Some journeys require a detour. Unexpected obstacles arise, and the path ahead suddenly looks different than anticipated.
Such instances demand an agile approach — one that allows teams to adapt and adjust their strategies in response to changing circumstances. The destination remains the same, but there are alternate routes to getting there.
Product managers are especially attuned to the various permutations a product roadmap can take. As stewards of an organization’s products, PMs constantly reimagine how to best structure their procedures in order to deliver maximum value to end users while maintaining alignment. This is especially true when things don’t go according to plan.
Even the most meticulously planned blueprints, after all, are susceptible to change. It’s the job of a PM to navigate the twists and turns — adapting and adjusting as needed to make each phase of the product a success.
Take talent-acquisition software company Yello, for example. The Chicago-area startup recently integrated with a third-party system whose licensing rules created the need to re-evaluate a product roadmap it had developed.
But rather than scrapping the entire initiative or postponing the product indefinitely, the company adapted its approach to ensure all stakeholders were on board with the revised plan — ultimately delivering a solution that better met the needs of its customers.
“A roadmap is just that — merely an intention, not a promise,” Yello Director of Product Management Geri Barrison said, commending her team’s ability to pivot when confronted with the unexpected.
“If the past 2 years have taught us anything, it’s that open communication and collaboration can get us through whatever comes our way.”
Built In Chicago met with Barrison, Milyli Director of Product Management Tim Randall and GoHealth Senior Vice President of Product and Engineering Wayne Young to learn how they keep their teams aligned behind a product roadmap — especially when those plans change.
GoHealth is a health insurance marketplace that makes it simpler to compare plans.
How do you ensure alignment across teams when developing a product roadmap?
At GoHealth, we always approach the development of a product roadmap collaboratively. This way, the resulting roadmap aligns with the goals of our various stakeholders. This can range from the marketing team to the engineering team to the licensed medicare agents who use the products we develop. By having everyone aligned on the business value of each roadmap item at the outset, we can anchor to that value when making decisions about our product investments — and revisit that anchor when priorities inevitably change.
Most recently, a strategic opportunity arose that required us to completely upend our roadmap in Q3 to take advantage of the opportunity during our busiest sales season. Since we operate our roadmap objectively based on the business value we generate, everyone was able to quickly pivot and rally around this new opportunity, instead of spending countless hours renegotiating our plan.
By having everyone aligned on the business value of each roadmap item, we can anchor to that value when making decisions — and revisit that anchor when priorities inevitably change.”
How do you maintain that alignment throughout the development cycle?
Consistent, transparent communication is key to maintaining alignment during the development cycle. Frequently, the team will run into issues where the work is more difficult than estimated or we experience unexpected blockers. Similarly, priorities or requirements might change during the development cycle. By maintaining respectful communication, everyone involved can evaluate the impact of these and identify opportunities to improve. This creates a high level of trust across teams.
How do project needs change during the development process?
Since we co-developed this new product in partnership with our insurance carrier partners, things evolved in real time as we balanced the limitations of our carrier partners in this short timeframe with providing the best, most efficient experience for our members and our agents. Anchoring back to those objective measures of business value, we were able to quickly triage these changing requirements without continually disrupting the work plan.
Yello’s talent acquisition platform is designed to offer companies a single solution for end-to-end recruiting, from sourcing talent to post-interview candidate evaluations.
How do you ensure alignment across teams when developing a product roadmap?
Alignment is the key to executing any roadmap successfully. In addition to the development and design teams, a close relationship with client success and sales is vital when creating a roadmap that adds value to both current clients and to the market.
Currently, Yello is working on updated user interfaces in a number of areas of the product. To get to a happy path, everyone must work together. In HR technology, it’s important to understand the clients and their needs more than anything.
We present our roadmap twice yearly at company meetings. We speak with the client success teams and sales to validate our research and make changes when necessary. Product plays an active role in user research, client meetings and with managing our client feature request process. We like a lean, mean, product machine — without the mean part.
We like a lean, mean, product machine — without the mean part.”
How do you maintain that alignment throughout the development cycle?
It’s important to understand everyone’s capacity and expertise. Weekly sync meetings with development, QA, product, design and documentation helps all of us understand where things are, and where there could be “gotchas”. We speak with clients throughout development, making sure to listen to the needs of the market, as well as the changes within the HR technology industry.
How did the project needs change during the development process?
Recently in integrating with a third-party system, the licensing rules of the third party created the need for us to re-evaluate our business rules, configuration recommendations and add additional functionality so that all needs were met to the best of our ability. This extended this specific feature two more sprints, which meant that decisions needed to be made.
In times like this, we look at the data: What will usage be? Is there another system that is more prevalent among our clients? We then validate that data with the customer success team. Fortunately, we were able to continue the additional two sprints, and we made a data-driven decision to descope the follow-up feature, while also ensuring that the work we are doing is wanted, meaningful and adds value.
Milyli builds secure, intuitive software that makes managing sensitive information easier.
How do you ensure alignment across teams when developing a product roadmap?
Constructing an effective product roadmap is an iterative process that requires team members to contribute from many departments. Input from customer advocates, designers, engineers, project managers, stakeholders and business leaders is essential to creating a great feature that delights customers and solves real problems.
As a smaller organization, Milyli is not exempt from the pitfalls inherent to product management processes that don’t adequately seek a diverse range of input across the organization. Product managers at Milyli move features through a cross-functional process that includes activities that engage someone from nearly every product-adjacent department. Common examples include working with account managers to connect directly with end users during discovery and whiteboarding solutions with engineering.
We recently launched version 3.0 of our Delegate product. Leading up to development, we frequently met with sales, marketing and support to discuss workflows, business requirements and problems we were solving. We incorporated feedback, answered questions and listened to concerns. The result was an aligned cross-functional team leading development.
In most releases, significantly larger features are not static things.”
How do you maintain that alignment throughout the development cycle?
In most releases, significantly larger features are not static things. It’s critical to continue learning as we build a feature, take what we learn, discuss it with stakeholders, customers and other teams, and regularly realign as development evolves.
At Milyli, we use a variety of mediums to build and maintain alignment. The most common activities are structured as part of our sprint process, including our biweekly stakeholder sync-up and sprint review.
In our stakeholder sync-ups, we discuss various topics, including what is currently being worked on, new risks or roadblocks, adjustments to acceptance criteria or requirements and their impact on other teams. While this rarely requires us to make adjustments to our development plan, it does serve as a way to help team leaders plan and prepare for their team’s role in a release.
Sprint reviews have grown at Milyli into an interactive and valuable review of features and UX from the sprint. Individuals from across the organization show enthusiasm about participating, both in celebrating the completed work and providing their unique perspective, often helping to improve our products.
How do project needs change during the development process?
It is not uncommon for the business requirement to evolve as development continues. Looking back at our Delegate 3.0 release, we hit several roadblocks midway through the release due to incomplete or missing application programming interfaces in the platform the release was being built on — most of which were assumed to be available at the start of development.
We quickly set up spikes to identify alternative solutions to these problems. Once adjustments were identified, we added and updated our user stories and sat with marketing, sales and support stakeholders to discuss. We reviewed the changes with them and their impact on the release delivery, and we quickly adjusted the timing of respective activities in reaction to adjustments to the development plan.
From a product management perspective, we also needed to update the roadmap. The adjusted timeline required us to shift and reprioritize features in the year’s product plan and communicate those changes to internal stakeholders and external partners. We were realigning expectations and timing well before release, allowing each impacted team to adjust their plans accordingly without feeling the pain of last-minute changes.
