Now suppose you do some roadmap planning: Roadmaps are not a panacea, but without some future direction, expect the classic problems of failing to plan: missed deadlines, working weekends, shipping unfinished work, political infighting, and ultimately, lost opportunity. → How do you push back by effectively communicating the tradeoffs of a late stage pivot? Or how do you address legitimate needs without whiplashing and demoralizing your engineering team? The quarter is going along just fine, but suddenly, BAM!: the exec team/head of sales/head of marketing just had a killer meeting with a customer/investor and wants to drop everything to build feature X right now.→ Sometimes you need to prioritize refactoring and cleanup, and other times you need to convince the team that it’s not worth it. Your engineering lead tells you that he is tired of dealing with late night alarms, and that you need to make time for critical infrastructure tasks instead of always dropping them from sprints for feature tasks.
→ How do you commit to a list that you believe will work, and the org will agree to, while also communicating that these are ultimately tests, not guarantees of success? You have to fix low checkout conversion soon but there’s no silver bullet and you need to test various ideas that have been floated by stakeholders across the company (marketing, customer ops, etc.).→ It’s so easy to say yes and just roll with it, but as the product owner, it’s your job to keep the org focused on real business value. The exec team wants to know why you can’t you just start and try it out next quarter. There is pressure to build a mobile app, but it’s a huge investment (major refactoring, hiring mobile devs, user acquisition) without clear business value.→ Do you warily agree, or risk not being a “team player” by pushing back to avoid overcommitment? How do you confidently plan and commit?