I accidentally went viral
You're all very welcome
A few fun things have happened over the last month, primarily that I went viral (twice!)
Here’s what you missed:
How to build a Now, Next, Later roadmap without the chaos
I included this in my last newsletter, but worth bringing back! I recently ran a little workshop with our product team, aligning around our OKRs, KPIs, and building out our roadmap.
When is it time to move on from an OKR?
As a follow up to the previous blog, Saeed Khan reached out with an excellent question: When is it time to move on from an OKR? How do you tie this to a Now, Next, Later roadmap if we’re not talking about dates? 🤔
How to prioritize bugs on a roadmap
If the question triggers you… well, it triggered me too. I ended up posting on Linkedin about this, and accidentally hit 63,500 views in under a week.
Quite predictably, the majority of people decided to tell me how to do this, proving that far too many people jump to answering a question without taking the time to read.
Our job as product leaders is not to tell someone how to do something 🚨 It is to listen, digest, and then break down the question properly: what are they really asking? How can we help them move past just the base level question and think more holistically?
When we do this, we empower young product managers to:
Empower themselves and their peers to ask the right questions
Set the right expectations and communicate properly
Become autonomous and build confidence in their work
Build relationships with trust
A lot of people assume that when someone asks “How do I do X?”, they’re simply looking for a step-by-step answer.
But more often than not, they’re grappling with something bigger—whether it’s unclear expectations, misalignment between teams, or a fundamental misunderstanding of how their work fits into the broader strategy.
Instead of reacting to the surface-level question, we should be asking ourselves:
• What problem are they actually trying to solve?
• Where might confusion be coming from?
• Is there a deeper knowledge gap that needs to be addressed?
• How can we help them move from execution mode to strategic thinking?
Would love to hear what you all have to say!
Until next time,
Andrea