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Julie Lam

AMA: Zoom Head of Product Operations, Julie Lam on Product Roadmap & Prioritization

July 2, 2024 @ 10:00AM PT

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  1. How do you think about communicating your roadmap to other teams? What level of detail do people need?

    Julie Lam
    Julie Lam

    Zoom Head of Product Operations • 2y

    Communication of roadmap with internal teams is important to ensure alignment of the vision and priorities. On an annual basis, Product org should share the strategy and high level roadmap. On a quarterly basis, product teams should share updates to roadmap based on what has been delivered and what is planned for upcoming quarters.

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  2. How do you get autonomy for prioritizing your roadmap when your sales process is very sales heavy, and sales leadership wants to dictate priorities?

    Julie Lam
    Julie Lam

    Zoom Head of Product Operations • 2y

    Prioritization of roadmap is not solely focused on sales' requests; though requests from Sales are important as they represent the asks from customers. In order to get autonomy on prioritizing roadmap items, one should consider interlocking w/ sales on customer requests (potential revenue) and providing Sales with visibility of innovation as well as alignment to overarching strategy.

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  3. 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?

    Julie Lam
    Julie Lam

    Zoom Head of Product Operations • 2y

    Roadmap items are execution against product strategy. Therefore, considerations for prioritizing roadmap items should include (1) support of the overall strategy, (2) innovation, and (3) delivering against customers' needs. One is not more important than the other; rather it's an aggregate of the these considerations.

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  4. Who are all the stakeholders that can provide input to a product roadmap? What are the stage gates to help decide if something should land in the roadmap?

    Julie Lam
    Julie Lam

    Zoom Head of Product Operations • 2y

    Input from customer facing teams such as Sales, Support and CSM are helpful to the product roadmap as they represent the input/requests from customers. Additionally, getting alignment with Engineering and Design leads is important to understanding feasibility and trade-offs that will impact product roadmap. Less about stage gates, more about grooming backlog and assigning attributes to each feature to help prioritize the features. Attributes can be weighted and aggregated. For example, a feature ...Read More

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  5. How does your product team usually work with your product marketing team with building the roadmap?

    Julie Lam
    Julie Lam

    Zoom Head of Product Operations • 2y

    Product team work with Product Marketing to showcase the roadmap and align the messaging. Product Marketing team should be elevating the messaging pre-launch, at launch and post-launch (to ensure the message is resonating with customers). Depending on the organization, some Product Marketing teams work with Product team on customer facing demos and vignettes.

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  6. What are the best practices for introducing roadmapping as a product management practice in a transforming organization that is new to product practices and mindset, and how can you ensure that different teams stay consistent with the formats or frameworks used, while still allowing for flexibility and innovation?

    In context of an organization undergoing business transformation, managing exiting products and product portfolios with a product approach rather than project based approach.

    Julie Lam
    Julie Lam

    Zoom Head of Product Operations • 2y

    One best practice Product Management team should institute is a Product Strategy with details on how each Product team will execute against the strategy. This will allow the product teams to align their roadmaps to the strategy. Products teams should also interlock with Sales team to ensure their roadmaps also meet customer demands.

    858 Views
    1 request