AMA: Square Product Leader, Abhiroop Basu on Roadmap Planning

One thing I've never had an issue on is coming up with features for a product. If you're ever bereft of ideas, simply go and speak to a customer and they'll provide a dozen ways your product can be improved. But it's important to structure the ideas so you don't get overwhelmed. Here's how you can go about doing that: Brainstorm with your partners: Setup time with your partners to generate and refine ideas. You can use customer feedback as an input Vote/prioritize on the top ideas: Give everyone ...Read More

Depending on the team in question the level of detail and approach will differ on how you communicate your roadmap. Here are some of the key teams you'll partner with and approaches you can take to communicate your roadmap: Core team: For your design, engineering, and data science partners you want to get into the weeds. Typically you want to share every element of the roadmap and more specifically the requirements for each and every feature. After all your core team are responsible for building ...Read More

This is an interesting question, but it's rarely a decision an individual product manager makes. Even if you're the only PM in your company, there will be PMMs, business development, sales, not to mention your leadership team who are all part of setting the priority/direction for the company. There isn't any point in you building a feature for existing customers if sales is focused on signing up new users. If you're company is new or young, customer acquisition is likely the bigger priority. In ...Read More

Prioritizing is one of the hardest tasks for a PM. Balancing the needs of stakeholders, with customer needs, and business priorities. However, only your manager (and their manager and so forth) should have any "control" on your roadmap. Everyone else, should be able to provide In reality, you will find other stakeholders will expect some level of influence. Once you've identified the initiatives for your team, you should use the RICE framework to prioritize them (see my other answer on this topi ...Read More

The simple answer is to prioritize the features that will bring your customers the most value and consequently drive the most revenue for your business/organization. Unfortunately, it's rarely that straightforward, particularly if you aren't working on customer facing features. Here are the four steps for prioritization: Solicit input from your partners: It's important to identify what your design, engineering, data science, product marketing, and other cross-functional partners find important. ...Read More

Some companies do a great job in providing a public-facing roadmap. At one company I worked at, there used to be a Trello board where customers could add features, upvote, and see what was coming up. It was completely transparent. On the other hand I've worked at companies where we didn't publicly list anything. There are good reasons to do both. At smaller companies being transparent can help build community, engagement, and enthusiasm for your product. You are also at low risk of having bad pu ...Read More