[On Demand] Product Roadmaps Webinar

Janna Bastow: [00:00:00] Hi everybody. And welcome. This is a ProdPad product experts fireside series that we’re running here today. And joining us today is Teresa Torres. We’re going to be talking about what to do when your leader still wants dates on your roadmap, which is a hot topic. I know it’s a hot topic because it’s the thing that comes up every time I talk about timeline roadmaps and why you need to ditch them and move to the Now-Next-Later roadmap.

And I invited Teresa because she wrote an article on this exact subject. I think this was last October and it went wild. I’m sure her inbox blew up. My inbox blew up because she wrote it. And so. Had to get her on here to chat about it because people are still trying to find ways to convince their teams to get off the timeline roadmap and onto something that looks more like a Now-Next-Later.

So we’re going to be talking more about that, but to give you a sense as to what these webinars are all about, this is a series of webinars. I recognize a [00:01:00] lot of faces from, or a lot of names from the audience here from previous webinars that we’ve run.

We run these things monthly. So, every month we bring in a different one. Expert Teresa has actually joined us before to talk about her continuous discovery habits book. And talk about continuous discovery in general. But we’ve also had all sorts of different experts joining us and we’ve had them all recorded.

And it’s always a mixture of either presentations and firesides, and it’s always with a focus on these experts and what they bring to the table with. From their experience it’s a focus on the content, the learning, the sharing and bringing the, to, to some light to their experience and the questions that we have for them.

So today is going to be recorded. It’s always one of the number one questions we get. And so you will be able to share it. You will be able to rewatch it and you will have a chance to ask questions. So get your questions in sooner rather than later. And that way we’re able to pick them up as we go.

Before we jump into the [00:02:00] meet, I want to talk to you about what it is that we do here at Prodpad. So many of you probably already know what we do which is great. Thanks for all your support. If you don’t know what we do, start your trial today. So Prodpad is a tool for product managers. So welcome product managers.

You should be trying this out. It’s a tool for road mapping. It’s a tool for idea management and feedback management. It’s a tool for collecting all the insights as to what it is you could be building and mapping them all out to understand where it is that you should be taking your product and informing the people around you as to where it is that you should be where it is that you are going.

Myself and my co-founder Simon built it because we were product managers ourselves and needed tools to do our own jobs and so it gave us. This sense of control gave us organization. It gave us and our teams transparency into the product management process. And now it’s being used by thousands of product teams around the world.

So you can try it for free. And we even have a [00:03:00] sandbox mode that we’ve built. And that sandbox mode is a place that is pre-filled with examples, Now-Next-Later roadmaps and OKRs. And you can see lean experiments and all sorts of stuff filled in. So you can play with it, you can move it all around, you can share with your colleagues, all sorts of stuff.

And see how it fits with your processes. And our team is made up of product people, so we would love to get your feedback once you jump in there and give it a try. A little highlight on one of the things that we’ve been working on is automations. One of the key things that ProdPad does is reduce the grunt work for you. And what broad pad automations does is it’s like, if this, then that, but for inside your ProdPad. So when an idea reaches a particular state, then automatically updated to do something, or when a piece of feedback from your customer does something, then updated to go do something else, lots of different pieces that you can connect together within a broad pad to create different pieces of automations.

We’re seeing some really creative uses of it. So by all means. Give it a try and let us know how it works [00:04:00] for you. So jumping in to, as I promised, the meat of what we’re going to be talking about. But I want to introduce Teresa. So Teresa, everyone say hello to Teresa Torres. I’ve known Teresa for years.

This goes back to our days hanging out at Mind the Product Conference and her getting involved with that. She’s been a speaker on the Mind the Product stage. That was a huge wow moment seeing that. She absolutely Blasted that one but has also been involved with things like workshops and some of the smaller events as well.

So we’ve had a chance to hang out in various cities as she’s gotten involved there. She’s also an internationally acclaimed author, a speaker, a coach. She’s a master of continuous discovery. She helps product teams make customer-driven decisions daily. And she’s coached hundreds of teams from startups to global enterprises and.

Taught over 12, 000 people through the Product Talk Academy. So, definitely pick up her book, [00:05:00] Continuous Discovery Habits and read her blog on producttalk.org. It’s an amazing resource that I’ve been going through and referring back to for years now. So everybody, say a big welcome to Teresa.

Teresa, thank you so much for joining today. 

Teresa Torres: Thanks for the lovely introduction. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for joining here today. And, as I said, one of the reasons why I invited you along today was not just because you’re always a blast to chat to, but you wrote this article last October about how teams can Convince some of the different people on their team about moving away from timeline roadmaps.

So what spurned that? Was it a particular situation or was it a particularly frustrating client or were you getting the same questions I was? Tell me where your head was with that. 

Teresa Torres: So I track all the questions that I get. Over a wide variety of, whether it’s events and Q& A or through [00:06:00] email or through the blog on social media.

We actually have a database of over a thousand questions now and we keep track of how often they come up. So this is a little bit like the equivalent of customer feedback. Managing support tickets, what are the big trends? 

Janna Bastow: Of course it is, yeah. 

Teresa Torres: For me it’s a question, right? So what are people asking?

Regardless, I’ve been blogging for 13 years now, and the question database is not getting smaller. I feel like the more we talk about these topics, The more specific and the more like, it just generates more and more questions. And what we do when I say we, because I have a team that supports me on this, like, I just can’t do it all myself anymore.

But, we look at, like, We have an Ask Teresa series on Product Talk where like roughly once a quarter, maybe every other month we look at what’s the question that’s bubbled to the top. So that’s getting asked the most often. And this roadmap question comes up so [00:07:00] much. It comes, I run a community for people putting the discovery habits into practice.

It comes up there over and over again. It comes up on almost every webinar I give on every talk that I give. People, it’s always in the form of like, Teresa, this is great. I read the book. I really want to work on discovering habits, but I have a problem. And my problem is this, my stakeholders, whoever they may be, it could be the CEO.

It could be marketing. It could be sales. It could be their boss. Like it literally could come from anywhere in the organization is saying, yeah, but I need a 12 month roadmap, or I need to know exactly what you’re building this quarter. We’re doing capacity planning. I need to know what your team is building this quarter.

