James Heimbuck

For an organization at this stage a product manager was probably brought in to help manage the vision, ensure the variety of customer requests and ideas are being reviewed and prioritized and the development teams are working on the right things. To do that there are a couple of key things you need to get to know quick: Who is your target user and what are the pain points your product solves? Who are the key players in your company who will help you get things done? This goes beyond engineers, t ...Read More

When I search the internet for "Product management prioritization frameworks" I get back 3.2M results so the options are nearly limitless of what to choose. MoSCoW, RICE, Value vs. Effort, Kano, etc. find a method that makes sense to you and the data is mostly available to apply to the framework. Now comes the hard part, sharing that list. Start with some friendly faces, share the context of what you knew for sure, what you had a good idea about and what you totally made up to find out where you ...Read More

The exact metrics you collect and want to move can vary based on your circumstances. For some teams it may useful to count how many transactions are flowing through platform, for some latency in responses to the platform, for others actual money flowing through. No matter what your platform does the hardest parts of tracking KPIs are: Understanding how your work connects to the larger company goals and how the business makes money. Finding a metric that is leading not lagging. If the metric star ...Read More

Talk to customers, talk to customers and talk to customers!! Any time you have a chance to talk to a customer or a potential customer take it! I find that mixing qualitative discussion and validating with quantitative research that we are not solving a problem for a loud customer or the most recent account review helps ensure you are working on a problem with real reach and that solving it will have real impact for customers. For me the best signal of a customer with a real problem is one who is ...Read More

Great question! It's easy to fall into "i'm sure a user would want to ABC and then they would XYZ . . " and expand the scope of your first iteration. The process I have found that has the most success is a couple of steps that focus the use cases being delivered to those that move the business goals forward. Match a product outcome to a business outcome If you have a business goal of increasing revenue product goals should ladder up to that. So new product line, driving user growth by X% or incr ...Read More

It can be tempting when joining a new organization to find something small to ship but you should remember that shipping does not mean a "win", you want to drive a successful outcome. So instead of focusing on finding something to ship, focus on finding a way to improve an outcome. That might be making it easier for the sales team to know what just shipped, giving the support team visibility into the bugs that are being worked on by the team or some other process improvement that makes life bett ...Read More

What is shared on the roadmap is all about who the audience is you are talking or preparing it for review and what incentives they have. Some things I have found success with are: For the executive team the focus should be on a few large items or themes that have clear ties to business outcomes. If the business focus is on new revenue focusing on the high level items that are intended to drive new sales with high level explanation of how (It serves a new buyer persona, it is a new usage based ad ...Read More

Platform teams can be very data driven if they have instrumented and are gathering good metrics but you have to get out of the office and get some qualitative data too! Go talk to your customer who is often a coworker. Grab time with developers on those teams to talk about what they are working on and why. What can't they do for their customers and think about how the platform can solve or make those problems go away before they get to them. The only thing to watch out for is over indexing on a ...Read More

Before thinking about the possible solutions/features we could build it is important to make sure that the problem is the right one to be focused on right now. There may be times that the biggest problems are just not solvable right now, or that the known best solution would take more time than customers are willing to wait for any solution even the best one. The best way I have found to balance this need between big long term improvements and small quick wins for the customers with with a RICE ...Read More

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 ...Read More