Very Common Product Management Problems
Jackie came up with the idea for PipSpace at a Startup Weekend event and quickly joined a 12-week tech and business accelerator. With momentum from that experience, Jackie and her co-founder Matthew launched into a full-force campaign to raise their first real round.
The product wasn’t ready
At the end of the accelerator, PipSpace was only a partial implementation of what could be launched to the public. The complete set of functionality was off in the distance, and they still manually performed a few steps to demonstrate the experience. Jackie and Matthew had a huge amount of feedback from the accelerator experience and needed to build out something that could:
- Meet aggressive financial goals, month-over-month, for the first quarter of 2018
- Demonstrate to investors that customers will use the product
How do we get from here to launch?
Jackie was responsible for figuring out the product roadmap, but she was facing a few problems:
- Some of the functionality that needed to be built was outside the team’s domain expertise
- Their contract user interface designer was spending a lot more time than they expected on the initial designs
- Matt, Jackie and the team argued over who their early target customers could be.
She felt stuck, and her development team was twiddling their thumbs. They asked her every day what they should be working on, yet also complained when they were told exactly what to do.
Product Team Problems 1: Personal Conjecture
Before you run to the races, let’s assess the health of your product team. There are some core strengths that your team needs to work on, and it may not always be solved by adding new people or introducing some new software. Let’s first talk about how you run your team meetings.
Product Team Problems 2: Pixel Obsessions
There are multiple reasons why your product managers and designers aren’t delivering work consistently to the development team and causing a bottleneck. When the product team slows down, has infighting over implementation and spends too much time obsessing over pixels, velocity slows down. They become a bottleneck for the engineering team.
Product Team Problems 3: Dried Up Backlog
When priorities aren’t clear and developers do not have a full backlog to choose from, they’re going to pick their favorite projects. Unfortunately, their favorite projects do not always line up with your immediate priorities.
Product Roadmap Primer: Spend Your Development Resources Wisely
If any of the previous problems sound familiar, then the Product Roadmap Primer is for you.
Take your product roadmap skills to the next level with this 30+ page workbook where I outline exactly how to go from “lots of feedback, new features, and bugs” to “a clear plan”. If your mind is abuzz with a million different ideas for your product, this guide will help unclutter your path forward.
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