I once worked with a team of engineers who took on writing documentation for a full quarter. They had learned that their great product had confusing documentation. The doc team was fully allocated to other things, though. So they switched gears and solved the real customer problem.

Your CTO has a goal to improve uptime. Your sales team has an ambitious quota to meet. Finance is worried about margins. And HR is telling you morale is low. Every exec has a goal and every goal has an exec. Perfect! Or is it?

Smart product people do discovery with customers. Are you also doing discovery with your stakeholders?

The science fiction story I told was of this future world with happy, successful customers became our next big release.

How to deal with fighting between your execs? Carefully. Unlike parents and children, you can’t just tell them to go to their room and take away their TV privileges.

I am a big proponent of the outcome roadmap: one that focuses on the big picture and vision for customers rather than a long list of features that are often changed, plus dates that are often missed. You can read my article on outcomes vs. outputs here.

So you have created the most beautiful roadmap ever. It will drive your company into the stratosphere. It will make your customers cry with happiness. Only thing is: you have to do a presentation about it. Some tips:

Spending is getting more and more scrutiny. As a CPO, how do you justify where you are spending your limited funds?

The past year I’ve been writing a book about stakeholder management with Melissa Appel. What began as an “early reader club,” to bounce writing ideas off smart product people, has turned into... a Stakeholder Support Group? Alignment Anonymous? Product Management Stress Release?

Features can shift greatly from quarter to quarter. A smart roadmap focuses on themes instead. Themes define what’s important to your customers at the present time. They generally remain the same over time. Example:

Many organizations struggle to separate the roadmap from the delivery of features. Often this is accompanied by a lack of vision and strategy. How do you ensure that your roadmap isn’t just a dressed up project plan?

Stakeholders often come to you just as the quarter is starting, or even partway into the quarter, with new requests. “Can’t you just slip this in?”

One place I worked, I started taking walks with coworkers at lunch time. We’d chat about work some, but a lot of the discussion was casual or even personal. Eventually, this habit grew into an informal networking group of 10 or 12, sharing information and insights from across the company.

In an ideal world, we wouldn't put dates on roadmaps. Roadmaps should be about customers and their problems, not the details of delivery. But nearly every CPO says their stakeholders love date commitments. Then they get all mad when plans change, even for good reasons.

A friend (let’s call her Sarah) leads product for a SaaS company that has traditionally sold to smaller businesses. Their growth strategy calls for them to move into the enterprise space where deal sizes are larger and more profitable. To be successful, they need to become best in class at one of the many things their platform offers today. Not all of them. (They don’t have the resources for that.) Just one of them.

Product people love tracking quantitative metrics. But before you can measure, you have to step back and ask why. There’s no substitute for interviewing customers, ideally face-to-face, and listening to them talk about how they use and like (or dislike) your product. These customer interviews lead to better quantitative measures, ideally helping you to prioritize and focus your roadmap.

A few months ago we talked about Hidden Power - people who have influence well beyond their title or position on the org chart. When you are new to an organization, Hidden Power can be hard to spot. Here are a few hints. Got more?

Have you ever thought everyone was agreement, then had the plan fall apart when one person reverses course? Hidden misalignments can undermine any plan unless you find a way to bring them to light and deal with them. A few ways to spot hidden misalignment:

In a famous example, Facebook found that users who add at least 7 friends in their first 10 days on the app tended to be more engaged and stay with the product longer. This led them to set an Objective of getting more new users to add more friends right away. The product team then went about testing various changes to the onboarding experience to encourage adding friends early.

While you want to make critical decisions on product strategy, direction, and priorities, you cannot do so in a vacuum. You need to reach out to other departments and get everyone on the same page.