 Hello everyone, my name is Rahul Gorkar and I am a senior product manager with Amazon. I hope you folks are having a wonderful day so far and thank you for joining this webinar. I hope you like this. The topic that I am going to talk about is navigating a product roadmap and its challenges. Let me start by refreshing your memory a bit. Do you remember this iconic company Nokia which was at one point of time the number one mobile manufacturer in the world? Do you remember this company Tower Records? It was a time when you had to go to a store to buy music. Do you remember the company Kodak? It was a time when people had cameras and they clicked photos with those cameras. Those photos had roles and those roles needed to be developed and printed. Do you remember this company Compaq? It was a time when people used to buy desktop computers and Compaq was one of the leading manufacturers of desktop computers. Now I am unfortunately old enough to have used all these products but some of you who may have not used these products should be aware that these were really iconic companies at one point of time. On the other hand, I am sure you know about the successful companies. Netflix originally started as a DVD rental company and today we know it as one of the most successful streaming platforms. Slack originally started as a gaming company and now today it is one of the most successful messenger companies in the world. A funny story about Slack is that the founder wanted to shut down the gaming business which was their original business because it wasn't doing that well. However, they had built an internal tool which was really popular amongst employees and users and they realized that they had something magical there and it is the Slack that we know of today. It was recently sold to Salesforce for more than 27 billion dollars. Instagram when it started had a lot of unnecessary features along with the photo sharing options. The founders quickly realized that people were getting distracted by the other features and the most common features that they were using was the photo sharing option and that is the Instagram that we know today which is synonymous with photo sharing. Groupon originally started as a crowdfunding website. However, today it is one of the most successful website offering deals and coupons. If you may ask what is the key difference between these two sets of companies? I will give you five seconds to answer this question in the comments. The answer is a successful product pivot and a successful change in the product roadmap at the right time. I'll start by explaining what does a product roadmap exactly mean. A product roadmap as per me is a strategic plan that outlines the vision and direction of your product. It can be used as the guiding light for the execution of your vision and strategy. It can be used to communicate goals and objectives to the stakeholders like your tech teams, your designers, your business stakeholders. It ensures that everyone in the team is on the same page when it comes to the product's development and it makes it easy to get everyone's spine. What does a change in roadmap, however, looks like? It may be a privatization of a different set of customer experience outcome or jobs to be done. Today, the customers are targeting a specific customer behavior. Tomorrow, you may want to target something else because of some observation that you are having. It may be related to changing your timelines. Sometimes, it is just the wrong time to release a feature. It may be trading off one feature to launch another key feature. Again, you may have your own reasons to do that. Or it may involve targeting a different customer base altogether which will require you creating features to address the needs of the new customer base. What are some of the key challenges that may influence your product's roadmap? I'll start with internal challenges. The first challenge which you may foresee are business goals and priorities and changes in these business goals and priorities. Now, as product managers, it is very important that your roadmap is fully aligned to what the organization is trying to achieve. However, if there is a change in the direction of your organization, then it is important to align product road map with those business goals and priorities. Let me give you an example of, let's say, Twitter. When Twitter started back in 2008, their primary focus in the first few years would have been on acquisition and customer base growth. They would have prioritized acquisition and engagement features like referral or under engagement, they would have prioritized retweets, trending topics, hashtags. However, as the organization became more mature, their focus would have shifted towards monetization and they would have prioritized building products like the promoted tweets, promoted advertising products that they have built. So it is important to ensure that your roadmap items are fully aligned to the organization's goals and priorities. The next challenge that may influence your product's roadmap is the technology and infrastructure. When the product is in a growing stage, you may have made some technical choices to scale faster. However, as the product becomes more mature, it is important to upgrade your technical infrastructure and that may have significant impact on the way you are defining your roadmap. On the other hand, technology evolves very fast today and some technological advancements may force you to basically make changes in your roadmap. One key technological trend that we are seeing these days is related to AI. As a product manager, if you are not thinking about AI in your product, then I would say that it's something that the product will really fail to... will struggle to succeed in the long term and it is high time that you think of how you can integrate AI in your product. And accordingly, what are the changes and roadmap items that may be needed to ensure AI is fully integrated in your product roadmap? Sometimes there are product metrics which influence your roadmap. If I have to think of a good example here, that will be of Netflix. So Netflix is known for its data-driven product roadmaps. They really believe and have very strong mechanisms to ensure that all their roadmap items are heavily influenced by the data trends that they see in the customer behavior. One example of that is