As the year comes to a close, leaders are looking to the future and figuring out how to build out their roadmaps for 2022. On this week’s Product Thinking Podcast, Melissa Perri shares clips of some of the best insights on roadmap creation and strategic planning at different levels of an organization so that leaders can start off the new year right.
Show Notes
Here are some of the key points that were talked about:
When building a roadmap, don't assume you can predict the future. Focus on the products that are being built now, so you can have near-term certainty with planning. Executive teams have to do discovery work if they want better estimates.
Product management needs to be tied to strategic decisions within the business. They have to be involved in the conversation around revenue growth, product growth and expansion because they need to understand the vision of the business.
Companies need Vision Led Product Management. This means being definitive about what the value of your product is, who it's being provided for and where the differentiation is going to lie. It's essentially having all the components of a product vision.
Before building a product strategy at a small scale, first figure out if one already exists at your organization. If there is, and it's being executed poorly, figure out what the essential goals are. If there’s no product strategy, do whatever you can to find out and understand the goals of the executives. Once you understand those goals, you can start to build your own product strategy.
To set strategy, leaders have to be the ones to make the choices about what to invest in for the growth of the business. They have to think about what skillsets they wish to grow in the company, what technologies they want to implement and what they can do to differentiate themselves from their competitors in 2-3 years' time.
If your sales team is going outside your company's product definition by a great deal, then you most likely don't truly understand the market your product is for. Product leaders need to communicate product-market fit to their sales teams and understand that they as product leaders don't make all the decisions. There has to be an alignment between strategy and communication in the organization.
Resources Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter MelissaPerri.com
Episode Transcript
Melissa Perri: Roadmaps are tough, right? So a traditional roadmap, here's a list of features, here's when you're going to get them. And companies like that because then marketing can plan and customer success can plan and your sales team can plan. And when I say your sales team can plan, they can start selling those features.
Here's what's wrong with that. We're assuming that we can predict the future. We know when things are going to release. We don't. Engineering is uncertain. There's uncertain problems. We can't forecast uncertain problems. So that's the first thing. That's just a fancy. We don't know when things are going to release.
Frankly, it's about time we just acknowledge that. How many hours a week do engineers waste trying to estimate things that are impossible to estimate? So I wish we would just acknowledge it'll release when it's ready because quality matters. Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day-to-day interactions with developers.
It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers.
Melissa Perri: With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perry. As the end of the year approaches, I'm sure you're all thinking about 2022, building out your roadmaps right now, thinking about budgeting and planning.
We wanted to share some of our best advice and insights on creating roadmaps and setting strategy at different levels of an organization so that you can start off 2022 running ahead. Here's some of our favorite clips about roadmapping from all of the experts we talked to over this past year. I get this question all the time and I'm sure you do too, which is how do we communicate the discovery work we're doing on roadmaps in a way where we can talk about it at the company but nobody's trying to sell it?
Roadmaps are tough, right? So a traditional roadmap, here's a list of features, here's when you're going to get them. Companies like that because then marketing can plan and customer success can plan and your sales team can plan. When I say your sales team can plan, they can start selling those features.
Here's what's wrong with that.
Melissa Perri: We're assuming that we can predict the future. We know when things are going to release, we don't. Engineering is uncertain. There's uncertain problems. We can't forecast uncertain problems. So that's the first thing. That's just a fantasy. We don't know when things are going to release. And frankly, it's about time we just acknowledge that.
How many hours a week do engineers waste trying to estimate things that are impossible to estimate? So I wish we would just acknowledge it'll release when it's ready because quality matters. So that's the first part of it. The second part of it is I actually think it's this output mindset. We're doing our marketing launches around output.
We're doing our sales strategy around output. Whereas I think instead, if we fully switch to outcomes, instead of talking about a list of features on our roadmap, we could talk about this quarter, we're focused on this outcome. We have this target in mind, which means we're going to work on this outcome until we hit this target.
