Productivity Archives | Lean Apps GmbH

4 Key Ingredients Of a Product Roadmap

Product roadmaps are like snowflakes. Each one is different and unique. That’s why there’s no single best way to create one.

But a good one will tell you the “why” behind the product you are building. It’ll give a visual summary of your product vision. It’ll be a living document with a changeable plan.

It’s part of every product manager’s job to create a product roadmap. Yet every product manager struggles with it.

Planning, creating and communicating a compelling roadmap are no easy feat.

From years of failing, learning and iterating, we have figured out 4 key ingredients to develop a robust product roadmap:

1. STRATEGY

In developing your strategy, you need to clearly explain:

Your product vision
Problems you are solving
Who your target customers are

Make sure you document this in a language that your stakeholders understand.

Challenges to overcome:

Your roadmap may be too far-sighted

Many product managers tend to include long term plans and deliverables into their roadmap. And sometimes these go as far as three to four years into the future. Don’t do that.

In an era of agile development, you would be required to make changes in product development according to changing market demands and technologies. That’s why it’s important to keep your roadmap fluid and high-level, so that it can accommodate change of priorities easily and quickly.

Your roadmap may not be prioritised

As a product manager, it is your responsibility to create goals that drive prioritization. And it is also your responsibility to ensure that your roadmap is aligned with your organisation goals.

This will help you make better decisions in choosing whether to pick your senior management’s favorite project or build a feature demanded by your target customer.

Using metrics will help you make better product decisions and drive your product roadmap more effectively.

Whatever metrics you choose, they should be aligned with your organisational goals and show results that matter. Choose a few of them but wisely.

For example, getting likes is merely good for company ego, but getting active users will actually bring revenues for the company.

2. PRIORITISATION

As a product manager, you often have too much data and you don’t know how to sort it out or to focus on what really matters.

Here are a few outlets from where you can sort relevant data:

Customers – Start with getting feedback from customers who are using your product. It could be phone or one-on-one interviews, online surveys, depending on how your customers prefer to communicate.
Competition – You can avoid a lot of failures by looking at your competitor’s mistakes. Your competition can tell you what customers like about a certain product, what they don’t like, and what they wish they had.
Sales – Make sure you include sales’ feedback and leverage their knowledge of the market and target customers. These are the people who will sell your product. It’s important to have their buy-in from the beginning.
Research – There are analyst research reports available in your category of product that can give you insight into what types of products work, with whom, and why. Combine them with real-world data gathered by your own sales team to better align your stakeholders while building your roadmap.

Make broad strokes/themes

Given that the roadmap should be high-level strategy, make sure you create broad headings/themes under which you can put in clusters of similar features or initiatives.

You could pick a few high-level goals you want to achieve. Ideally, they should not be long term. They should span one or a few releases, but never be feature-specific. They can contain one or more epics though.

The biggest advantage of this approach is that you can switch features in and out of these themes without disrupting the roadmap.

How to Prioritize?

Engage your entire team to prioritize to get their buy-in early on.
Focus on high-level goals rather than details.
Cluster multiple initiatives into strategic themes.
Evaluate what value each theme brings to customers. Depend on customer value rather than customer opinion.
Examine how much level of effort is required to accomplish a theme. The level of effort could be defined as all the costs borne by the team, business and even customers — time, expertise and money — to bring an initiative to its completion.
Learn to say NO to feature requests that might seem like easy wins, but in the end add no significant value to the product.

3. EXECUTION

A great way to collaborate across your organisation is to empower each of your stakeholders to drive their own initiatives within their field of expertise. And you as a product manager should put these initiatives together into the big picture for the executive buy-in.

Here are the 3 most popular types of roadmaps:

Timeline-based

A timeline-based roadmap will show your initiatives in the context of time. It will visually communicate how long you will take to accomplish every initiative in the order of priority.

A word of caution here: keep your dates high-level and avoid being too specific. Your deadlines should not be the focus of your roadmap. Your strategic priorities should be.

Here’s an example:

Roadmap without dates

This is the kind of roadmap that focuses on how you achieve your goal rather than when. Instead of specific dates, you put your initiatives in order of priority .i.e what must get done first.

Here’s an example:

Kanban

Kanban roadmap shows priorities and progress/status at each stage of development to the stakeholder. You plan according to the amount of work in progress and your team’s capacity. As a result, you have more focus and transparency throughout the development cycle.

