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

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. Across everything I have to do a PM leader, I make a deliberate effort to block some time for customer discovery every week but honoring that time myself is a challenge many times - given all the other priorities that come my way. Given customer discovery is time intense, availability of time and resources to conduct the due diligence by other cross functional teams such as UX researcher, data analyst can many times be a challenge. Embracing AI co pilot products in this space is what I see as an unlock to making PMs impactful in customer discovery space. Validating the problems before scaled investment is table stakes - and how it is done depends on whether it is a B2B or B2C product. For B2B, reviewing the roadmap with customers periodically is an effective way to make sure you are building that has both customer and business value.You can test PMF of B2B products by unlocking a few paying customers first before expensive GTM motions. From a B2C perspective, low-investment way to A/B experiment and validate the impact with data before scaling is an effective way to drive the right product investment.

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 and then comes an actionable plan, more in the 60-90 day time arch.

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 effective & impactful. 1. How often does this happen? If it is a regular occurrence, then it worth re-evaluating your planning time horizon & process including insights used. Is there a key group of stakeholders whose voice is not being incorporated into the planning process. 2. Why has something else become more important? Could this have been flagged earlier? 1. If is driven bottoms up and has an impact on the company KPIs, then convincing the leadership is important. Can the team do better in how they identify opportunities. 2. If the importance was flagged due to a top down shift - given the insights motivating this change are already known to your leadership, can it be a light weight update? 3. Finally, you mentioned docs and decks - ideally it should be either/or. Is there an overall organization standardization needed to create a standard format to drive organization effectiveness?

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 roadmap could be to have a high confidence roadmap for month 0-3 and a "suggested" roadmap for the month 3-6. Close to the month 3, review the "suggested" roadmap and make changes as leveraging a light-weight process.

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 next. Having these details will help drive confidence on your strategy. Make sure to articulate a summary of this plan in any forum where your product is reviewed.

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, 1. 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. 2. Leadership - This is the group that needs to approve your plan. Focus on the “why” and “why now” and impact of your roadmap. Also, share the details of the investment cost needed. 3. Wider organization - For wider organization they are more of the “informed” audience. Inform this group after roadmaps are approved. This group needs to know what is being done at a high level. If there are existing ceremonies in your organization, leverage those forums to get roadmap approval/inform roadmaps.