Details

This program is for executives and/or Product Leaders who want to adopt an “outcome-driven roadmap” or “become product-led.” This is truly an organizational change, and requires buy-in from whoever currently has decision-making power over what is built (your roadmap).

It can also be useful for PMs who want to create this change within a larger organization (if this is you, let’s have a conversation).

Most Product teams at start-up companies struggle to connect their priorities to the goals and vision of the company, and therefore struggle to deliver high-impact product. Getting buy-in on the roadmap (and therefore your product strategy), is difficult. There are many stakeholders in the business who have different, often competing needs:

• Customer Success: “We’ll lose a ton of revenue if we don’t build feature X for this high-value customer!”

• Sales: “We are going to lose a ton of deals to this competitor and miss our sales target if we don’t build feature Y!”

• Tech: “Our technical debt is making our developers miserable, and if we keep ignoring it they may quit!”

Early on in a start-up’s lifecycle, founders and executives are able to maintain a broad view of the business and the market, and make the call on what to build next. But as the business grows, this problem becomes too complex for one or two executives to to navigate. Not only do they have increased responsibilities in other areas of the business (board meetings, raising money, hiring, putting out fires wherever they may be!), but the business has likely grown to a point where the founding team’s intuition is no longer enough to guarantee success. This is when you need strong Product Management!

Going from a “founder-led” roadmap (where the founder has the knowledge and time to dictate what is built), to a Product-led roadmap (where the Product Team identifies and proposes strategies) is a make-or-break phase of maturity. I’ve been lucky enough (or unlucky depending how you look at it 😂) to lead product teams through this phase many times, and have developed a playbook that any SaaS startup Product Team can implement.

We’ll start with a one-day workshop where we’ll step through the framework and tools you’ll need to become an outcome-driven organization, and we’ll co-create a plan specifically for your team. I’ll continue to work with you until you feel you’ve successfully implemented it!

I’ll work with you to take these steps:

• Organize your Product Team to divide and conquer, ensuring people with the right skills are focused in areas that will drive the business forward

• Define (or re-define) simple and measurable north-star product metrics that map to business goals

• Review (and source new) ideas that should be considered for the roadmap, and build business cases that quantify the value of each

• Understand the effort and resources needed to pursue each business case, and use those estimates to force trade-offs in priorities

• Gain buy-in from leaders and stakeholders throughout the business—both for your proposed roadmap, and for the outcome-based planning framework itself

• Set up means to regularly share the roadmap with everyone in the company and collect and incorporate feedback

When those steps are complete, you will have:

• Implemented a product roadmap planning process that guarantees your tech team is focused on moving the needle on the metrics that matter most

• Gained alignment across teams and leaders by making goals, roadmap initiatives and decision-making transparent to everyone in the organization

• Inclusive decision-making (executives, team leaders across the company, and product managers), based on quantified business value and time-to-deliver projections

• An empowered product team that works autonomously to generate “bottom-up” strategies and solutions