Here’s an example:

4. COMMUNICATION

Communication is just as iterative as the process of planning your roadmap. You need to have buy-in of your stakeholders at every step of the way.

Planning: You can use a high-level roadmap to talk to your executives about the themes that you’ve zeroed in on as the most important for your upcoming planning period. Show how each theme on the roadmap aligns with the product vision.

Prioritization: Get all your stakeholders involved in ranking their priorities. Make the whole process transparent to get cross-functional buy-in. They should know from the onset why certain projects are prioritised over others.

Execution: When your vision is converted into action, make sure that each department knows how their work is contributing to the big picture.

Release: Before the product is handed over to the sales/marketing team, make sure you communicate how your product solves customers’ problems and what value it brings to them. This will allow the sales/marketing team to position and sell the product successfully.

Tips to get cross-functional buy-in:

Tell a convincing story and show the ‘why’ behind every initiative on the roadmap.
Start with the big picture and then zoom into specifics. Tell the ‘why’ of your strategic goals before getting into the details of ‘how’ and ‘what’.
Make it clear and concise. Your product strategy should be distilled into a clear message with obvious takeaways for stakeholders.
You should be able to justify your prioritisation with data and collaborative planning.
Your initiatives should be able to show the customer value they bring.
Tailor your message according to the stakeholders you are facing. If you are dealing with top level executives, communicating your high-level strategy would be crucial. Whereas if you are dealing with developers, you could talk about specific release plans and contribution to the bigger picture.
Tailor your language according to your audience. If your audience is non-technical, dumb down the technical terms and jargon to describe features and title initiatives.
Show a high-level completion of each initiative as percentage completion without diving too deep into details on your roadmap.
Use a broad color scheme to distinguish the status of each initiative on your roadmap.

You can also check out the “Checklist to create your Product Roadmap” here

One last reminder

The more aligned you are with the interests of your different stakeholders across the organisation, better are your chances of succeeding with your roadmap.

Get cracking!

No risk, no reward: Why teams are being punished for high-stakes innovation

Digital transformation is one thing, but true innovation is another. It’s twenty-five years after the first PC was invented, thirteen years after the first iPhone was released, and five years since Space X’s reusable rocket, all major innovations that have changed the way people think about invention.

These three companies have one thing in common, which is that they have teams and budgets dedicated to blue-sky innovation. Unfortunately for existing, non-technology based companies, these types of creation are impossible standards to live up to. Most organisations have existing products and services that need to create revenue, and technology is used less as an end in itself, and more as a way to add value to the current offering.

There are three ways that companies typically use innovation to enhance their products and services:

Improving operational efficiency
Creating new revenue models
Better their customer experience

But in the process of pursuing these goals, not all teams can afford to fail. Failure in an organisation that makes FMCG products, or one that manufactures vehicles could mean that these teams lose their jobs. It can be frustrating trying to compete in the same innovation race as companies like Google and Tesla. And unfortunately, most teams are not incentivised or encouraged to push for greater innovation.

Here’s why we think that organisations are dooming their innovation efforts to fail, and what we can do about it.

1. In order to innovate, you need to take risks. But risks are scary, failure-prone and expensive; naturally teams don’t want to risk anything!

Fail fast – right? We’ve heard the fail fast sentiment so many times that it’s almost lost its meaning. Besides, “failing” is a very different concept across different industries. Tech giants in Silicon Valley can write software, launch it, see how it works, and then fix it. In the rest of the business world, when we’re launching a new sneaker, or pharmaceutical product, or car, there’s no room for abject failure.

Solution

Forget failing fast. Instead, test fast. Smart teams know how to break their highest risk assumptions into small, testable chunks, and get them in front of users as soon as humanly possible. Don’t worry about the fidelity or about how perfect the product is. Just test your highest risk assumptions to make sure you’re getting qualified customer or user feedback so that you can adjust or move forward with confidence.

In order to test whether an idea is a success or failure, you’ll have to make sure you have user data. That means you’ll need to know how to quickly test your assumptions. Our favourite ways to test include landing pages, social media campaigns, explainer videos and shadow buttons. These lean experiments will allow you to build, measure and learn, instead of guessing, building and failing.

2. People are geared towards getting promotions, and you don’t get a promotion if you have a major failure under your belt.

