Product Management in Practice, 2nd Edition

Chapter 9. The Infinite Time Suck of Documentation (and Yes, Roadmaps Are Documentation)

Many of the most impactful things we do as product managers are also the least tangible. The most meaningful contributions we make to our team are often manifest in the miscommunications that we resolve, the conversations that we redirect toward our high-level goals, and the tactical trade-offs that we explain to company leadership. But none of these things provide a quick, easy, and material answer to that anxiety-provoking question we considered toward the beginning of this book: “What exactly did you do, anyway?”

It is for this very reason that I spent so much of my product management career crafting comprehensive and (hopefully) impressive product specs, roadmaps, and many, many PowerPoint decks. Every fancy document I created was something I could point to and say, “Look—I did this thing!” But very few of these fancy documents were actually helping my team achieve its goals.

None of which is to say that documentation is intrinsically bad. Quite the opposite: writing good documentation is a critical part of a product manager’s job. The day-to-day challenge is to understand what exactly makes documentation “good” in the first place and to recognize that “good” and “impressive” are not always the same thing. In this chapter, we will look at how we can make documentation more useful by spending less time on it. And we’ll start with the final boss of documentation: the roadmap.

“The Product ...