And when we do, we'll move to this next outcome. Under this outcome, we've identified these customer opportunities. We're currently working on this one. And because we're currently working on it, we can tell you what solutions we're experimenting with. We think this next opportunity is the most important one after that.
And in the future, we know this whole other branch of opportunities is going to be relevant and we're going to have to get to them. And what I like about that, so that's just the now, next, future roadmap format combined with opportunities and then only solutions in the now. And what I like about is that we have near-term certainty.
We know what we're building right now.
Melissa Perri: We may not know when we're releasing it, but we know what we're building right now. We know what we're learning right now. As we go a little further in the future, in the next category, we should, based on our interviewing and our understanding of the opportunity space, have some guess it was what's next.
And then we all have an infinite list of things for the future. So that seems like it matches better the ambiguity and uncertainty in our work. But now we have to solve the problem of sales needs to know what's to sell and marketing needs to know what to market. And that's that final piece of the output to outcome shift is that if we're doing good discovery in the now stage, even before it releases, we should have customer testimonials.
We should have impact. We should know not just that our marketing releases should not be we launched this feature. Our marketing releases should be this feature is now available to you. And here's what Melissa had to say about it. Here's how it impacted Melissa's business. So if you're doing discovery and you're getting feedback throughout the process from your customers, even if the date's unknown, your marketing team can work on that because they're pulling from your discovery work to get the value proposition and the benefit and the impact and they can have it ready for whatever day it launches.
Melissa Perri: Or they could decide to do it two months after it launches when they have even more customers. So what's hard about this is that like it's not just a product team change, it's kind of a whole company output to outcome change. Yeah, that's like a big shift mentally. I think one of the big pieces of pushback that I hear from CEOs and from, you know, executives when we think about it in that kind of way, and maybe you have a good solution for this is how can I tell what's in my now thing?
Is it going to be like a year from now? Are you going to release that thing two years from now? Or is it going to be like next week? Do you try to like, think about just general like swag estimates of like this is a quarter versus a year project or anything like that? Yeah, so part of your discovery should be testing feasibility assumptions.
So the problem with the way we estimate right now is we give engineers, like if you're working in Scrum, which is what most people are doing, here's a two week sprint, estimate these stories. The engineers have done nothing to look into what it's going to take to build those stories. So they are swags, right?
But we don't treat them like swags. We treat them like truth. And the whole rest of the organization starts planning as if they're going to release, which is why everybody thinks that engineering isn't doing their job and why engineering gets mad at the rest of the company and there's always this tension.
Melissa Perri: It doesn't have to be that way, right? Like if in your discovery process, you're taking a solution and you're breaking it down into its underlying assumptions, a whole set of which are feasibility assumptions. As engineers test those feasibility assumptions, they're getting the data they need to make better estimates.
And so the closer you get to being ready to build something, the better your estimate should get. And you're going to be able to say this looks like a three week project. This looks like a six week project. This looks like a three month project. So you still get that data. You just get it after you've actually collected.
You still get the estimate. You just get it after you've collected data about the complete unknown. So Teresa, are you telling me that if an executive wants better estimates, they have to do discovery work? Pretty much. I think that's amazing. Oh my God. I hope everybody's listening to that. And now the next time you say, hey, we don't have time to do discovery.
Well, you don't have time to get a roadmap that's accurate either. As a product leader, when you're thinking about the role of product management in an organization, how it contributes to strategy, what it should be thinking about, especially now as a CEO, when you're setting both the business strategy and the product strategy, what should product management be involved in from a strategic level in an organization. Right?
Either from day one or at scale. What have you seen be the responsibilities of product managers in there? And maybe also like, what do you think they're not getting involved in as much as they should be getting involved in?
Melissa Perri: I think product management should be intently tied to strategic decisions within the business when it's focused around product and the growth of the business. If it's focused around personnel and spending and things of that nature, maybe not so much. But when you come to the root of the business and you're talking about revenue growth and you're talking about product growth, and you're talking about expansion of the business, product should be in those discussions.
