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Planning, Prioritization, Processes and Roadmaps

Planning

  • Almanac.io - a resource for open-source documents and templates related to planning, prioritization, and other management topics.

  • Architecture Jams: a Collaborative Way of Designing Software - by Gergely Orosz. Takeaway: How to set up an architecture jam. “Architecture done for the sake of architecture is a poor investment. You'll want to solve an actual problem, ship this as a solution and confirm that it works and improves things.”

  • Company Alignment: The Salesforce Secret to Success - by Marc Benioff. Takeaway: a summary of V2MOM, which stands for: Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures. “Always start with a beginner’s mind, which is a concept that comes from Zen Buddhism — a beginner’s mind allows you to constantly see the world with fresh eyes. This mindset will help you declutter your mind, dispose of outdated assumptions, eliminate distractions, and allow yourself to focus on the what, why, and how of whatever you set out to do.”

  • Design Docs at Google - by Malte Ubl. Takeaway: A thorough breakdown of how, why, and when to craft a design doc.

  • North Star Playbook - by Amplitude. Takeaway: a downloadable book on the North Star Framework, with guidance for running a North Star workshop and settling on a North Star metric. The North Star is “a model for managing products by identifying a single, crucial metric (the North Star Metric) that, according to Sean Ellis, ‘best captures the core value that your product delivers to [its] customers.’”

  • Operating Plans for Pre-seed Startups - by Axel Bichara. Takeaway: "There is no mystery to writing an operating plan. An operating plan is a list of everything you intend to do as a business over the next 6–12 months. Think of it as a month-by-month to-do list for all aspects of your company...A great operating plan helps you identify earlier when your burn rate is higher than you hoped. This buys you enough time to to course-correct."

  • Product Requirements Template - by Unusual Ventures. Takeaway: A template that drives a thoughtful analysis of product requirements via guiding questions structured to tell a coherent story. Includes a "Press Release" field that draws from Amazon's methods.

  • Remote Brainstorming for Regular Humans - by Bartek Ciszkowski. Takeaway: How to keep brainstorming sessions simple, engaging and productive. Includes sound tips for facilitators ("ensure the space is shared," include breaks) and links to useful tools (like Excalidraw) for remote sessions.

  • The Secret to a Great Planning Process — Lessons from Airbnb and Eventbrite - by Lenny Rachitsky and Nels Gilbreth. Takeaway: "[T]he root cause of nearly all bad planning processes is very simple: a basic lack of understanding of roles — who is responsible for what, when. For example, who should have a say in the plan, and when? What exactly does each stakeholder need to deliver, and to whom? Who sets the timelines? Who holds everyone accountable? And who makes the final call? These questions are too often left unanswered, which leads to chaos and disappointment during the planning process." Includes discussion of the W Framework, created by the authors to drive planning at all levels of an organization, and a template. The Framework covers these four pillars: "1. Context: Leadership shares a high-level strategy with Teams; 2. Plans: Teams respond with proposed plans; 3. Integration: Leadership integrates into a single plan, and shares with Teams; 4. Buy-in: Teams make final tweaks, confirm buy-in, and get rolling."

  • Strategy Templates for Company, Initiative, and Project - by Lenny Rachitsky. Takeaway: Easy-to-use, one-page templates in Google Docs for making visually appealing planning documents.

  • Technical Research and Preparation - by Keavy McMinn. Takeaway: "When I’m planning to propose building a new system or functionality, I’ll typically make a spike or two (or three or four) to demonstrate the concept. By ‘spike’ I mean writing just enough code to check how something could work. The purpose of this is to gain insight, and could have different motivations."

  • Use This Startup's Playbook for Running Impactful Virtual Offsites - by FirstRound. Takeaway: A step-by-step guide to structuring an offsite, including a draft agenda.

