Move to the next level with ProdPad’s help<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Supporting you as product managers to be the best you can be, both as individuals and within your organization, is integral to ProdPad\u2019s ideology. We provide you with the tools you need to push towards success. I\u2019ve broken down how ProdPad helps you to transform into the type of product manager who consistently and effectively manages products that generate positive outcomes for both your customers and your business. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Move from opinion-based decisions to customer-based decisions <\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Innovation expert Steve Blank highlights the importance of customer-based decision making by saying<\/a>: \u201cNo facts exist inside the building, only opinions.\u201d You need to listen to what your customers are experiencing by collecting feedback on your product. Don\u2019t rely on what you or your key stakeholders think<\/em> when you have a catalog of customer perspectives and needs at your fingertips. Without customer validation, how do you know how your product is holding up? Is it truly solving customer problems? Without a customer-centric approach, you will build stuff that you think your customers want instead of what they actually need, resulting in mountains of tech debt and wasted development costs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n With ProdPad, you can easily link ideas and feedback together<\/a> to ensure the right decisions are made. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We\u2019ve said this time and again at ProdPad – remember when our CEO, Janna Bastow, did a thing on Twitter?<\/a> – but a roadmap full of dates will not do you or the product team any favors. I appreciate that a shift from deadlines and features to time horizons and themes won\u2019t happen overnight, so why not start by setting work to be completed by each quarter, and then gradually phase out time restraints altogether? Fortunately, it\u2019s still possible to show time on ProdPad’s lean, outcome-focused roadmap<\/a> so you can emphasize the problems being solved both now (with more detail and certainty) and in the future (with less detail and certainty).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Considerably more important than the number of features<\/em> your team ships each development cycle is the impact<\/em> those features have on your customers and the outcomes<\/em> they help to generate. Josh Seiden defines an outcome<\/a> as \u201ca change in human behavior that drives business results\u201d. Rather than adopt a \u201cfeature factory\u201d approach whose primary goal is to churn out as many features as possible (with questionable assumptions about their ultimate value), ask yourself what problem you\u2019re trying to solve and how confident you are that the delivered feature will solve it. Adopting this mindset means you\u2019ll become more focused on prioritizing work that is valuable and worthwhile. ProdPad\u2019s Ideas feature<\/a> allows product people to chart all ideas on an Impact vs Effort matrix to aid in relative prioritization of those ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Your organization needs to know what you\u2019re working on and the outcomes you\u2019ve generated. Stakeholders need to see that the strategy is being executed, the sales team needs an idea of what features are coming out soon, but you should also make sure you\u2019re transparent with your customer base. Let them know you\u2019re listening: tell them when you\u2019re working on solutions to their problem or when you\u2019ve released something that addresses feedback they\u2019ve given you. In ProdPad you can create multiple versions of your roadmap, tailored to each of your different audiences and with appropriate levels of detail for each, which is perfect for transparency, visibility, and gathering input on features under consideration. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve seen too many product roadmaps that end once the code for a feature gets pushed to production. A product manager’s job shouldn\u2019t simply stop once something has been released. It\u2019s critical to learn from the freshly released functionality so you can iterate and improve accordingly. When crafting an initial idea and building it out for development, make it a practice to predefine a set of success criteria and how you might measure them so you can easily determine whether it achieved the desired outcomes. Start documenting these outcomes so you and others on your team can incorporate what you learn into future work. It\u2019s these learnings that may go on to shape, or even adapt, the rest of your product strategy. The completed roadmap cards in ProdPad contain fields for tracking how well the shipped ideas met the desired objectives. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s all about striking a balance. Of course your customers need to be at the forefront of your product strategy, they are the ones for whom you need to deliver value. But a great product manager is able to ensure that they\u2019re aligned with the rest of the organization and working towards the same objectives. In ProdPad, user outcomes are incorporated by tying customer feedback and problems to the ideas making up every product initiative. Additionally, ProdPad has an Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)<\/a> feature to ensure that the desired outcomes (both business and customer) are identified and to measure progress towards those objectives facilitated by the relevant initiatives. <\/p>\n\n\n\nEmbrace time horizons and ditch timeline roadmaps<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"Better](\"https:\/\/www.prodpad.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/Timeline-roadmap-in-ProdPad.png\")
Measure success based on impact and outcomes rather than features <\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"Use](\"https:\/\/www.prodpad.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/Prioritization-char-in-ProdPad.gif\")
Be transparent with your organization as well as with your customers <\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Learn from the functionality you\u2019ve just released <\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"Use](\"https:\/\/www.prodpad.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/Objectives-and-key-Results-in-ProdPad-1.png\")
Consider both business and customer outcomes<\/h3>\n\n\n\n