basically they realize that customers were spending significant amount of time in searching for the content that they needed and they wanted to reduce this time. So they built the recommendation service of Netflix that we know today. It was basically tailoring recommendations based on customer preferences on what they have seen and also including other factors like ratings and reviews. So it is important to ensure that you keep track of your key metrics and see what is the key pattern that you see in those metrics. Now, some external challenges that may influence your product roadmap are customer behavior trends. So this is like a change in shift that you see in customer behavior. If I think about FMCG or that is one industry where specifically the stuff that we eat, people are becoming more health conscious today. So a lot of companies which were initially focused on creating junk foods are now creating variants targeting the health conscious customer. Another example that I can think of here is of Uber. Uber back in 2017, when it was growing, it realized that there is a shift in customer behavior where customers are becoming more environmental conscious. They want to reduce the traffic on roads. They want to ensure that they are able to reduce their cost. So in order to address all their needs, they launched UberPool. So it is important to keep track of your customers on what are the different preferences they have. A second external factor which may influence your product roadmap are the regulatory and compliance requirements. Here I can think of a couple of examples. Back in 2018, when Europe launched the GDPR, which is General Data Protection Guidelines, Facebook had to make sure that they fully comply with those guidelines and they had to launch features like taking users' consent, giving them visibility on how their data is being used, giving the users full control of the way their data being used. These are the kind of features that Facebook introduced when EU introduced GDPR. Another example that I can think of here is Robin Hood. Sometimes there was recently a lot of scrutiny on Robin Hood because of the kind of features that their product was missing and there was some misuse of and manipulation of market that was happening through the app. So Robin Hood had to ensure that they built the features which are fully in compliance with the government. The last and important key factor is the overall industry trend and what are the economic conditions and industry shifts that we are seeing. So these are some key factors which may influence your product roadmap. Now how can PMs get better at identifying these challenges? The first recommendation that I have is to stay on top of these external events by reading about them or by reading about the technology or by listening to industry experts or by visiting external events as and when possible. The second recommendation that I have for PMs is to not fall in love with your future ideas. As PMs, we have strong conviction in the roadmap that we have built. However, our ideas should be loosely held is what I believe and we should trust data and customer anecdotes to make the roadmap choices. It is very important that we are flexible to change the roadmap as and when needed. The third recommendation that I have is to gather data, conduct market research and leverage the customer feedback. I can't stress on this enough. Keep looking at your metrics continuously. Keep talking to your customers. These are just basic one-on-one of PMs but it is important enough to iterate it again. The next recommendation that I have is to stay connected to your leadership priorities. Keep talking to your leaders on how are they thinking about the business? How do they see the business evolving? What are the top priorities that they have in their mind? And how can you contribute to those top priorities? Make engineers your friends. Keep talking to them about the changing technological landscape. What are the different things that are evolving? What are the key challenges that they are seeing on the tech side? Is that something that will become a problem in the long term? Is there something that we need to prioritize immediately? So by talking to your engineers, you will get a better understanding of what are the important roadmap items that you need to prioritize from a technical perspective. And the last one is to stay connected with your legal teams on the regulations that may be impacting your product. The next slide that I have is to ensure that how you communicate is roadmap changes. It is critical to ensure that you collaborate with your stakeholders from beginning. It is important that you do not enforce these roadmap changes on them. And you involve them from the beginning. They fully should understand why are you proposing those changes and what are the implications of those changes? Getting their buy-in will make your life really easy. It is important for you to clearly outlay the product trade-offs. It is important that your leadership and stakeholders understand what are the net gains that we are seeing? What are we getting versus what are we losing? And overall, are we going to see positive changes or positive trends by changing a few product roadmap items? The last part, I would say, is to communicate the change and impact through metrics, provide enough market evidence, provide enough customer feedback, highlighting the need for change. And whenever you are driving a change, ensure that you are increasing the communication and transparency, ensure that your leadership, as well as your stakeholders, are constantly updated on all the changes that you are making in the product roadmap. Your biggest win as PMs will be that the leadership and stakeholders are informed and fully understand the roadmap changes. I want to end by sharing a quote from Konstantinos Markides, who is a famous professor in LBS on strategy. So he says, designing a winning strategy is the art of asking questions, experimenting and then constantly renewing the thinking process by questioning the answers. No matter how good today's strategy is, you must always keep reinventing it. And I would recommend all PMs strongly consider this particular thought whenever they are thinking about their road road maps. Thank you very much for listening to my webinar and I hope you learned something new today. Thank you, bye.