Last week, over 300 passionate product people joined me live for a free webinar on ‘Building Effective Product Roadmaps’ (the recording is below).

I want to share the results of the polls I ran during the webinar and figured, why not do a summary of the key points too.

Let’s get into it!

From my experience, there are two common reasons why I see product backlogs become long and unmanageable.

​A lack of strategy​ and, therefore, backlogs become a dumping ground for any and every idea.

Working big, breaking down big solutions, rather than breaking down the outcome (refer to ​my last post​)

A common pattern I see in many of the product teams and companies I coach is that they’re doing a lot of incremental work but little-to-no iterations.

They have this big idea (often framed as an initiative) and become solely focused on breaking it down. The initiative becomes a series of epics, and that epic becomes a series of user stories, and so forth.

A comprehensive guide to conducting user interviews covering: 1) How to structure a user interview for maximum impact and 2) How to design better questions to elicit high-quality responses.

We are told that great Product Managers are great storytellers but the preaching often lacks actionable guidance on how to become good at storytelling. It’s time to change that!

KPIs = measures of health. OKRs = things we want to change.

When I've helped organisations become more outcome/product orientated, more often than not, I've moved them away from 'epics' and 'user stories' and towards things like one-pagers, opportunities, hypotheses, etc. Why? Because they’re are better tools for facilitating outcome thinking and experimentation.

In 2019 an HBR article stated that of the $1.3 trillion spent on transformations, $900 billion was wasted. More interesting is that, Digital and Agile transformations alike are seldom seen in product-tech companies (e.g. Canva, Google, Amazon, etc). Moreover, one job search for ‘Scrum Master’ or ‘Agile Coach’ role, and you won’t find them at these companies either — why?

Perceptual Mapping is perhaps one of my favourite competitive analysis and Product Positioning tools. Product positioning as defining where your product fits in the market relative to its competitors as it is perceived by your customers.

A step-by-step guide (with templates) to level up your Product Discovery. A common question I get when I coach Product Managers is, "I know what I want to do discovery on, but how do I get started?" Although there are many ways to start discovery, I have two tools that are my absolute go-to for kicking off and structuring Product Discovery.

There are many different types of roadmaps and different formats that roadmaps can take.

Here are a few different shapes a Product Roadmap can take. I hope this gives you some inspiration and perhaps even makes you rethink your current roadmap format.

What's the difference between Product Management and Product Ownership? Are they the same thing, or different?  It’s ok, no one seems to know. Rather we find the answer lies in where it all began - where they came from.