In theory, a product roadmap might be flawless. In practice, things are a little more complicated.
Such is life working in product management, where the only constant is change. Product managers understand the volatility that comes with the territory and to get out ahead of it, they tend to focus their efforts where they’ll make the biggest impact: team alignment.
For Bec Powell, a group product manager at hiring applicant tracking system Lever, developing a product roadmap starts with a discovery phase, which encourages product leaders to evaluate their team members’ talents, the team’s body of past work and user feedback. When the roadmap is finally enacted, staying aligned — made possible by focusing on the end user and adhering to the company’s mission, objectives and key results — ensures that as change arises, the team will still reach their end goal.
We checked in with Powell and another product pro to pull together some tips on team alignment, maintaining momentum and how to change course when variables arise.
When developing a product roadmap, what steps do you take to ensure there’s alignment across teams from the get-go?
Whenever you’re developing a product roadmap, it’s important to take a step back and evaluate what stage your product team is at before you get started. For example, you may have some newer product managers who are experienced but don’t have experience in the industry you’re in; some internal mobility with folks who know the product well, but not the product manager industry as much; and some deeply knowledgeable product managers. Once you figure out where you’re at there, you can create a common denominator together for the product. Define what a product roadmap even is, as well as what it means for you, your budget, your timing and your customers. It’s so important to set contextual alignment across the board as well.
Then it’s great to look at your past, what your current product does and your backlog. Is there something you may have failed at? Why did it fail? Funding, execution and budget may have changed and you can attempt to execute in a better way.
Last but not least, it’s so important to take into account customer feedback and evaluate what they’ve been asking for and what’s feasible.
One great thing Lever does that I’d highly recommend is using the mission and company goals as a North Star.”
How do you maintain alignment throughout the development cycle?
There are so many ways to create alignment and maintain it throughout the cycle. One great thing Lever does that I’d highly recommend is using the mission and company goals as a North Star. At Lever, our mission is to connect people to meaningful work, and we all believe heavily in this, so we develop our company goals, or objectives and key results (OKRs) around this. Then if someone has an idea or when you’re building out the roadmap, you can ask, “How does this fit into our mission and our OKRs for the quarter? Where do we want this to go?”
One thing we always focus on is data and our process in harnessing data to make a product change. If we look at alignment in our development cycle and the data for the roadmap, we are able to see the order of operations and what will work and what will not. This creates sound data for alignment throughout the development cycle to keep us on track.
As project needs change, how do you reprioritize the product roadmap and keep teams aligned?
As needs for our product and better supporting our customers change, we look back to our company OKRs. Is this feasible and in line with what we’re building out for the quarter? Sometimes, requests from our customers or various teams take more time. In this case, we’re all about quick wins. How can we break down the ask into different stages and roll them out on an ongoing basis so we’re not bogged down but still addressing the ask at hand? This can give us more time to update features qualitatively.
One key component that keeps all of our teams on the same page is recruiter empathy. Since our product’s main users are recruiters, we make sure that we work with our internal recruiting team to see what we can do better and how we can make enhancements because they’re crucial to our success.
When developing a product roadmap, what steps do you take to ensure there’s alignment across teams from the get-go?
Every year, Envoy’s senior leadership team gets together to discuss and align on the strategic objectives and priorities for the organization. These priorities are broken into initiatives across multiple departments, but ultimately ladder up to our broader business goals and customer needs. Alignment and buy-in at the earliest stage of the planning process is critical in ensuring our product roadmap sets the team — and organization — up for success.
Envoy’s immigration technology platform is at the core of our service offering. Because of this, and because we want to empower the tech and product teams, we bring them into the fold as early as possible once priorities are set. Operationally, we implement a framework that drills down into quarterly roadmaps, bringing together all stakeholders to prioritize the projects that will have the biggest impact in realizing our objectives and meeting customer needs.
Once the quarterly roadmap is set, we break things down further into different swim lanes to help divvy up projects and ensure alignment across teams. While the roadmap can change, the goal is to deliver the maximum value to our customers while also meeting the company’s strategic objectives.
How do you maintain alignment throughout the development cycle?
This comes back to weaving the already-defined strategic priorities into the subsequent projects of the quarterly roadmap to really underscore our why. For example, when we re-platformed Envoy’s customer application, our goal was to make the employment-based immigration space easily accessible and as transparent and intuitive as possible for our customers. Immigration is complex and opaque, and the regulatory environment can be difficult to navigate. But by enabling users to understand immigration legal tech, we were able to dig in and solve real customer pain points.
Our roadmap served as our North Star, enabling us to identify the critical tracks of work that would deliver the greatest value to our users in tandem with our strategic objectives. By maintaining alignment, course correcting as needed, and empowering our product and development teams, we were able to completely rearchitect the front end, build a suite of impactful new features, and migrate more than 1,000 customers and all their data to the new platform. It was an ambitious initiative, and every employee at Envoy was involved in some capacity.
Empowered teams with a clear understanding of priorities are best equipped to develop innovative solutions.”
As project needs change, how do you reprioritize the product roadmap and keep teams aligned?
While our goal is to remain focused on our objectives and customer needs, sometimes pivoting is necessary. For our tech and product teams, the roadmap can be altered for two main reasons: a major business opportunity or a significant regulatory change to the U.S. immigration process.
Our work is often dictated by immigration policy changes from various government agencies. When there is a significant regulatory change, we have to quickly adapt and update our platform to minimize the impact to our customers and their foreign national employees.
Business opportunities are driven by senior leadership. But in both instances, updating the roadmap and looping in the product and development teams immediately goes back to our belief that empowered teams with a clear understanding of priorities are best equipped to develop innovative solutions. Regardless of the scenario, communicating changes to the roadmap to key stakeholders and to the product and tech teams is essential to keeping alignment in check.
When you provide teams with the information they need to understand priorities and think critically, they will collectively find the most innovative and efficient solution to meet the moment.