And a lot of these are vestiges of an old mindset, of like this old traditional way of working. And a lot of our stakeholders are starting to embrace outcome driven development and empowered product teams. But they don’t realize that all these other vestiges need to fall by the wayside for us to really get all the way there.

And so I just wanted to write about what do we, [00:08:00] like, what do we, how do we help our organizations move? fully into this world of outcome driven empowered teams. And I think knowing how to evolve a roadmap in that context is really critical because it’s one of the strongest artifacts that the rest of our organization relies upon.

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a battle that I’ve been, I’m trying to, Fight as well. I think a lot of people know that I’ve been in this battle against timeline roadmaps for almost my entire professional career now. Probably about the same 13 years that that you’ve been writing as well, and I often will talk about, how to get away from timeline roadmaps, why Now-Next-Later is a better way of working and, of what I realized is that the the questions that come up is yeah, but what about This particular situation and yeah, but we have to do it this way, because, or what about getting this particular stakeholder on board and each of those is a situation in itself.

And it’s handling each of those different stakeholders that becomes the. the art of getting your team away [00:09:00] from the way that they’re working, that old school way of thinking and into this more modern way of thinking. And bit by bit, I think those answers are coming out, but I think we still need to continue shining more light on them.

And you did a really good job in that article highlighting some of the different ways that you might start building your team. Bringing some people on board, comparing it to how sales and marketing works, comparing it to, how to convince your leadership, for example. 

Teresa Torres: Yeah, I, we can get into that a little bit.

I think I opened that article. I think what a lot of people miss. is we can’t really solve a problem unless we fully understand both sides. Like, who is this a problem for? Who does it work for? And I think with roadmaps, that’s particularly important. So I think product teams understand why dates are a problem and we can get into that, but we don’t always understand why the organization wants dates or needs dates.

So like, if we talk about the first, why are dates a problem for product teams? Well, if we want to do good discovery, we don’t know ahead of time what’s going to work. [00:10:00] Right? Like, if we really want to build something that’s going to work for the customer, we can’t put it even on a three month roadmap. Like, I don’t know until I start doing the discovery what this is going to look like or how it’s going to work.

I might throw it away altogether. In fact, if I’m making a good discovery, I’m throwing things away constantly. 

Janna Bastow: So that’s 

Teresa Torres: the first thing is that, like, and hopefully, like, if there was any silver lining to COVID, and I even hate saying there was any silver lining to COVID, but if there was, It’s that companies got a huge dose of reality of how unpredictable and uncertain the future is.

And if you started January of 2020 with a 12-month roadmap, I’m going to guess by March of 2020, when the whole global economy slowed down, that your roadmap had to change. Here’s the deal. Like we’re not going to have a global pandemic every year. Let’s hope to God we don’t but things do constantly change and we’re starting to recognize, like we talk about agility, right?

We talk about being reactive. We talk about being able to respond to what’s happening in our market. We can’t do that if we’re locked into a fixed plan. [00:11:00] Now, the pushback I immediately get is, Yeah, but what about regulations? Those have a due date. Okay, we are always going to have times where we do have to put a date on something.

If you are, if you have European customers and it’s pre GDPR, You did not have a choice. You had to implement GDPR by May of whatever year the deadline was. 

Janna Bastow: May 20 2018. I remember that because everyone had a date on the roadmap. 

Teresa Torres: Yeah. And that’s fine, right? Like we sometimes have to have dates on the roadmap.

The problem is we put dates on the roadmap when we don’t need them. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah. 

Teresa Torres: And then we’re creating this, like, Death march where it’s sprint after sprint. There’s never a break. We’re exhausted. Yeah, we learned something that isn’t that’s what we’re doing isn’t going to work. And if we raise that concern, it breaks the next 17 sprints, and it puts the entire roadmap at risk.

And so what do we do? We build the thing that we know is not going to work. And that’s [00:12:00] insanity. 

Janna Bastow: Exactly. Exactly. Like people assume, well, we have dates for some things and therefore we must have to be able to put dates for everything. And you’re penalizing yourself by putting dates for everything. Like reality is that sometimes you’re going to have dates.

So therefore, acknowledge that and put the effort in to work to those dates, but give yourself the flexibility for the things around it. 

Teresa Torres: Yeah, and I think that, like, making space for that flexibility is really key, because if we don’t, we now know, I don’t, I think it was who was the big A B test?

Was it Optimizely? Optimizely was one of the 

Janna Bastow: big A B testing companies, yep. 

Teresa Torres: Yeah, I can’t remember if it was Optimizely or if it was another one. One of the big A B testing companies published a report years ago about what percentage of A B tests fail. And it’s like 80 to 90%. Okay. Now let’s think this through.

We have two, I would say two broad categories of AB tests. We have marketing automation, this color versus that color, this headline versus that headline AB testing, but product teams tend to [00:13:00] AB test as a gate on feature release. Did the feature have the expected impact? Okay. If we’re seeing 80 to 90 percent failure rate on expected impact, when we gate a feature That means most of what we’re building is falling short of our expectations.

I would argue we can and should learn that earlier in the process, and we should pull the plug before we do all the work. And that, that A B test is just one source of data, right? Like, we see this in the VC world. 90 plus percent of startups don’t get to a viable product, right? So we’re slowly starting to recognize a lot of what we think is gonna work is not gonna work.

And so if we put a whole bunch of stuff on our roadmaps and we just blindly deliver, we’re spending a lot of resources on things that are not going to have the impact we thought. And it’s just really wasteful. And I don’t think we need to be doing that. GDPR stuff comes along every once in a while.

Most of the time, we should be giving ourselves time and space to figure out what’s actually going to work for the customer. [00:14:00] 

Janna Bastow: Absolutely. And a couple of webinars we did a we ran some calculations to figure out what the cost is on some of these things that are failing, whether they work or not but just the pure cost that we often don’t think about when it comes to, oh yeah, we’ll just build that feature and it runs into the tens of thousands, even for something quite small, when you consider the effort of your development team and your design team and your product team and the, everybody else.

Hacking away to make something reality. So if you can actually just turn that into the product person did a, a spike, they just looked into it and decided that actually it wasn’t going to be the right thing to do. That can save you the tune of 50 grande right there. 

Teresa Torres: And it’s not just the cost of building.