Prioritization

  • How to Prioritize Using These 9 Mental Models - by Eric Jorgenson. Takeaway: This lengthy and informative article covers three models of opportunity cost (including the Eisenhower Matrix), three models of leverage (an example is the 80/20 rule), and three models of what not to do when prioritizing.

  • On Drafting an Engineering Strategy - by Mathias Meyer. Takeaway: How to develop an engineering strategy, even when there is no defined business strategy. Covers prerequisites, drafting objectives, and other key aspects of the process.

  • Prioritization Shouldn't Be Hard - by Melissa Perri. Takeaway: "In the absence of a product strategy, the most critical job function of a Product Leader is to set one. If you want your teams to prioritize, you need to provide the framework. And not just some arbitrary framework ...Your people need a real strategy, based on data, and aligned to a company’s goals."

Roadmaps

  • Copy of Living Carbon Roadmap - by Living Carbon. Takeaway: a sample roadmap spreadsheet you can copy and adapt.

  • Effective Product Roadmaps - by Melissa Perri. Takeaway: pivots away from Gantt charts and toward "a model that helps us take into account uncertainty and allows us the flexibility for both discovery and delivery. To do this, we focus on Product Roadmaps that are made up of outcomes, a theme, and hypotheses, and we leave out any unvalidated solutions or features."

  • How to Build a Product Roadmap Everyone Understands - by Andrea Saez. Takeaway: "The litmus test for a good product roadmap is that it’s visual, accessible and clear enough for anyone to scan for answers to the following questions: What are we doing? Why are we doing it? How does this tie back to our OKRs? This is the fundamental idea behind a theme-based product roadmap – and its benefits are enormous and immediate."

  • My Favorite Product Management Templates - by Lenny Rachitsky. Takeaway: a collection of templates to organise strategy, roadmaps, jobs to be done, and much more.

  • On Writing Product Roadmaps - by Gaurav Oberoi. Takeaway: "Roadmaps are a tool to think about your product beyond the next couple of sprints. They force you to plan, communicate, and get buy in. The win is that your team is aligned, can focus on execution, and reliably achieve long term goals." Includes some useful examples of roadmap docs, and proposed schedules for planning and creating your roadmaps.

Produx Labs series:

  • Setting a Vision - by Tami Reiss. Takeaway: The first step in this series about building a roadmap. "A good company vision will: Be connected with the company mission and values; Is clear, concise, and easily remembered; Allows mid-level leaders to know how their team can contribute to achieving the goal."

  • Smart Product Bets Start with DATA - by Denise Tilles. Takeaway: "The first step in establishing product operations is getting that manual baseline ... Inputs for this baseline will come from finance, sales, customer support, data science, engineering, at the very least. Once you’ve created that full picture of topline and bottom line revenue drivers you’ll be well positioned to inform your 2020 planning."

  • Creating a Strategy? Start By Generating the Best Ideas - by Tami Reiss. Takeaway: Includes a chart featuring 16 "Product Strategies for Growth" for leaders. "You should run through the list as you are generating options to make sure you’ve exhausted all paths available to you. If you know you want to add new customers, grow lifetime value, or increase profitability, look at those columns to find strategies which produce that result."

  • The Path Forward is Clear, Stop Acting Like It Isn’t - by Tami Reiss. Takeaway: "without considering cost of delay, validating with data, and thinking about the impact on key accounts, big pieces of the prioritization puzzle are missing...Data is more informative and concrete than consensus and gut feel. You want to lead a team of product managers who rely on cold hard facts to support their choices, not subjective rankings filled with bias."

  • Are You Building an Outcome or Feature-Driven Roadmap? - by Denise Tilles. Takeaway: "There are a variety of ways your roadmap can express your strategic intentions. What’s important is to show how you’re driving towards outcomes. And from those strategic intentions, you’ll have initiatives that evolve from a problem into a solution."

  • Roadmap Templates - by Lenny Rachitsky. Takeaway: Two visually appealing, straightforward roadmap templates and a Timeline template created in Google Docs.