One of the recurring tasks as Head of Product is coming up with quarterly roadmaps. Now that the fabulous product management team at commercetools and I have done this together six times, I feel like we’re getting somewhere good. Good enough to be worth sharing anyway.
Why roadmap anyways (and how to do it well)
I’ll admit it — when I started as a product manager, I was not a fan of building roadmaps. Hated it. Because they looked like this:
More of a project plan, listing all the outputs in a specific order (with mostly improvised box-sizes and dates), than a document that highlighted what we were planning…
Working to carve out solutions that address the problems they’re meant to solve.
At commercetools, we strive to have a working environment where everyone and every team feels, and is, valued/respected.
To strive towards something also means that we’re never quite satisfied with the status quo, and constantly look for ways to improve. That leads to having plenty of ideas, and no way to work on all of them at the same time! And how do we know if an idea is actually effective at solving a problem? Sounds an awful lot like the day-to-day challenges which product teams have…
commercetools has been growing a lot lately, and we want to continue doing that. Not only do we have new product owners, UX experts and developers joining, we are also growing areas around the core platform teams. More sales, more training, more support, more marketing; in offices all around the world to support the growing product we’re making.
Being strong believers in independent teams, we thought about how we can ensure delivering a great product while:
- Minimizing disruption and interference with how the platform teams work
- Simplifying collaboration for all the other departments that contribute to the whole product
Our…