It’s the opportunity cost of what you could have been building and how you could have reaped the benefits of if you had built the right thing. So I think we just don’t think about it this way. It’s so easy to go about our day to day lives thinking. This is a good idea. Of course it’s going to work.

And the thing is, when we hear 90 percent failure, I see on [00:15:00] social media, like yesterday or the day before I realized I should not spend my weekends on social media, I’m working on it. 

Janna Bastow: weekend, do what you like with it. 

Teresa Torres: Yeah, exactly. Somebody, that was like a little message to myself. Stop spending your weekends on social media.

Somebody mentioned like, this has not been my, it might’ve been on Reddit. This was not, this has not been my experience. As a product manager, like, I don’t see 90 percent failure. Okay, let’s talk about this. It’s not that 90 percent of what you’re building is a catastrophic failure. It’s that 90 percent of what you’re building is falling short of the expectations when you chose to build it.

This is, I think, a really important distinction. First of all, most of us don’t take the time to get clear on what our expectations are for this feature. We definitely don’t document it. And then we definitely don’t after releasing it, measure the impact. So we’re not even aware that 90 percent of what we’re building isn’t working.

Right? But I challenge everybody who’s listening, if you go through that exercise, is every single time you release something, you take the time to [00:16:00] document, why are we building this? What’s the expected impact? And then you actually instrument it and measure it. You’re going to be very depressed at how often things fall short of your expectations.

And I’m not telling you to do that because I want you to be depressed. I’m telling you to do that because that is the best motivation for doing better discovery earlier in the process so that you increase your hit rate. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah, I get that. Absolutely. And that’s actually something that ProdPad really helps with is we’ve built in space for every idea, every key result that you measure every uh, initiative that you put on your road map.

There’s a space in there for your target outcome and your actual outcome. So it makes it really difficult. To forget to put in there what your target outcome is. It makes it obvious if you’ve forgotten to do so, it makes it obvious. You’ve forgotten to fill it out on the flip side when you finish something.

And that’s made a huge difference in our way of working as well as everybody else’s way of working. So definitely something to bear in mind as you try to measure that. And would love to see everyone else’s measures on, where they come up on and that 90%, maybe [00:17:00] we’ll do some sort of state of the industry and see what that comes out as with product features as well.

Cause I’d love to see what that comes out to. 

Teresa Torres: I would be curious what percentage of your customers are used. I’m sure ProdPad is amazing and is opinionated and steering people in that direction. But I also know most teams aren’t doing this, right? So I’d be really curious about, do you have good data?

One thing we tried to do was we did a benchmark survey and we asked people about their discovery habits. And one of the things we asked was about their outcomes. And I realized most people don’t know how to answer that question. Like, and I even in the survey did a little bit of teaching, right? Like there was a splash screen that gave an example of an outcome, given an example of an output and then asked them, are you being asked to deliver outcomes?

Are you being asked to deliver outputs? Are you being asked to deliver a mix of both, which is most of us deliver this outcome, but also build these features. And then of course there was another. Category, and then the other category, they had to fill in what they’re being asked to deliver. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah.

Teresa Torres: And [00:18:00] the responses were shocking to me. Like, partly because, like, I live in this world of outcome driven teams. And I forget that, like, most of us are not actually in this world of outcome driven teams. Yeah. But, like, it was just really clear that, like, people don’t know what an outcome is. And then the next question we asked, if they said they were being asked to deliver outcomes, we asked them, is your outcome tied to driving revenue or is it tied to reducing costs?

Janna Bastow: Yeah. 

Teresa Torres: And then again, they had another, and if it was another, they had to fill in a verbatim. And there was a huge gap, like the majority of verbatim were either revenue or saving costs, they just couldn’t make the connection. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah. 

Teresa Torres: So it’s really hard to get good data on this because we’re still learning the concepts.

Janna Bastow: Yeah. So this is really fascinating. We’re going into a really interesting rabbit hole that could make a, I think this could be like another totally off topic, but I’m here for it. But I think we’re going to have to put a pin in it. I am going to ask my product team to look into that data and see how people are interacting with the outcomes field.

[00:19:00] I know we had some data on it when we first launched it, but I haven’t checked in on it recently. Now this is also a hint for anybody who’s using ProdPad now to get in there using it to get our stats up. Just playing the stats there. Obviously that’s bad product management right there.

Everyone knows that, but Hey. 

Teresa Torres: It’s your webinar. You get to make the rules. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I like Wade’s comment there. He said, I’m trying to be the type of company that is outcome led. And this is actually what I said. Many companies out there, everyone assumes that because everyone’s read the book, continuous discovery habits, everyone’s read Marty Kagan’s books.

Everyone’s read all the books that are up there. They’re all the thought leader books, and everyone assumes that everyone else is like that on the far end of the scale where everyone else is like, They’re totally lean. They’re totally outcome driven. They’ve got it down and they’re all trying to get there.

The reality is that most companies aren’t quite there yet, but they’re all likewise, they’re all trying to be there. They’re all trying to make those improvements and get there. And that’s actually a great place to be. As long as you’re acknowledging that, Hey, you know what? Last quarter, we didn’t measure as much as we could.

We [00:20:00] weren’t as successful as we could. We’re still hanging on to some of those timelines, but we’re trying to work our way over. That’s okay. The first step is acknowledging that, Hey. We know that we’re not ideal yet, but we’re working our way over and we’re having these conversations. We’re turning up to the webinars.

We’re having those chats internally. You’re making the steps that you should be doing. I talked to literally hundreds of product people. All the time, every month, probably. And no one is way over on this side where they’re all like, they’ve got it all down. You very rarely talk to the companies who are in the case studies of those books.

But you also rarely talk to companies who are like the super old, the case studies on the other side of the books, like the ones who are the sinking ships most companies are trying to work their way back over that way, which is great to see. 

Teresa Torres: Yeah. It’s really funny. Like one of the criticisms I get.

Usually on social media it is like, nobody actually works this way. Like Teresa lives in the ideal world. And I want to get into this. I don’t actually think anybody works this way. I will fully acknowledge that. [00:21:00] I don’t think there’s any company in the world where every single product team is perfectly outcome driven.

They have the perfect discovery habits. And every, and their leaders are like, yep, you figure it out. We’re going to be hands off. Where they’ve 

Janna Bastow: checked every last thing on the box. 

