Yearly product planning
Product planning requires influence and strategic thinking for effective execution.
Influence is the tool for operating when it comes to product planning
Annual Product Planning
It is December. A month filled with retrospective thinking of the past year and a renewed hope of building a better future in the coming year. The version of this exercise for yours truly is planning product roadmap.
This is the first time I am participating in this dance at a relatively large sized product and team. The product size has been exponentially each time I do this exercise across roles and organisations.
First when I did for our own startup we were talking about 100’s of users. Next, as an operator it was for couple of 1000s of users. Now, in a single threaded role, it is couple of million transactions from 1000s of users.
On the contrary in terms of positional leverage, these things matter for such exercises, I have moved in the opposite direction. From being a founder to now being an individual contributor.
During the startup time, my vision was published and along with the team we broke it down into now, next and later. The liberty to think year long was unaffordable for us. I didn’t have to structure business goals as we were operating under uncertainty at many fronts.
As an operator running product ops in a growth stage startup. I ran the exercise where the collection of bets were prioritised with the business goals that were communicated. There was not much of strategy when it comes to products.
We married the roadmap to the goals we need to hit as it was a growing startup that was getting serious about being product centric. We had sizeable traction but growth loops were missing. It dealt with aligning product managers to think about being outcome oriented from their function of product development. It was an exercise of setting OKRs and KPIs for business goals given to ultimately build growth loops. The challenge was that it was multi-stakeholder product which means deciding the trade-off we would make and also the priorities we will pick.
This time around, my context is much different. Unlike the previous times, I now manage an established growth stage product. No development is urgent but all have to be important. It is also in segment where I have domain knowledge but not much information about stakeholders. Additionally, I am just an Individual contributor who wields the prioritisation (my main responsibility) by justifying the decisions we need to make in product development.
North star framework [NFM] works perfectly in this case and the better part of last week was spent reading reams of published work by John cutler, a product evangelist. He is an operator who developed this framework couple of years back and then made it popular with his then workplace, Amplitude.
NFM works because it is rigorous and collaborative in nature. We have to indulge cross functional teams and capture their contributions in order to end up with a single metric that when effected in the right direction moves the overall business forward. It is also being more deliberate about the next steps to be considered to maintain your moat and also innovate.
The end objective of this exercise would be a formula with which you can re-prioritise the roadmap basing on the changing business context. This is critical when you know the market can change suddenly. The team also gets to see its work impact the end outcome. Unfortunately, many product developers don’t feel this way when functioning in bigger orgs. It helps that we are single threaded designed org. One team for one product.
So, it only felt apt that the same rigour and responsibility needs to be translated into product planning exercise as well.
At present, I have done the planning for product planning exercise. Once I execute the work that needs to be done over the course of next couple of weeks. The end result would help me formulate the roadmap and connect all the other components(image).
I will not be sharing about what came out but will write more on this once the exercise and work is complete with lessons learnt.
Resources for being strategic about product planning
Since, I wrote about my product planning exercises. It is only beneficial for anyone indulging in reading this post to get a small bundle of posts that served me in different roles.
Startup product planning - Subjimandi.app
The way I used to share the strategic part of product building was a two parter.
Answering prompts and one of them that I found helpful was this from John Cutler.
some potentially helpful prompts to get your team thinking about insights, data, etc. pic.twitter.com/cIYObZX5sR
— John Cutler (@johncutlefish) August 2, 2021
The second was about sharing problem space to set context. This resulted in writing multiple PR/FAQs.
An illustration workflow of multi-url stemmed from the various stakeholders we had to co-ordinate to run operations. Products were shipped in a 4 week cycles and they would pick up bets that could be worked independently.
Series B startup - FarMart
I came in to help product managers execute strategically and steady the ship as the product’s initial traction was not able to tie to business outcomes. Also, the leadership recently learned OKRs and decided to implement it across the org.
Product team was struggling to define their future work through roadmap and align it to the OKRs. So, the challenge was making the product work matter. It was hypothesis driven and segment basing on the areas where they will impact.
We invested in understanding the work that needs to be done and worked backwards from there to build the roadmap with the metrics to track using the above two resources.
B2B SaaS - Autonomous Procurement
My current context involves a post PMF high growth startup in a league of its own. We have defined product strategy, business goals and metrics dashboard. We needed a roadmap. I tried to tie all of these component up through the North Star Framework.
I hope these links becoming a starting node in your product planning exercise. Being strategic in product development plays dividends on the longer term horizon.
The downside of this exercise is that it doesn’t compensate the business not having a strategy. If you are working in such orgs, no framework or planning can save you the turmoil of disoriented roadmap.
A roadmap is a powerful diagnostic tool for any company. Show me your roadmap, and I'll tell you about your organization's dysfunctions.
— Janna Bastow simplybastow.bsky.social (@simplybastow) June 12, 2023
A bad roadmap often indicates underlying issues in a company. 📈
Retrospective
Much of the thinking while doing annual planning exercises have an intent of being hopeful. It is important that as an operator we rely on lessons learnt from the past and move beyond hope. This is where we need to wield our influence and shape the participation of people partaking in these planning exercises.
The exercise of planning provides you focus on what is important and while executing it in later part of the year. You can prioritise the urgent but always come back to the focused work.
No one plan is perfect, but planning is important , I am paraphrasing what Winston Churchill said.
Signing off till next time,
Vivek, being a terrible dancer on the dance floor.