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Crafting Effective Product Roadmaps & Decoding “Technical PM”

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 should a product roadmap be written?

2) Am I interpreting “Technical PM” correctly?

3) Do companies hire PMs with 2-3 years of experience?

Top Learning Resources:

1. Product Manager vs Offer Manager: what’s the difference?

2. True purpose of MVP

3. Scenarios, user stories and use cases in product management

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Top Discussions

Question 1How should a product roadmap be written?

I’m a novice in the field of product management, and I’m responsible for writing the product roadmap. Can someone kindly give me some advice on how to proceed? To what extent are the details to be covered? It would be quite helpful if you could offer some templates.

– Carolyn Miles

Discussion

A] I hate it when employers treat new PMs in this way. What are they genuinely hoping to accomplish with this?

What an absurd way to instruct someone, even as a thought exercise. “Go try something with no prior understanding about how to accomplish it or even where to begin.”

Here is a really high-level place to begin. Fill out each project (epic) with whatever pertinent information you may have based on the prioritized lists of projects your team hopes to complete over the course of the next six months or more, broken down by quarter. If your firm hasn’t already defined an epic, there should be some templates available online.

– Maria Wilson

B] Product Roadmaps (the super-aspirational, beginning-of-year variety) are typically created by more senior members of the product organisation who don’t perform the daily work with the products. I find it exceedingly unlikely that an intern with almost no organisational context would be hired for this position.

Building a product plan is not the best thing to assign an intern; work on genuine, legitimate product features would be.

– Lawrence Martin

C]  I won’t assign you the entire book, but “The Build Trap” does a great job of handling the topic.

There are roadmaps at all levels, from extremely detailed feature, component, or team level planning papers that lay out your plans for the upcoming few weeks to very broad strategic set of challenges.

The core of the roadmap is stating the challenges you want to address and the order in which you intend to do so. It’s intended to serve as a tool for gathering feedback on your comprehension of the product and what stakeholders want.

I like the now, next, later format personally.

– Nathan Endicott

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Question 2) Am I interpreting “Technical PM” incorrectly?

My most recent interview was the worst I’ve ever had. My expectations for the interview were that it would be a role for managing a technical product (defining needs/features, coordinating across teams, etc.), with the ability to step in and help out with technical skills as needed and generally have an understanding of the technical side of the product (structure, capabilities, etc.).

According to the interview, it appears like they are looking for someone to oversee production and development while assisting the product director by creating roadmaps and doing interviews on the side.

Has anyone else experienced this? Am I misinterpreting what Technical PM is supposed to be?

– Christie Dook

Discussion

A] ‘Stupid job title’ is a little aggressive.

There are certain roles that need insane tech understanding to push any features. For eg. In a consumer company like say Spotify, the pm who manages search feature should have thorough technical understanding of how ranking happens, what are the different methods used in increasing search relevance, how should the weights be shifted to allow new hits to be ranked higher.

If the guy managing the engineers is a non tech guy, the whole search experience will go down to support business requirements.

Consider products like AWS beanstalk or EC2 or S3 services, these are things mostly hardcore technical guys will be able to ideate around.

So yeah, technical PMs are meant to support and drive tech initiatives in the company.

– Karan Trivedi

B] You can achieve the same thing with a comma or dash and the area of focus the role is for.

It’s pretty easy to tell that a “Product Manager, Platform” job is going to be more technical than a “Product Manager, Onboarding Experience” job. Ditto with the actual product you’re working on. Everyone knows that you’re going to need a bit more technical understanding at an API product company vs a Functional SaaS app.

There’s 0 need to put “Technical” before the PM job title. Don’t even get me started on the nonsense that is “Product Owner”.

– Marco Silva

C] Except the way many HR departments work, if you want to pay someone more than someone else, you need to give them a different job title. So if you want to pay a premium for a PM of a certain product that require additional skills, you need a separate title.
I supposed that you could argue that “Product Manager, Platform” is a different title than “Product Manager, Experience” if you wanted. But in that case it seems like all you’re arguing is what words and punctuation we should use to describe a clearly different role.

– Risa Butler

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Question 3) Do companies hire PMs with 2-3 years of experience?

I’m coming up on 2 YoE at my current company as a PM and I’m thinking about applying to other places over the next few months.

Problem is most “entry-level” PM jobs I see on LinkedIn are 5+ years of experience or 0 years of experience (APM/MBA). I don’t think I have a chance at the 5 YoE jobs and I have no desire to run the APM gauntlet again.

Are there PM jobs at big companies looking for people with 2-3 years of PM experience? What would you expect from a PM with this level of experience if you were hiring one?

– Amy Walker

Discussion

A] I would apply for the companies asking for 5 years, especially if you have other experience prior to PM (i.e. not fresh out of school). Tiny startups are less likely to hire IMO because they’ll be looking for leaders who can function with a lot of autonomy and set product direction. I would target unicorns and midsize companies (FAANG probably worth a shot but it’s like winning the lottery).

– Marco Silva

B] Not sure about big companies but I am at an SME that hires a lot at this level. They likely don’t have a graduate programme and are looking for people that know the basics so can start contributing quickly but still have a lot of room to grow. Are you set on working at a big company?

– Ahmad Bashir

C] @AhmadBashir, I currently work for a large legacy tech company. I’m not dead set on working at a big company but I would like to improve my resume and increase my compensation as well, which crosses out most SMEs.

I’d trade both those things to work on a product I was incredibly passionate about though (ex. a game studio or an interesting consumer product).

– Amy Walker

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Top Learning Resources

Product Manager vs Offer Manager: what’s the difference?

An equivalent search for keyword ‘product manager’ simply returns various product management jobs. This is a classic case of term ‘overloading’ (applying multiple different meanings to the same term), and can cause confusion when describing what product management actually is.

True purpose of MVP

Minimum viable product (MVP) is a popular concept in the product circle. Product managers, designers, and developers are well familiar with it – but there is considerable misunderstanding and misguided assumption about what it is. For example – MVP is not the first phase or deliverable of a pre-planned project. This entirely missed the point!

Scenarios, user stories and use cases in product management

I had no idea what a Product Manager was when I started at Capital IQ, almost 10 years ago. I didn’t even apply for the job. A friend told me they were hiring, and I asked if there were any roles for people like me — engineers who liked Photoshop. After talking to a few people, I was told I’d make a good Business Analyst (their term for Product Manager, I’d later learn). The combination of business and analysis sounded intriguing, so I jumped on the offer.

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