Because one, they need to listen and understand where the vision of the business is going. But then two, they also have to give feedback in terms of what else are other people doing from a competitive point of view? And also, what are people doing to use our product and use our service? What are we providing?
And then what are other people doing out there in the marketplace? And then what makes sense for us to go after from a differentiating point of view? What is going to be that aspect of our product or service or company that's going to be different from everybody else? And we see a lot of companies that have strategies that are like, oh, we want to be different from this company, or we do this a little bit different from them.
But really, once they get in terms of product functionality, it's really the same. There's no differentiation between that.
Melissa Perri: And so you say it, but you don't really live it. The product is in a lot of those strategic discussions in terms of revenue, product growth and expansion and partnerships as well. Then you have some sort of vision moving forward. And product can build to that, can develop to that, and is aligned with where the business is going.
And then they can develop that forward thinking strategy to be competitive and or surpass competitors in terms of features and functionality. Because there's a lot of industries out there with products that have been in the market for three, five, seven years, where it's really just table stakes. That one company builds something, the other company builds the same thing.
One company builds something, the other company builds the same thing. And nothing really is transformative. If you get product in the room from an executive point of view, in a strategic point of view, they can say, this is where we need to go. Where do we think we can align that with revenue? This is where our customers are going.
Melissa Perri: And this is where our competition is going. And they make decisions to say, we want to pursue this, we want to pursue that. Or maybe there's another avenue or channel they want to pursue. Yeah. So I think it's incredibly important what you're saying. And I think a lot of companies are not doing that work to actually figure out how to differentiate.
Like a lot of conversations I've been in so far, not so far, but like lately, I've been about how do we keep up with competitors, but not actually how do we differentiate against competitors? So I think that's absolutely key when we think about product management and setting visions. How do we do something different?
Because catching up is just, you're just going to be the same as somebody else. Why would I choose you over somebody else if you're not actually differentiated? I completely agree with your point as well about product management, being involved in growth. Because I think a lot of times, especially in enterprise companies that have a sales function, sometimes we think revenue is all sales and we don't see how much of it is tied back to product.
And I think that's a dangerous place to get into because now product just becomes like a cost center in our minds instead of a revenue driver, which for many companies it is, right? It is a revenue driver and we have to remember that.
Melissa Perri: That's a big part I see with the product management organizations that struggle too. It's just like reactive versus proactive approach to product management. Are you going to just listen to everybody, give you the features, put them on the backlog and just build it? Or are you going to think about where are we going and what's that strategy for it?
You call that something called vision-led product management, right? Figuring out what that strategy is, having that forward thinking approach. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that actually means? Yeah, absolutely. What it really means is really being definitive about what the value of your product is going to be, for whom you're going to provide that value, where the differentiation is going to lie, et cetera.
All these major components of a product vision. I think we talk about mission statements, we talk about visions, we talk about strategies. But there's not a lot of books out there, I think, that really try to articulate what the differentiation is between each of those things. And that mission statement is just that high level one sentence.
Here's the worldwide problem that we're trying to solve. This is why we exist in business at all. And that's great to have. I'm not precluding that in the slides, but it's not a vision for the product, right? And I think that what that means is there's a lot of space for a product leader to say, the vision that I have for our product in three, five years time frame is that we're going to solve the following problems for our customers.
Here's who our customers are going to be. We're going to solve them in the following way. And it doesn't mean you have to get really detailed and anti-agile in some sort of a way by having all the UX mock-ups and things like that ready to go.
Melissa Perri: It's more like you just need to provide a concept for what it's going to look like. And, most importantly, how your own customers would measure success themselves. And I think this is one of those points that I've found along the way was that the companies that were really successful weren't just able to define success in their own terms, to say, we're successful when we hit a certain growth rate or when we hit a certain level of annual recurring revenue, but instead to say: our annual recurring revenue is a byproduct of the value that we provide to our customer base.
