How do you align roadmaps for product managers on individual products with the broader platform?

If you are referring to individual products using capabilities from broader platform, I would categorize those products are target customer scenarios that the platform enables. As you come up with the roadmap for your platform, you need to work closely with all those scenario owners / customers and align your roadmap to enable those scenarios to succeed. While you decide on platform capabilities based on deep understanding of customer scenarios, if you align the execution of your roadmap with the scenario timeline, you have a higher chances of success. In other words, don't just build a platform but line up your execution to align with the consuming scenario so you can demonstrate clear business impact.

Different companies/teams use differnt tools to align roadmaps. More than aligning roadmaps, you align on success metrics (you can use frameworks like OKR framework) and your execution dependencies/timelines (you can use any schedule tracking tools or excel simplistically).

Alignment can be a challenge for platform product managers since you usually have more than the average number of internal stakeholders and increased cross-team dependencies to get your work done. At best you have the potential to have a large scale impact, at worst your projects get blocked by another team. That’s why it’s critical to gain alignment across the broader platform. When striving for cross-team alignment, I always tell my teams to think in ‘spheres of influence:’

• Start with your immediate team: Work with your team to prioritize your product roadmap based on customer feedback and data. Make sure your team is bought into the work before circulating too broadly.

• Expand to your larger product area: Most teams do quarterly planning, so once you and your team know your quarterly roadmap, I highly recommend circulating it to your broader product area, which includes teams that you partner with closely. You want to identify any cross-team dependencies as early as possible and get the work prioritized on their roadmaps if necessary. Since you usually partner closely with these teams and you’re probably also doing work that their teams need, the hope is that you can negotiate getting onto each other’s roadmaps.

• Expand to the entire product organization: Since platform work has a broad impact, you usually want to let the wider product organization know what you’re working on as well. This can help you identify early unintentional impact you may have on their teams or even better, ways they can benefit from your work. Usually you have a good sense of your key internal stakeholders so you may be able to limit alignment to a few key teams outside of your product area, but it never hurts to let the broader organization know what you’re working on.

Aligning roadmaps for product managers on individual products with the broader platform requires a collaborative approach. It is critical to establish overarching strategy and platform goals that are aligned with the company's business objectives and extremely important to understand clearly each product's goals and asks from the platform. Once the platform goals and asks from individual products are established, use a prioritization framework to define the priority. Use shared prioritization frameworks and use collaborative roadmap planning approach to align all the stakeholders and make sure they understand the rationale for why certain work is prioritized over others. Establish KPIs and dependencies, set up regular sync and feedback loops to update on not only progress but also communicate any changes.

Build with, not for them.

Building 0 → 1: From my experience, a new "Platform capability" that evolves behind a key initiative has a much better chance of creating leverage and driving larger organizational impact. This requires a closely integrated or even embedded team placement with a broader alignment on key outcomes.

Building 1 → N: this is an area where you'd often experience a lack of internal buy-in as each team is juggling their own set of priorities. Here, I suggest starting by choosing the right tactic:

1. Stick (Enforcement): Teams have to adopt by X date, otherwise their integration with your components could break. When leveraging this strategy, ensure you have executive support to drive cross-org alignment.

2. Carrot (Incentive): This is where you have to sell teams on the value of the newer capability, so they dedicate roadmap capacity on their own.

3. Ninja (Proactive Integration): Your team goes into other teams' codebases and refactors code to use the new API, library, or component, and asks domain teams to review/validate your PRs.

Reserve the "stick" method for critical infrastructure changes, emphasize "carrot" to drive voluntary adoption, and fallback to "ninja" for when centralization means faster execution on business-critical initiatives.

Hopefully there are some shared goals and a company or product vision to align your work to and if not you may need to write your own vision for the platform. For example if you were working on a platform that was driving a patient care portal with a 5 year vision to connect users to providers that answer questions within 5 minutes you probably would not focus on a request to integrate with fitness scheduling software but instead focus on how do we build the communication tools that will provide those answers from providers.

It is also helpful to keep that list of priorities public and with the reasoning (Why are we doing this?) public as well. This gives visibility to other teams asking for something where their request might land if they have an estimate of the impact it will make.

Aligning roadmaps for individual products with the broader platform is crucial for ensuring coherence, efficiency, and synergy across different aspects of the product ecosystem.

Here are a few pointers:

1. Understand the Platform Vision: Begin by understanding the overarching vision and goals of the platform. What is the purpose of the platform, and how do the individual products contribute to that vision? This understanding provides the context for aligning the roadmaps.

2. Identify Key Themes and Initiatives: Break down the platform vision into key themes and initiatives. These could be technological advancements, market expansion, user experience improvements, etc. Each theme represents a strategic focus area for the platform.

3. Collaborate with Product Managers: Engage with the product managers responsible for individual products. Discuss the platform vision and key themes with them. Understand their product's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT analysis) in relation to the platform's objectives.

4. Map Product Roadmaps to Themes: Work with each product manager to map their product roadmap to the key themes and initiatives identified earlier. Identify how each product contributes to the platform goals. Ensure that there is alignment between (this is key) the features, enhancements, or developments planned for each product and the broader platform strategy.

5. Prioritize and Sequencing: Prioritize initiatives based on their importance to the platform vision and potential impact. Consider dependencies between products and initiatives. Determine the sequencing of initiatives to maximize value delivery and minimize risks.

6. Regular Communication and Review: Establish a cadence for regular communication and review sessions with all product managers involved. This could be through regular meetings, updates, or workshops. Use these sessions to discuss progress, address challenges, and ensure ongoing alignment.

7. Flexibility and Adaptation: Remain flexible and adaptable. The roadmap should not be set in stone but should evolve based on changing market dynamics, customer feedback, technological advancements, and other factors. Be prepared to adjust priorities and reallocate resources as needed to stay aligned with the platform strategy.

8. Feedback Loops, Measure and Evaluate: Establish feedback loops between individual products and the broader platform. Encourage product managers to provide insights, suggestions, and feedback on how the platform can better support their products, and vice versa.

   Define key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of both individual products and the platform as a whole. Regularly evaluate progress against these KPIs and use the insights gained to iterate and refine the roadmap alignment process.