Creating products that spark joy
Creating products that spark joy

Building a product that will delight your users and turn curious enthusiasts into die-hard evangelists requires commitment and alignment from the entire company, from marketing to sales to engineering. Product roadmaps are the shared language of these teams, enabling them to coordinate in real time while planning for the future.

Elevate 2019⁠

, a conference for engineering and product managers hosted by

Plato⁠

, we learned from Becky Flint’s product management experiences at PayPal, Shutterfly, BigCommerce, Feedzai, and most recently, Dragonboat, a software suite for product management.

The Marie Kondo approach to feature prioritization

At this stage, you probably have a product with paying users who are finding value in your product. To stay ahead of your competitors, you can’t miss a step: the features you release need to spark joy in your customers.

As a product manager, you’re the voice of the customer in your organization, and the best way to champion your user’s needs is to deeply understand them. Concretely, user interviews and app analytics are powerful ways to understand how your users utilize your product.

When thinking about new features, this qualitative and quantitative data should serve as your North Star. Once you’ve identified new features that spark joy, you can prioritize them with the following steps:

Reference strategic pillars for the sales, marketing, engineering, and product teams. What’s the biggest goal for the company as a whole? Growth? Retention? These overarching goals are a key driver in which features you prioritize over others.

Determine which metrics or goals are the most important by ranking them or assigning weights

Prioritize features that move the needle for the most important metrics

Communicating the roadmap

Once you’ve prioritized your roadmap, other teams need to be aware of what’s in the pipeline. Because this is a living document, we want to follow the following guidelines while communicating the roadmap:

Each level of stakeholders should only see parts of the roadmap that affect them. For example, does a marketing executive need to see the acceptance criteria of the individual stories?

Communicate changes in the roadmap on a regular cadence to keep stakeholders aligned.

Emphasize that the roadmap doesn’t necessarily mean that these things will be implemented. The roadmap should be treated as a direction, not a blueprint for implementation.

Avoid committing to dates, but stay true to the dates you do commit to.

Achieving alignment on your product roadmap through strategic prioritization and communication is crucial for the success of the product. By following these guidelines, you can keep your company aligned and humming as you continuously deliver valuable features to your users.

Do you have any other tips for prioritizing and communicating your roadmap? Feel free to leave a comment or join the conversation on

Twitter⁠

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Creating products that spark joyCreating products that spark joy

The Marie Kondo approach to feature prioritization

Communicating the roadmap

Creating products that spark joy
Creating products that spark joy