Teresa Torres: Never going to happen. I don’t even think it’s ever going to happen. I think you could ask me a hundred years from now, if I was so lucky to be alive, I still don’t think it would exist.

Janna Bastow: Yeah. 

Teresa Torres: I don’t think that’s a criticism. There’s a lot of things we aspire to that don’t exist. I think the idea behind the book and the idea behind everybody that’s pushing these ideas is there. We could be doing more for our customers. Why aren’t we? Why don’t we adopt these habits and these practices?

And to bring us back to our topic, I think one of the reasons why we aren’t is because product teams are leading the change in our organizations. And the rest of our organizations are following us. And what happens is we get a little bit out over our skis. Hopefully that analogy works globally.

Right? Where if you get out over your skis, [00:22:00] you fall on your face. That’s the thing to know about this. So we get out over our skis a little bit, we’re ahead of everybody else and the rest of the organization is still geared around, I need to know what’s coming and when. And I want to get into why that matters.

Like the rest of the business does need to know what’s coming and when. And the reason why they need to know that is because right now business, like your marketing team is running campaigns and planning campaigns around what is releasing when. And if they don’t know what is releasing when, they can’t run marketing campaigns.

And if they can’t run marketing campaigns. Your sales team can’t close business and your sales team wants to know what’s happening when, because they want to be able to tell a customer that is about to sign. But only if you have this feature, they want to say, Oh, we’ll have that feature in April of 2025.

Right? So, product teams have to understand this need. The CEO has to report to the board, this is what we’re doing and why. The sales team has to be able to tell a prospect, we can meet that need by this timeline. The marketing team has to be able to market land campaigns. [00:23:00] When we say we can’t tell you what’s happening when, we basically tell the rest of the organization, we don’t care about what you need.

So the key here is we have to find a middle ground. We have to find a strategy that allows the rest of the organization to do their job and allows us to do our job. And this is what the blog post is about. I think a lot of people want to rip out the date based roadmap and replace it with a Now-Next-Later roadmap and call it done and have the rest of the organization just deal with it.

That is never going to work. Right. 

Janna Bastow: We 

Teresa Torres: have to, it. It’s continuous improvement. We have to iterate our way there. So in the blog post, what I wrote about is like, we have to recognize why teams need dates. So let’s start with dates. Let’s give them what they’re asking for. And then let’s gradually introduce them to these other ideas of like, Hey, let’s also communicate what problem we’re solving for the customer and what outcome that might drive for our business.

Janna Bastow: Yeah, 

Teresa Torres: [00:24:00] right. And if we just keep our date based roadmap, we’re still meeting the needs of the rest of the organization. But we add what problem we’re solving for the customer and we add what impact we’re gonna have for the business. Now we can start to change the narrative in the organization. When we’re talking to our sales team, when we’re being pulled into a prospect call, which we’re always been doing, and we hear the sales rep talk about the feature, We can talk about the problem we’re solving.

Janna Bastow: Yeah. 

Teresa Torres: And what does that do in that sales conversation? The customer doesn’t care about the feature. They care about their problem being solved. And the salesperson starts to see, Oh, my customer just wants, there’s a problem solved. And we start to teach our sales teams to talk about problems, which by the way, our best salespeople are already doing this.

It’s everybody else that needs to learn how to do it, right? And then same with the marketing teams. When we’re working, when our marketing team is asking for help with a campaign and what’s happening when, we can help them position it based on the problem that we’re solving, not on the features that we’re delivering.

And by the way, that’s [00:25:00] better marketing because we know to market benefits and not features, right? But again, it’s not that marketing and sales don’t know how to do their jobs. It’s that business has worked this way for a hundred years and change is glacially slow. So if we Add what we want to eventually be on the roadmap to the date based roadmap.

We start to teach them how to use those things. And this is actually why I love the Now-Next-Later roadmap, because I think the now column should have solutions. It should be, this is what we’re building and what is being delivered soon. And the next column should not. And I think that’s where we bridge this gap in the organization.

We can tell you what we’re going to deliver in the near term. Everything in the future is a little bit hazy. 

Janna Bastow: And this is the crucial step that the Now-Next-Later introduces. A lot of people think of the Now-Next-Later as just three columns in which they can shove a whole bunch of dates or treat it like a kanban of, this is the order in which we’re tackling things and they’re all the same.

But what the really crucial change is that [00:26:00] they move away from a date based roadmap, To something that is time horizon based and the time horizon is the now is the stuff that’s right in front of you that you can see and your article very much talks about how for, teams like sales, and you might’ve mentioned support as well, marketing, some of these teams need to know what’s coming out in the next release.

And that’s fair, because, what’s coming out in the next release if you know that you can tell them, right, you’re not hiding anything from them. If you have those dates. Put it on the roadmap or communicate to them. You don’t necessarily want to communicate that to customers because things change.

And that could get a bit messy, but for the most part, you should be able to communicate more or less what’s happening right in front of you. But as you start looking, further afield beyond and into the far yonder the later column we all know that’s Months away, you don’t even know how big your team is going to be by next February, let alone how fast you’re able to deliver.

So why putting on dates there? We know that you’re making it up. And so, [00:27:00] yeah, go on. What I 

Teresa Torres: I think it is funny that nobody hits the roadmap. 

Janna Bastow: Nobody what? 

Teresa Torres: Nobody hits the roadmap. Nobody hits the roadmap. Nobody delivers according to the roadmap. Yeah, no, exactly. I think I saw a stat 

Janna Bastow: Once about something like 20 percent of roadmaps are delivered, and I thought even that seems a little bit, Yeah.

probably a bit high. I haven’t seen that. But yeah, absolutely. So 

Teresa Torres: like, it’s like the organization is planning around a document that is pure fiction. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah. 

Teresa Torres: And this is actually, we can use this to our advantage, right? So if we just put a customer problem on the roadmap with the feature, that’s And then we say, look, we’re going to miss this date.

Instead of saying we’re going to miss this date, we can say, we’re either going to push the date out or we’re going to reduce the scope of the feature, but still solve the problem. Exactly. Which do you prefer? Yeah. Now we’re again, starting to teach people about, it’s not about the solution we’re building.