Right? And what it's all about is driving value for them. And here's what value for them actually looks like. And that forces you to then go do the research and understand who your customers are going to be, what makes them tick, what their alternative solutions could potentially look like, why they're going to retain with you over time, and so on.
And as you map that out, then you can make sure that everybody on the product team is rowing in the same direction, towards actually realizing that vision. And I think that by doing a really good job of laying that out and communicating that within your company, it gives you the ability to be able to push back on all these inbound requests that are coming in. And so it's like that notion of the best defense.
Melissa Perri: And if you find yourself playing defense a lot, the best defense is a good offense. The more you can get people excited about this vision that you're going to go towards, the more they're willing to run alongside you with that and not distract you with all these random inbound requests. Dear Melissa, I work in a command and control organization.
What's your recommendation on building a product strategy at small scale within the product team and leveraging that strategy up to get broader visibility and buy-in from leadership and other stakeholders? Does that work? Can you even do that? The answer is yes, I think that does actually work. And it kind of gets back to what we were talking about in our first and second questions, right?
The first question is, does the product strategy really not exist? As I mentioned before, sometimes those product strategies are just living in somebody's brain and they decided not to write it down. So step one, go find out if there is a product strategy that's been really, really poorly deployed. That's where I would start and figure out like, what are you trying to achieve?
What are the goals there? And now in the absence of that, because this does happen, I've seen it a million times, there is no product strategy.
Melissa Perri: Okay, now we got to come up with something. There's usually goals. There's usually something somebody wants to achieve, even if they're very not explicit. So like I said, there are things that companies want to achieve to get to IPOs or acquisitions, or there's goals that they really want to hit. And those things are usually clear cut in executives' minds.
They're thinking about them all the time. They're presenting to boards on them. These are things that they need to hit. These are their own personal goals. Find out what those goals are. Do whatever you can to find out what those goals are, because now you have somewhere to start. And once you understand those goals, you can start to build your own product strategy or start asking the right questions on if what you're building is going to achieve those goals.
So once you figure out what those goals are, now is your opportunity to really define what could we do to get to those goals? What is our product strategy with my little scope of the world that I could do to help achieve the goals? And if you can paint that picture, I've seen really good change. I've seen this at a lot of organizations that actually successfully did this.
I was working in a really, really large organization that had like seven business lines, and there was no cohesive product strategy at the top. Everybody was working in silos. Every single one of those business lines had their own little thing going on. It wasn't really a strategy. It was just like pull things off a backlog and build. 5,000 person organization was huge.
But we had one business line that really started to pull together and said, we don't have a product strategy, but we do have goals. And I'm going to build our own product strategy for my little neck of the woods and figure out what it is for success here. And how do we achieve those goals? And then each one of my teams are going to come back to me and tell me how can their part of the world get to those goals?
So they did it inside this little part of this organization and really built a nice robust product strategy for them. And it made everybody else in the organization go, oh, we should probably do that too. And it started a conversation at the leadership level, which I was part of and I really loved about why we don't have a product strategy across the board.
And how that was probably causing things to be delayed in our releases. It was causing us to be slow releasing things. It was causing us to not release the things that we actually should be releasing. And just seeing them build a product strategy made the leaders who were not product managers and had never seen this before go, oh, that's what it looks like.
I want that everywhere because it spoke to them. It told them what they needed to know, what these teams were building, why they were building it, and how it was going to actually help them achieve the things that they needed to achieve. So by demonstrating that they could build a product strategy and that's what it looked like, they helped actually shape the entire culture of the organization and they got everybody building product strategies.
And that's what I think is so powerful about just seeing what good looks like. So many people are just hunting around for what does good look like. And if you can demonstrate that and show it, a lot of times people go, oh, yeah, yeah, I want that because it's answering the questions that they have. So many leaders have questions about what are people building or what is the right thing to build.
