Des Traynor on Product Roadmaps

thanks Ben so I think product roadmaps are interesting because they're basically the causes by which most colleagues fight and at least in my experience anyway I think products typically started really really simple and you know it's always fun to look just a little bit back here is for example Microsoft Word it's a pretty little product right very simple and on that well scoped and well defined this is word one dot oh yeah it's funny actually this style of text editor is coming back on OSX like they're not posting like new features undo and stuff and but yeah weird kind of groan it's easy to slide where it could but it is also you know think the second most commercially successful software product of all time so you know tread carefully if you want to market what it did definitely grow up right here's Salesforce this is Renae started right yeah it's pretty like that yeah they also call things like membership here like that's it you don't know the county of a membership and there's so many amazing benefits you can get get complimentary is the exhibit ape when you open a sales for to camp by June thirtieth nineteen I did like this is in grab an obviously Salesforce like it you know again super successful company it's fair to say that they've definitely added a couple of products along the way okay but like what actually happens here what happens is I think it starts out simple do you think you're working on this little perfect thing and then you get some little modicum of traction a few people are like and I think it's pretty cool I'll eventually like holy this is much bigger than I actually thought it would be so um if you haven't seen like the you know the best definition attraction is something like this right you're getting more users over time it's awesome how's that you know here at traction accident but like everything comes together right it's not just users you know users don't come for free users come with ideas and bugs and opportunities and more types users and teammates product requests and feature requests and more use cases and all of this just basically piles in and it's like this is we need to build really really quickly and that's kind of scary because if you do it all you know you could end up building something pretty months monstrous so you have this roadmap on how you decide what gets out gets off the roadmap is ultimately it is the best execution of your strategy I really fundamentally believe accompanies true goals can be found on its roadmap it's easy to say you want to be like innovative or descriptive or like you're user-friendly but like what's on the roadmap is actually what matters right um I didn't come we have like five key ingredients in our roadmap and I'm gonna talk to you about a couple of them and hopefully you find this useful so we iterate on existing product we have new ideas genuinely new ideas that we want to work on we obviously solve customer problems as I'm hoping the customers here know yeah we build features help scale to help her add help us work at scale and obviously we improve the quality of a product over time again hopefully some of you experienced that so let's just talk about a few of these new ideas are kind of quite interesting to me because they're the ones where it's very easy to to say you're doing it but not actually do it truly new ideas in my opinion are counterintuitive customers aren't actually asking for them the data won't support you building them they'll be dismissed as toys they're likely to fail the near impossible to justify and because we knew they actually by definition have absolutely no precedent so it's really hard to make a case for like let's do it because all of this shit's against you right and that's why I really like this quote by Allen Cooper who's a MOOC so detains the creator of visual basic but he's just a January phenomenal designer who said it's like you can innovate or you can predict to measure performance but you can't do both so you have to make this choice like if you really want to innovate you have to instill it in your team and your peers to hold each other accountable for when a lack of innovation has happened you have to ensure it's safe for teams to try new things and measure success not in like revenue generated but like in like new ideas attempted because that's the only thing you're trying to do right you're trying to try new stuff and lastly you have to ensure that new ideas can get into exploration whatever going through this extreme rationalization process rationalization is a meat grinder it takes really interesting ideas and just beats the out of them alright it sounded he checks them when it justifies I'm gonna pair them down and it reads Forrester reports and it concludes it's definitely no marker for this but like if you really want new ideas to happen you have to create a process by which new ideas can happen without someone coming in and trying to make a business case for it and one random example of this that we've been working on I still can't tell you it's a success because it's a new idea right is them some of you might know the intercom messenger if you don't this it's this thing here on the right it's basically how you talk to your customers Ravine intercom coast or how your customers talk to you if you were an intercom customer and we could do all sorts of fun things here like attachments like stickers like emoji like plain text like links all that sort of stuff and one of our engineers once thought like well wouldn't it be fun if instead of just all this text we actually put in video replies and this is him thinking wouldn't it be cool and of course if he had to talk to me I would have said that's it that's a terrible idea I'll give you the business cases against it the support team will not use it because it's lowered and typing and they all work together it's because we really noisy I'm pretty sure if you want to exchange data and hyperlinks and stuff like that it's no easy way to do it you can't speak it out that would sound stupid so thankfully it wasn't run by me or I talked he didn't talk to me for sure so do what don't the way you record these things but I just have to explain just explain in the next clip is you holding a spacebar to record reply and here is I believe the world's first spacebar selfie dance from one of our customers who's testing at the future here are video replies that are happening all around this is like truly a new way that like businesses and customers are communicating and you know we're onto something cuz we've got their mall using all right yeah always a good sign but like I say all that just again it's a good question to ask like it's like what ideas did you have that you rationalized debt and it's always we're tinkling with that in the product team are we being too rational here or should we not retry it because we think it's genuinely new another key ingredient is product iterations so an intercom where big advocates of the cupcake principle we were already on our blog post it's actually an idea from Brandon Shara from adaptive path but put simply the cupcake principle states if you're gonna say make a wedding cake and you're gonna get married in a few months time you have a few different ways you could go about it one of them will be spend a whole lot of time working on cake base