AMA TODAY! 🤓I invented the Now-Next-Later roadmap, co-founded Mind the Product & ProdPad

@graham_bird Thanks for the question, Graham! Firstly, it's essential to publish your roadmaps. Making them accessible to relevant stakeholders helps to provide transparency and allows everyone to be on the same page about product direction. It also builds trust! Next, always align your roadmaps with company goals. This provides clarity and also reinforces the roadmap's relevance/importance to your broader org objectives. And as always, regular communication is key. Whether it's through meetings, updates, or interpretive dance 💃, you’ve got to be consistently communicating changes, progress, and rationale behind decisions so you can get (and keep) buy in from various teams. And use ProdPad to help with consistency and upward communication of roadmaps. Eg. use it to manage your more detailed version, but then create saved views and published versions to match the needs of whichever stakeholders you need to meet with next.

@kiwidenny Thanks for the question Denny! When you're building a roadmap for a product that hasn't launched yet, you’ve got to start with clear objectives. For a pre-launch product, the immediate objective could be to successfully launch with a specific initial userbase. In the Now column, your immediate priority might be market research to understand your target audience and their needs. You'll be focused on developing MVP that addresses the core problem you've identified. Once you have that MVP, you'll release it to a select group for beta testing. The main outcome you're aiming for here is to validate your product idea, refine the MVP based on real-world feedback, and set the stage for a broader launch. Moving to the Next horizon, this is when you might officially launch your product. You'll also be doing marketing campaigns to drive awareness and user acquisition, so you might represent those on your Now-Next-Later roadmap as cards. As users engage with your product, gather feedback to understand what's resonating and what might need iteration. The goal for this phase is to achieve your initial user base targets, gather insights for product improvements, and maybe start generating revenue. Lastly, in the Later phase, your sights are set on the long-term. Here, you'll be looking to scale your efforts, expand the product's features based on user feedback and market demand, and maybe seek out strategic partnerships to enhance your product's reach or capabilities. The long-term outcomes might be things like making significant progress towards your revenue goals, establishing a solid and growing user base, and positioning your product as a go-to solution in its category. I hope this helps! See you back here on Monday, we'd love a review and upvote for ProdPad 😁 https://www.producthunt.com/prod...

@antmurphy Ha, an age old question indeed! Here’s the secret though: It’s a fallacy that a Now-Next-Later roadmap CAN’T have dates on it. We don’t live in la-la land. If something has to have a date milestone communicated against it, then you can and should put that on the roadmap card so people on the team know what fixed commitments are coming at them on the horizon. What the Now-Next-Later format allows you to do is to step away from the problem of having dates for EVERYTHING, which is what a timeline roadmap has. Because, really, do you need to specify a date for everything, or are you really just penalizing yourself by putting deadlines on things where you could otherwise give your team a little space for flexibility? If there’s the occasional deadline, that’s probably fine. Externally driven, or strategically important dates sometimes just need to be communicated. But if the leaders are insisting that everything has a date… really push back and ask why. Do they think you won’t deliver as fast if you don’t have a barrage of deadlines? Are they unsure of how they can market effectively without knowing exact launch dates? Have they promised a bunch of stuff to customers and are now passing the buck to y’all in the product team? I’ve written a guide on how move from a timeline roadmap to Now-Next-Later and how to handle all of these objections and more (check the last page): https://www.prodpad.com/resource... If you found this helpful, please be sure to check out our launch on Monday and give us a good review if you like what you see! https://www.producthunt.com/prod...

@askotzko Thanks for the questions, Andrew! Roadmaps today: The shift in how we work has led to more flexible and adaptive roadmaps. The Now-Next-Later roadmap is here to stay! The unpredictability of our current world means roadmaps aren't set in stone anymore. Communication is now more frequent, and transparent, and involves a wider range of stakeholders to make sure everyone's on the same page, to keep up with the pace of change and the lack of face-to-face interaction. Burnout: Regularly check in with team members wellbeing and workloads. We have a weekly pulse score but then also regular 1:1s and a team ready to adapt to individual needs. We offer regular (extra) days off throughout the year, mental health resources, and, perhaps best of all, try not to work to external/arbitrary deadlines which inevitably create crunch periods that require recovery from. Most of all, we try to create an environment where people feel like they can speak up if they are snowed under. Outcomes v Output: While the focus is rightly on outcomes (the impact of the work), discussing activity metrics can still be valuable. These metrics give context to the efforts made and can highlight areas of improvement. For instance, if a team conducted numerous customer interviews but didn't gain much insight, it might be time to reevaluate the interview process or the questions being asked. So, while outcomes are the main goal, activity metrics can provide valuable insights into the journey there.

@jen_swanson_tuckpoint Ha! Hi Jen, and nice to meet Aimee and Stu too 😅 With generative AI, I think people got pretty over-excited about what it could do, but when you really start playing with it, you realise it’s powerful but has clear limitations. It seems more powerful than it is, though, because of its masterful command of language. Sorry Aimee 🙈 AI is a tool in our toolbelt. As product people, we shouldn’t lean too heavily on a tool, nor shirk it, but understand it for what it is, and what it’s capable of, and craft products with it accordingly. This command of language is incredibly useful in some applications like product management, where writing with clarity is needed, but not for the sake of the writing (it’s a means to the end, really), which is why we so enthusiastically adopted it. It’s also good at coming up with next-in-series, which is great for brainstorming, helping people spot gaps in the stories they’re trying to capture, for example. And it’s also good at concise, constructive feedback, and asking follow up questions, which is why it’s working well as an AI coach. But don’t worry Stu, it’s not going to take over the planet 😜 Thanks for the question, Jen! Hope to see you back on our launch page on Monday 😎 https://www.producthunt.com/prod...

@ines_liberato Thanks for sharing the love about ProdPad! 🥰 And yes! There's actually already some prompting in there around privacy and accessibility (so the ideas that come back have these considerations in mind, or are flagged in the risks and challenges), and we're testing some tweaks around considering ethical or other responsibility/accountability angles that product people should keep in mind.

@sjohnson717 A question as old as time. Or at least as old as the gantt chart roadmap 🙈 Utlimately, a roadmap shouldn't be driven by dates, because it's bad for business. It results in tech debt stacking up, and team members getting less done, and coming out of it feeling less autonomous and happy. It introduces risk into the business. Risk that the wrong thing is built, or that market opportunities are missed, or that expectations are left unfulfilled. Teams could avoid so much heartache by not relying on a date-driven format of working. This doesn't mean dates can't EVER appear on roadmaps. If something is externally driven or strategically important, it can still be communicated on a lean roadmap. It just doesn't assume that EVERYTHING on the roadmap has a date, just because the format makes it so, or because some pointy-haired boss thinks it's going to drive things faster (it won't). You can show high level deliverables on a Now-Next-Later roadmap, or finer-grained levels of detail on your release plan. Generally, the execs and other stakeholders around you want dates on the roadmap as it gives them a sense of control and knowledge, and that's hard to give up, even when we shine a light on it and point out it's a false sense of control and knowledge (us PMs have been making up dates on the roadmap since the day we were asked to tie anything down, and we all add huge amounts of buffer so we don't get caught out getting it wrong, so even if the roadmap is in control—delivered on time—the team undoubtedly delivered less than if they were allowed to work in a lean way in the first place). Hope this helps! If it does, please make sure to check out ProdPad and lend your support to our Product Hunt launch today 😎 https://www.producthunt.com/post...