There’s a stage in every team’s career where they have two options: Take a huge risk on a radical new product or service, or go with the safe option and make sure it succeeds. It’s a painful reality that we are not only wired to avoid risk, but the companies we work for are actively discouraging us from taking a chance. And the creation of vanity metrics assists the process, allowing teams to fudge results to create the illusion of success. The product might have 100 sign-ups, but nobody converts, and that’s a problem.

Solution

First, identify and eradicate vanity metrics. Ask your teams the following questions:

Which marketing channels are you using for this product?
If teams are using every available marketing channel, it means they don’t really know who their customer is.
What is usage and/or retention of the product like?
Sign-ups are one thing, but actual usage is another. Make sure that the product is being used and that customers continue to use it.
What is your most critical and high risk assumption? Did you test for it?
It’s easy to address questions that we know the answer to, but the most important challenges to address are the unknowns.

Then, create success metrics that actually mean something! Matching your customer needs to your business goals is, without a doubt, the greatest challenge companies face today. That means that before you start any project, you need to know what it is that you want to achieve, and then give your teams the freedom to get there, even if that means sometimes not achieving your objective. Being punished for taking the hard path is not going to help you, or your organisation’s long-term success, so make sure there are good reasons for your team to take calculated risks.

3. The task of “innovation” is too big. Incremental change is not encouraged or recognised.

Leadership is encouraging teams to create the next big thing, but the reality is, you probably don’t need a fancy AI solution to your challenge. Innovation, in its purest and most delightful form, is not always sexy. Here at Lean Apps, we love products and services that are so obvious that they seamlessly and quickly fit into your life – you almost can’t imagine life without them. Innovation is incremental, and by using the build, measure, learn framework that we use at Lean Apps, you can work incrementally towards your next innovation breakthrough.

Solution

Understand and reward incremental change. There’s huge value in marginal gains, and this approach is far less risky than hedging your bets on a larger, more radical solution. The iPod was an iteration on the mP3 player, the reusable rocket is an iteration on the standard rocket, Venmo is an iteration on traditional banking apps. Look at what you’ve got, and think about how you can make it better – not how you can reinvent the wheel. Whether its gathering data and using it correctly, or improving your supply chain, or heightening your customer service capabilities, the answers are often right in front of your eyes.

Finally:

Incentivise your team to take calculated risks using the tools that we’ve listed above. And enjoy the process! Testing fast gives a sense of accomplishment and understanding that traditional waterfall development doesn’t – you’ll be stunned at the results, and how excited your team is about taking next steps.

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for more innovation tips, lean development advice, and general tech hacks.

8 Essential Chatbots You Need to Know

Man: I love you Siri.

Siri: Oh, I bet you say that to all your Apple products.

Man (chuckles): Ok tell me what you are wearing?

Siri: Aluminosilicate glass and stainless steel. Nice huh?

Man (chuckles): Do you think I am fat?

Siri: I’d rather not say.

Siri is just one of many feisty chatbots that is fooling humans online. Some of these types of chatbots are so smart and funny that you would prefer to interact with them than real humans. And unlike humans, they never get impatient, or become unavailable on national holidays.

But before we go on flirting with the idea of making chatbot friends, let’s find out what these types of chatbots really are. They are computer programs designed to simulate human conversation with users through web-based applications or stand alone apps.

And believe it or not, by 2020 it is estimated that over 85% of customer interactions will be handled without a human. There are many types of chatbots that are already going far beyond performing routine tasks in various fields.

Here is a list of 8 most important use cases of chatbots across different industries:

1) Shopping Bot

Each time a walk-in customer has a query, and it goes unattended, the retail store loses business. Thanks to shopping bots designed to be virtual shopping assistants, the purchasing journey for both customers and sales staff has become very easy.

Now let’s say a customer walks into a store looking for a pair of trousers. He/she wishes to have a certain material, size and style of the trousers. The bot gathers information from various sources and then relays it in the form of pictures of the trousers available, the price range, the discounts and the in-store location. Bam! The customer clicks on his preferred choice and the purchase is done.

Example: Uniqlo IQ is an intelligent shopping chatbot that besides answering the basic shopping queries, also bubbles up product rankings by occasion, personal preferences, and even daily horoscopes. It helps digital window shoppers complete purchases by providing directions to the closest Uniqlo store with products in stock.

