437: Product road mapping for executives to align customer needs and business strategy – with Maziar Adl

How product mangers can improve collaboration in cross-functional teams

Today we are talking with Maziar Adl, the co-founder and CTO of Gocious, an organization that creates product roadmap management software. When I met Maziar and he told me about his company, I asked why does the world need another roadmapping company given the abundance of current options to product managers. His answer intrigued me because it identified a clear pain point that isn’t getting enough attention. Then when I heard his backstory in technology leadership roles at Xerox and Experian and the challenges he encountered with product roadmaps, I was eager to invite him to be a guest on this podcast. As the title of this episode conveys, our discussion will weave together topics for aligning customers’ needs and business strategy. 

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[2:36] What problems have you ran into related to aligning business strategy and product work?

In product management, I often saw silos coming from top to bottom. The executive team makes decisions and translates those decisions to different parts of the organization, but mission for everybody to walk toward got lost in translation. Bottom up, there were also issues. The engineering team works on progressing the product but doesn’t communicate information back up to product management or executive groups.

The role of product management is extremely in flux. It’s evolving so fast. There are courses in product management, but 15 years ago you couldn’t get a PhD in product management and come out knowing how everything works. Product managers bring many skills together to make it work. The role isn’t well defined, and processes and tools are evolving too.

When I was the director of engineering, I often saw that what I understood the product to be was different from how directions of other departments in the organization understood the product. There was a big gap in communication at the executive level. That’s when I realized there was a need for a tool that can bring cross-functional teams together.

[6:52] Did you find a gap in the roadmapping tools that were available before you started Gocious?

There were two types of tools that were available. Many of the tools product managers use on a day-to-day basis are engineering-focused ticketing systems. They’re about cutting sprints and prioritizing user stories. An executive or someone in sales or finance cannot understand much from these tools about what product is coming out next month or next year. These tools don’t help product managers explain features to others.

There are other tools that do some of this work of explaining features for you, but they don’t show the portfolio of products. They aren’t organized in a way that somebody in sales can look at a product and see the history of innovation on that product or what else is coming into the market. These tools mostly show initiatives. You can see activities that are going on to improve areas of the product, and you can see how those initiatives are organized, but you can’t see how an entire product evolved over time. You don’t see the big picture.

I realized that if everyone at the company is on the same page about the company’s portfolio of products and can see the evolution of the products, it will make a huge difference in the way cross-functional teams come together to discuss the next stage of the products that have to come out the door.

[10:31] What was your experience at Experian?

I was the CTO in a part of the organization called consumer services. We had a direct-to-consumer product. We had a lot of feedback from focus groups and call centers. We had meetings to discuss opportunities for new products. Later, we went through a major transformation and started focusing more on driving the business from a c...