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Farheen Noorie

AMA: Zendesk Senior Director of Product Management, Farheen Noorie on Roadmap Planning

October 26 @ 9:00AM PST
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Zendesk Senior Director of Product Management, Farheen Noorie on Roadmap Planning
Top Questions
How do you get autonomy for prioritizing your roadmap when your sales process is very sales heavy, and sales leadership wants to dictate priorities?
Farheen Noorie
Farheen Noorie
Zendesk Senior Director of Product Management • October 27
Prioritizing only for Sales teams can lead to traps where you are building Product one customer at a time and these products may not speak to each other. On the other hand by not including Sales you will be missing out on a core team that speaks to your customers every day. My recommendation woul......Read More
2631 Views
1 request
Which stakeholders have input into your roadmap, and how to balance giving them influence vs control?
Farheen Noorie
Farheen Noorie
Zendesk Senior Director of Product Management • October 27
This is possibly a good application of the RACI framework to determine which of your stakeholders have influence vs Control * Responsible: Think of your product, engineering, and design leadership. They should have the same goals and priorities as you. Hence their feedback as well as en......Read More
2592 Views
1 request
How do you think about communicating your roadmap to other teams? What level of detail do people need?
Farheen Noorie
Farheen Noorie
Zendesk Senior Director of Product Management • October 27
How you communicate your roadmaps depends on who you are communicating it to plus the existing processes in your organization. Here are some examples * Executive Staff: I have had success in creating decks for E-staff members highlighting the specific items that they are interested in. I hav......Read More
2588 Views
2 requests
It’s impossible to get our exec team to focus on one segment. How do I balance prioritizing my roadmap while building for different segments?
Farheen Noorie
Farheen Noorie
Zendesk Senior Director of Product Management • October 27
That is a hard situation to be in. Here are some options to try * Communicate your roadmap to the executive team organized by segments, showcase what you can prioritize for a segment and what you cant with the latter focusing on multiple priorities across various segments being the pri......Read More
2678 Views
2 requests
What are some of the lenses your look through or principles you apply when prioritizing a roadmap? How are they weighted relative to each other?
Farheen Noorie
Farheen Noorie
Zendesk Senior Director of Product Management • October 27
There are lots of frameworks available for prioritization. The key is to find the one that works the best for your product function and the needs of your stakeholders. Most frameworks are directional and product folks should use product sense and intuition to build a roadmap that makes the most s......Read More
2630 Views
1 request
How do you manage a roadmap when company leadership cannot or will not provide guidance? (e.g. the C-team is all newly hired and don't know enough about the product or customers)
Farheen Noorie
Farheen Noorie
Zendesk Senior Director of Product Management • October 27
My strategy would be to either * Give them enough context and try again for guidance * Change the question So how do you do either of those? Instead of asking for guidance on the roadmap, you can try one or more of the following * Is the roadmap too detailed for your C-team? Instead can ......Read More
2580 Views
1 request