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Julie Lam

Head of Product Operations at Zoom

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How do you know if you have validated the problem space enough to start dedicating engineering resources to building out the product?

Julie Lam

Zoom Head of Product Operations • 1y

I would start with problem, root cause, solution (aka RCA) and really understand the problem you are trying to solve with your product. Once you understand the problem and proposed solution, next step would be to validate it with customers. Customers' feedback is a good indication on whether you have a good product to address problem in the market. Additionally, you need to understand the target market and your competition in the space (how does your solution stack against competitors, what succ ...Read More

1,788 Views

What key activities do you do to validate problem statements?

Julie Lam

Zoom Head of Product Operations • 1y

Key activities for validating problem statements:

Ask customers / potential buyers about the current problem they are experiencing
Document the problem and root causes
Ensure the product manager, designers and engineering teams understand the problem
Talk to your competitors in market on what problem they are experiencing / solving for
Test the current experience yourself to better understand the problem

1,416 Views

Who are all the stakeholders that can provide input to a product roadmap? What are the stage gates to help decide if something should land in the roadmap?

Julie Lam

Zoom Head of Product Operations • 2y

Input from customer facing teams such as Sales, Support and CSM are helpful to the product roadmap as they represent the input/requests from customers. Additionally, getting alignment with Engineering and Design leads is important to understanding feasibility and trade-offs that will impact product roadmap. Less about stage gates, more about grooming backlog and assigning attributes to each feature to help prioritize the features. Attributes can be weighted and aggregated. For example, a feature ...Read More

1,276 Views

What are the best practices for introducing roadmapping as a product management practice in a transforming organization that is new to product practices and mindset, and how can you ensure that different teams stay consistent with the formats or frameworks used, while still allowing for flexibility and innovation?

Julie Lam

Zoom Head of Product Operations • 2y

One best practice Product Management team should institute is a Product Strategy with details on how each Product team will execute against the strategy. This will allow the product teams to align their roadmaps to the strategy. Products teams should also interlock with Sales team to ensure their roadmaps also meet customer demands.

858 Views

Which stakeholders need to have buy-in for your product strategy, and how do you approach creating alignment?

Julie Lam

Zoom Head of Product Operations • 2y

Product strategy has to align with company, sales and engineering strategies. Start with the company strategy/mission, then define product pillars to support company mission. Once you have a draft of product strategy, vet that with Sales leaders to ensure your product strategy will help them achieve their revenue goals and vet with Eng leaders to ensure they have the capacity and resource to deliver against your product strategy (this might be an iterative process). Once you align with the cross ...Read More

836 Views

What are some of the lenses your look through or principles you apply when prioritizing a roadmap? How are they weighted relative to each other?

Julie Lam

Zoom Head of Product Operations • 2y

Roadmap items are execution against product strategy. Therefore, considerations for prioritizing roadmap items should include (1) support of the overall strategy, (2) innovation, and (3) delivering against customers' needs. One is not more important than the other; rather it's an aggregate of the these considerations.

678 Views

How do I know if we have a product strategy problem or a go to market problem? Our product isn’t growing as fast as we’d like.

Julie Lam

Zoom Head of Product Operations • 2y

In order to determine if it's a product strategy problem or GTM problem, you have to look at the data. If you have great pipeline but no adoption and usage, it is likely a GTM problem. So you need to think of ways to solve for engagement and adoption and ongoing usage of the product. If you don't see pipeline, then it is likely the product strategy is not landing in the market. So you will need to revisit your strategy with your sales and exec leadership teams.

548 Views

How does your product team usually work with your product marketing team with building the roadmap?

Julie Lam

Zoom Head of Product Operations • 2y

Product team work with Product Marketing to showcase the roadmap and align the messaging. Product Marketing team should be elevating the messaging pre-launch, at launch and post-launch (to ensure the message is resonating with customers). Depending on the organization, some Product Marketing teams work with Product team on customer facing demos and vignettes.

525 Views

How do you get autonomy for prioritizing your roadmap when your sales process is very sales heavy, and sales leadership wants to dictate priorities?

Julie Lam

Zoom Head of Product Operations • 2y

Prioritization of roadmap is not solely focused on sales' requests; though requests from Sales are important as they represent the asks from customers. In order to get autonomy on prioritizing roadmap items, one should consider interlocking w/ sales on customer requests (potential revenue) and providing Sales with visibility of innovation as well as alignment to overarching strategy.

508 Views

How do you think about communicating your roadmap to other teams? What level of detail do people need?

Julie Lam

Zoom Head of Product Operations • 2y

Communication of roadmap with internal teams is important to ensure alignment of the vision and priorities. On an annual basis, Product org should share the strategy and high level roadmap. On a quarterly basis, product teams should share updates to roadmap based on what has been delivered and what is planned for upcoming quarters.

453 Views

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