Building a Product Roadmap as a Product Manager

Even today, in the age of GPS and advanced navigation systems built right into our phones, when you’re getting ready to take that long-planned family trip to the campground in the mountains you’ve heard so much about, you want to pre-plan your trip to be sure you're taking the best route, know the best places to stop and eat along the way, and are ultimately prepared to answer that age-old question: “Are we there yet?” In other words, you want a roadmap. This is true not only for family vacations, but for practically anything we do that involves processes comprising many elements and stages—particularly in the realm of product development.

In this video course, intended for audiences of all skill and experience levels, your host, Peter Yang, lead product manager at Credit Karma, shows you how some of the most successful product managers create and use product roadmaps to rally the people around them to build products that solve customer problems and generate demand. You’ll examine the end-to-end process used by product managers at companies like Amazon and Facebook to build world-class products. Peter begins by reviewing how to create an inspiring mission statement, vision, and strategy for your team. Then, you look at how you can define and build a product from scratch, including the all-important need to thoroughly understand the customer’s problem. You’ll also explore how to select the right goal metrics and write a crisp product requirements document. When you’ve finished this video course, you’ll have a sound foundation upon which to effectively guide your team and take your product to launch and beyond.

What you’ll learn—and how you can apply it

• How to define an inspiring mission statement, vision, and strategy for your team
• Follow the “understand, identify, and execute loop” to build great products
• Work backward from the customer problem and capture it all in a press release
• Pick an effective goal metric to rally your team around
• Drive amazing execution with your team through great communication and decision making

This video course is for you because…

• You're a new or aspiring product manager who wants to get a head start on learning the end-to-end process of defining and building a product
• You're an experienced product manager who wants to pick up more product development best practices
• You're a designer, developer, data scientist, or someone in any other profession who is interested in becoming a product manager
• You’ve taken the Product Management Starter Kit learning path and want to dive deeper into the product development process

Prerequisites:

• It would benefit you to first take the Product Management Starter Kit learning path. This course is a deep dive on the product development process.

Materials or downloads needed in advance:

• All materials are provided in the path

Further resources:

• Product Management in Practice: A practical book for product managers that focuses on core communication, organization, research, and execution skills
• Product Roadmaps Relaunched: A book that covers more details on product roadmap planning
• Product Leadership: A book that includes interviews with more than a hundred product managers from around the world on leadership best practices
• Building Products for the Enterprise: A book that focuses on product development for enterprise product managers