2) Lead Qualification Bot

Conversations can be the fastest route to revenue. But sales rep cannot be available to open conversations 24/7 with potential leads. That’s where Lead bots come in.

They are like smart sales assistants who target website visitors with personalized messages and then route them to appropriate sales reps.

Example: At Lean Apps, we have a chatbot that engages with visitors on our site, telling them what sort of services we offer – app development, UX, design sprint etc. This allows the user to choose the option that it is looking for and set up a meeting immediately.

And since we have integrated hubspot in the background, we are able to track all the information filled by the users and have our sales rep contact them personally through email.

3) Pharma Bot

Pharma chatbots are nothing short of medical advisers to patients that cannot immediately reach a doctor. These bots provide information on how to respond to certain health conditions, how to undertake a complex drug procedure or simply how to use a new medical device.

When patients feel too overwhelmed to read the fine-print written on drug packaging, these bots serve as digital assistants by educating the users on the side-effects and dosage of a certain drug.

Example: Florence is a health assistant bot that helps users stay on track with their treatment regimens by sending medicine-specific reminders and information. It can also locate physicians and pharmacies, and help users track their health information.

4) Productivity Bot

Let the bots do menial tasks while the employees get on with more important things! Almost all smart businesses are using productivity bots these days to automate their frequent tasks.

These bots are not dumb programs that can only respond to the same old clichéd questions such as when is the team meeting? Or what is the office wifi password?

You can customize these bots to practically do anything work-related

Example: At Lean Apps, we have created a slackbot named Potato that helps us raise impediments, list impediments created by others, delegate an issue, and raise sales and marketing tickets. On an average, we save up to 30 minutes everyday that would otherwise be spent creating tickets on Jira through the web option. And every morning, we can get a quick overview of different projects through release burndown charts that tell us the progress of various sprints.

5) Appointment Bot

Thanks to appointment bots, call-waits have become a thing of the past. Now you no longer need to slog through calls, or wait for the operator to connect you to the right department.

If you need to schedule an appointment, you can simply tell your requirement to the appointment bot, choose from the available slots, and bam! Within seconds you have your scheduled meeting. Just like that from anywhere on the fly.

It’s also a relief for the staff members who can get free from these routine, mechanical tasks and focus on giving a better service to clients.

Example: Andy is a scheduling assistant chatbot that helps patients set up appointments with the right doctor with few simple steps without requiring any sign-in, password, or download.

Feebi is a restaurant chatbot that helps diners to book a table online instantly without having to wait in queues.

6) DevOps Bot:

From creating new user stories in sprint planning to running deployment jobs, and performing analytics, there are bots for the complete life cycle of DevOps.

Example: At Lean Apps, we use Slack to connect to AWS. It’s called Clive and it allows us to stop and start servers from anywhere, even on a flight, through our phones. Just one simple command.

7) Finance Bot

Finance chatbots seem to have taken on more than mundane queries. They help clients manage their money better by suggesting them ways to save a certain amount each month.

By using predictive analytics and cognitive messaging, these types of chatbots are able to provide updates on customers’ accounts, make payments and even discuss options of getting rid of debt.

Example: Aida is a bank customer service bot that is able to handle requests like sharing client’s balances and reviewing statements with them. Aida helps employees open client accounts easily and more quickly, becoming nothing short of a full-time customer support staff member.

8) Music bot

There are many types of chatbots for artists and music companies that are already bringing artists closer to their fans.

Example: Katy Perry released a chatbot to promote her album Witness. And it allowed fans to interact with her, get ticket upgrades and use exclusive filters. Spotify chatbot calls its users by their first names and helps them create a group playlist among friends in Facebook Messenger.

Yet the music industry still has a long way to go. The show has just begun!

How I got 2-3 days of work done in 1 day?

The other day I decided to outsource self-management. In other words I gave the day off to my brain’s frontal lobe, which is known to make choices. In my case usually very questionable ones.

And being absolutely mindful of that, I surrendered to the idea of letting someone else make all the decisions for me for a day. Even the most ridiculously brain dead ones. Like when to eat, when to take a coffee break, when to exercise or when to take a deep breath. Only toilet breaks were left to my discretion.

The whole concept was to de-clutter and free up space in my mind so that I could concentrate purely on the most important tasks of the day: prepare a roadmap for my company’s blog, submit a sales pitch and write two business case studies. I would usually spread these tasks over three days or so depending on my ability to procrastinate or my inability to work for hours at a stretch.

