Roman's Product Management Podcast

It may not be pleasant to experience, but conflict is necessary to innovate successfully. Without competing ideas, it's virtually impossible to create great products. Unfortunately, many conflicts are handled poorly; they are hidden or result in personal attacks. In this article, I explain how you can skilfully navigate conflict and use it as a source of creativity and innovation for your product.

Developing a winning product strategy is hard. Keeping the strategy relevant and achieving product success on a continued basis is even harder. In this episode, I discuss how you can use the product lifecycle model to address this challenge. I explain how the model can help you make the right strategic choices, focus and evolve the product strategy, and proactively progress and grow the product.

The product roadmap is a popular product management tool that communicates how a product is likely to evolve. But despite its popularity, it’s not always applicable. In this podcast episode, I share three scenarios in which using a roadmap is not advisable. I explain why not using a roadmap is the right course of action, what you can do instead to plan ahead, and which steps you can take to get closer to developing a realistic, actionable roadmap.

The product strategy is probably the most important artefact in product management. But how do you come up with an effective strategy in the first place? How can you minimise the risk of offering an unsuccessful product and instead maximise the chances of achieving success? In this episode, I introduce product strategy discovery as a systematic, disciplined approach to help you develop a winning strategy for your product. Attend my Product Strategy and Roadmap training course: https://www.romanpichler.com/training-courses/product-strategy-roadmap/ Read or listen to my book Strategize: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0993499244 Episodes referred to in the podcast: Product Strategy and Product Discovery: https://www.romanpichler.com/podcast/product-strategy-and-product-discovery/Building High-Performing Product Teams: https://www.romanpichler.com/podcast/building-high-performing-product-teams/The Strategy Stack: https://www.romanpichler.com/podcast/the-strategy-stack/Everything You Need to Know About Product Portfolio Strategy: https://www.romanpichler.com/podcast/product-portfolio-strategy/Continuous Strategizing: https://www.romanpichler.com/podcast/continuous-strategizing/

A product team is a cross-functional group whose members work together to achieve product success. Most people would agree that the person in charge of the product, a UX designer, and one or more developers should be on the team. But if stakeholders should be included, is more contentious. In this podcast episode, I discuss two types of product teams, core and extended ones. I explore the benefits and challenges of using a larger team that includes the key stakeholders, and I share practical tips to make this approach work.

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. To learn more, attend my training courses and read my book Strategize: https://www.romanpichler.com/training-courses/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/0993499244

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. Download the Strategy Stack here: https://www.romanpichler.com/downloads/tools/Romans-Strategy-Stack.pdf Read the related article on my blog: https://www.romanpichler.com/blog/ Attend my product strategy and roadmap training: https://www.romanpichler.com/training-courses/product-strategy-roadmap/

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. To learn more, attend my Product Leadership Training and read my book How to Lead in Product Management. More info: www.romanpichler.com

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 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.

"Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team," Steve Jobs once said. This insight also applies to product management: As product people, we can’t achieve product success on our own—we rely on the support of others including stakeholders and development teams. This episode shares my advice on how to foster collaboration and form an effective product team in order to maximise the chances of offering a great product.

The product strategy is an important product management artefact. But despite its significance, it is not always effectively used. In this episode, I discuss ten common strategy mistakes I see people make so you can avoid them and successfully leverage the product strategy.

The product vision plays a crucial part in achieving product success: It sets a shared direction and helps create strong alignment. Despite its importance, there are two competing views of what a product vision is and how it should be captured. In this podcast episode, I discuss the different approaches and explain which one I recommend.

To create value, product people, stakeholders, and development teams have to work together. But when people collaborate, things don’t always go smoothly, and problems emerge. As the person in charge of the product, you should address these issues and offer constructive feedback. That’s often easier said than done, though. Asking people to change their behaviour can be difficult, especially when you are not their boss. To help you with this challenge, I have developed a new framework, which I describe in this podcast episode.

Change seems to be the only constant when it comes to software technology. Over the last ten years, microservices, cloud-based computing, augmented reality, blockchain, the Internet of Things, machine learning, and artificial intelligence have emerged—to name just a few new technologies. But as product people, we are often so busy with getting new and enhanced features delivered that we risk overlooking new tech trends and being overtaken by competitors. In this episode, I share three tips that help you spot new and potentially disruptive technologies early on so you can take full advantage of those that will benefit your product.