AMA: Uber Director of Product, Sirisha Machiraju on Product Roadmap & Prioritization

How, when & the level of detail of roadmaps delivery will depend on the audience. In general, for any team, understand their role in your roadmap execution lifecycle and use that to inform your communication strategy. For example,  Stakeholders & core functional team - This group needs the details such as date of delivery, solution. Keep this group informed through the process so they can share feedback early on in the process and can plan around this work.  Leadership - This is the grou ...Read More

Is your leadership aware of this pivot? If not, I would recommend starting there. Are there internal stakeholders who need to be educated about this pivot as well. If so, start with that alignment first. As part of this alignment, highlight the reasons for the pivot and impact to business and users. As part of these conversations, include not just details of the near term roadmap but also add details on what questions will be answered by the end of the time period to inform the team what comes n ...Read More

First of all, congratulations on your new role! I am sure there will be no dearth of problems to solve here:) But if there is one advice I can share -that would be to make the most of your first 90 days to connect, learn & build the trust. Meet as many people as you can, Don’t jump into problem solving unless you have been hired with some guidance from your leadership. Build trust with your tribe, absorb all the information you can including understanding the product, people & process an ...Read More

Unfortunately, reprioritization of a  roadmap is not a fun exercise and can many times lead to frustration with long discussions and alignment meetings. Repriortization is the symptom of a different root cause. Rather than fix "how" reprioritization is done, understanding the "why" and solving for that will be more impactful. Not knowing the details of your organizations or how your planning cycles work, here are a couple of questions to ask that you can use to make these exercises more effectiv ...Read More

This would entirely depend on the stage of your product & the space you operate in. For example, if you are working on early stage 0->1 product, may be a monthly roadmap makes more sense. If you are working on large complex platforms, the roadmap might be a multi half e.g., data platform, FinTech etc. In such cases, capacity planning will be more than 6 months out more, in the sense that you have a ring fenced team focussed on this complex initiative.  A balance between 3-to-6 month roadm ...Read More

Customer discovery should never be treated as a 1-time planning activity. It should be an ongoing process to define a running backlog of opportunities. Customer discovery should be done across all available & valid channels - customer interviews, competitive intelligence, product usage analytics, support interactions, customer facing team interactions to name a few. The hardest thing is to identify and  keep an eye on all valid channels to build a holistic view. This can be very time intense ...Read More