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Persuading Stakeholders Career Growth Roadmapping

Welcome to our Product Newsletter, a biweekly email highlighting top discussions, and learning resources for product managers.

What We Will Cover In This Edition:-

Top Discussions: 

1) How to convince the stakeholders for a feature that they refuse to add, but would benefit them?

2) Thoughts on In-Office v/s Remote Product Manager Role for career growth?

3) What’s the benefit of roadmapping software?

Top Learning Resources:

1. Identifying good design in 6 steps

2. What are webhooks?

3. The agony and ecstasy of building with data

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Top Discussions

Question 1) How to convince the stakeholders for a feature that they refuse to add, but would benefit them?

Background to my current dilemma. I am working on recommendation systems. One use case we work on is sending targeted campaigns.

We have been working on a POC predicting which customers were more likely to purchase product X. The goal would then be to have the product X campaign target only those users with a high likelihood of converting and thus, produce a better conversion rate.

Additionally, those who have no interest in product X could receive something else more targeted to them. We can only send a limited number of campaigns per month, so you’d think this idea would go over well.

However, after our initial clustering of the data, we met with our stakeholders to present and get feedback. We learned they are not interested in targeted campaigns anymore because they don’t want to reduce the audience size and limit exposure. They said their strategy this year is “send to as many people possible in hopes of converting as many people as possible.”

So, my question is: Do we continue to work on the POC and try to persuade them with the potential benefits, or should we focus efforts elsewhere? I don’t want to waste my team’s time and we could explore other things, but I know there’s that saying about customers who don’t really know what they want – you know like the one about Henry Ford and how people would’ve asked for faster horses or something.

To summarize, I have a POC for a new feature that ideally benefits stakeholders and helps achieve their goals. Stakeholder doesn’t seem interested because it goes against their strategy, and I would need them in agreement to be able to validate the feature. So, there’s no hope to persuade with data. Do I continue with hopes of them agreeing to at least test the idea or just move on?

– Ana Rodrigues

Discussion

A] I have worked on the product in a movie studio, and they were never interested in anything that was not Shiney. They would constantly reduce the budget for infrastructure and platform while dumping money into VR experiences that our users did NOT ask for… some companies won’t listen… and some will. Such is life.

Build it and prove the value…because the company failing due to the wrong product, but you get to say “I told you so” isn’t worth it

– Rohit Kumar

B] Why is conversion rate your key metric? Optimizing conversion doesn’t mean you’re optimizing revenue.

If I were you and getting pushback, I’d ask myself are there bigger opportunities for impacting the key metrics that drive business? It’s the same pushback I get internally when I talk about recommendations and personalization and it’s not wrong.

But like another person said, if you truly believe they’re wrong you need money to convince them. Either run your own campaign for a large enough size to show the difference (can be hard with internal politics or such). Or get them to carve out a small batch of users that you believe would benefit from the treatment.

– Nathan Endicott

C] Suppose they’re really just a stakeholder like a marketing person who is going to be running the ad campaigns later. In that case, you need to convince someone above their level or tie it to a different strategic goal that is out of their area to justify it. E.g., If you’ve done a RACI chart and they are just ‘informed’ but being loud, you can tell them this is what’s best and you’re going ahead.

But… Are they just stakeholders or are they the people paying your salaries and bearing the financial consequences of their decisions? You don’t get to spend other people’s money on stuff they didn’t ask for, even as an employee thinking you are doing your job. Even if it means them losing money, it’s ultimately their choice to make. They also might not be telling you the whole strategy if it’s commercially sensitive to how exactly the company maximizes profits. That’s not to say you can’t build it, but rather: If you can convince them, you should build it. If you can’t, definitely don’t.

Getting alignment on ideas is a critical part of the PM role and you should see this as a challenge, to convince people, and only go ahead if you succeed. You definitely should not skunkworks it as a PM – while engineers can sometimes say they still did their main work while skunk working something only while blocked and justify it, as a PM being part of that would mean you’ve failed the key part of your role which is ensuring the engineering teams are delivering value in areas the business has approved business cases for.

–  Richard Soneva

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Question 2) Thoughts on In-Office v/s Remote Product Manager Role for career growth?

Hey, y’all. I’m currently job searching for a new remote product manager role and am navigating various companies’ remote work plans for 2022 and beyond. I am earlier in my career (graduated college in 2018, 2 years in PM) and haven’t worked in a traditional tech/product company or PM team before. As I’m considering options for my future, I was wondering what more experienced PMs felt about remote work. Do you think it’s important for collaboration, mentorship, and learning the ropes to be on-site? Do you think the industry’s best companies to work for will eventually be bringing people back into the office?

I’m currently in a high-cost-of-living area near a major city but would like to move to a cheaper, smaller city closer to my family and work remotely. However, I don’t want to permanently dampen my career prospects by only working remotely and not being in a city where I can easily go back to an office should I need to.

So my question for the group is – What has your experience been with working from home? What’s your company’s return-to-office strategy? How does WFH life compare to working on-site in your experience? Any advice?

Thanks!

– Angie Godwin

Discussion

A] I was in a similar position and had to start my first remote product manager gig out of grad school, remotely because of the pandemic.

The first year was good, although it was harder to learn and make connections than in a normal office setting. As time progressed, I felt more and more isolated with my growth plateauing. I recently decided to switch jobs for an on-site/ hybrid setting.

IMO it’ll be beneficial for the first 5-7 years to be around people you can learn from. Zoom/ Slack is good, but we discount a lot of social/ personal learning/ mentorship that can come from in-person interactions. In your situation, if you have a choice either work from the big city or live near your family and commute once in while to the closest big city. It definitely helps to be close to, if not within the top tech hubs.