It’s about solving this problem for the customer. Yeah. And we all know how to reduce scope to hit a [00:28:00] deadline. We all know how to do that. Like if, and if we don’t, we need to learn how to do that. Cause that is a core product management skill, right? So like. The challenge is, we get into trouble with deadlines when the scope is fixed, the team is fixed, the deadline is fixed, and we run into an unknown.

It blows up in our face, 

Janna Bastow: right? One tip that I have, because a lot of people say, well, how do you reduce scope and still solve the problem? Well, think about it. Don’t call it solve the problem, call it solve for the problem area, right? Sometimes if you’re thinking, solve the problem, you’re thinking of a single feature.

You’re still thinking too specifically. You’re putting a bunch of features on the roadmap and each problem is one particular little thing and you can’t de scope it. The problems on your roadmap should be bigger, chunkier. Problem areas that you’re saying, well, we’re going to tackle this area, and then we’re going to tackle this area, and then we’re going to tackle this area.

And if we do that should take us more or less to this terrain over here. Yeah, there should be room to say, well, once we’re in this area, we could go big if we got lots of time, and we’re actually really good at it. We’re going to completely blast this area [00:29:00] and we’ll solve all these problems.

But as you get there, you realize, oh, actually, we don’t have this much time. We’re just going to solve like 70 percent of the problems. Or actually 50 percent or 20 percent of the problems. And that’s what you’re scoping. So you’re still tackling that area, but you’re not solving all of the problems that are in that problem area, which gives you more scope to play with.

Teresa Torres: Yeah. Another way to play with scope is to solve the problem for somebody, not for everybody. 

Janna Bastow: That’s a good way to put it. I like that. So we can say, 

Teresa Torres: Look, in an ideal world, we can solve this for everybody, but I need X weeks. I have two weeks, so I’m going to solve it for this slice of our customer base, who, by the way, is waiting for this feature before they buy.

Right. And so we meet the needs of sales on the timeline that they need it, but we don’t, we’re not on a death March where we’re building way too much. And I think that’s what makes this work. Product teams build way too much, way too soon. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah. Yeah. It’s too easy to say, well, while we’re in there, we’re just going to solve everything in this [00:30:00] area.

And we create this masterful chunk of work and then put it out there. And then once they deliver it, the marketing’s like, great, we’ve done this giant thing. And no one ever hears about it again, because it’s all gone out as one. It goes, whoop, there we go. 

Teresa Torres: Okay. Let’s talk about marketing a little bit, cause I think this is really key.

Janna Bastow: Okay, go 

Teresa Torres: on. We like product teams to have to be careful. We can’t tell our marketing people how to do their job, but we can influence. Go on. We can tell 

Janna Bastow: everybody how to do their job sometimes. 

Teresa Torres: I want to, but I don’t know if 

Janna Bastow: I 

Teresa Torres: can. Let’s say that I work at a company and I’ve worked at many companies like this.

Let’s say I work at a company where the marketing team runs a hundred percent of their campaigns around code releases. This is very common. And in this situation, a roadmap with dates is critical. Because it takes time to plan campaigns, and to get everything queued up, and to do a big launch date. It costs money, and we want to make sure that we hit that date, or we’re gonna lose money.

Okay, great. Support that. So meet them where they are. That’s what they are, that’s how they [00:31:00] work. Support that. I would do this. I would say, okay, we’re gonna hit your date. And four weeks, six weeks, twelve weeks, whatever the timeline is, after that date, I want us to run a second campaign. I’m going to find you customers who are using the product, and we’re going to run a campaign around the success our customers are having with that release.

I like that. That campaign is going to be way more effective than the, hey, we launched something campaign. And what’s going to happen? Your marketing team is going to see that and experience that. And by the way, your feature better work or you’re not going to have customers to support that marketing campaign.

So this all starts with good discovery, right? If you know your feature is going to work. Work with your marketing team to do a follow on campaign that is about customer success. I like that. And they will quickly learn those campaigns perform better, they’re going to want to do more of them, they’re going to be less dependent on your release plans, and they’re going to be more excited about, tell me when we have a customer who’s [00:32:00] using this, and it gets you away from delivery dates.

Janna Bastow: I love that. Give it a proper one two punch. Yeah. My top tip for getting marketing on board with the idea of moving away from giving hard dates is to separate your hard launch from your soft launch. Right. Because with marketing, one of the problems is that they have to put in Sometimes it takes weeks to plan this big campaign.

They’ve got ad campaigns going out, billboards going up, and they’ve got money being spent on this thing and all of this is hinging on the design and product and development team getting this code out on time, which unfortunately is not what’s going to happen. A bit of a dicey project. We don’t know how much is going to be built or how long it’s going to take or whether it’s going to land this week or the other week, which is difficult.

Right. Cause you don’t know exactly what it’s going to be like until you actually get in there and it’s done. And so they’re asking, Hey, what week is this going to launch? We can do the big. Things and you don’t know, and this causes tension because you’re stacking two projects [00:33:00] up against each other. And if one slips, the other one loses all its value.

Well, what you need to do is you need to get the development project up to the point that it can do a soft launch and it gets itself put into some sort of feature flag mode, a beta mode, some sort of mode where it’s launched. The mark, the development team is now hands off and says, we’re We’ve done it.

We’ve built it to the point that we’re happy with it and hands it over to the marketing team and to support and sales and other people can see it’s used internally, perhaps with a beta group of customers, the product team can play with it, but really crucially marketing has their hands on it so they can go and use it for the marketing materials.

They can build out customer testimonials. They can get videos of people using it. They have pictures of it actually working as opposed to the designs that. Probably changed from the original Figma files or whatever it was. So they’ve actually got this final functional product and then they can plan the biggest bangest launch they want.

If they want, four weeks to do it or four months, [00:34:00] however long they want, they can do that. And then their campaign goes out and there’s zero risk that this thing doesn’t work on the day that it’s out there because all it takes is to flip a switch and it’s on and they can do their big campaign in the sky or whatever it is.

Teresa Torres: We see Apple does this extraordinarily well. Every June, Apple makes announcements about what’s coming in September at their developer conference. They always announce this thing is coming. Now hear from this partner or look at this app that’s going to be available. Meaning they’ve already partnered with developers.

