AMA: Meta Director of Product - Horizon Worlds Platform, Mike Arcuri on Product Roadmap & Prioritization

In executive conversations about roadmaps, I nearly always express them team's (and my own POV) up front. I also connect the dots from business principles/priorities to the investment themes for the roadmap to the projects and milestones in the roadmap. By doing it in this way (i.e. "here's our understanding of our business position and strategy, here's our understanding of company/broader org priorities, here's how our team's mission and scope will contribute to these..."), I find I get clear f ...Read More

I like to start with the product stage, context, and strategy. From these, and your customer data you should be able to determine your priorities With an early stage, pre-PMF product, you may be prioritizing learning about your customer needs and how well your product is meeting those needs above all else. When you know your product is meeting some people’s needs or providing some valued entertainment, you can focus primarily on increasing engagement and retention. How can you make your product ...Read More

Here's a rough e2e prioritization process: Set context with the team and your stakeholders on the overall business, product stage and strategy, key problems, behavioral data, and user research. Establish roadmap themes based on these key problems, needs, and opportunities. Engage everyone in brainstorming solutions for these important problems and opportunities. De-duplicate ideas and group brainstormed ideas/solutions together. Arrange projects ideas into an ordered list. Sort the list by both ...Read More

Executives that can't provide focus for your team can be a common situation when there's early stage market uncertainty and pressure to do customer discovery and find PMF. Top company leadership feels an intense time pressure (I've heard it described as a holding both a compass and a stopwatch), and so is reluctant to reduce potential segments that could become winners. More than anything here, they're hoping for some signal/data/customer success that could then increase the certainty of focusin ...Read More

In terms of how to communicate with your internal organization, partner teams, and stakeholders during a pivot, I'd make these internal partners and stakeholders a participating part of the pivot planning process. Once you're through that process and back to executing, then you can communicate timelines and project status internally just like before. How to communicate with an external audience (e.g. clients in a b2b business or consumers in a b2c business) is a decision that usually gets vetted ...Read More

I like to get as much input as is reasonable both internally and externally. Internal examples of stakeholder input: partnerships, sales, marketing, product support, operations, finance, data science, design, execs…  External sources of roadmap input: press reactions & professional product reviews, app store ratings and reviews, customers support requests, user research, inbound marketing research, and above all behavioral data from your logging/analytics. In terms of gates... during the pla ...Read More

I answered this partly in the earlier question “We’re pivoting our product, and it’s difficult to plan the roadmap too far out. How do we reset expectations on what product communicates?” TLDR is “it really depends on your company values/priorities and your product and community.” There are risks to sharing too much detail too early (failed follow-through can erode user community support and/or business partner/channel support). I personally like to optimize for customers, not competitive intell ...Read More

I've worked with marketers who are great at understanding customer and business opportunities. I regularly work with these teams in combination with data science and user research teams to form an "understand roadmap" to answer the open questions that would most help our product progress (about our market, our users, our competition, our brand). At times I've also asked these marketing partners play leadership roles in team roadmap planning and they've done a great job. Other marketers are great ...Read More

One piece of advice: Understand your product, organization, and company and what each of these needs to succeed. Then do that thing (at your appropriate job scope: product/org/company). A bit more detail: Consider doing a listening tour of your peers and reports in your first 30 days: What are they most worried about/hopeful for with you coming in? What’s the one thing they’d like to see you change? Keep the same? Your job is always to:  Build the right product. Build the right team. But your pr ...Read More

We all inherently understand that the farther out you plan, the greater the uncertainty. This was also one of the key themes in the Agile development methodology. But I don’t believe I’ve ever heard someone explain the implications of this in a practical way for product managers. Some businesses may require 5-year financial plans for product investments. Sometimes called LRPs for “long range plans.” These are bullshit as forecasts, but the exercise is useful as a check that this new product coul ...Read More

There’s already a planning process in your company, it's just likely a poorly defined/understood one with a lot of downsides. You might start by doing a learning/listening tour, identifying and aligning team members on the current pain points with planning/lack of planning.  Then you can explain the reasons why change is desirable, the goals of changing the process, then the new process itself. When you're ready and have some support/buy-in to adopt a new process: Be sure to define the roles ind ...Read More