– Bethany Grey

B] @BethanyGrey, The problem though is that people 5-7 years into their careers are more likely to be the people who want to work remotely, because they don’t need that in-person mentorship and are at the point where they’re starting families, placing less value on socializing at work, etc. Any company forcing people to come into the office is going to be driving away the very people who you want to have in the office to learn from.

I think you’re better off at a company that offers flex/employee choice on whether you come into the office and has a strong, intentional culture around growth and mentorship

– Jesus Rojas

C] Thanks for your response! I’m in the DC/Baltimore area so not in a top tech hub, but there is a good amount of tech in DC. I want to move to Baltimore but the economy there is not great if I would need to be in person.

I think my ideal situation would be to go into the office 1-2 times per week to get to collaborate and learn from people in person.

– Angie Godwin

D] “Remote work is less effective at building trust and relationships”.

But – there is one other side of the coin here:

I was an immigrant in Germany where, although the team was diverse on paper, it was a mix of White Europeans – primarily French and Germans. I am considered an extrovert and an effective communicator by people who know me personally.

But at that workplace I found myself sidelined: I was new, I was a non-EU, and I was the only dark-skinned person in the club. I executed a strategic initiative really well, heck I even speak some German, but the fratboys club remained aloof. But what about making some connections with another department? Nope! It was difficult because we sat in a room together and my manager was a master at micro-management.

I ended up moving on from that org within a year. Ever worked on a project where you really went above and beyond? I did. And yet, I was received poorly – that experience shed very negatively on my self-confidence.

Contrast this with my recent experience at a remote-only org where people were more than happy to know me and connect with me on Slack. We had thorough chitchat and I really felt I could connect with the team. And I can reach anyone in the org without some subtle pressure.

So, was the on-site work really effective for me? No, not at all.

We work async so if there are any quick chores, I can do them without issues planning a bit ahead. I have a better work-life balance: I can hit the gym without issues, and I don’t spend my time commuting, I don’t need to rent expensively so as to be near a metro/office, I eat healthily and don’t spend ~€150/month on a poor office lunch. My life does not revolve around work.

At the end of the day, “the claim that on-site is effective in building relationships and trust” should be taken with a truckload of salt. A positive-sum, remote org can give you above that and beyond.

– Naomin Wosu

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Question 3) What’s the benefit of roadmapping software?

So from what I know about roadmaps, it’s supposed to be a very high level. Some people just do “Now, Next, Later.” or some others just put items broadly for Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4.

Given this, all I do for roadmaps is to have a PowerPoint slide and I make new boxes and drag them around to update the roadmap. Is there more to it? Why is there advanced software like ProductPlan or Roadmunk?

– Mario Romero

Discussion

A] To me the point is that if you work in enterprise organizations there will be many roadmaps with a degree of interdependency and people with interests at varying zoom levels from team to exec portfolio level. Roadmap tools do help bring that picture together.

If you’re in a startup with a discreet end-to-end product area I kinda don’t see the point beyond what you’re already doing.

– Joel Schulman

B] Stakeholders in general are uncomfortable with roadmaps that take into account the unpredictability of software development, don’t trust the teams to meet their goals, and want to have the ability to micromanage the process as it’s in progress. Plus, most organizations are not set up to have teams that are self-reliant and able to independently meet their goals.

Combine all these and you get the need to provide roadmap software that makes it easy to continuously update and share a Gantt-style roadmap as it becomes immediately outdated and gives leadership the ability to easily view roadmaps across teams and within dev cycles. The higher quality of these visualizations gives the appearance of reliability that a simple excel chart or PowerPoint slide can lack.

IMO, you’re doing the right thing by not overthinking your roadmap presentation. If your current process works for you and your team and stakeholders, no need to be tempted by fancy roadmap software.

– Juan Allo

C] IMO the roadmap software is more for insights collection and tying it back to inform the roadmap.

For example, ProductBoard has a Portal section which can be externally facing for users to vote on which features are critical, important, or nice-to-have. You can embed this Portal into your own websites or products.

Anyway, ProductBoard can also integrate and pull in data from many other systems automatically and tie those back to roadmap items as well. The Insights tab for each roadmap item is where you can document other qual and quant data to tie to your decision-making.

PB will calculate a “user impact score” based on those user inputs and help you prioritize the roadmap.

That’s really more of the power behind it. It’s not meant for just looking at roadmaps at a high level.

I’m not familiar with Roadmunk or ProductPlan so can’t speak to those.

– Pauline Francis

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Top Learning Resources

Identifying good design in 6 steps

Art is subjective, it’s like a game where there are almost no rules. Design is different, and the fact that someone can put together a list of principles should already tell you that there are some rules to the design game. If there are rules, then we can tell whether or not these rules are being followed, which means that design is not subjective. However, to be fair, I can’t really say that design is 100% objective, there are always things that come down to personal preference that is determined by your culture and experiences.

What are webhooks?

The thing about APIs is that they’re passive – you need to send a request to get a response. APIs will never reach out to you, ask you how you’re doing, and why you’re behind on your car payments. Webhooks, on the other hand, are active – instead of taking a request and returning a response, they send out data when something happens internally.

The agony and ecstasy of building with data

It’s nice to have a metric that everyone can rally behind. It’s easily explainable. It’s simple. You can have a giant monitor in your office that displays the number ticking up in real-time and it will feel like Mardi Gras watching that number dance.

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