Roman's Product Management Podcast

The most amazing product strategy and product roadmap are ineffective if the stakeholders don’t support them. Without their buy-in, you’ll struggle to execute the strategy and find it hard to deliver the roadmap. But it doesn’t have to be this way. This podcast episode shares my tips to help you secure strong stakeholder buy-in to strategic product decisions, align people, and achieve product success together.

Outcome-based product roadmaps offer many benefits over traditional, feature-based ones including a strong focus on the value a product should create. But how can you introduce this new approach when an organisation is used to feature-based plans and stakeholders find it difficult to trust an outcome-based roadmap? To address this challenge, I introduce a four-step process in this podcast episode.

Markets, products, and technologies change at an ever-faster pace, and product strategies are in danger of becoming quickly outdated if they are not being adapted. To help you address this challenge, I discuss continuous strategizing in this podcast episode—an approach that looks at strategy as an ongoing process rather than periodical work. What's more, I offer practical advice on how you can implement continuous strategizing and ensure that your product strategy is truly adaptive.

OKRs—objectives and key results—are a popular goal-setting technique. But can and should you use OKRs on product roadmaps? What benefits does this approach offer and are there any drawbacks? These are the questions I’ll answer in this podcast episode.

For any business to succeed, it is crucial to make the right strategic decisions. To achieve this, you’ll benefit from using four different types of strategies: business, portfolio, product, and technology strategy. But that’s not enough. You’ll also have to successfully align the plans. To help you address these challenges, I have developed a new framework, the Strategy Stack, which I introduce in this podcast episode.

Being empowered can make all the difference in doing a great job. Sadly, not all product people have the authority they need. This observation is hardly new, though, and just wishing for more empowerment isn't enough. In this podcast episode, I explain what empowerment in product management really means. I help you determine how empowered you are, and I share specific tips to increase your empowerment.

Products often don’t exist in isolation. Instead, they are part of a product portfolio. Think of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, which belong to Microsoft Office. Such a portfolio benefits from having a dedicated strategy—a product portfolio strategy. But what information should it contain? Which template can you use to describe it? How does it relate to the overall product portfolio management work? And who should create and update the strategy? Listen to this episode to find out my answers.

Product discovery has become increasingly popular in recent years as a way to determine the right solution. In this podcast episode, I explain why you need a product strategy to succeed with product discovery, how the strategy helps you determine the right outcomes and opportunities, and how you can use the Product Vision Board to build an Opportunity Solution Tree.

Strong product leadership is crucial to offering successful products and enabling product-led growth. Unfortunately, there is disagreement and confusion about what exactly product leadership is and who should exercise it. Is product leadership limited to someone working as a head of product? Or can—and should—others lead in product management too? In this podcast episode, I share my advice to help you effectively practise product leadership and and become great at leading others.

The GO Product Roadmap is a simple yet effective tool to help teams create goal-oriented, outcome-based roadmaps. Despite its simplicity, I find that it’s not always correctly applied. To address this challenge, I’ve created a checklist, which I share in this podcast episode and which you can download for free from my website.