That’s one of the perks of working remotely. There is no one to hold you accountable for your time, space or behaviour. And the only organ (brain) that perhaps has a loose leash over your day is also exceptionally smart at finding ways to succumb to wasteful distractions.

Losing 5.5 hours doing nothing everyday

“According to research, most people achieve only 2.5 hours of actual work and lose about 5.5 hours in low or no-value tasks, distractions, interruptions, meetings, calls etc.,” said Dr. Antoine Larchez, my decision-maker for the day and usually known as productivity/happiness coach.

He welcomed me. And nine others like me. (Basically individuals that find themselves easily distracted and sucked-up into social media trash during work hours.) Into a spacious, white room. Adorned with big green chakras on the facing walls.

We were asked to put our phones on airplane mode and close all our browser tabs and windows on our desktops. Productivity Boost Day! That’s what we had all signed up for. Some of us were there to finish our most dreaded/procrastinated tasks. And some of us were there to break the monotony of our usual ways of working.

I belonged to the latter group. I wanted to test if I functioned any better when left to the devices of another person. But before I could get comfortable about settling in to spend my day in that atypical room, Antoine got us all up on our feet. Asking us to start with jumping jacks.

Signing an emotional contract

After few giggles here and there, some hand-leg coordination exercises and a clapping circle, he asked us to commit to our goals for the day. The tangible outcome of our goals was put up on a white roll out sheet in front of the room as a symbol of accountability. We also committed to paying a monetary fine on account of failing to reach our targets.

Each of us betted anything from €10 (INR 700) to €50 (INR 3,500) bucks depending on the significance of our goals and available cash in our pockets. Likewise, we were allowed to reward ourselves if proven successful in achieving our goals. Some of us rejoiced in the idea of going to a movie afterwards, reading a book or simply taking a day off.

It was like signing an emotional contract. To stay focused and perform during the day. And refrain from social distractions in all forms. Online and offline.

Working in productivity capsules

The whole day was divided into six time-bound productivity capsules of 50 minutes each. The room would fill up with music each time we completed a productivity session.

At one point I felt, it was all about following commands. When Antoine said, “Stop working,” we stopped. When he said, “Show me burpees,” we showed him so. When he said, “Start working,” we started so. And when he said, “relax and go into a happy place in your imagination,” we did exactly so.

For some of us, it was like having a Guru that knew what worked best for its disciples. For others, it was basically mirroring a behavioural pattern that looked pretty productive.

At the end of the day, most of us got into a synchronised work flow. Punctuated by music and dopamine releasing exercises. That prevented us from slacking off every now and then. And anytime we found ourselves branching away from our main task, we took to the ‘Not-now pad’: a piece of paper set aside to dump all our ideas or to-do lists for later.

A hack or structure?

I am not sure if I have nailed a new productivity hack. But it’s definitely worth a try. To set aside a day when you resign from the position of being a self-manager. And just be the agent of execution. Following instructions. And letting someone more experienced design your day. It could be a coach, a scrum master or a team member on roster.

I am sure every CEO would like the idea of having at least one Productivity Day in the week when employees are allowed no distractions or meetings. A pure getting-things-done day to focus and perform!

At Lean Apps, we are planning to turn Wednesdays into the Productivity Boost Day of the week. “And if all goes as planned, we might soon be looking at a four-day working week in our company,” said Narjeet Soni, CEO of Lean Apps.

This article originally appeared on yourstory.com

Category: Productivity

4 Key Ingredients Of a Product Roadmap

1. STRATEGY

Challenges to overcome:

2. PRIORITISATION

Make broad strokes/themes

How to Prioritize?

3. EXECUTION

Timeline-based

Roadmap without dates

Kanban

4. COMMUNICATION

Tips to get cross-functional buy-in:

One last reminder

No risk, no reward: Why teams are being punished for high-stakes innovation

1. In order to innovate, you need to take risks. But risks are scary, failure-prone and expensive; naturally teams don’t want to risk anything!

2. People are geared towards getting promotions, and you don’t get a promotion if you have a major failure under your belt.

3. The task of “innovation” is too big. Incremental change is not encouraged or recognised.

8 Essential Chatbots You Need to Know

How I got 2-3 days of work done in 1 day?

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