People were already using it long before they announced it. And then even so it’s still not coming for another three months. Yeah, right. So, like, it’s not that we can’t do marketing around launches. We can’t do it, we shouldn’t be marketing around first release dates. We want real people using it, whether that’s our employees, whether it’s close in customers, whether it’s design partners, it doesn’t matter who, right?

But the idea [00:35:00] is, by the time we’re publicly making a big decision, about it. We need to know what already works and we need to know who it works for. And we need to include that as part of our marketing. 

Janna Bastow: Excellent. All right. So what about, that’s marketing. We’ve got them happy with this. They’re on board.

What about sales? That’s simple. You’re done. 

Teresa Torres: Done. Um, sales are a little bit harder. Sales is hard because we, first of all, we have to think about this from a sales mindset. And Rich Marinoff writes a lot about this. I think he does an extraordinarily good job of writing about other people’s perspectives in the organization so that you’re in a better position to influence.

So if you’re not familiar with his blog, I believe it’s called product bites. That’s what the Y 

Janna Bastow: product bites with the Y. Yep. 

Teresa Torres: Yeah. He’s top notch. I’m going to just toot his horn a little bit. Okay. So let’s talk about salespeople for a second. A salesperson is motivated to close the deal that’s in front of them.

That is their job. It’s not to worry about [00:36:00] . It does my product service that needs 100 percent they’re looking for. Does the product service need enough that I can close the business and hopefully get the renewal later? Right? So, of course they’re trying to get creative. I understand your needs.

How do I use my existing product to address those needs? Then they run into gaps. Like, of course, the customer has a need that the product currently can’t address. So what do they want to do? They want to go to the product team and say, build me this feature so that I can tell the prospect sitting in front of me right now that yes, we can meet that need.

Sign the contract. This is why we get overwhelmed with feature requests. Our job is not to build those feature requests. Our job is to do the work to understand why that customer needs that feature? What are they trying to do? Which is discovery. And then do that with a hundred other customers that have a similar need, even though their feature request looks a little different.

And instead of building the hundred individual feature requests, we need to build the one thing that meets those hundred customers [00:37:00] needs. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah. 

Teresa Torres: But this causes stress for our salespeople, because the salespeople don’t want to have to explain why feature A is different. We didn’t build Feature A, we built Feature B instead, because we know better what you need than you do, customer.

That puts our salesperson in a tough situation. So we have to support the salesperson when they do that. We have to say, look, we know your customer asked for Feature A. Let me sit down with you and walk you through why feature B actually needs to meet their need better, which means we need to fully understand that customer’s need, which means we probably need to be involved in those sales conversations.

Yeah. And then we need to equip that salesperson, not we go in and be the hero, which is what a lot of product people want to do. We need to equip that salesperson to be the hero in front of their own prospect, where they are a hundred percent convinced. That is, feature B is better and they’re ready and able to explain it to that customer.

Janna Bastow: Yep, absolutely. And here’s the reality, and here’s the reality that sometimes feature B isn’t [00:38:00] better. Sometimes. The salesperson is dragged in by a client who feature A or feature B isn’t the right solution for them, right? It needs to have features for them to close this deal. It needs to have features X, Y, and Z and all these other things.

Sometimes they drag in clients who aren’t actually a good fit. And this is actually 1 of the problems that you have. This tension where there’s always this one extra feature that’s needed. And ultimately it comes down to finding this right balance in that the salespeople should be out there as almost like discovery agents, they’re finding out which features are going to bring the product forward, right?

If they hear one product, one feature a. That might be an interesting thing. If they hear features from like 10 different clients, cool. That’s really good information, right? You want to hear that as a product person and then yeah, build feature A that’s going to solve the problem or help them understand how feature B is going to solve that problem.

But sometimes they start asking for features. X or feature Y or things like this. It doesn’t mean it’s your job to build these features. [00:39:00] Sometimes you need to point them to what your ideal customer profile is. Work with them on who the ideal customer is and help them understand that you are building a product that looks like this for this type of customer.

They need to do their job and find customers who look more like your existing customers rather than going for the customers who sometimes it’s the easy ones who’ve come to them. saying, yeah, we’ll buy. If it only does this one thing, we’ll buy. If it only does this one other thing. And unfortunately you can’t be a business.

If you’re going to build for customers who don’t want your product, 

Teresa Torres: these things are also not independent because the more your marketing team. uses customer success stories to market, the more you get better leads for your sales team. So if I hear a customer tell a story about how they use the product and why it worked for them, and that story resonates with me, I’m a way better lead.

And if I hear, like, here’s a vague feature list that I’m [00:40:00] going to interpret however I want and try to shoehorn it into my needs. And so, a lot of this, and I know for product, like, a lot of product managers might be listening to this and just be like, I, my job is not to fix sales and marketing. Like, I don’t know what to do with this.

It’s not your job to fix sales and marketing, but if we want to be effective in our organizations, we have to understand where sales is coming from, we have to understand where marketing is coming from, and we can make their jobs easier in a way that makes our jobs easier, right? So we can nudge. The more we talk about customer problems and business outcomes, and less about specific features, the easier everybody’s job gets.

Yeah. 

Janna Bastow: You want to know one of my favorite tactics is using the way that sales works to help convince your leaders. That you don’t need to work towards dates. So your salesperson, for example, doesn’t have to make a commitment upfront as to how many or which customers are going to land on which dates.

Just like you shouldn’t have to commit to which features are going to be [00:41:00] launched on which dates. 

Teresa Torres: This was the analogy I used in my blog post. So we do ask, like, I, I think I was talking to somebody who, like they said, their CEO said, I can’t just give you an outcome. No other part of my organization works this way.

And I was like, is that really true? It’s not really true. We give sales reps quotas. What’s a quota? It’s an outcome they’re trying to reach. Now, a sales rep has to show progress throughout the quarter towards that outcome. And usually that progress is things like how many sales calls did you make? How many emails did you send?

How many opportunities are you working? What’s your percent likelihood that you’re going to close those, right? So we have visibility into whether they are on progress towards making their quota. What they don’t do is say, I’m going to close this deal on this date, I’m going to close this deal on this date, I’m going to close this deal on this date, because everybody knows that would be impossible.

