working and managing stakeholders meetup. notes

‘tis the season of events and networking. Yesterday, some people talked and some people asked about product management, roadmaps, and managing stakeholders.

Takeaways:

• Every project has a driver; be it from UX, engineering, marketing, program management (hello!) – it’s the person who invests the effort and puts in the energy. It’s someone’s role (not job) to stay on top of questions, answer, redirect, inspire and assist. Good.

Roadmap comments:

• The roadmap should be transparent, open to all stakeholders. But for those who need a bigger picture, organized to zoom out. We have stories (detailed), epics (well on their way to detail); maybe we should consider a higher layer (features?). The height of our roadmap(s) takes effort to even understand, and the expectation is to manage
• The whole team can contribute to the roadmap; ideas can be ignored, attached to existing plans, or evolved into new stories/epics/features. How others do this? e-mail with a touch of machine learning, to apply labels managed by specific product people
• The better tools (better our Jira plugin, at least) to manage roadmaps also keep stakeholders about changes to priority
• Here’s a good rule: sell the current product (not future features); you don’t get the commission on promises :D              

Growing a team comments:

• Keep asking yourself and the squad: Did they learn something new? Do they own a feature? Did they help someone else today? Are they (still) happy here?
•  “enter meetings prepared to be the stupidest person there; might be true more often than not”; it can help move past conflict, get to the basics, ensure a better understanding for all in the room
• What to read: The Inmates Are Running the Asylum

Come to meetups. They’re nice.