In the same organization, I had the CEO pouring through JIRA tickets. I was like, please get out of JIRA. Don't do that. Get out of my JIRA tickets. You're never going to learn what you need to learn in there. What are you trying to learn? And he was like, I have no idea what anybody is building. I was like, yeah, that's a roadmap problem.
That's a communication problem. Our product leaders are not doing their jobs to bubble up why we're building the things we're building and connected to your goals. But reading a user story in JIRA is not going to give you the information you need. So when we started to put those roadmaps in place, he was like, oh, I get it.
And he backed off. He stopped asking so many questions. He was like, okay, I get it. This is where we're going. And he was able to have intelligent conversations on the level that he should be having them on, which wasn't the nitty gritty, why are you building that feature? But the what is this going to achieve for us?
So I think demonstrating those things, if you're ever in doubt and you know how to do these things, I see no fault in being able to demonstrate what good looks like to these leaders. I think that's always a great way to go because they're also going to look at that and it's going to help your career. Did you know I have a course for product managers that you could take?
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Use code THINKING to save $200 at checkout on our premiere course, Product Management Foundations. We're talking a lot about strategy creation and strategy deployment. So they're two different things, right? You create the strategy and then you deploy it and then you make sure that it's actually working and you revisit it and iterate it.
When I see a lot of people set strategy or a lot of leadership teams set strategy, they like lock themselves in a room for a week in November and then they come out and they're like, cool, we solved all the problems in the world. This is what we're going to do next year. And then they just roll it out and they never go back and revisit it.
So my question for you is how do you set, like what are the motions that you should be going through in a company to set the strategy, to deploy the strategy and then come back and actually look at it? Like what do you suggest people do to get started there? Yeah, that's a great question. So all of these things should be living.
Melissa Perri: There's no two ways about it, right? And it's good to have a cadence to like look at what you're trying to achieve for the year. Like I always sort of say have a three-year idea, have a one-year idea, six months and like three months, right? Like think about what you're trying to achieve over those various different time horizons I think is very important and review like on a monthly basis.
That's where I get them like just that's just your mechanism. Just like let's check what we're doing. Strategy formulation is hard, right? Because it's this notion again of good strategy, bad strategy, the diagnosis. Diagnosis are hard to like really understand what is a problem that's out there that is not solved or not solved well or that you can solve better than somebody else.
That's hard, right? Like you go to the doctor, it takes them a while sometimes to diagnose you. It's just not an easy thing. There's rigor that needs to be done. And this is when these tactics like looking externally to what the market is doing, market insights you can gather internally, how your business is performing, what capabilities do you have, what's unique about what you're doing, customer insight demand, what are they asking for?
You're going to have opposite information. You're going to have the market saying that oh we need to have AI everything and then internally you're like well I don't have anybody who can do that and then you know customers think that they need it but they're not ready to invest in it because it's still an immature technology, right? These are the sort of moments that you're in and I think that's where the leadership part comes in where somebody has to make a choice to say do we believe in this technology, what it can bring to our product?
Do we want to grow that skill set in our company because we think it could differentiate us in two to three years time? That's the leadership choice that needs to happen and it's not to sort of go up to the mountain, close your eyes and then you know suddenly I'm going to build the most customer-centric business in the world.
Melissa Perri: All of this is the trade-offs and asking these questions about what the market wants externally, what your customer needs are, what capabilities you have. It's a melting pot and ultimately you have to sort of say this is how we think we can win, where we want to play and where we think we can win. That's the choice you start making.
To the 18F example, at that time they chose to go deep on portfolios because they thought they could win and grow the business. What were in place then were measures to say is that working? Are they winning a certain percentage of deals that they would have lost previously? Are they actually seeing further retention or extension of contracts that they probably wouldn't have seen before?
