Suppose that you’ve just joined a company or launched your minimum lovable product to market. You’re beginning to receive fantastic feedback and validation from your clients. Congratulations!

You are now being bombarded with feature requests your customers, partners and suppliers. They are all asking you when you can deliver their requested features, yet some of these features seem less priority than others— so, what do you do?

Perhaps its time to communicate through a product roadmap. Sounds simple enough, but the process is much more nuanced than you first think!

Provided below is a guide to creating your first product roadmap, which you’ll see is art mixed with science. …

Newer product managers are often given a specific set of scope to navigate with a focus on product delivery and execution. Tasks usually centre around empathising with customers to understand pain points, specifying product requirements, and hustling and doing whatever necessary to implement to plan.

There comes, however, a point in every product manager’s career path where a broader set of responsibilities are needed. Whether it be more products or features, more relationship management with strategic customers, partners or management teams, a wider remit becomes inevitable. PMs don’t get formal training on how to adapt when this shift in responsibilities is asked of them, so how should they prepare for the step-up in leadership? …

Many product managers “don’t know” or “don’t have” a process for planning and prioritizing initiatives, according to ProductPlan’s 2020 Product Management report. There are a few reasons for this:

• Many managers simply want to focus on creating value and solutions to problems faced today, not tomorrow.
• Many managers focus on having quality conversations about what they think is the most important and why, without needing to use any score-based approach.
• Many products change priorities all the time due to externalities outside of their control, including commercial preferences, legal, regulatory, and customer.
• There is no one product management prioritization framework that will work for every company and industry. Each company has its nuances and factors that impact priorities, so adopting any one framework overwhelming for even the most seasoned product manager. …

The product backlog is a list of the features, fixes, infrastructure changes or other activities that a team may deliver to achieve a specific outcome. It is known to be the single authoritative source for things that a team works on.

Managing a backlog is often compared to playing the game of Tetris, where work items are seen as incoming blocks that are often unpredictable. …

Have you ever found yourself feeling like you’ve been trying to gain agreement on a significant decision, but you’re getting nowhere?

Have you ever sent communications about a significant project or initiative, with limited to no engagement or reply to your emails or messages?

Have you ever held a meeting with senior leadership or received an unclear action or decision? Or perhaps you’ve just received a generic reply that they would “ think about it and get back to you”?

If you’ve experienced any or all of the situations above, don’t worry; we’ve all been there, but perhaps it’s time to reassess the way you build consensus with your stakeholders. …

Mental Health

In the first half of this year, I found myself with a multitude of life changes that caused a great deal of anxiety. I was unable to sleep on hot, restless nights, and I often had a mind racing with a wide variety of unhealthy thoughts:

• I worried about the pandemic’s impact on our startup’s viability.
• I worried about the health of myself and my loved ones.
• I worried about my finances and keeping a roof on top of my head.
• In short, I worried about everything.

The impact on my physical health was dire. Every night I’d only end up having 3 to 4 hours of broken sleep, during which I would be subconsciously scratching due to the heat and horrible dreamscapes fuelled by anxiety. …

When designing new products, many organisations rely on requirements gathering exercises that often place the onus on a product designer/business analyst/product owner to specify a checklist of features that the technical team needs to build against.

A common method is to write up detailed specifications, hand it over to engineers to get them built, then repeat. This linear and siloed process is also known as a “build trap”, a term popularised by Melissa Perri.

Lobbing detailed specifications over to engineers from afar rarely works well for a few main reasons:

• Designs made in isolation are often inefficient and incorrect— time may be wasted researching ways to solve a problem. Assumptions made through designs could have easily be validated with team collaboration. …

Never has there been a better time to build a payments startup. The shift in consumer demands towards digital and contactless payments provides a plethora of opportunities for software solutions to enable all kinds of innovative purchase interactions.

While hundreds of fintech and payment startups are launched each day, each trying to be the next Stripe, Square, PayPal, or Klarna, many don’t make it. According to the Startup Genome, 11 out of 12 (92%) startups fail. According to Failory, the large majority of reasons were related to Product-Market Fit (34%), Marketing (22%), and Team Problems (18%).

With up to 74% of reasons relating to product and marketing, startups must carefully evaluate its strategic choices, partnerships, and product design. …