Welcome to Product Management Challenges!

03038 Product Roadmap to the Promised Land

Before the testing and bug fixing, before the technical design and product plan, before the business and technical requirements, comes the Product Roadmap. And as we speak, Product Managers are asking themselves the question: “Just what is a Product Roadmap?”

It’s a good question, one for which I’m not sure there is any single answer to suit every company’s needs. As Product Manager, you find that different departments and members of the team have very different expectations from a Product Roadmap, when it comes to the details. Yet the term “Product Roadmap” conjures up a pretty consistent idea in everyone’s mind: “It’s the document that’s going to show everyone where we’re going, and the road we’re going to travel to get there.”

Do you have a Product Roadmap? One can be critical to supplying the inspiring vision that everyone uses to march in the same direction. And this is all the more essential for a one-product company. Read below for some tips to creating and using a Product Roadmap.
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03037 Requirements: Like Lambs to the Slaughter

As your company gears up to start the next software release, a Product Manager reaches the point where carefully crafted requirements are ready to submit to the Engineering team. The Product Manager holds a long meeting with Engineering to review each and every requirement.

Holding this meeting feels a lot like watching the beloved little lambs you have shepherded so carefully all go marching off into the slaughterhouse. It’s as if each requirement were scrutinized, chopped up into little pieces, and swept into the trash one by one. But like Darwin’s natural selection process, this is an event that, while sometimes cruel, leaves the strong still standing to survive and thrive.

The trick is to understand that like natural selection, it’s, well, only natural that a lot of the ideas you propose won’t make it to the high priority pile, and from there to the product development plan. Read on below for a sampling of what gets said as requirements are debated and given the thumbs-up or the thumbs-down.
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03036 Two Good Product Management Websites

Articles from Product Management Challenges have been published on a couple of websites recently. These sites focus on product management and marketing, and have useful information and links for Product Managers.

One has a salary survey for Product Manager positions, and the other looks like a good place for exchanging information with others in your field.

Click the links below to take a look at these sites.
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03035 Contracts: The Letter of the Law

When that lucky time comes where your company is drawing up a contract with a soon-to-be customer, the whole team is in a state of heightened anxiety. People are worried, tempers flare. What if we botch this sale? Are we being too picky? Are we betting the farm?

If you’re lucky, as Product Manager you have had the opportunity to carefully craft a master contract ages ago that presents the agreement neatly and positively, and saves your company’s assets.

But in the real world, you may find that you’re called upon to make strategic decisions that drive the master contract terms and conditions only after the next big customer has requested the contract. Even if you already have a contract template, there’s always something new coming into the product that needs your attention.

The wrong contract can lead to unprofitable deals that lose money with each additional order it covers. This is serious business.

Read on for some useful tips to help the team navigate that part of the sales cycle where you are helping draft a very special letter, a “Letter of the Law.”
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