Are the teams actually more effective and happier when they're focused on the domain for a longer period of time? Those are the measures that are in place and we're reviewing those like every month. Are we seeing the behaviors we thought we would see from choosing this approach? If we're not, okay, what's our next best idea based on what we've learned?
Let's take a different approach. I think that systemic sort of thinking and action is just not there in many companies.
Melissa Perri: So when you're working with your executive team, a lot of that is probably pulling out what is the company vision and what are the business goals. How often do you find that those are really well fleshed out? And then how much do you have to contribute to them to get that information out of executives?
I hear this complaint all the time from product leaders like there is no business goals, just make money. So what do you do to figure out where is the business supposed to go and how often do you walk into it where it's all fully formed? That's super rare. That's a really good question because I think you have to employ different tactics.
I just assumed that 80% of the time it's not there or even if it is there, it's a little fuzzy or stale and occasionally it'll be really good. So what I do with the executive team is sort of introduce the need for it and it's for it to be well articulated. Sometimes I'll do a draft, right? And draft is a good forcing function because, you know, everyone, sometimes people don't proceed as a problem.
When you have a draft you have, it's a lightning rod, it's something to discuss. And so I often find that, you know, I use this framework called VMSO which is vision, mission, strategies and objectives. I believe that you can articulate a company's product strategy or company strategy in like a couple of pages and you don't know what a strategy is really.
It's all a power point of friscation. So I try to draft that and just say, look, this is a confidence level. I use that to drive conversation. And often if it doesn't exist then you maybe you peel off a couple of people to focus on a piece like, you know, I think I did this accountally, did this at a Parseval where CEO and a couple of us, okay, look, I own the vision and mission so here's what we have.
I don't love it. Let's tighten it up and then match those to the strategies we want to invest in and then the key objectives and metrics. So a huge part of that is just fill the vacuum and have something that people can debate.
Melissa Perri: That's been pretty effective. But be humble. Don't pretend that you're coming up with it unless it's truly, truly absent. Usually in a company it's not, it's very mostly not ever absent but you can tap into what exists, make it better, share the responsibility so because it's not just yours, it has to be collective.
I like that a lot where you're saying just fill in the gaps because I've met so many people who complain that we don't have a company vision or we don't have a product strategy and sometimes they are product leaders or they're product managers but they're not really doing much to fill in the gap. Like they're not putting anything down where anybody can react to it. They're like we have lots of ideas but you're not sharing them.
So what's your advice for somebody who wants to get started there writing that draft? How should they go about like making sure they're humble, making sure they're presenting it in the right way to their leadership team? What kind of conversations do you have? You know the VMSO is a framework, there are many, OGSM and so on and so forth.
I've been using VMSO. I understand what the framework is and so I will draft it. I will listen hard to the company, listen hard to the customers and say this is our vision.
Melissa Perri: This is really what we're doing. And you know, vision is hard sometimes because it needs to be aspirational, but so you can just craft a mission right, and say, oh we need a vision, and hear like three different ideas, but write it down. It's really that simple. Sorry, I keep saying that because sometimes I've done things so many times.
I think it's simple and so people are like: what do you mean? It's simple? No more write it down, write it down and then socialize it. You know, start small one-on-one, say: hey, I did this and this is what I use it for and we should discuss it. And then the next meeting you just you put it up, you know zoom, and you discuss it like: okay, who needs to be part of this?
Let's talk about it, let's refine it. And you know it really is like: oh, second week you're like boom, because you don't know as much as you think you know, but at the end of a quarter you know a ton. You have intuition. You're using your pattern recognition and you can start having these conversations in a very thoughtful way.
So just get started. In many cases, in many parts of not just product but in a company, there are many vacuums and opportunity looks like filling them and moving forward, even with a draft. Not enough people do that.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, this is bias to action that I feel like really helps people move up in the leadership positions too and helps get them recognized at companies, like being able to to do something to move things along. And one thing I like that you just said too is it doesn't sound like you're saying, hey just make up a company's strategy from scratch, right you're? You're listening to these executives and then you're translating and the customers and everybody, and you're just translating back what they're saying to you in a way that reflects what you think the company vision is and the strategy.
