Prioritizing hurts. It’s not just ordering a list, it’s picking the ideas that will live. But there’s a strange difference between doing it, and communicating it. Prioritize by yourself on a Saturday afternoon with a clear head. Communicate on Monday morning to questions and challenges from everyone involved.
Then every month, you get to do that again with leaders that didn’t participate in the daily and weekly renegotiations. Every team in the company has several representatives in attendance. The executive team and product leadership are going to ask questions. And you know what’s really neat about that readout meeting? It’s 60 to 90 minutes, and it doesn’t get longer as your company adds more projects. So the meeting that began years ago as a deep dive into every aspect of all three projects is now a pre-read deck and a quick skim across fifteen projects. Maybe you get ten minutes of air time, maybe fifteen, maybe five. How to cover a month’s work in such a tight window?
One: only talk about the big rocks. If they want to know about something from the small rocks list, they’ll ask. So what’s a big rock? In broad strokes, I feel like big rocks for roadmap are defined by marketable deliverables at a date. In other words, they’re short phrases on a slide deck roadmap, and they’ve probably got a flagship customer associated. Small rocks are stories in Jira, and there are too many of them to fit on a roadmap. They’re not roadmap, and they’re either date-bound to “ASAP” or the date doesn’t matter. Medium rocks are never gonna get done, so it’s on PM to make them big or make them small. Leadership from all over the organization might care about small and medium rocks, but let them ask instead of anticipating everything.
Two: The monthly meeting should be an internally-detailed version of your portion of the external roadmap. Your goal for the presentation is two slides. The first is a roadmap visualization of now, next, later. Now is broken into finished, blocked, and in-flight. Next is a prioritized list. Later is pre-read material, don’t plan to talk about it. If you’re dividing later into planned release vehicles and you’re not at a default alive company, stop doing that. The second slide is a list of linked materials for the pre-read crowd:
- recent and upcoming releases with the big rocks, release notes, and tickets
- recent customer wins and escalations with current status
- SLO dashboards if your company swings that way
Three: if you’ve recently made a breakthrough, a third slide with a screenshot of the product or the metrics demonstrating your progress is a great idea, with kudos to the team.
“Wait a minute,” I am sometimes asked, “What about all the customer commitments? Every one of those JIRA stories has customers attached, and if you go into the meeting notes / Gong recordings / &c you’ll find that we committed to deliver ASAP!” It is an unfortunate truth of the enterprise software world that people say things in meetings that they don’t really mean. Worse, this happens on both sides: the customer pushes hard for a change that they don’t really need, and the vendor attaches the customer name to things they want to do anyway. It’s not uncommon to find that the “allow left-handed retroencabulation flanges to be installed at 90 degrees” ticket isn’t really a requirement, even though it’s got ten million dollars of customer names attached. Here is one simple trick to cut through the noise: if it’s getting brought up by sales leadership or someone whose title begins with C and ends with O, then it’s a real commitment that probably needs to go into the roadmap deck and the monthly rollup. If you or your direct reports personally made the commitment, same. If there’s so many of these that you can’t fit them into a single slide anymore, you’ve identified a problem: either your executives can’t scale, or your team is overcommitting.
Now for the important part, the takeaway, the bottom line. There’s a Kanban world of electronic post-its on an electronic wall that is more granular than the Powerpoint world of “we will deliver a two word concept in a three month time frame”. Both levels of detail are critical to deliver a successful product. When you unintentionally mix these levels of detail, it’s confusing. To make your portion of the monthly meeting go smoothly, present at Powerpoint level and preread at Kanban level.
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