Aindra Misra

Your roadmap should have just enough details on the top level that will explain the below three things: WHAT? Summary of the problem, high level potential solution and the link to resources (documents, diagrams etc) Why? Value prop and mapping with the business goals and priorities When? Delivery time It's great to break down the delivery time into smaller chunks and have clear milestones for the phases. The rest of the details and granularity should be out of the roadmap and into execution proc ...Read More

You should try to split your stakeholders into two categories: Primary Stakeholders - The ones which will be directly benefit or impacted by your work. These should not just be your customers who will use the product, but also the teams who will help get this work to the finish line, upper management who need to report this work to higher above. Primary stakeholders can be of various functions - PMs, eng partners, user researchers, design, PMM, leadership Secondary Stakeholders - These are the o ...Read More

Skills for a PM leader are primarily categorized into two large buckets: Hard Technical/domain knowledge skills based on the product you support - eg:It can be understanding of MAU, DAUs, ad revenue etc for growth PMs or it can be AI, data and infra tools and technology for Platform PMs Inferring information from data - It's very critical for PMs to translate data into information which is valuable to them Soft Stakeholder management - As a PM, you need to manage a bunch of teams and people both ...Read More

Engineering counterparts are not easy to influence as they come with some kind of bias that PMs are not there to help them but to add processes, hierarchy and more meetings to their day to day, without knowing their pain points and/or technical stuff. Based on my experience, here are some of the qualities you can develop to influence and impress your eng counterparts Get hands on wherever you can - In the age of AI, there are a lot of nocode tools to build prototypes etc (Cursor being one). If t ...Read More

It should be an iterative process and start off with creating a product mindset before enforcing roadmapping process to your company/team. Here are the steps, I would recommend: Create awareness about Product roadmapping and benefits - Hold awareness sessions and mandatory trainings for the PM team and build a product mindset Create a lightweight and flexible roadmapping process to begin with as a phase 1. Enable PMs to drive the roadmap and share it widely. Guide them on how to do it Start shar ...Read More

This is a common case scenario. Here are the few things I would take into account when providing a reset of expectations: For the items too far out in the roadmap should be provided with an asterix and tentative disclaimer Ensure that as soon as you know that there is a possibility of a pivot, start communication informally with the primary stakeholders to avoid surprises and backlash Once there is clarity on the pivot, come up with a plan to explain the following things in the communication - W ...Read More

Here are the steps I take for end to end feature prioritization - Talk to various stakeholders (sync and async) and collect a list of features from them with the following details - Impact, expected ETA of the request, mapping with business goals Talk to the engineering team and get a list of the foundational/tech debt features which they want to implement to improve efficiency of the team and create a modern tech stack Align the business with the capacity split between business features and fou ...Read More

As you progress through the PM ladder, the TL:DR is that you will be less in the weeds with the day to day functioning of your squads but rather be working on long term planning and strategy on a larger scope to deliver business goals. Some examples: PM 1,,2, Senior PM - Prioritization for 1+ squads, scrums, JIRA hygiene, align with team goals, quarterly planning Group PM - 1-3 year strategy, people management of PMs, larger scope with 2-3 products in the portfolio, ideation, opportunity sizing ...Read More

As you are receiving critical feedback from your manager, ask them to follow the STAR format. Situation, Task, Action and Result. Make the manager accountable on what they want you to accomplish from this task. You can definitely provide proposals using the STAR format based on what you think. But ask the manager to align on those actions, and what you will chase and try to improve on. Ask them to share what they think you can do. Align with them on all the proposals and then start working towar ...Read More