If the sales team is going way outside of your product definition, do you really understand the market? Is your product right? Do you really have product market fit right? And if you do, have you communicated back to the sales team? And then I think just remembering product led versus product led does not mean you make all the decisions and you say yes or no.
It really is about alignment, strategy and communication. So are you focusing there? Are you working with the sales team to get a product that actually is saleable is kind of the way I think about it.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, and you bring up a good point about like: is your product actually right or is the market right? Did you define it right if you're not selling? I see that a lot when, when we're promising too many things or we have a difficult product that is to deliver, often it's not aligned to the strategy or we don't have a strategy right.
I watched some promises be made, you know, to large customers who were actually not our target customer, where we wanted to, you know, go into in the future just to try to, you know, get a proof point in there or make them happy. And then when we're struggling to actually build that product, we go: why right? Like, why are we stopping everything to do this?
So I think that's the key part, like between sales led and product led too. It's it's not just: whatever can we sell, we'll build. It's more like: how do we start from a strategy and grow from that? Yeah, and again, I mean not to continue to come back to my core tenant here and sound like a broken record if you haven't built the relationship with the sales team and a sales leader, again there's no trust there, right?
So it's like, well I would ask the product person: they're just going to block my sale and, by the way, that's how I make my money. Is commission right? And you know it's like you have to go build that trust. You got to build that relationship and as a, as a sales leader some, sorry the product leader sometimes you do make that decision to say, look we are good, this isn't a big deal technically we shouldn't do it, but like it's really not the big of a deal, fine put that in the contract.
Like we'll go do it because it's just building that trust and again, you got to be smart about that, but it's not the worst thing in the world. A, to build trust internally. B, because look, as I tell every sales person like I know I'm product person but I like revenue too, like I love it when we make sales.
You know we're on the same page here. Yeah, what you just said too, I think is a hard concept, especially for junior product managers to get through their head and people who want to like get into product leadership. You know positions. I have this conversation with people a lot. It's not about doing everything right and by the book, right like.
It's not about here's my roadmap and I shall never deviate from that roadmap, and it's not for a strategy or here's my perfect prioritization, but sometimes it's about making concessions to build that relationship and sometimes when I teach product leaders about that, I'm like: you know, you'll figure out what to build, you're working out with the salespeople. But then you may decide to make a trade-off just to to win them over. People's faces drop and they're like, oh but we're supposed to be product-led, what are you talking about?
That's sales-led. But yeah, my my backlog was so beautiful before all these people who want to make money on it came around. You know, it's like, yeah yeah. And I think we get over that when we realize, like you know what we were talking about before, you're all working towards a common goal and sometimes building that relationship and making that concession especially if it's a tiny concession now, versus being in a huge argument when you know the rubber hits the road, is going to be so much more effective and that's it.
That's all of the advice we have to give on roadmapping. Well, probably not. I'm sure we've got more to come in 2022, so don't you worry. But hopefully that gets you started with your yearly or annual planning, as we like to call it, and my biggest piece of advice is: don't cram this into just a couple hours or one week.
Make sure you're really looking at the data. You gather the data. Take the time to gather the data like do that, then sit back and start to analyze it. This should be a continuous process. We shouldn't just leave roadmapping and all the planning till the end of the year. So use this as your time to get started on the right foot.
Start off your roadmapping process but then, you know, at the end of Q1, go back and refine it, make sure that you're always keeping it up to date and regularly review your roadmaps. So that's my biggest piece of advice for you: make sure you stay tuned next week for our last episode of the year very, very exciting. I'm going to talk all about 2022 predictions and what we can look at for product management.
So I hope you enjoy that and I hope you're having a wonderful holiday season.
