Aleks Bass on Product Roadmap & Prioritization

The most helpful way to maintain alignment with the exec team is to align early and often on the product vision and strategy. Those conversations will likely surface gaps or areas of misalignment that you can address or close at the strategy level before you ever get into a roadmap discussion. If however, you find yourself at the receiving end of some exec input that isn’t aligned with a strategy you have socialized, there are several ways to handle it. Pull the suggestion into your input proces ...Read More

There are several stakeholders that have input into our roadmap, a few main partners and collaborators are listed below: Other Product & Design Teams Sales/CS teams Marketing & Growth Research And more… Most cross-functional partners just want to be heard and want to understand whether their requests will be addressed or not. This is why transparency is a key element in all 3 of the following tips to help you maintain the balance between influence and control:  Give your cross-functional ...Read More

Prioritization is the most important role of the product management function, and there seems to be a general sense that there is one major moment of prioritization that culminates in a completed roadmap. The reality is that the exercise in prioritization starts much earlier. Like many organizations, we are resource-constrained and have many more ideas than we can realistically action. Therefore, prioritization is one of the most important things we can do to help the company succeed. This means ...Read More

Our Product Marketing team is a key cross-functional partner and therefore provides us with suggestions, feedback, and market factors they are noticing through several channels. This is one of the ways in which our PMM team influences the roadmap. Additionally, our product marketing and product management teams work closely together to define key elements of the product strategy (key buyers, use cases, value proposition) as well as the go-to-market strategy and enablement activities. These pre & ...Read More