then you spend a whole lot of time working on filling and lastly you spend a whole lot of time working icing and you put it all together and the day your marriage you like actually chocolate and Karen's disgusting in the oven doesn't work you know so like the idea being you know you basically find out right before it matters that it turns out it's a bad idea an alternative way to do this will be let's make a cupcake and see what happens here right on maybe when you're making the cupcake you like the open doesn't work we should fix that or like chocolate and carrot isn't actually a smart idea you know be ill you'll piece it together over time right and then you can scale it up to a cake and you scale up and that's how we think about this and in fact every feature in intercom kind of has its own roadmap for that exact reason which is you ship it you get feedback you plan an expiration you ship it you get feedback and because every time you add to the scope of your product you need to do this it's the only way that each feature will get better so a quick example of this in Ericom some of you might know the inbox insights feature basically gives you data on how on how your support team are doing with supporting our customer is what your response time is what your volume is and Michelle here is the product manager of our support product and she's asking it for feedback it is because right after we shipped to weed users on my watch we did we want to talk to him we want to learn things like what what are you trying to understand here what could make these better and of course lo and behold if you ask customers you're using a product I'll be using us what's going on here how can we help it better you'll get feedback you'll get lots of feedback and that will flow straight out that like all of this builds into v2 and the key idea here for me is that you know it's a mistake to chose things over wall and forget about them always plan on the future iterations every feature has its own roadmap the questionnaire is a Guelph feature is did you ship and then never revisit a third word thing we work on a lot of customer problems so this one's kind of a personal thing to me because you're all familiar with that Henry Ford quote I was represented by these two characters here I'd like a faster horse Anderlecht routing here's a horse done next problem we all got our me a great product team and I'm like that's not what you want to do when you're trying to solve customer problems and this is kind of a trite example but like - whoa rail example here is like feature quest I'd like a faster horse Oh watch the dog here is saying is so speeds important attribute what else do you care about and he'll say well speed is a big one reliability moderate stamina to could travel over long distances ideally a horse that I could ride and not get soaked if it's raining all these sort of criteria and you're like okay I'm not you can see herd up kind of forms you a mental model of what the actual job is that they're trying to do and what a good example of this was an exchange I had recently I I basically stated that a Google Calendar to slock HQ integration will be great it will tell you if someone's in a meeting or not and this is me exhibiting the classic thing that customers do I'm thinking entirely in terms of a solution as it exists in the world today and I was really impressed with the reply they said there's we'd like to make it better to know when someone's unavailable and why thanks for the suggestion and that's exactly what my problem is right I'm thinking in terms of an existing solution either see in the world today but they're applying with a generalized form of what it is I'm trying to do that's how they that's basically how you avoid this right well like customer feedback is tricky to Paris like they owe customers of expertise in their problem but they speak only in terms of like preconceived solutions they cannot predict their future behavior and they'll overstate an understate importance from time to time so ill if you look at like customer feedback is this like modulus blob you'll see something like this right here's all these conversations but what you need to be doing is grouping them together to find the commonalities so in this case here like communicate away status I'm one of these little bubbles and I'm saying hey it'll be cool if we could have a Google Calendar integration I'm sure somebody else is asking for status away status settings I'm sure someone else is talking about Outlook integrations and the idea is they need to solve it at this level because otherwise if you do all of these you're going to do like 100 different ways to do the same thing and that's a really that ends up in a real messy product so another good question to ask yourself is like what features did you ship without really considering the problem a lot of people talk about just improving quality so when you're going to improve a feature that exists you have to understand the quality importance satisfaction and frequency trade-offs it's you know all of these things are matter for different reasons quality how well executed is it today importance how important in the workflow is it satisfaction is how happier customers with it and frequency is how often do they use it so if you consider something like you know our reset password dialog is really shitty how much does that matter versus the screen that users see after login could be a little bit better you have to like balance these things because you got something that people rarely use and it's an edge case and it doesn't matter as much as something that every single person bounces in like often like one conclusion of happiness a lot is like that the most neglected screen people think about is the one you land in right after you log in right so once again everyone gets to but for some reason people are all that's doing let's work on something else the way of internet explains to people is to have this sort of axes in their head how often do people use it and how many people use it and for any given feature you can say well we should get people using it more or we should get more people using it and the question I'd leave you on that is like what features in your product are under used or under adopted that you should change them so your road map our road map is those five things I would bet yours won't be too dissimilar however what is distinct in my opinion is the actual formula right your road map for minute changes over time so when you're making the product when you're not sort of fragile embryonic sort of stage of your product you're only working mostly on new ideas because you got nothing there so far so obviously most what's gonna be new right but then as you start to have people using it you'll be pushed to make it good then when you have customers you'll be forced to solve customer problems and you can sort of see how your priorities may shift over time but if you always need to make sure that you're making a conscious decision here I said at the start I fundamentally believe a company's true goals are written on this roadmap so what does yours say about you Thanks

Channel: Intercom

Views: 29,639

Keywords: innovation, product management, product roadmaps

Id: VRduWvP2VLM

Length: 12min 27sec (747 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 17 2016