Okay, now let’s look at the analogy for product teams. We do ask [00:42:00] them, even when we give them an outcome, we still ask them to tell us what feature is delivering on what date. That’s not, we should recognize that’s equally impossible. We should say, look, we’re working on this portfolio of things that are in discovery.

We think this one has a percent chance of succeeding. This one has a percent chance of succeeding. This one has a percent chance of succeeding. By the end of the quarter, we expect to hit our outcome. Now, just like sales reps don’t always hit our quotas, I don’t expect product teams to always hit their outcome.

But we’re managing a portfolio of risk just like salespeople are managing a portfolio of risk. 

Janna Bastow: And we’re running experiments just like salespeople, right? Salespeople experiments. It’s picking up the phone and doing emails and doing their stuff, right? And a lot of their experiments. Fail, right? They get hung up on they don’t know which of their people, which of their prospects are going to buy.

They just know if they keep hammering the phones and hammering emails, someone’s going to buy. That’s how it’s worked in the previous quarters and previous years. And it’s probably going to continue working as long as they follow their sales process. Well, we don’t know which of our experiments are [00:43:00] going to fail or succeed.

If we did, we’d just do the ones that are going to succeed. Instead we just know that if we follow a process of doing experiments and focusing on the right sort of areas, we know that some of them are going to succeed. For us to more or less hit our numbers because they weren’t previous quarters.

Teresa Torres: It’s the same in marketing. There’s a quote. I think it comes from like a 1950s era advertising firm that was like, I know 50 percent of my ad spend is working. I just don’t know which 50 percent exactly. So it’s like, okay, great. We have an outcome, drive a certain number of leads, get a certain amount of traffic.

You have a bucket of money, spread it out, make a bunch of bets. We don’t know ahead of time which ones are going to win. We just know if we make enough bets and we learn from our losing bets that we will build a track record of winning enough bets. 

Janna Bastow: Yes, exactly that 

Teresa Torres: We deal with this uncertainty and ambiguity really well in marketing and sales.

We just hold product teams to a different standard. Yeah, it’s because features feel concrete and certain, [00:44:00] but we’re recognizing they’re not and we get a 90 plus percent failure rate. 

Janna Bastow: And for people who feel like everybody else is already there, remember, not everyone is there. Not everyone has that checklist.

Everyone is working their way towards that way of working. We’re seeing some companies who are working this way. Other companies are still fighting these arguments. Somebody had a question in the Q& A that touches on a really interesting subject area, which is that this one always comes up as a hot topic.

Okay. What about companies who have budgets? They work out their financial budget for the year and then allot it based on what you would get done for the year. Have you ever helped and coached companies through this? 

Teresa Torres: Yeah, same idea. Same exact idea of what you would do on a roadmap. So you’re in your annual budgeting meeting.

Everybody’s horse trading their favorite features when they’re doing that. Just add a customer problem statement and a business outcome to each feature. Just start to build awareness of why we are making these decisions? Because we’re trying to solve this [00:45:00] customer problem, because we’re trying to drive this business outcome.

Janna Bastow: Yeah. 

Teresa Torres: The reason why you want to do that is because in August, when you realize you’re not going to deliver that feature, or you’re still on March’s features, which is more likely the case, you can start to talk about, I can catch up if we solve this customer problem in this other way, because it’s faster, right?

So when we don’t really have to change anything about our organizations. That’s the beauty of this strategy. All we have to do is add more information to the artifacts we’re already using. So in annual planning, add a customer problem, add a business outcome. On your roadmap, add a customer problem, add a business outcome.

Because I guarantee it, you are not going to hit that roadmap. You are not going to deliver all those projects. And your company already knows this because you never have in the history of time. But by adding a customer problem and an outcome to those documents, when you’re on track to miss You now have more flexibility for catching up for [00:46:00] still meeting the customer problem for still driving the business outcome.

And the reality is what your company cares about is the customer problem, the business outcome, not the feature. They just don’t have the language. To talk about it that way. Yeah. We can give them the language. 

Janna Bastow: And speaking of the business’s language. So Manna taught Manna in their question here and talked about a particular thing.

At the end of the year, you get audited on what you’ve done with the money. I actually love this because this is speaking their language, but this creates an opportunity for you to be able to retroactively look back and say, well, let’s say our team cost a million. Dollars or pounds or euros or whatever to run for the year.

And so, we spent this quarter working on solving this problem area and this quarter working on this problem area. And in this problem area, you can see that we moved it from here to here. So it cost us a quarter million and we got from here to here. That was the value that we drove for this.

So you should be able to tie your results back to. The efforts that you put into it by taking [00:47:00] the budget and retroactively applying it. Budgets are easy. Retroactively. Budgets are a lot harder when you’re looking forward. Particularly if you don’t have a fixed team size, but if you are able to fix that team size, you can make guesstimates on how much your team is going to cost you and therefore.

Make guesses at how much it’s going to cost to go tackle an area ahead. If you’re saying, Hey, we’re going to tackle this problem ahead of us in the next column, we’re going to spend a quarter million dollars going from here to where we think is going to be there. If we tackle this area, that’s what our goal is. 

Teresa Torres: What I love about this too is a lot of product teams say, why wouldn’t we just build it? It’s only going to take a week. Well, that week is tens of thousands of dollars. Right? So we can’t just think about it as it’s just a week. We’re spending tens of thousands of dollars during that week to pay for all our salaries, to pay for all our time, to pay. And remember, it’s not just that week, it’s the rest of the life of that software that we’re going to maintain and bug fix and support.

And I think it’s actually really important that teams [00:48:00] build this awareness of what it actually cost to build these features, so that we get better at these trade offs. And I think that also helps our leaders, like, okay, We’re, you made a decision probably in, for some companies, August for most companies, probably November when we’re doing our annual planning of we’re going to spend 250k on this.

Okay, well, we’re, we found a way to just spend 50k on this and we changed the scope because we think it’ll still solve the problem. Now you look like a hero. You just saved the company 200k. Right? So the more we can learn this language, the better we can help drive this change. And I want to highlight this moment, because I know we have like seven minutes left. There is something every single person on this call can do right now. Like literally right now, to help their organization move in the right direction. And that is, look at your roadmap. Your date based, old school roadmap. and just add what customer [00:49:00] problem is each thing solving. That’s it. Just do that.

