Abhiroop Basu

The simple answer is to prioritize the features that will bring your customers the most value and consequently drive the most revenue for your business/organization. Unfortunately, it's rarely that straightforward, particularly if you aren't working on customer facing features. Here are the four steps for prioritization: Solicit input from your partners: It's important to identify what your design, engineering, data science, product marketing, and other cross-functional partners find important. ...Read More

One thing I've never had an issue on is coming up with features for a product. If you're ever bereft of ideas, simply go and speak to a customer and they'll provide a dozen ways your product can be improved. But it's important to structure the ideas so you don't get overwhelmed. Here's how you can go about doing that: Brainstorm with your partners: Setup time with your partners to generate and refine ideas. You can use customer feedback as an input Vote/prioritize on the top ideas: Give everyone ...Read More

Prioritizing is one of the hardest tasks for a PM. Balancing the needs of stakeholders, with customer needs, and business priorities. However, only your manager (and their manager and so forth) should have any "control" on your roadmap. Everyone else, should be able to provide In reality, you will find other stakeholders will expect some level of influence. Once you've identified the initiatives for your team, you should use the RICE framework to prioritize them (see my other answer on this topi ...Read More

Depending on the team in question the level of detail and approach will differ on how you communicate your roadmap. Here are some of the key teams you'll partner with and approaches you can take to communicate your roadmap: Core team: For your design, engineering, and data science partners you want to get into the weeds. Typically you want to share every element of the roadmap and more specifically the requirements for each and every feature. After all your core team are responsible for building ...Read More

Some companies do a great job in providing a public-facing roadmap. At one company I worked at, there used to be a Trello board where customers could add features, upvote, and see what was coming up. It was completely transparent. On the other hand I've worked at companies where we didn't publicly list anything. There are good reasons to do both. At smaller companies being transparent can help build community, engagement, and enthusiasm for your product. You are also at low risk of having bad pu ...Read More

This is an interesting question, but it's rarely a decision an individual product manager makes. Even if you're the only PM in your company, there will be PMMs, business development, sales, not to mention your leadership team who are all part of setting the priority/direction for the company. There isn't any point in you building a feature for existing customers if sales is focused on signing up new users. If you're company is new or young, customer acquisition is likely the bigger priority. In ...Read More

It comes down to which aspects of the role excite you the most. Depending on the company you are working at, Product Marketing and Product Management can have a lot of overlap. I’ll first discuss some of the similarities and differences in the roles before summarizing how you should think about making the choice. Early in my career I found this Medium article instructive in deciding which path to pursue. Product Marketing really has two sets of functions, “outbound” activities and “inbound” acti ...Read More

Both roles are quite tough to get into without experience, but PM is marginally easier. Companies will typically have more PMs than PMMs. The PMM to PM ratio is roughly 1:4. Even if the company prioritizes PMM roles, it's rare that the ratio will get higher than 1:2. There are fewer PMM roles in the industry. Just doing a quick search on LinkedIn shows that there are about ~100k open PMM roles, while there are about ~280k open PM roles.  PMs typically get hired first. Most companies will start w ...Read More

In almost all cases you want to have Product Marketing creating the roadmap deck and delivering it, rather than Product. There are two main reasons for this.First, some PMs (please don't hate me) tend to focus more on describing the feature rather than articulating the value and benefit. Of course there are many skilled PMs that can do both, however it’s unlikely all your PMs will be able to do it consistently. Customers don’t care about the specifications of the feature, they want to understand ...Read More