And then when you’re done with that, and you’re ready for the next step I’m going to recommend is just add a business outcome. Why does this matter to your company? And if you need help with either of those things, I’m going to tell you, like, if you don’t know what your business outcomes are, because your leader did not describe them, I have a one minute video.

It is one minute long. That’s how much time you need to invest. You can find it in videos. producttalk. org. I might even be able to pull up a link if I’m super fat savvy here that talks about how to identify your business outcomes from your product’s revenue model. So you don’t need to wait for your leaders to define business outcomes for you.

You literally can do this yourself and you can look at the features and just use common sense and reasoning. Why does my company want me to build this feature? Oh, because they think it’s going to increase retention. Great. That’s the outcome. And I’m now going to put customer problems and outcomes on my roadmap.

And just see what that does. And anytime you’re asked about a feature, talk about the customer problem, talk about the outcome. [00:50:00] It’s, it literally is that simple. 

Janna Bastow: Excellent. I run what I call the check. So I see a lot of roadmaps. I run what I call roadmap clinics, which is like people bring the roadmaps to me and I help transform them into Now-Next-Later formats and whatnot, or people show me whatever they put together so far.

And I run a check and I should be able to read your roadmap and go. So what now? I don’t know anything about your business, but I should be able to more or less look at it. And by the end of it, go, okay, so what does this mean for your business? And if I’m not seeing something that says, Oh, that sounds like a customer problem or something, that’s going to solve something for your business.

If I’m not seeing how it’s tied back by the end of the year, it doesn’t say, so what, like, where is this? How is this tied back together? Everything on your roadmap should have some sort of. You should be able to say by the end of the year, what’s it actually done for your business? And you should be able to be something that’s human readable.

As in, you show it to somebody who doesn’t know your [00:51:00] business and they go, Oh, right, yeah, I can see what’s going on here. I see so many roadmaps that are just a bunch of jargon and features and a bunch of stuff. And I can say, okay, so if you’re building that and then that and that and that, so what, you have a bunch of new features, what does that actually get you?

And they go, Oh, well, that’s going to help us do this, and this. Cool. Put that on there, which is exactly the thing that you’re trying to get them to do. 

Teresa Torres: This is probably my next favorite social media argument, which is it’s not my job to drive business outcomes. It’s my job to serve the customer.

Janna Bastow: Nice. 

Teresa Torres: Okay, well, why do you get a paycheck? Right? Like, we have to think this through. Like, okay, your job is to serve the customer. That is true. But if you don’t also serve the business, there will literally be no money to make, to pay your paycheck. And I think a lot of people, we’re living in an era where there’s like, a theme or current or narrative of like, capitalism is bad.

And I think that’s what’s driving this, and I will be the first to tell you [00:52:00] there are a lot of things that capitalism has created that I think are awful and greedy and horrible, but there’s also a lot of good that has been created by capitalism. All you have to do is go to North Korea and see an alternative.

Not to get too political here, but here’s the thing. If you work at a company, if you take a paycheck from a company, your job is to create value for the business. Full stop. That is your job. Ideally, you are doing that by also creating value for the customer. And what people miss is if you don’t create business value, if you just create customer value, you will lose your job.

Your products will probably be shut down because it is not sustainable for a business to run a product that does not create value for the business. That is the hard reality of business. And it’s like, I hear myself saying this and I imagine some people are being like, that’s so obvious. Why do you even have to tell us this?

There is a large percentage. I don’t, I can’t put a [00:53:00] number on it, but it’s a non trivial because I see it pop up every day. People argue, it is not my job to deliver business outcomes. Oh, no. It is your job to deliver business outcomes. So I really like the key here, a lot of companies ask us to deliver business outcomes at the cost of the customer.

Our job is to make sure we’re delivering business outcomes while serving the customer. That’s how we align those things. That’s how we create customer value. So I just had to go on a little mini rant about that. No, 

Janna Bastow: and I love that. I love that. And the way to think about this, most companies, like 99 plus, Percent are going to need to be customer aligned with their outcomes.

There are very few companies who don’t need to be aligned, if you’re a monopoly, and honestly, it doesn’t matter whether you’re serving the customer or not but most customers are, most companies are going to need to be aligned in that way. But put it this way, you are truly customer driven, only doing what the customers want.

Well, why not make the product free? They would love that. [00:54:00] Yeah. Wouldn’t be great for the business. 

Teresa Torres: And I will say again, I’m bringing in some of the extremes of social media. I know a lot of us get this, but it’s especially after TechIt went through some really tough times in the last couple of years.

So I want to acknowledge that. And I think that’s where a lot of this narrative is coming from. I think people miss the fact that, like, literally your paycheck depends upon your business making money. So it’s not evil for your business to make money. That’s what puts food on your table. Right? And we have to bring more of that commercial mindset, that business mindset to our work.

It doesn’t mean we have to do it at the cost of the customer. In fact, I hope one of my goals with Continuous Discovery Habits was to show how we can do it in a way that’s good for our customer. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah. Excellent. Well said. All right. So just a few things to wrap up here. So we’ve got more on [00:55:00] this.

I know that there’s going to be some people here who are fired up to go tell their team to get on board with the Now-Next-Later roadmap. Our team here at ProdPad has created a team deck, it’s a Google slide that you can take back to your team. It has the notes, the speaker notes already in there to guide you through how to convince your team to get on board with a Now-Next-Later and get away from their timeline roadmap ways of working.

Next up, we do have another webinar guest coming up. That’s going to be Adam Thomas. He’s going to be talking about the first Five deadly sins of strategy on August 15th. So save that in your calendar. Same time, same place, the one and then finally, just a big thank you from us at Prodpad.

By all means, jump in and start your trial. If you want to start your own Now-Next-Later roadmap, get in there and give it a try. And in the meantime huge thank you to you, Teresa. This has been an absolute blast. I’ve absolutely loved having a chat with you today. Thanks for answering our questions [00:56:00] and going on rants with me about this.

Teresa Torres: Absolutely. Thanks for remembering my rants. I appreciate it. 

Janna Bastow: Excellent. This has been good fun. Thank you everybody for all the chats. Been keeping an eye on the questions and the chat here today, but there’s been a lot but really appreciate it and see you all here back next time as well.

All right. Bye for now.